1. Personality PowerPoint® Presentation by Jim Foley
© 2013 Worth Publishers

2. Module 34: Classic Perspectives on Personality

3. Topics Freud’s Psychoanalytic Approach:
Personality Structure: id, ego, superego
Personality Development: Psychosexual Stages
Defense Mechanisms
The Psychodynamic theorists
Assessing Unconscious Processes: Projective Tests.
Modern ideas about the unconscious
Maslow: Becoming a self-actualized person
Rogers’ Person- Centered Perspective
Genuineness
Acceptance
Empathy
Assessing the self
Evaluating Humanistic Theories:
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4. Personality: An individual’s characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors [persisting over time and across situations]
Agreeable, Open
Introverted
Naïve
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Yes, I changed the name of one of the dwarfs to both respect and satirize political correctness and then decided to change the rest into terms more related to personality traits, although “Sleepy” was a tough one, Sneezy was a distortion, and Doc was a stretch. See if students can recall which original names go with the names I made.”
Instructor: The last line of the definition is added to make it clear that we are talking about qualities that are not just a function of one role or one phase of life.
Sensitive, Reactive
Contentedly lethargic
Conscientious
Neurotically irritable

5. Psychodynamic/Psychoanalytic Theories
These theories of human personality focus on the inner forces that interact to make us who we are.
In this view: behavior, as well as human emotions and personality, develop in a dynamic (interacting, changing) interplay between conscious and unconscious processes, including various motives and inner conflicts.
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To help and understand people was to focus on bringing out unconscious thoughts, feelings, conflicts, including those rooted in childhood.
These models of understanding the mind began with the man who once said he was “the only worker in a new field”: Sigmund Freud.

6. Freud’s Path to Developing Psychonalysis
Sigmund Freud started his career as a physician.
He decided to explore how mental and physical symptoms could be caused by purely psychological factors.
He became aware that many powerful mental processes operate in the unconscious, without our awareness.
This insight grew into a theory of the structure of human personality and its development.
His name for his theory and his therapeutic technique: psychoanalysis.
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Instructor, you can mention that he saw patients with unusual symptoms, such as recurring blindness or paralysis only of the hand, that did not seem to have physical causes. He sought to understand how the different parts of the human personality interacted, including the hidden, unconscious parts.

7. Psychoanalysis: Techniques
Techniques for revealing the unconscious mind:
He used creative techniques such as free association: encourage the patient to speak whatever comes to mind,
The therapist then interprets any potential unconscious wishes hidden in the client’s hesitations, slips of the tongue, and dreams.
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How did Freud use Psychoanalysis to bring unconscious processes of patients into conscious awareness, especially an embarrassing process such as a shame about touching one’s genitals (leading to the hand paralysis)?

8. Freud’s Personality/Mind Iceberg
The mind is mostly below the surface of conscious awareness
Personality develops from the efforts of our ego, our rational self, to resolve tension between our id, based in biological drives, and the superego, society’s rules and constraints.
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The Unconscious, in Freud’s view: A reservoir of thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories, that are hidden from awareness because they feel unacceptable.

9. The Developing Personality
We start life with a personality made up of the id, striving impulsively to meet basic needs, living by “the pleasure principle.”
In a toddler, an ego develops, a self that has thoughts, judgments, and memories following a “reality principle”
Around age 4 or 5, the child develops the superego, a conscience inter-nalized from parents and society, following a “morality principle.”
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The ego works as the “executive” of this three-part system, to manage bodily needs and wishes in a socially acceptable way.

10. Freud’s Theory of Psychosexual Stages
The id is focused on the needs of erogenous zones, sensitive areas of the body.
People feel shame about these needs and can get fixated at one stage, never resolve how to manage the needs of that zone’s needs.
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Instructor: See if students can describe how the cartoons (one will be revealed later in the slide content) relate to one of the psychosexual stages.

11. Male Development Issues
Freud believed that as boys in the phallic stage seek genital stimulation, they begin to develop unconscious sexual desires for their mothers and hate their father as a rival, feeling guilt and fearing punishment by castration.
He named these feelings “the Oedipus complex,” after a story from Greek mythology.
Resolution of this conflict: Boys identify with their fathers rather than seeing them as a rival.
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The Oedipus story, which Freud apparently saw as an allegory to the general male experience: Oedipus kills a man he later realizes is his birth father, and later marries a queen that he eventually realizes was his birth mother.

12. Defending Against Anxiety
Freud believed that we are anxious about our unacceptable wishes and impulses, and we repress this anxiety with the help of the strategies below.
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13. Which Defense Mechanism Am I?
These two are sometimes confused with each other.
The common theme, as with all defense mechanisms: they seek to prevent being conscious of unacceptable feelings.
The difference: the first one compensates, the second one distracts.
A politician gives anti-gay speeches, then turns out to have homosexual tendencies.  Reaction Formation Someone with an anger problem accuses everyone else of being angry and threatening.  Projection
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Reaction formation seeks to compensate for an unacceptable desire by acting in the opposite direction.
Projection distracts the attention of self and others away from one’s own unacceptable traits, points the finger of blame elesewhere.

14. Neo-Freudian, Psychodynamic Theorists
Psychodynamic theorists, such as Adler, Horney, and Jung, accepted Freud’s ideas about:
Psychodynamic theorists differed from Freud in a few ways:
The importance of the unconscious and childhood relationships in shaping personality
The id/ego/superego structure of personality
The role of defense mechanisms in reducing anxiety about uncomfortable ideas
Adler and Horney believed that anxiety and personality are a function of social, not sexual tensions in childhood
Jung believed that we have a collective unconscious, containing images from our species’ experiences, not just personal repressed memories and wishes
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Instructor: although few psychodynamic theorists and clinicians today accept Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious, they do accept a similar idea, that we do have some universal human tendencies, formed through evolutionary rather than cultural history, that operate at an unconscious level.

15. The Psychodynamic Theorists
Carl
Jung
Alfred
Adler
Karen
Horney
Highlighted universal themes in the unconscious as a source of creativity and insight. Found opportunities for personal growth by finding meaning in moments of coincidence.
Focused on the fight against feelings of inferiority as a theme at the core of personality, although he may have been projecting from his own experience.
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Criticized the Freudian portrayal of women as weak and subordinate to men.
She highlighted the need to feel secure in relationships.

16. Assessing the Unconscious: Psychodynamic Personality Assessment
Freud tried to get unconscious themes to be projected into the conscious world through free association and dream analysis.
Projective tests are a structured, systematic exposure to a standardized set of ambiguous prompts, designed to reveal inner dynamics.
Rorschach test: “what do you see in these inkblots?”
Problem: Results don’t link well to traits (low validity) and different raters get different results (low reliability).
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17. Unrepresentative sampling: Flaws in Freud’s scientific method
Unfalsifiability:
He developed theories that are hard to prove or disprove: can we test to see if there is an id?
Post facto explanations (hindsight bias) rather than predictions:
Whether or not a situation makes you anxious or not, you could either be fixated or repressing.
Unrepresentative sampling:
He did not build his theories on a broad sample of observations; he described all of humanity based on people with unusual psychological problems.
Flaws in Freud’s scientific method
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Biased observations:
He based theories on his patients, which may give him an incentive to see them as unwell before his treatment.

18. Evidence has Updated Freud’s Ideas
Development appears to be lifelong, not set in stone by childhood.
Infant neural networks are not mature enough to create a lifelong impact of childhood trauma.
Peers have more influence on personality, and parents less, than Freud assumed.
Dreams, as well as slips of the tongue, have many possible origins, less likely to reveal deep unconscious conflicts and wishes.
We may ignore threatening information, but traumatic memories are usually intensely remembered, not repressed.
Still, sexual abuse stories are more likely to be fact, less likely to be wish fulfillment, than Freud thought.
Gender and sexual identity seems to be more a function of genetics than Oedipus conflicts and relationships with parents.
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19. The Unconscious As Seen Today: Processing, Perceptions, and Priming, But Not a Place
The following processes operate at an unconscious level, not because they’re repressed, but because they are automatic:
Schemas guide our perceptions
Right hemisphere makes choices the left hemisphere doesn’t verbalize
Conditioned responses, learned skills and procedures, all guide our actions without conscious recall
Emotions get activated
Stereotypes influence our reactions
Priming affects our choices
Unconscious: a stream, not a reservoir
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The title refers to the unconscious not being a storage area for repressed memories, but more a set of processes that operate without the need for the involvement of our conscious awareness.

20. Freud’s Legacy
Freud benefitted psychology, giving us ideas about: the impact of childhood on adulthood, human irrationality, sexuality, evil, defenses, anxiety, and the tension between our biological selves and our socialized/civilized selves.
Freud gave us specific concepts we still use often, such as ego, projection, regression, rationalization, dream interpretation, inferiority “complex,” oral fixation, sibling rivalry, and Freudian slips.
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Not bad for someone writing over 100 years ago with no technology for seeing inside the brain.

21. Developing a Healthy, Genuine Human Personality
Maslow: Becoming a self-actualized person
Rogers: Growing, in a social environment of:
Genuineness
Acceptance
Empathy
Assessing the self
Evaluating Humanistic Theories:
What about Evil?
Too much individualism?
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22. Humanistic Theories of Personality
Abraham Maslow
Carl Rogers
In the 1960’s, some psychologists began to reject:
the dehumanizing ideas in Behaviorism, and
the dysfunctional view of people in Psychodynamic thought.
Maslow and Rogers sought to offer a “third force” in psychology: The Humanistic Perspective.
They studied healthy people rather than people with mental health problems.
Humanism: focusing on the conditions that support healthy personal growth.
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23. Maslow: The Self-Actualizing Person
In Maslow’s view, people are motivated to keep moving up a hierarchy of needs, growing beyond getting basic needs met.
At the top of this hierarchy are self-actualization, fulfilling one’s potential, and self-transcendence.
In this ideal state, a personality includes being self-aware, self- accepting, open, ethical, spontaneous, loving caring, focusing on a greater mission than social acceptance.
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24. Rogers’ Person-Centered Perspective
Rogers agreed that people have natural tendencies to grow, become healthy, and move toward self-actualization.
Genuineness: Being honest, direct, not using a façade
The three conditions that facilitate growth (just as water, nutrients, and light facilitate the growth of a tree):
Acceptance, a.k.a Unconditional Positive Regard: acknowledging feelings without passing judgment;
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Note: Empathy is NOT sympathy: what is important to nurture growth is to have someone understand you, consider your feelings and hold them for you. This is more vital to growth than having someone feel sorry for you.
Empathy: tuning into the feelings of others, showing your efforts to understand, listening well

25. Assessing the Self in Humanistic Psychology: Ideal Self vs. Actual Self
Questionnaires can be used, but some prefer open interview.
Questions about actual self: How do you see yourself? What are you like? What do you value? What are you capable of?
If the answers do not match the ideal, self- acceptance may be needed, not just self-change.
In the humanistic perspective, the core of personality is the self-concept, our sense of our nature and identity.
People are happiest with a self-concept that matches their ideal self.
Thus, it is important to ask people to describe themselves as they are and as they ideally would like to be.
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26. Critiquing the Humanist Perspective What about evil?
Some say Rogers did not appreciate the human capacity for evil.
Rogers saw “evil” as a social phenomenon, not an individual trait:
“When I look at the world I’m pessimistic, but when I look at people I am optimistic.” –Rogers
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About the capacity for evil, it doesn’t necessarily contradict the humanistic model: it is possible to say that some people are not moving far up the hierarchy, are stuck pursuing basic survival and security needs even if they already have enough money to survive, or are stuck seeking and defending self-esteem.
Humanist response: Self- acceptance is not the end; it then allows us to move on from defending our own needs to loving and caring for others.

27. Critiquing the Humanist Perspective Too much self-centeredness?
Some say that the pursuit of self-concept, an accepting ideal self, and self- actualization encouraged not self-transcendence but self- indulgence, self-centeredness.
Humanist response: The therapist using this approach should not encourage selfishness, and should keep in mind that that “positive regard” means “acceptance,” not “praise.”
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