THEORIES OF PERSONALITY OUTLINE

Introduction to Personality Theory

Psychodynamic Theories
Freud: Psychoanalysis
Adler: Individual Psychology
Jung: Analytical Psychology
Klein: Object Relations Theory
Horney: Psychoanalytic Social Theory
Fromm: Humanistic Psychoanalysis
Sullivan: Interpersonal Theory
Erikson: Post-Freudian Theory

Learning Theories
Skinner: Behavioral Analysis
Bandura: Social Cognitive Theory
Rotter and Mischel: Cognitive Social
Learning Theory
Dispositional Theories
Cattel and Eysenck: Trait and Factor
Theories
Allport: Psychology of the Individual

Humanistic/Existential Theories
Kelly: Psychology of Personal Constructs
Rogers: Person Centered Theory
Maslow: Holistic-Dynamic Theory
May: Existential Psychology

INTRODUCTION OF PERSONALITY THEORY

Overview of Personality Theory
Personality
theorists (1) make controlled observations
of human behavior and (2) speculate
on the meaning
of those observations. Differences in theories are
due to more t h a n differences in terminology; t h e y stem
from differences among theorists on basic issues concerning the
nature of humanity.
What Is Personality?
The term personality has several definitions. In everyday
language, the word personality refers to ones social skills,
charisma, an d popularity. However, scientists u s e the term to
mean more than a person's persona, or public image. To them,
personality is a pattern of relatively permanent traits or
characteristics that give some consistency to a person's behavior.
What Is a Theory?
Theories are tools used by scientists to generate research and
organize observations.
Theory Defined
A theory i s a set of related assumptions that allows scientists
to use logical deductive
reasoning
to formulate testable
hypotheses.

Theory and Its Relatives

The term theory i s often used incorrectly to imply
something other than a scientific concept. Although theory
has some relationship with philosophy, speculation,
hypothesis, and taxonomy, it is not the same as any of
these. Philosophy-the love of wisdom-is a broader term
than theory, but one of its branches- epistemologyrelates to the nature of knowledge, and theories are
used by scientists in the pursuit of knowledge. Theories
rely on speculation, but speculation in the absence of
controlled observations and empirical research is
essentially worthless. Hypothesis, or educated guess,
is a narrower term than theory. A single theory may
generate hundreds of hypotheses. Taxonomy means a
classification system, and theories often rely on some sort
of classification of data. However, taxonomies do not
generate hypotheses.
Why Different Theories?
Psychologists
and
other
scientists generate a
variety of theories because they have different life
experiences and different ways of looking at the same
data.
Theorists Personalities and Their Theories of Personality
Because p e r s o n a l i t y theories flow from
an individual theorist's personality, some psychologists
have
proposed
the Psychology of science, a
discipline that studies the personal characteristics of
theorists.
What Makes a Theory Useful?
A useful theory must (1) g e n e r a t e research-both
descriptive research and hypothesis testing, (2) be
falsifiable; that is, research findings should be able to
either support of refute the theory, (3) organize data
into an
intelligible framework and integrate new
information into its structure; (4) guide action, or provide
the practitioner with a road map for making dayto-day decisions; (5) be internally consistent and have a
set of operational definitions; and (6) be parsimonious,
or as simple as possible.
Dimensions for a Concept of Humanity
Personality theorists have had different conceptions of
human nature, and the authors list six dimensions for
comparing these conceptions. These dimensions include
determinism versus free choice, pessimism versus optimism,
causality versus teleology, conscious versus unconscious
determinants of behavior, biological versus social influences
on personality, and uniqueness versus similarities among
people.
Research in Personality Theory
In researching human behavior, personality theorists often
use various measuring procedures, and these procedures
must be both reliable and valid. Reliability refers to a
measuring instrument's consistency whereas validity refers
to its accuracy or truthfulness.

Levels of Mental Life

Freud saw mental functioning as operating on three
levels: unconscious, preconscious, and conscious.

PSYCHODYNAMIC THEORIES
FREUD: PSYCHOANALYSIS
Overview of Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory Sigmund
Freud's psychoanalysis has endured because it (1)
postulated the primacy of sex and aggression-two
universally popular themes, (2) attracted a group of
followers
who
were dedicated to spreading
psychoanalytic doctrine, and (3) advanced the notion
of
unconscious motives,
which permit
varying
explanations for the same observations.
Biography of Sigmund Freud
Born in the Czech R e p u b l i c in 1856, Sigmund Freud
spent most of his l i f e in Vienna. In h i s practice as a
psychiatrist, he was more interested in learning about the
unconscious motives of patients t h a n i n curing
n e u r o s e s . Early i n his professional career, Freud
believed that hysteria was a result of being seduced
during childhood by a sexually mature person, often a
parent or other relative.
In 1897, however, he
abandoned his seduction theory and replaced it with
his
notion of the Oedipus complex, a concept that
remained the center of his psychoanalytic theory.

Unconscious
The unconscious includes drives and
instincts that are beyond awareness but that
motivate most human behaviors. Unconscious
drives can become conscious only in disguised or
distorted form, such as dream images, slips of the
tongue, or neurotic symptoms. Unconscious
processes originate from two sources:
(1)
repression, or the blocking out of
anxiety-filled experiences and (2)
phylogenetic endowment,
or
inherited
experiences that lie beyond an individual's
personal experience.
Preconscious
The preconscious contains images that are not
in awareness but that can become conscious
either quite easily or
with some level of difficulty.
Conscious
Consciousness plays a relatively minor role in
Freudian theory. Conscious ideas stem from
either the perception of external stimuli (our
perceptual conscious system)
or from
the
unconscious and
preconscious after they have evaded
censorship.

Provinces of the Mind

Freud conceptualized three regions of the mind:
the id, the ego, and the superego.
The Id
The id, which is completely unconscious,
serves the pleasure principle and contains our
basic instincts. It operates through the primary
process.
The Ego
The ego, or secondary process, is governed by
the reality principle and is responsible for
reconciling the unrealistic
demands of the id and the superego.
The Superego
The superego, which serves the idealistic principle,
has two subsystems-the conscience and the egoideal. The conscience results from punishment for
improper behavior whereas the ego- ideal
stems from rewards for socially
acceptable behavior.
Dynamics of Personality
Dynamics of personality refers to those forces that
motivate people.
Instincts
Freud grouped all human drives or urges under
two primary instincts-sex (Eros or
the life instinct) and aggression (the
death or destructive instinct). The aim of the
sexual instinct is pleasure, which can be gained
through the erogenous zones, especially the
mouth, anus, and genitals. The object of the
sexual instinct is any person or thing that
brings
sexual pleasure. All infants possess
primary narcissism, or self-centeredness, but the
secondary narcissism of adolescence and
adulthood
is not universal. Both sadism
(receiving sexual pleasure from inflicting pain on
another) and masochism (receiving sexual pleasure
from painful experiences) satisfy both sexual
and aggressive drives. The destructive instinct aims
to return a person to an inorganic
state, but it is ordinarily directed against
other people and is called aggression.

Anxiety
Freud believed only the ego feels anxiety, but
the id, superego, and outside world can each
be a source of anxiety. Neurotic anxiety stems
from the
ego's relation with the id; moral anxiety
is similar to guilt and results from the ego's
relation
with the superego;
and realistic
anxiety, which is similar to fear,
is produced by the ego's relation with the real
world.
Defense Mechanisms
According to Freud, defense mechanisms operate to
protect the ego against the pain of anxiety.
Repression
Repression involves forcing unwanted, anxietyloaded experiences into the unconscious. It is
the most basic of all defense mechanisms
because it is an active process in each of the
others.
Undoing and Isolation
Undoing is the ego's attempt to do away with
unpleasant experiences and their consequences,
usually by means of repetitious
ceremonial
actions. Isolation, in contrast, is marked by
obsessive thoughts and involves the ego's attempt
to isolate an experience by surrounding it with
a blacked-out region of
insensibility.
Reaction Formation
A reaction formation is marked by the repression
of one impulse and the ostentatious expression
of its exact opposite.
Displacement
Displacement takes place when people
redirect their unwanted urges onto other objects
or people in order to disguise the original
impulse.
Fixation
Fixations develop when psychic energy is blocked
at one stage of development,
making psychological change difficult.