This document summarizes key aspects of the psychoanalytic perspective on personality as proposed by Sigmund Freud. It describes Freud's theory that personality is formed by unconscious drives and conflicts between the id, ego, and superego. Freud believed people progress through psychosexual stages in early childhood and that experiences at these stages can result in fixation. The Oedipus complex and its resolution are also explained. The document briefly discusses some criticisms from neo-Freudian theorists like Jung, Horney, and Adler.

1. Lecture Slides
Chapter Eleven
Personality
By Glenn Meyer
Trinity University

2. Introduction: What Is
Personality?
Personality is an individual’s
unique and relatively
consistent pattern of thinking,
feeling, and behaving.
Personality theory attempts to
describe and explain how people
are similar, how they are different,
and why every individual is unique.
Psychoanalytic perspective
emphasizes the importance of
unconscious processes and
the influence of early childhood
experience
Humanistic perspective
represents an optimistic look at
human nature, emphasizing
the self and fulfillment of a
person’s unique potential
Social cognitive perspective
emphasizes learning and
conscious cognitive processes,
including the importance of
beliefs about self, goal setting,
and self- regulation
Trait perspective emphasizes
description and measurement
of specific personality
differences among individuals
Four basic perspectives:
Psychoanalytic
Perspective
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Humanistic
Perspective
Click Here
Social Cognitive
Perspective
Click Here
Trait
Perspective
Click Here

3. The Psychoanalytic
Perspective on
Personality
The Life of Sigmund Freud
• Born in 1856 in what is today Pribor,
Czech Republic
• Studied medicine, became a
physician and outstanding
physiological researcher
• Among first investigators of a new
drug that had anesthetic and mood-altering
properties—cocaine
• Prospects for an academic career in
scientific research were very poor,
especially for a Jew in Vienna, which
was intensely anti-Semitic at that
time
• Freud gave up physiological research
for private practice in neurology

4. Influences in the Development of
Freud’s Ideas
• One influence was Joseph
Breuer: hypnosis; patients
with psychological symptoms
• Freud developed his own
technique of free association
• 1900, his most important
work, The Interpretation of
Dreams
• 1904, the Psychopathology of
Everyday Life described how
unconscious thoughts,
feelings, and wishes are often
reflected in acts of forgetting,
inadvertent slips of tongue,
accidents, and errors
• Fled the Nazis to England

5. Freud’s Dynamic Theory of Personality
Psychoanalytic Approach
• Psychoanalysis is both an approach to therapy and a theory
of personality.
• Emphasizes unconscious motivation – the main causes
of behavior lie buried in the unconscious mind
• Freud (1940) saw personality and behavior as the result of
a constant interplay among conflicting psychological forces.
• These psychological forces operate at three different levels
of awareness:
• Conscious
• Preconscious
• Unconscious
• Unconscious material seeps through to the
conscious level in distorted, disguised, or symbolic
forms
• Can be revealed by free association, dreams, slips of
the tongue (Freudian slip), accidents, etc.

8. Dream Analysis
Click here
Techniques to Reveal the
Unconscious
Free Association
Click here
A psychoanalytical
technique in which the
patient spontaneously
reports all thoughts,
feelings, and mental
images as they come to
mind
Dreams contain
• Manifest content
(surface meaning)
• Latent content (true,
unconscious meaning)

9. The Structure of Personality
Id
• Instinctual drives present at birth
• Does not distinguish reality from fantasy
• Operates according to pleasure principle
• Motive to obtain pleasure and avoid
tension or discomfort; this is the
most fundamental human motive and
guiding principle of id
• Immune to logic
• Energy comes from
• Eros— self-preservation or life
instinct
• Libido—psychological and
emotional energy associated with
expressions of sexuality; sex drive
• Thanatos—death instinct
• Reflected in aggressive,
destructive, and self-destructive
actions
• Person
possesses a
certain amount
of
psychological
energy
• Psychological
energy
develops into
three basic
structures of
personality: id,
ego, superego

10. Ego
• Latin for I
• The partly conscious rational component of personality
• Develops out of the id in infancy
• Understands reality and logic
• Most in touch with the demands of the external world
• Reality
• Mediator between id and superego
• Reality principle — the ability to postpone gratification
in accordance with demands of external world
• Can repress desires that cannot be met in an
acceptable manner

11. Superego
• At age 5 or 6, child
develops an
internal, parental
voice that is partly
conscious
• Internalization of
parental and
society’s moral
standards
• Responsible for
guilt; praises and
admonishes

12. The Ego Defense Mechanisms
• If demands of the id or superego threaten to overwhelm
the ego, anxiety results.
• If a realistic solution or compromise is not possible, the
ego may temporarily reduce anxiety by distorting
thoughts or perceptions of reality through ego defense
mechanisms.
• By resorting to these largely unconscious self-deceptions,
the ego can maintain an integrated sense of
self while searching for a more acceptable and realistic
solution to a conflict between the id and the superego.
• Repression is the most fundamental ego defense
mechanism. Others are used if repression fails.
• The short-term use of defense mechanisms can be
helpful; long-term use is problematic.

14. Personality Development
Fixation
• At each psychosexual stage, the child
is faced with a developmental conflict
that must be successfully resolved
• Child may be frustrated or
overindulged in stage’s expression of
pleasurable feelings
• If frustrated, child will be left with
feelings of unmet needs characteristic
of that stage
• If overindulged, child may be reluctant
to move on to the next
• In either case, result of an unresolved
developmental conflict is fixation
Freud’s
Psychosexual
Stages
People progress
through five
psychosexual
stages of
development. The
foundations of adult
personality are
established during
the first five years of
life, as the child
progresses through
the oral, anal, and
phallic
psychosexual
stages.

16. The Oedipus Complex
Child’s unconscious sexual
desire for the opposite-sex
parent, usually accompanied
by hostile feelings toward the
same-sex parent
Boys:
• Confrontation with father
for the affections of mother
• Boy feels hostility and
jealousy toward his father
• Realizes that father is
more physically powerful
• Boy experiences
castration anxiety, or fear
that father will castrate him
• To resolve, boy uses
identification — imitates
and internalizes father’s
values, attitudes,
mannerisms
Girls:
• Little girl discovers that
little boys have a penis
and that she does not
• Feels a sense of
deprivation and loss —
penis envy
• Attempts to take her
mother’s place with her
father, she also identifies
with her mother
• One of the most critiqued
of Freud’s ideas
Identification: Ego
defense mechanism that
reduces anxiety by
imitating behavior and
characteristics of
another person
• He later admitted “the
sexual life of adult women
is a ‘dark continent’ for
psychology.”

17. The Latency and Genital Stages
Genital Stage (puberty and
older)
Click here
Latency (5 years – puberty)
Click here
• Because the Oedipus
complex causes anxiety,
sexual urges of boys
and girls become
repressed
• Children desire to
associate with same-sex
peers, a preference
that strengthens the
child’s sexual identity
• Final resolution of the
Oedipus complex in
adolescence
• Incestuous urges start
to resurface; they are
prohibited by superego
and societal restriction
• Person directs sexual
urges toward socially
acceptable substitutes,
who often resemble the
person’s opposite-sex
parent
Song lyrics from 1911:
I want a girl just like the
girl that married dear old
dad.

18. The Neo-Freudians
• Carl Jung’s collective unconscious
• Karen Horney’s focus on security
• Alfred Adler’s individual psychology
• Neo-Freudians followed Freud in stressing the
importance of the unconscious and early childhood,
but they developed their own personality theories
• Disagreed with Freud on three key points
• Disagreed that behavior was primarily motivated by
sexual urges
• Disagreed that personality is fundamentally
determined by early childhood experiences
• Disagreed with Freud’s generally pessimistic view of
human nature and society

19. Carl Jung — Archetypes and the
Collective Unconscious
• People motivated by more general psychic
energy to achieve growth
• Believed in collective unconscious
• Based on human collective evolutionary
history (archetypes)
• “The whole spiritual heritage of
mankind’s evolution, born anew in
the brain structure of every
individual.”
• Mental images of universal human instincts,
themes, and preoccupations
• Common archetypal themes that are
expressed in virtually every culture are hero,
powerful father, nurturing mother, witch, wise
old man, innocent child, and death and
rebirth.
• Two important archetypes that Jung (1951)
described are anima and animus—
representations of feminine and masculine
qualities
• First to describe introverts and extraverts
Carl Jung
Ceremonial
buffalo robe
of the Plains
Indians
Archetypes in popular
culture

20. Karen Horney — Basic
Anxiety and “Womb Envy”
• Stressed importance of cultural and social factors in
personality development
• Looked at anxiety related to security and social
relationships
• Basic anxiety — the feeling of being isolated and
helpless in a hostile world
• Described three patterns of behavior that the
individual uses to defend against basic anxiety:
moving toward, against, or away from other people
• Disagreed with Freud’s interpretation of female
development, and notion that women suffer from
penis envy
• What women envy in men, is not their penis, but
their superior status in society
• Contended that men often suffer womb envy,
envying women’s capacity to bear children
• Men compensate for minor role in reproduction by
striving to make creative achievements in their work
• Believed that the drive to grow psychologically and
achieve one’s potential is basic human motive

21. Alfred Adler — Feelings of
Inferiority
• Most fundamental human motive is striving for
superiority
• Arises from universal feelings of inferiority that are
experienced during childhood
• These feelings motivate people to compensate for
real or imagined weaknesses by emphasizing
talents and abilities and by working hard to improve
themselves
• Overcompensation may cause superiority complex,
in which a person exaggerates their own
achievements and importance
• When people are unable to compensate for specific
weaknesses or when feelings of inferiority are
excessive, can develop an inferiority complex—a
general sense of inadequacy, weakness, and
helplessness
• Adler believed that humans were motivated to grow
and achieve their personal goals
• Emphasized importance of cultural influences and
social relationships

22. Evaluating Freud and the
Psychoanalytic Perspective
on Personality
• Inadequacy of evidence
• Small and skewed
samples
• Problems with testability
• Psychoanalytic concepts
are vague and
ambiguous
• Impossible to disprove
because even seemingly
contradictory information
can be used to support
Freud’s theory
• Better at explaining past
behavior than at
predicting future
behavior
Ideas that have been
substantiated by empirical
research
• Much of mental life is
unconscious
• Early childhood
experiences have a critical
influence on interpersonal
relationships and
psychological adjustment
• People differ significantly
in ability to regulate
impulses, emotions, and
thoughts toward adaptive
and socially acceptable
ends

23. Sexism and Freud
• Because penis envy produces feelings of shame and
inferiority, Freud claimed, women are more vain,
masochistic, and jealous than men
• Women are more influenced by emotions and have a
lesser ethical and moral sense than men
• Used male psychology as a prototype
• Women are essentially viewed as a deviation from the
norm of masculinity

24. The Humanistic
Perspective on Personality
• Emphasizes free will, self-awareness,
and psychological
growth
• Emphasizes inherent
goodness of people, human
potential, self-actualization,
self-concept, and healthy
personality development

25. The Emergence of
the “Third Force”
• Another group of
psychologists opposed to
both psychoanalysis and
behaviorism championed a
“third force” in psychology
• Saw people as being
innately good
• Focused on the healthy
personality
• Doubted that laboratory
research with rats and
pigeons accurately reflected
human nature
• Most important factor in
personality is the individual’s
conscious, subjective
perception of self
• Major figures – Carl Rogers,
Abraham Maslow

26. Carl Rogers—The Self-Concept
• Most basic human motive is actualizing tendency — the innate
drive to maintain and enhance the human organism
• Other drives are secondary
• Self-concept — set of perceptions and beliefs you hold about
yourself
• People are motivated in accordance with self-concept
• Self-concept begins early in life
• Positive regard = sense of being loved and valued by others
• Children’s increasing self-awareness produces need for positive
regard
• Regard can be conditional and unconditional
• Unconditional positive regard: child’s sense of being
unconditionally loved and valued, even if he or she doesn’t
conform to standards and expectations of others
• Conditional positive regard: child’s sense of being valued and
loved only if he or she behaves in a way that is acceptable to
others
• Feelings become denied or distorted not because they are
threatening but because they contradict the self-concept. In this
case, people are in a state of incongruence.
• Fully functioning person has a flexible, constantly evolving self-concept
and experiences congruence

27. Evaluating the Humanistic
Perspective on Personality
• Difficult to test or validate scientifically
• Based on philosophical assumptions or clinical
observations rather than on empirical research
• Tends to be too optimistic, minimizing some of the
more destructive aspects of human nature
• Influence of humanistic psychology has waned
• Made contributions to psychotherapy, counseling,
education, and parenting
• Subjective experience and the self-concept has
become widely accepted

28. The Social Cognitive
Perspective on Personality
• Stresses conscious thought processes, self-regulation,
and the importance of situational influences
• Social cognitive personality theorists rely on
experimental findings
• Social cognitive perspective emphasizes conscious, self-regulated
behavior rather than unconscious mental
influences and instinctual drives
• Social cognitive approach emphasizes that our sense of
self can vary, depending on our thoughts, feelings, and
behaviors in a given situation

29. Albert Bandura and Social
Cognitive Theory
• Human behavior and
personality are caused by
the interaction of
behavioral, cognitive, and
environmental factors
• Process called reciprocal
determinism
• Person’s cognitive skills,
abilities, and attitudes
represent the person’s self-system
• Most critical elements
influencing the self-system
are our beliefs of self-efficacy
• Self-efficacy — the belief
that people have about
their ability to meet the
demands of a specific
situation

30. Evaluating the Social Cognitive
Perspective on Personality
• Well-grounded in empirical, laboratory research
• Major impact on the study of personality
• However, laboratory experiences are rather simple and
may not reflect the complexity of human interactions in
real world
• Downplays the influences of the unconscious, emotions,
and conflicts
• Emphasizes the self-regulation of behavior
• Places most of the responsibility for behavior on the
person

31. Freud Versus
Bandura on Human
Aggression
Freud
• Aggression is a universal,
unconscious human
instinct that must be
controlled by the internal
and external restraints of
culture, society, and
morality
• Aggressive instincts were
part of the irrational,
impulsive, and
unconscious id Bandura (social cognitive
theorists)
• Discount the importance of
unconscious instincts or motives
• Emphasize that behavior is
driven by conscious goals and
motives

32. The Trait Perspective on Personality
• Focuses on
identifying,
describing, and
measuring individual
differences
• Trait theorists view
the person as being
a unique combination
of personality
characteristics or
attributes, called
traits
• Trait: formally
defined as a
relatively stable,
enduring
predisposition to
behave in a certain
way

34. Surface Traits and Source Traits
Source Trait
Click here
Surface Trait
Click here
• Characteristic that can
be inferred from
observable behavior
Examples: “happy,”
exuberant,” “spacey,”
and “gloomy”
• 4,000 English words
describe specific
personality traits
Most fundamental
dimensions of personality;
broad, basic traits that are
hypothesized to be
universal and relatively
few in number

35. Two Representative
Trait Theories –
Cattell and Eysenck
Raymond Cattell
• Proposed 16 personality
factors
• Used a statistical
technique called factor
analysis to identify them
• Developed the Sixteen
Personality Factor
Questionnaire
(abbreviated 16PF)
• Sixteen is generally
considered by others as
too many traits

36. Two Representative
Trait Theories –
Cattell and Eysenck
Hans Eysenck
• Had three different source
traits
• Introversion-extraversion
• Neuroticism-stability
• Psychoticism
• Believed that individual
differences in personality
are due to biological
differences among people
• Three is generally
considered by others as
too few traits

37. The Five-Factor Model
• The consensus among many trait
researchers is that essential building
blocks of personality can be
described in terms of five basic
personality dimensions, which are
sometimes called “the Big Five.”
• Factors — usually rated from low to
high
• Has been tested in more than 50
cultures
• Probably biologically based as
evolution found these factors adaptive
• Traits seem stable over lifespan
• Seem consistent over different
situations and related to specific brain
activities and structures

38. Personality Traits and Behavioral
Genetics
• Interdisciplinary field that studies the effects of genes
and heredity on behavior
• Basic research strategy is to compare the degree of
difference among subjects with their degree of genetic
relatedness
• Evidence for genetic influence is particularly strong for
extraversion and neuroticism, two of the Big Five
personality traits
• Twin studies have found that openness to experience,
conscientiousness, and agreeableness are influenced
by genetics to a lesser extent
• As twins grow up and leave home, personalities can
diverge somewhat, showing the influence of
environment and experience

39. The Neuroscience of Personality
Brain Structure and the Big Five
Brain imaging
(MRIs) has found:
• People who were
high in
extraversion
(Factor 2)
showed higher
levels of brain
activation in
response to
positive images.
• People who
score high in
neuroticism
(Factor 1) show
more activation
in response to
negative images.

40. The Neuroscience of Personality
Brain Structure and the Big Five
Extraversion
Click here
• medial orbitofrontal cortex
sensitivity to rewarding stimuli
Agreeableness
Click here
• posterior cingulate cortex
understanding beliefs of others
• fusiform gyrus
perceiving faces
Conscientiousness
Click here
• middle frontal gyrus
planning, working memory,
and self-regulation
Neuroticism
Click here
• mixed pattern of brain structure
Openness to
experience
Click here
• no significant pattern of brain differences
Associations
with brain
structures

41. Evaluating the Trait Perspective on
Personality
• Don’t really explain personality, simply describe general
predispositions
• Doesn’t describe the development of the behaviors;
simply saying they are due to environment and heredity
is not that useful
• Trait approaches generally fail to address how issues
such as motives, unconscious mental processes, or
beliefs about self affect personality development
• Doesn’t discuss grand conclusions about the essence of
human nature that characterize the psychoanalytic and
humanistic theories

42. Assessing Personality
Tests to
measure
and
evaluate
personality
fall into two
categories
Projective tests
type of personality
test that involves a
person’s
interpreting an
ambiguous image
Self-report
inventories
type of
psychological test
in which a person’s
responses to
standardized
questions are
compared with
established norms

43. Projective Tests
Projective tests developed out of
psychoanalytic approaches
• Interpretation of an ambiguous image
• Used to determine unconscious motives,
conflicts, and psychological traits
• Related to projection (defense
mechanism)
• First projective test was the famous
Rorschach Inkblot Test
• Presentation and interpretation of a
series of black-and-white and colored
inkblots
• Numerous scoring systems exist
based on such criteria as whether
person reports seeing animate or
inanimate objects, human or animal
figures, and movement, and whether
person deals with whole blot or
fragments
• More structured projective test is
Thematic Apperception Test
• Involves creating stories about each
of a series of ambiguous scenes

44. Strengths and Limitations of Projective
Tests
Clinicians say the strength of projective tests is that they
provide qualitative information about individual’s
psychological functioning.
Critiques
• Testing situation or examiner’s behavior can
influence a person’s responses
• Scoring of projective tests is highly subjective
• Projective tests often fail to produce consistent
results
• Many studies question their validity and their
reliability

45. Self-Report Inventories
• Psychological test in which an individual
answers standardized questions about
their behavior and feelings
• Answers are then compared with
established norms
• Often called objective personality tests
• Most widely used self-report inventory is
the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality
Inventory (MMPI)
• Current version is MMPI -2
• Originally designed to assess mental
health and detect psychological
symptoms
• Includes more than 500 questions to
which person must reply “True” or
“False”
• Topics include social, political,
religious, and sexual attitudes;
physical and psychological health;
interpersonal relationships; and
abnormal thoughts and behaviors
• Includes “lying scales”

46. Other Self-Report Inventories
Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16PF)
• Based on Cattell’s trait theory
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
• Designed to assess personality types rather than
measure personality traits
• Has reliability and validity problems

47. Strengths and Limitations of
Self-Report Inventories
Strengths
• Standardized — each
person receives the
same instructions and
responds to the same
questions
• Use of established
norms: results are
compared with
previously established
norms and are not
subjectively evaluated
• Reliability and validity of
self-report inventories
are far greater than
those of projective tests
Limitations
• Evidence that people
can “fake” responses
to look better (or
worse)
• Tests contain
hundreds of items
and become tedious
• People may not be
good judges of their
own behavior
• No personality test,
by itself, is likely to
provide a definitive
description of any
given individual