Freud's Personality Theory

• Personality refers to enduring characteristics differentiating people, leading actions in consistent, predictable manners across situations and over extended time.
• Personality constitutes lasting behavior and thought patterns across time and situations.

Four Major Perspectives on Personality:

• Psychoanalytic: Focuses on unconscious motivations
• Trait: Examines specific personality dimensions
• Humanistic: Emphasizes inner capacity for growth
• Social-Cognitive: Highlights environmental influence

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

• Graduated from the University of Vienna in 1873 and medical school
• Specialized in nervous disorders, noting some patients lacked physical causes for their conditions.
• Psychoanalysts believe behavior stems from unconscious personality aspects.
• Identified three awareness levels: conscious, preconscious, and unconscious mind.

Psychoanalysis: The Unconscious

• Analogizes the mind to an iceberg, largely hidden.
• Conscious Awareness: Small part above the surface (preconscious)
• Unconscious: Contains thoughts, feelings, wishes, and memories below the surface.
• Repression: Banishes unacceptable thoughts and passions to the unconscious, revealed through dreams and slips.

Freud’s Theory of Personality

• Three levels of consciousness:
• Conscious mind handles current focus
• Preconscious mind contains retrievable information
• Unconscious mind holds unaware material
• Personality has the id, ego, and superego.
• The id is unorganized and inborn, seeking immediate tension reduction from basic urges.
• The ego restrains instinctual energy to ensure individual safety and societal membership.
• The superego embodies societal rights, wrongs, conscience, and ego-ideal.
• The id constantly seeks to satisfy basic drives according to the pleasure principle.
• The ego seeks to gratify the id in realistic ways, guided by the reality principle.
• The superego acts as a voice of conscience, focusing on ideal behavior.
• The id relies on primitive thinking, operating unconsciously and seeking pleasure while avoiding pain.
• The id's two major instincts consist of Eros (life instinct) and Thanatos (death instinct).
• Eros motivates pleasure-seeking, while Thanatos motivates aggression.
• The libido is the energy source for the id's instincts.
• The ego perceives reality and interacts intelligently with reality:
• The ego mediates between the id and superego, partly conscious, deals with demands, and makes rational decisions.
• The ego serves the id, maintaining contact with reality per the reality principle and controlling mental processes, satisfying id urges.
• Internalized parental and societal rules structure the superego.
• The superego has two components: conscience and ego ideal. -- Conscience contains notions of right and wrong, and the ego ideal embodies how one ideally wants to be.
• The superego constrains gratification of immoral impulses and is partly conscious and unconscious.
• An individual's feelings, thoughts, and behaviors result from the ids, superegoes, and egos interaction.
• Conflict among the id, ego, and superego causes anxiety.
• The ego employs defense mechanisms to control or reduce the anxiety.
• Defense mechanisms are psychological tendencies that the ego uses to prevent people from becoming overwhelmed by conflict among the id, the ego, and the superego.
• Defense mechanisms operate at an unconscious level.
• Defense mechanisms reduce/redirect anxiety through distorting reality.

Common Defense Mechanisms:

• Repression: Unacceptable, anxiety-producing thoughts pushed into unconsciousness
• A rape victim not recalling attack details
• Regression: Acting like an earlier life stage
• Anxious young adults reading comic books when visiting parents
• Reaction formation: Anxiety-producing feelings replaced with opposite
• Men anxious about attraction to men dating women frequently
• Rationalization: False but believable excuses to justify inappropriate behavior
• Cheating students claiming exam unfair
• Denial: Believing something false is true
• Aging people denying they are getting older
• Displacement: Redirecting feelings to a safer target
• Angry husbands yelling at children
• Projection: Attributing unacceptable feelings to others
• A stealing store employee suspecting other employees
• Sublimation: Replacing unacceptable impulses with socially acceptable behavior.
• Playing video games instead of getting in a fight.

Stages of Personality Development:

• Freud’s psychoanalytic theory suggests that a series of stages associated with major biological functions develop personality.
• Psychosexual stages of development are the source of unconscious conflicts, and involve critical events in every child's life.
• Each stage involves a conflict between pleasure and reality, and the resolution determines personality.
• Fixation occurs if needs are under or over-gratified.
• Each stage includes an erogenous zone, where the body experiences sexual pleasure.
• Personality forms in early life, rooted in early childhood conflicts.
• The psychosexual stages are:
• Oral (0-18 months): Centered on the mouth
• Anal (18-36 months): Focus on bowel/bladder elimination
• Phallic (3-6 years): Focus on genitals/Oedipus Complex
• Latency (6-puberty): Sexuality is dormant
• Genital (puberty on): Sexual feelings toward others
• Strong conflict can cause fixation at stages 1,2, or 3.

Freud's Stages of Personality Development

• Oral stage occurs during the first year.
• Anal stage occurs from approximately age 1 to 3.
• Phallic stage is next, focusing interest on genitals.
• The latency period lasts until puberty
• Genital stage starts after puberty, and is a mature sexuality period.
• Oral stage (birth to 18 months) features the mouth as the erogenous zone, with gratification through sucking and swallowing.

Oral Fixation Outcomes:

• Oral receptive personality relates in a way such as being preoccupied eating/drinking, reducing tension through oral activity (nail biting, drinking, smoking), being passive and needy and sensitive to rejection.
• Hostile and verbally abusive people can result from the oral aggressive personality.
• Anal stage (1 1/2 to 3 years): The erogenous zone is the anus, with conflict surrounding toilet training.
• Retentive personality: Stingy, stubborn, perfectionistic, compulsively orderly.
• Expulsive personality: Messy, careless, lacking self-control.
• Phallic stage (3 to 6 years): The erogenous zone includes genitals, where self-stimulation produces pleasure.
• Oedipal Conflict (Boys) vs. Electra Conflict (Girls): Children identify with the same-gender parent.
• Child is sexually attracted to the opposite-sex parent and wishes to replace the same-sex parent.
• Oedipus complex (little boys) and castration anxiety.
• Boys believe the father knows about his desire for mom, and they fear castration, repressing desire and defensiveness.
• Electra Complex (little girls) and penis envy.
• Girls start attached to the mother, the shifts of attachment when she realizes lack of penis.
• She desires dad who she sees as a means to obtain a penis substitute (a child), and represses her desire for dad, incorporating the values of her mother and accepting inferior society.
• Latency period: Girls socialize only with girls and boys only socialize with boys to minimize awareness of sexuality.
• Genital stage involves:
• The fifth stage of psychosexual development.
• The development of secondary sexual characteristics (pubic hair)
• The physical sexual characteristics re-awaken sexual urges, where they cannot repress sexual desires impulses and urges.
• Beginning search for a relationship with someone they can share sex and intimacy with.

Freud’s Ideas as a Scientific Theory:

• Theories require observation explanations and testable hypotheses.
• Freud's theories include few objects and few hypotheses.
• Freud's theories rely on recollections and interpretations of patients' free associations, dreams, and slips.
• It does NOT predict behavior or traits.

Four Types of Personality Theories:

• Psychodynamic
• Humanistic
• Trait
• Social Cognitive

(1) Psychodynamic Personality Theories:

• Source of information from expert analysts from people in therapy.
• Cause of behavior consists of unconscious internal conflict and childhood experiences, and pleasure-seeking impulses and social restraints.
• The outlook on humans includes negative, but theory has comprehensive features.
• People called Neo-Freudians place less emphasis on sex:
• Carl Jung highlights the Collective Unconscious -- Jung also discusses the balance between introversion and extroversion.
• Alfred Adler describes Striving for superiority that motivates environment mastery, and the notion of the Inferiority Complex.
• Karen Horney believes personality is cultural rather than biological.

(2) Humanistic Personality Theories:

• Source of information obtained from self reports population and people in therapy.
• Cause of behavior of self concepts, self-actualizing tendencies, and conscious feelings of oneself.
• The outlook on humans is positive, and the comprehensiveness of theory is fairly comprehensive. Maslow and Rogers have a Humanistic approach as a Third Force.
• Humanistic approach includes optimistic view of human nature and free, good humans and is inner directed.
• Rejected Freud’s pessimistic view of personality
• Rejected Behaviorist’s mechanistic view
• Offers the statement that everyone has a potential for growth, and healthier growth involves self-actualization (be all you can be).
• States given the right conditions, we can reach our full potential.

Roger’s Person-Centered Perspective

• People should have a good sense of their own tendencies.
• With the right conditions, people will develop to their full potential.
• Genuineness, Acceptance and Empathy. Self-Concept: The central feature of personality.
• Self concept involves Real Self versus the Ideal Self. People need approval and/or positive regard from others. Conditions of worth, which contain behavior changes to get approval from others.
• We need unconditional positive regard, where we are not hiding the ideal self.
• Well-adjusted persons have a combination of self-concept and experience.
• Poorly adjusted persons also have a combination of these variables. Maslow suggests a Hierarchy of human motives, where one must must satisfy lower needs before higher needs. Self actualization culminates a lifetime of growth and improvement.
• Self actualized people are the fullest, challenging themselves with no identification, but has some important characteristics, such as being open to new experiences and creative, being committed to a cause, trusting, caring, yet independent and courageous.

(3) Trait Personality Theories

• Source of information includes observations of people, in general.
• Cause of behavior contains stable characteristics, where genetic basis is emphasized.
• Outlook on humans is neutral - neither positive nor negative.
• Comprehensiveness of theory isn't very comprehensive.
• The measure that people are different from one another are along basic, enduring dimensions known as traits.

Trait Dimensions:

• How many?
• Measurements?
• Where do they originate? Allport is a component suggesting that traits are what reflect our values, and has a range of 3 kinds of traits: cardinal, central and secondary.
• Single personality trait directs activities (greed, lust).
• Major characteristics structure personality.
• Less personality is a key that affects behavior as much as central and cardinal traits. Eysenck: found two (2) major trait dimensions:
• Introversion vs extroversion
• Neuroticism vs Emotional Stability
• Cattell theory and the 16 basic variables.
• Distinguished traits, such as dynamic ability and temperament.
• Also described the less surface traits from what is more important traits. Recently theorists have begun to converge to describe a range of 5 dimensions consisting of being undependable-concienciousness, disgreableness_agreableness, close mindedness-openess, introvert -extravert, neuroticisim-emotional stability. The five factors consist such as being calm or worrying, and being good natured or irritable: calm extroversion, opnness, agreeableness and conscientiousness. Other traits include being sociable, imaginative, kind and organized.

Five Factors

• Openness
• Extraversion
• Conscientiousness
• Agreeableness
• Neuroticism Traits are actions in different ways.
• Consistency is the same across all traits.
• Explain why individuals behave
• Distinctiveness makes personality unique. Consensus isn't easy to answer.

Assessing Personality Traits with MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory).

• The object of the tests simplify someone's behavior patterns personality Inventories.
• MMPI is used across a range of personality, which can be psychological or normal related.
• Tests determine how different groups of traits appear.
• Walter Mischel (1968) believed behavior across time or situation is not consistent -situation debate and believed that it might not be a point for personality, and is an allusion.
• He believed the behavior influenced by the situation rather than a trait and traits as a determinant.

(4) Social-Cognitive (Learning) Approaches to Personality Theories

Consists of obtaining observations of behavior. Cause of behavior is influences like people's cognitions and their thoughts, but environmental colors perception. Humans are neither negative or positive. Theory comprehensiveness isn't very high. Learning is a perspective, which has to do with intellect.

The Social Learning Theory

Bandura emphasizes the role of learning and behavior. It has its origins from:

• Classical Conditioning
• Operant Conditioning
• Modeling Studying what is going on, and the environment helps to a certain extent. Bandura's cognition emphasizes the importance of self-efficacy: ability to achieve certain goals. If someone has higher self efficacy then they have greater abilities, and they would try to meet them as well. Bandura also speaks of Reciprocal Determinism where different factors affect one another. It comes down to cognition and environmental factors, but in contrast they both come down to behavior. Important that the internal and external factors are present. The perspective of a social cognitive environment relates to personal control of someone's destiny with what feels more controllable. Methods of research consists of behavior correlation and experiment, what raises people's self-awareness has impacts the affects. Outcomes of control -helplessness causes effects on prisons or homes and other groups.

Comparison of Personality Theories

There are a range of views with what to consider: psychoanalytic, social learning, humanistic.

Personality Assessment

Consists of gathering systematic gathering information about a person to understand and predict human behavior.

It includes to obtaining a reliable, valid individual differences.

There are also various interview ways that can be explored: Behavioral Assessment, and other ways.

(2) Behavioral Assessments

• Principles of Learning theory
• Used to measure behavior determine the characteristics related to personality.

(3) Objective Test Assessment

• -Personality measures self reports from individuals and infer related personality characteristics. It can have objective measures, such as MMPI or NEO inventories. MMPI helps to differentiate certain people's difficulties with normal characteristics or personality. MMPI is used in an environment. Measures help with certain problems. The Projective Test Assessment (4:) provides stimuli for feedback to then understand their unique traits from ambiguous. It is based on unconscious thinking patterns. The Thematic Apperception Test relates to tests that relate to individual's personality. This often relates to inkblot styles.