Personality: Historical Perspectives & Freud

• Personality
  • Long-standing traits and patterns that propel people to think, feel, and behave consistently.

Historical Perspectives

• Hippocrates linked personality/behavior to the 'four humours' of the body, including yellow bile, black bile, red blood, and white phlegm.
• Galen proposed that disease and personality differences stemmed from imbalanced humours like yellow bile, black bile, red blood, and white phlegm.
• Franz Gall believed personality could be determined by bumps on the skull, an idea known as phrenology.
• Immanuel Kant developed Galen's four temperaments theory.
• Wilhelm Wundt argued that personality could be described along axes of emotional/nonemotional (strong vs. weak) and changeable/unchangeable.

Sigmund Freud (1853-1939)

• One of the most recognized yet controversial figures in psychology, whose cultural influence remains.
• Enrolled at the University of Vienna (Austria) in 1873, later became a medical doctor specializing in psychiatry.
• He was intrigued by the patients that displayed conditions that defied neurological explanation like "glove paralysis” and “Hysteria."
• Developed Psychoanalytic Theory.

Psychoanalytic Perspective

• Levels of consciousness include conscious, preconscious, and unconscious.
• Personality develops from balancing biological aggressive and pleasure-seeking drives with internal (socialized) control.
• Id is the most primitive drives or urges.
  • It is present from birth.
  • Operates by the pleasure principle.
• Superego is the moral part of the mind that only wants to do what is right and acts as a learned conscience.
  • It operates by the Perfection Principle.
• Ego is rational and tries to satisfy the id and superego.
  • It is part of our personality seen by others.
  • Operates under the Reality Principle.
• Psychosexual Stages of Development
  • A child’s personality develops as they pass through several stages that are driven by sexuality and aggression.
  • Conflicts between forces of the mind are centered around issues associated with these zones.
  • Fixation can get stuck at any stage stemming from unresolved conflict, and it can result in certain personalities.
• Oral Stage (0-18 months)
  • Erogenous Zone: Mouth
  • Key Conflict: Weaning
  • Symptoms of fixation: Dependency on pleasures of the mouth.
• Anal Stage (18 mo – 3 years)
  • Erogenous Zone: Anus
  • Key Conflict: Toilet Training
  • Symptoms of fixation: Excessive neatness, orderliness, stubbornness, stinginess, and controlling behavior.
• Phallic Stage (3-6 years)
  • Erogenous Zone: Genitals
  • Key Conflict: Attraction to opposite sex parent!
  • Symptoms of Fixation: Sexual role rigidity or confusion.
• Latency Stage (6 years-puberty)
  • Erogenous Zone: None
  • Key Conflict: Repression of sexual impulses; identification with same-sex parent
  • Symptoms of Fixation: Do Fixations.
• Genital Stage (puberty-adult)
  • Erogenous Zone: Genitals
  • Key Conflict: Establishing mature sexual relations and emotional intimacy
  • Symptoms of Fixation: Sexual dysfunction and unsatisfactory relationships.

Defense Mechanisms

• Defence mechanisms are methods for coping with anxiety, a major theme of psychoanalysis.
• Anxiety is unbearable to the conscious mind.

Neo-Freudians

• All Held similar ideas:
  • Human functioning involves interaction of dynamic forces (id, ego, super ego).
  • Defense mechanisms exist.
  • Mental life is unconscious.
  • Childhood shapes personality.
  • Inner conflicts occur.
• Most downplayed Freud's fixation on sex and emphasized social environment and culture.
• Alfred Adler's individual psychology focuses on the drive to compensate for feelings of inferiority.
• Inferiority complex leads to feelings of lacking worth and not measuring up to societal standards.
• Childhood development is social while the birth order has an impact on personality.
• Erik Erikson's psychosocial theory of development describes personality as it develops throughout one’s lifetime.
  • Stages relate to important social relationships and associated developmental tasks.
• Carl Jung's analytical psychology balances conscious and unconscious thought and experience, containing two parts of unconsciousness.
  • Personal Unconscious
  • Collective Unconscious including Archetypes
  • Analytical Psychology: Self-Realization is incorporating unconscious archetypal aspects of the self.
  • Two main attitudes or approaches to life are introversion and extroversion
  • Persona is the outward mask adopted.
• Karen Horney rejected Freud's ideas, focusing on unconscious anxiety.
  • She emphasized early childhood experiences of isolation or helplessness leading to "basic anxiety".
  • Three coping strategies: moving toward people with affiliation and dependence, moving against people with aggression and manipulation.

Approaches to Personality

• Behavioural Perspective claims personality traits are not inborn but developed through learning.
  • B.F. Skinner saw personality as a series of response tendencies.
  • Personality is not fixed in childhood, but continues developing throughout life.

Social-Cognitive Perspective

• Social-Cognitive Perspective states that learning and cognition contribute to individual differences in personality.
  • These are shaped by reciprocal determinism, observational learning, and self-efficacy.
  • Reciprocal Determinism says cognitive processes, behaviour, and context all interact.
  • Observational Learning occurs through observing others' behaviour and its consequences.
• Self-Efficacy is one's level of confidence in own abilities.
• Julian Rotter
  • Locus of Control describes internal or external beliefs about the power we have over our lives.
• Walter Mischel
  • Person-Situation Debate: personality traits are not consistent across situations, but behaviour within situations is consistent.
  • Self Regulation is will power.
  • The Marshmallow test tested this.

Humanism

• Humanism emphasizes individual choices.
• Grew out of discontentment with negative views of humanity from psychoanalysis plus issues with behaviourism.
• Sought to study healthy individuals with positive aspirations and did not believe biology is deterministic.
• Abraham Maslow studied creative, healthy people, identifying common characteristics.
  • Personality arises from trying to meet needs.
• Carl Rogers highlights the potential for good in everyone striving for self-actualization. -Client Centered Therapy is where the patient takes a lead role in therapy and the maximum effectiveness relies on unconditional positive regard, genuineness, and empathy.
  • Self-Concept is our thoughts and feelings about ourselves.
    • Ideal Self: who we want to be.
  • Actual Self: who we are.

Biological Perspective

• Biological Perspective describes nature versus nurture issues.
• Evolutionary Psychology claims adaptive traits evolved via survival and reproductive advantage.
• Behavioural Genetics: The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart studied 350 pairs of twins from 1979 to 1999. -Identical twins, raised together or apart, showed similar personalities. -Leadership, obedience, well-being, alienation, and stress resistance were observed.