Theories of Personality (Certificate of Completion)

Psychology's most famous figure is also one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the 20th century. Sigmund Freud, an Austrian neurologist born in 1856, is often referred to as the "father of modern psychology."

Freud revolutionized how we think about and treat mental health conditions. Freud founded psychoanalysis as a way of listening to patients and better understanding how their minds work. Psychoanalysis continues to have an enormous influence on modern psychology and psychiatry.

Sigmund Freud's theories and work helped shape current views of dreams, childhood, personality, memory, sexuality, and therapy. Freud's work also laid the foundation for many other theorists to formulate ideas, while others developed new theories in opposition to his ideas.

Sigmund Freud Biography

To understand Freud's legacy, it is important to begin with a look at his life. His experiences informed many of his theories, so learning more about his life and the times in which he lived can lead to a deeper understanding of where his theories came from.

Freud was born in 1856 in a town called Freiberg in Moravia—in what is now known as the Czech Republic. He was the oldest of eight children. His family moved to Vienna several years after he was born, and he lived most of his life there.

Freud earned a medical degree and began practicing as a doctor in Vienna. He was appointed Lecturer on Nervous Diseases at the University of Vienna in 1885.

After spending time in Paris and attending lectures given by the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, Freud became more interested in theories explaining the human mind (which would later relate to his work in psychoanalysis).

Freud eventually withdrew from academia after the Viennese medical community rejected the types of ideas he brought back from Paris (specifically on what was then called hysteria). Freud went on to publish influential works in neurology, including "On Aphasia: A Critical Study," in which he coined the term agnosia, meaning the inability to interpret sensations.

In later years, Freud and his colleague Josef Breuer published "Preliminary Report" and "Studies on Hysteria." When their friendship ended, Freud continued to publish his own works on psychoanalysis.

Freud and his family left Vienna due to discrimination against Jewish people. He moved to England in 1938 and died in 1939.

Sigmund Freud Quotations

Sigmund Freud’s Theories

Freud's theories were enormously influential but subject to considerable criticism both now and during his life. However, his ideas have become interwoven into the fabric of our culture, with terms such as "Freudian slip," "repression," and "denial" appearing regularly in everyday language.

Freud's theories include:

• Unconscious mind: This is one of his most enduring ideas, which is that the mind is a reservoir of thoughts, memories, and emotions that lie outside the awareness of the conscious mind.2

• Personality: Freud proposed that personality was made up of three key elements: the id, the ego, and the superego. The ego is the conscious state, the id is the unconscious, and the superego is the moral or ethical framework that regulates how the ego operates.3

• Life and death instincts: Freud claimed that two classes of instincts, life and death, dictated human behavior. Life instincts include sexual procreation, survival and pleasure; death instincts include aggression, self-harm, and destruction.4

• Psychosexual development: Freud's theory of psychosexual development posits that there are five stages of growth in which people's personalities and sexual selves evolve. These phases are the oral stage, anal stage, phallic stage, latent stage, and genital stage.5

• Mechanisms of defense: Freud suggested that people use defense mechanisms to avoid anxiety. These mechanisms include displacement, repression, sublimation, and regression.6

Sigmund Freud and Psychoanalysis

Freud's ideas had such a strong impact on psychology that an entire school of thought emerged from his work: psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis has had a lasting impact on both the study of psychology and the practice of psychotherapy.

Psychoanalysis sought to bring unconscious information into conscious awareness in order to induce catharsis. Catharsis is an emotional release that may bring about relief from psychological distress.

Research has found that psychoanalysis can be an effective treatment for a number of mental health conditions. The self-examination that is involved in the therapy process can help people achieve long-term growth and improvement.7

How Psychoanalysis Influenced the Field of Psychology

Sigmund Freud's Patients

Freud based his ideas on case studies of his own patients and those of his colleagues. These patients helped shape his theories and many have become well known. Some of these individuals included:

• Anna O. (aka Bertha Pappenheim)

• Little Hans (Herbert Graf)

• Dora (Ida Bauer)

• Rat Man (Ernst Lanzer)

• Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff)

• Sabina Spielrein

Anna O. was never actually a patient of Freud's. She was a patient of Freud's colleague Josef Breuer. The two men corresponded often about Anna O's symptoms, eventually publishing the book, "Studies on Hysteria" on her case. It was through their work and correspondence that the technique known as talk therapy emerged.8

Major Works by Freud

Freud's writings detail many of his major theories and ideas. His personal favorite was "The Interpretation of Dreams." Of it, he wrote: "[It] contains...the most valuable of all the discoveries it has been my good fortune to make. Insight such as this falls to one's lot but once in a lifetime."9

Some of Freud's major books include:

• "The Interpretation of Dreams"

• "The Psychopathology of Everyday Life"

• "Totem and Taboo"

• "Civilization and Its Discontents"

• "The Future of an Illusion"

Freud's Perspectives

Outside of the field of psychology, Freud wrote and theorized about a broad range of subjects. He also wrote about and developed theories related to topics including sex, dreams, religion, women, and culture.

Views on Women

Both during his life and after, Freud was criticized for his views of women, femininity, and female sexuality. One of his most famous critics was the psychologist Karen Horney, who rejected his view that women suffered from "penis envy."

Penis envy, according to Freud, was a phenomenon that women experienced upon witnessing a naked male body, because they felt they themselves must be "castrated boys" and wished for their own penis.10

Horney instead argued that men experience "womb envy" and are left with feelings of inferiority because they are unable to bear children.11

Views on Religion

Freud was born and raised Jewish but described himself as an atheist in adulthood. "The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life," he wrote of religion.12

He continued to have a keen interest in the topics of religion and spirituality and wrote a number of books focused on the subject.

Psychologists Influenced by Freud

In addition to his grand and far-reaching theories of human psychology, Freud also left his mark on a number of individuals who went on to become some of psychology's greatest thinkers. Some of the eminent psychologists who were influenced by Sigmund Freud include:

• Anna Freud

• Alfred Adler

• Carl Jung

• Erik Erikson

• Melanie Klein

• Ernst Jones

• Otto Rank

While Freud's work is often dismissed today as non-scientific, there is no question that he had a tremendous influence not only on psychology but on the larger culture as well.

Many of Freud's ideas have become so steeped in public awareness that we oftentimes forget that they have their origins in his psychoanalytic tradition.

Freud's Contributions to Psychology

Freud's theories are highly controversial today. For instance, he has been criticized for his lack of knowledge about women and for sexist notions in his theories about sexual development, hysteria, and penis envy.10

People are skeptical about the legitimacy of Freud's theories because they lack the scientific evidence that psychological theories have today.13

However, it remains true that Freud had a significant and lasting influence on the field of psychology. He provided a foundation for many concepts that psychologists used and continue to use to make new discoveries.

Psychoanalysis

Perhaps Freud's most important contribution to the field of psychology was the development of talk therapy as an approach to treating mental health problems.

In addition to serving as the basis for psychoanalysis, talk therapy is now part of many psychotherapeutic interventions designed to help people overcome psychological distress and behavioral problems.

The Unconscious

Prior to the works of Freud, many people believed that behavior was inexplicable. He developed the idea of the unconscious as being the hidden motivation behind what we do. For instance, his work on dream interpretation suggested that our real feelings and desires lie underneath the surface of conscious life.

Childhood Influence

Freud believed that childhood experiences impact adulthood—specifically, traumatic experiences that we have as children can manifest as mental health issues when we're adults.

While childhood experiences aren't the only contributing factors to mental health during adulthood, Freud laid the foundation for a person's childhood to be taken into consideration during therapy and when diagnosing.

Literary Theory

Literary scholars and students alike often analyze texts through a Freudian lens. Freud's theories created an opportunity to understand fictional characters and even their authors based on what's written or what a reader can interpret from the text on topics such as dreams, sexuality, and personality.

Biography of Alfred Adler

Alfred Adler was born in a suburb of Vienna, Austria, in 1870.

His family was financially comfortable and one of the few Jewish families in his village. In protest against the isolation of orthodox Judaism, Adler later converted to Christianity.

As a child, Adler was unhealthy and suffered from rickets. His childhood was often unhappy. He heard a doctor tell his father that he Adler’s pneumonia was so serious that he would die, and treatment was useless. Adler decided to become a doctor in order to overcome death and the fear of death. Eventually with the courage that he later was to urge on his patients, Adler overcame his physical difficulties.

Adler married…

Adler received his medical degree from Vienna University in 1895. He was interested in the contribution of psychological factors to illness and its cure, but he did not limit his practice to psychiatry until 1910, after his break with Freud.

Adler was impressed by Freud’s book on dreams and defended it against critics, although at the time he did not know Freud personally. In 1902 he joined Freud’s weekly discussion group. He became Freud’s successor as president of the group in 1910 and coedited its journal. He took over many of Freud’s cases and was Freud’s personal physician.

In 1911, Freud broke with Adler, unable to reconcile Adler’s theoretical contributions with his own. Freud questioned Adler’s intellectual ability and accused Adler of failing to recognize the importance of the unconscious, thereby fundamentally missing the point of psychoanalysis.

In 1912, Adler established the Society of Individual Psychology, and in 1914, he founded his own journal.

Adler developed interventions to resolve problems with children, including the prevention of delinquency and of psychological difficulties related to physical handicaps, poor parenting, and problems in getting along with other children.

Adler wrote extensively, publishing over 300 articles and books. He moved to the United States in 1935 and taught at the Long Island College of Medicine.

In 1937, at the age of 67, he died of cardiac problems.

The fundamental motive in Adler’s theory is the never-ending effort to move on to a better way of life. The struggle takes different forms for different people, and it seems impossible to some, who resign themselves to defeat.

Adler emphasized conscious striving and the creative self, in contrast to Freud’s unconscious determinism.

He described the fundamental motivation to strive from a felt minus to a felt plus.

A person with an inferiority complex feels overcome by a lack of worth and ceases striving.

In this striving toward a better condition, a person is guided by fictional finalism, the image of the goal.

Adler viewed personality as a unity.

A person’s unique style of life is evidenced by early memories.

Although he thought of each person as unique, Adler listed types of mistaken styles of life: ruling type, getting type, and avoiding type of person.

In contrast, a healthy style of life is socially useful.

Parents contribute to unhealthy styles of life by pampering or neglecting their children.

Adler’s theory has inspired training programs for parents.

Family constellation, particularly birth order, influences personality development.

Adler regarded the second-born position as the most desirable,, although research does not generally confirm his prediction of higher achievement for this sibling position.

Social interest is the key factor in psychological health.

A health person succeeds in three tasks of life: work, love, and social interaction.

Adler intervened in schools to deal with problem children.

Adlerian therapy supports self-esteem and aims to change the style of life to a socially useful one.

Adler described physical as well as psychological benefits of therapy.

Carl Jung’s personality theory focuses on the interplay between the conscious and unconscious mind, universal archetypes, the process of individuation, and psychological types.

The theory emphasizes the integration of various aspects of personality to achieve self-realization and encompasses universal and individual dynamics.

It forms the foundation for the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a widely-used personality test.

Jung’s Model Of The Psyche

Like Freud (and Erikson) Jung regarded the psyche as made up of a number of separate but interacting systems. The three main ones were the ego, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious.

According to Jung, the ego represents the conscious mind as it comprises the thoughts, memories, and emotions a person is aware of. The ego is largely responsible for feelings of identity and continuity.

Like Freud, Jung (1921, 1933) emphasized the importance of the unconscious in relation to personality. However, he proposed that the unconscious consists of two layers.

The first layer called the personal unconscious is essentially the same as Freud’s version of the unconscious. The personal unconscious contains temporality forgotten information and well as repressed memories.

Jung (1933) outlined an important feature of the personal unconscious called complexes. A complex is a collection of thoughts, feelings, attitudes, and memories that focus on a single concept.

The more elements attached to the complex, the greater its influence on the individual. Jung also believed that the personal unconscious was much nearer the surface than Freud suggested and Jungian therapy is less concerned with repressed childhood experiences.

It is the present and the future, which in his view was the key to both the analysis of neurosis and its treatment.

Personal Unconscious

The personal unconscious, a concept developed by Carl Jung, refers to all the information and experiences of an individual’s lifetime that have been forgotten or repressed but continue to influence their behavior and attitudes on an unconscious level.

This aspect of the unconscious mind contains memories, perceptions, and thoughts that may not be consciously accessible but can potentially become conscious. It also includes complex combinations of such contents, which Jung referred to as “complexes”.

These are emotionally charged associations or ideas that have a powerful influence over an individual’s behavior and attitudes.

For instance, a person might have a fear of dogs due to a forgotten childhood incident. This fear, while not consciously remembered, is stored in the personal unconscious and could cause an irrational response whenever the person encounters dogs.

Bottom of Form

In Jung’s model of the psyche, the personal unconscious exists alongside the conscious mind and the collective unconscious, the latter of which contains universal archetypes shared among all humans. These three components interact with each other and contribute to an individual’s overall personality and behavior.

“Everything of which I know, but of which I am not at the moment thinking; everything of which I was once conscious but have now forgotten; everything perceived by my senses, but not noted by my conscious mind; everything which, involuntarily and without paying attention to it, I feel, think, remember, want, and do; all the future things which are taking shape in me and will sometime come to consciousness; all this is the content of the unconscious” (Jung, 1921).

It’s important to note that the contents of the personal unconscious are not always negative. They can also be positive or neutral aspects of experience that have simply fallen out of conscious awareness.

Karen Danielson was born near Hamburg, Germany, on September 15, 1885. She was the second child in an unhappy marriage of an often-absent Norwegian sea captain and his beautiful, somewhat higher-class wife.

She retained a strongly independent character, regarded her father’s outspoken religious Lutheran attitudes as hypocritical, and questioned the fundamentalist teachings of her church.

This was a time of social change in Germany, opening opportunities for women. She entered the University of Freiburg in 1906, in a class of 58 women and 2,292 men, where she studied medicine. She received her psychiatric degree in 1915.

She married Oskar Horney in 1909 and moved to Berlin, where she continued her medical studies. They had three children. The couple continued to have a troubled marriage and finally separated.

Karen Horney was a psychoanalytic patient of the Freudian analyst Karl Abraham. It was characteristic of her to explore new ideas, but she sought relief from personal problems as well: depression, fatigue, and dissatisfaction with her marriage.

She poured increasing energy into her career, and became one of the founding members of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute in 1920 and published several papers on male and female development, relationships, and marriage.

Because of the hostile environment in Germany, in 1932, she accepted an invitation to become associate director of a new Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago. She moved to New York in 1934.

Horney and her followers quickly formed a new organization, the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, and founded the American Journal of Psychoanalysis.

She challenged classic Freudian theory. The psychoanalytic community dismissed her points and attacked her motivations.

Freud is reported to have said of her, “she is able but malicious and mean.” He accused her of an inadequate analysis, saying that she did not accept her own penis envy.

She traveled to Japan and stayed at several Zen monasteries. In Zen Buddhism, Horney found support for the idea of a striving, healthy “real self” withing the individual that Freudian theory did not offer.

On December 4, 1952, within months of her return from Japan, she died of previously undiagnosed abdominal cancer.

Karen Horney revised psychoanalytic theory to emphasize interpersonal factors, and this theme has been expanded by later relational theorists.

The child experiences “basic anxiety” as a result of parental rejection or neglect.

This anxiety is accompanied by “basic hostility,” which cannot be expressed because of the child’s dependence on the parents.

The child attempts to resolve the conflict by adopting one of three interpersonal orientations:

Moving Toward People (the self-effacing solution); Moving Against Them (the expansive solution); or Moving Away Form Them (the resignation solution).

The healthy person can flexibly use all three orientations, but the neurotic person cannot.

Horney described four basic strategies for resolving neurotic conflict: Eclipsing the Conflict, Detachment, the Idealized Self, and Externalization.

The neurotic individual turns away from the “real self,” which has the potential for health growth, to an Idealized Self. The Tyranny of the Shoulds supports the Idealized Self.

Horney described several Secondary Adjustment Mechanisms: Blind Spots, Compartmentalization, Rationalization, Excessive Self-Control, Arbitrary Rightness, Elusiveness, and Cynicism.

Horney emphasized the Cultural Determinants of development. Parenting patterns vary from society to society; even the Oedipus complex is not a universal human experience in her theory.

Horney discussed gender roles as developments shaped by particular cultures, which can change if cultures change.

Horneyan therapy seeks to uncover unconscious conflicts originating in childhood but emphasizes their implications for present life.

Relational Theorists (a newer approach than Horney’s theory) also emphasize early parent-child relationships and their implications for a sense of self and for interpersonal relationships throughout life.

Disturbances in Object Relationships contribute to many disorders, including narcissism, and to disturbed relationships in adulthood.

In addition to contributors from psychoanalysis, developmental researchers investigating attachment have contributed to our understanding of object relations.

Erik Homberger Erikson was born near Frankfurt, Germany, in 1902. He was raised by his mother, who was Jewish and of Danish ancestry, and his stepfather, a Jewish Pediatrician whom his mother met when she sought care for 3-year-old Erik.

Erikson did not know that he was conceived illegitimately, he believed his stepfather was his biological father. Erikson was not accepted as fully Jewish because of his physical appearance: tall, blond, and blue eyed. This somewhat confused background contributed to his own keen interest in identity.

Erikson studied art and wandered through Europe in his youth, trying to become an artist. He taught art to children of Freud’s entourage. His wife, Joan Serson, was studying to be a psychoanalyst, and she introduced him to psychoanalysis. Interestingly, in later years he became a the psychoanalyst and she the artist. They had three children.

Erikson was analyzed by Freud’s daughter, Anna, for three years and was recruited as a analyst, a “lay-analyst” because of his nonmedical training. Anti-Semitism was becoming increasingly overt. To mark the identity change of his own life, he took Erikson as a last name at this time.

Although he had no college degree (not even an undergraduate degree), Erikson became a child analyst and taught at Harvard. He was part of a team that prepared an analysis of enemy leader Adolf Hitler for the American government during World War II.

When Erikson was a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, the United States was undergoing a wave of concern about communist infiltration in schools.

Although he considered himself a Freudian, Erikson proposed many theoretical innovations that emphasized the ego and social factor. Most notably, he theorized that ego development continues throughout life. He died in 1994, at the age of 91.

Although Erikson had neither medical training nor an advanced degree of any kind except a certificate in Montessori education, his contributions to psychology have transformed our understanding of human development and of the relationship between the individual and society. Erikson’s most important contribution was a model of personality development that extends throughout the life span.

Erikson proposed a theory of psychosocial development that describe eight stages in the life span. A ninth stage was later added to reflect his final thoughts.

According to the epigenetic principle, these stages build on one another and occur in invariant sequence across cultures.

In each stage, the individual experiences a crisis, which is resolved in the context of society.

The original eight stages are trust versus mistrust, autonomy versus shame and doubt, initiative versus guilt, industry versus inferiority, identity versus identity confusion, intimacy versus isolation, generativity versus stagnation, and integrity versus despair. The ninth stage is gerotranscendence.

In each stage, culture influences development. Conversely, individuals also influence culture through the way they develop at each stage, particularly through their identity development.

Considerable research has been conducted on the psychosocial stages. Predicted age changes have been found, and measures of identity formation show predicted positive personality correlates of higher identity status.

Considerable research on racial and ethnic identity illustrates the relationship between individual development and culture.

Erikson’s cross-cultural studies of the Sioux and Yurok explored the relationship between individual ego development and the culture, a theme that identity status researchers have continued.

The Role of Culture in Relation to the Psychosocial Stages

Each stage has its own cultural institution to support continuation of the strength that emerges at that stage.

Stage 1 – Religion

Positive developments in the first psychosocial stage leave one with the capacity for hope. Erikson observed that religion through the centuries has served to restore a sense of trust at regular intervals in the form of faith while giving tangible from to a sense of evil which it promises to ban. For Erikson, religion makes the wisdom of past generations available to support healing and growth.

Stage 2 – Law

Positive developments in the second psychosocial stage leave one with the capacity for will, or will power, which develops out of the toddler’s struggle between autonomy and shame. Institutional support for will is found in the law, which legitimizes and provides boundaries for an individual’s autonomy.

Stage 3 – Ideal Prototypes

The third stage of psychosocial development leaves the child with the basic virtue of purpose. The corresponding element of the social order for this stages consists of the ideal prototypes of society. In civilized cultures, prototypes are numerous, fragmented, and changing. Some protypes include socioeconomic status, military, and gender roles.

Stage 4 – Technological Elements

The sense of competence that develops in the fourth stage is supported by technological elements in culture, particularly the way that labor is divided among people. Opportunities unfairly limited by discrimination are particularly harmful to the developments of this stage, as is an overemphasis on work as a basic of identity.

Stage 5 – Ideological Perspectives

The virtue of fidelity, which emerges from the fifth psychosocial stage, enables the individual to be faithful to an ideology. The ideological perspectives of a society support, sometimes even exploit, this ego strength. This stage permits reassessing issues of racial and ethnic identity.

Stage 6 – Patterns of Cooperation and Competition

Successful resolution of the sixth stage brings the ego strength that Erikson called a capacity to love. This strength is supported and channeled through what Erikson termed “patterns of cooperation and competition.” For many, marriage serves this role, although cultures may provide other forms besides the nuclear family for shaping the sense of community.

Stage 7 – Currents of Education and Tradition

The strength of care develops in the seventh stage of development. In this stage one plays the nurturing role of the older generation toward the younger generation. Societal involvement is clearly evident in such institutionalized forms as school systems. Consistent with Erikson’s claim that his stages are human universals, cross-cultural research finds generativity across diverse cultures when people channel their power motivation in prosocial ways that can be helpful to the next generation.

Stage 8 – Wisdom

Given demographic changes, our society has become more aware of its oldest members. The ego strength developed during old age is wisdom, described by Erikson as “informed and detached concern with life itself in the fact of death itself.”

Toward a Psychoanalytic Social Psychology

Erikson envisioned a psychoanalytic approach that would consider social and cultural realities rather than focusing exclusively on the individual, as Freud had done.

Personality development is influenced by culture, which, for example, provides a moratorium period for exploration of identity.