Individual Psychology: Theory and Dynamics

• Individual psycho theory presents an optimistic view of people and puts emphasis on social interest.
• Adler believed people are motivated by striving for superiority or success, which is influenced by social factors.
• People shape their behavior based on their view of the future.
• Psychologically healthy people are aware of their actions and motivations.

Dynamics of Personality

• Striving for success or superiority is the primary force behind behavior.
• Subjective perceptions influence behavior and personality.
• Personality is unified and consistent.
• Social interest is important when evaluating human activity.
• Style of life represents a person's unique way of living and is formed by creative power.
• Individual psychology suggests everyone starts with physical deficiencies, triggering feelings of inferiority that drive them to achieve superiority or success.
• Unhealthy individuals aim for personal superiority, while healthy individuals seek success for everyone.
• Individuals aim for a final goal, either personal superiority or success for all, which may be fictional but unifies personality and makes behavior understandable.
• People strive for superiority or success to make up for feelings of inferiority.
• Some individuals pursue superiority with little concern for others, driven by exaggerated feelings of personal inferiority.
• Healthy people are motivated by social interest and aim for success for everyone.
• People's subjective perceptions, rather than reality, shape their striving for superiority or success.
• Fictionalism: the goal of superiority or success can guide one's style of life and gives unity to personality.
• People create a belief system to overcome physical deficiencies, even after the deficiencies are overcome.
• Individual psychology highlights the uniqueness of each person.
• It suggests that inconsistent behavior is not real.
• Organ dialect: the expression of the direction of the individual's goals.
• Conscious and unconscious actions are in harmony in a unified personality.
• Unconscious actions are neither formulated or understood clearly.
• Conscious thoughts aid in striving for success.
• Social interest is essential as it means a feeling of togetherness with humanity, highlighting membership in a social community.
• Social interest comes from mother-child relationship during their early months of infancy.
• It gives a way to measure psychological health and is the sole criterion of human values.
• Style of life includes goals, self-concept, feelings for others, and attitude, shaped by heredity, environment, and creative power.
• Adler outlined problems involving interactions with others, occupation, and love. The basic styles of life based on these are the dominant type, the getting type, the avoiding type, and the socially useful type.
• Dominant type show a ruling attitude with little awareness.
• Getting types are dependent on other people.
• Avoiding types tend to avoid problems
• Socially useful types cooperate with others.
• Adler believed that people are free to create their own style of life.
• All people are responsible for who they are and how they behave.
• Neurotics that are maladjusted tend to have underdeveloped social interest; They also set high goals, live in their own world, and have a rigid style.
• Exaggerated feelings of inferiority can lead to maladjustment.
• People with a pampered style of life have weak social interest and want to continue the parasitic relationship they had with their parents.
• People with a neglected style of life feel unloved so they adopt a neglected style of life.

Safeguarding Tendencies

• Safeguarding tendencies aid in protecting exaggerated self-esteem from disgrace includes excuses, aggression, withdrawal.
  • Excuses- Claiming that you would like to do an action but follow up with an excuse.
  • Aggression
    • Depreciation- Undervaluing other people's achievements by the person.
    • Accusation- Blaming others for failures and seeking revenge.
    • Self- Accusation- Marked by self-torture and guilt.
    • Withdrawal- Distance.
      • Moving Backward- Going back to a more secure period of the life.
      • Standing Still- Not moving in any direction, in order to avoid facing any threat.
      • Hesitating- Vacillate due to difficult problems.
      • Constructing Obstacles- Building a straw house to knock it down to show that they can protect their self-esteem and prestige.
      • Masculine protest is the belief that both men and women are the same.
      • Adler believed society artificially developed the differences.

Carl Jung: Analytical Psychology

• Collective unconscious contains emotionally toned experiences inherited from our ancestors.

  • Some aspects become highly developed and are called archetypes.

  • Jung believed that conscious images are the ones that are sensed by the ego, not the core of personality.

    • Personal unconscious- Contains repressed infantile memories, impulses, forgotten events, and experiences originally perceived below the threshold of our consciousness.
    • Collective unconscious- Contains distant ancestors' experiences with universal concepts as they have been transmitted down generations.

  • Archetypes are emotional images similar to complexes. - Persona- the personality that people show to the world. - Shadow- the archetype of darkness that we don't acknowledge. - Anima- feminine side of personality. - Animus- a masculine side of personality. - Great Mother- fertility and nourishment and power and destruction.

    • Wise Old Man- the archetype of wisdom.
    • Hero- the image people have of a conqueror. - Self- The most comprehensive archetype that pulls together all the archetypes.

  • Causality and teleology is being motivated by past experiences and expectations.

  • Progression and regression is moving forward and backward to self-realization.

  • Introversion is the turning inward of psychic energy toward the subjective.

    • Extroversion is being oriented to the outside energy.
    • Sensing shows that something exists.
    • Thinking leads to recognize the meaning.
    • Feeling evaluates value.
    • Intuiting leads people to know without knowing how. - Logical thinking is the chain of ideas that can be extraverted or introverted based on attitude. - Feeling is used to evaluate an experience and can be either extraverted or introverted. - Sensing receives physical stimuli and transmits them to consciousness and can be either extraverted or introverted. - Development of the psyche is grouped into four general periods—childhood, youth, middle life, and old age.

  • Childhood

    - Anarchic Phase: chaotic and sporadic consciousness.
      - Monarchic phase is when the ego and logical thinking begins.
       - Dualistic phase is when the ego as perceiver arises.
    

  • Youth - Young people strive to break away from parents and find a mate.

    • Middle Life begins at age 35-40, by which point there is a lot of potential.
    • As the evening of life approaches, life can be fulfilling when death is seen in this light.
      • Self-realization or individuation is when a person has all psychological components functioning in unity and gains balance between introversion and extraversion.