Theories of Personality Reviewer
behind people’s actions.
Feist, J., Feist, G., & Roberts, T. (2013). Theories
of personality. McGraw-Hill.
Freud: Psychoanalysis
● The twin cornerstones of psychoanalysis, sex and
aggression, are two subjects of continuing
popularity.
● Freud’s understanding of human personality was
based on his experiences with patients, his
analysis of his own dreams, and his vast readings
in the various sciences and humanities. These
experiences provided the basic data for the
evolution of his theories.
● He spent 4 months with Charcot, from whom he
learned the hypnotic technique for treating
hysteria, a disorder typically characterized by
paralysis or the improper functioning of certain
parts of the body.
● Breuer taught Freud about catharsis, the process
of removing hysterical symptoms through “talking
them out.”
LEVELS OF MENTAL LIFE
● Unconscious - The unconscious contains all those
drives, urges, or instincts that are beyond our
awareness but that nevertheless motivate most
of our words, feelings, and actions.
● Preconscious - The preconscious level of the mind
contains all those elements that are not
conscious but can become conscious either quite
readily or with some difficulty.
● Conscious - It is the only level of mental life
directly available to us.
PROVINCES OF THE MIND
● The Id - The id has no contact with reality, yet it
strives constantly to reduce tension by satisfying
basic desires.
● The Ego - The ego, or I, is the only region of the
mind in contact with reality. The ego becomes
the decision-making or executive branch of
personality.
● The Superego - represents the moral and ideal
aspects of personality and is guided by the
moralistic and idealistic principles.
DYNAMICS OF PERSONALITY
Motivational principle, to explain the driving forces
● Drives - operate as a constant motivational force.
1. Sex - aim of the sexual drive is pleasure, but this
pleasure is not limited to genital satisfaction.
Sex can take many forms, including narcissism,
love, sadism, and masochism.
Narcissism - the desire and energy that drives one's
instinct to survive.
Love - when people invest their libido on an object or
person other than themselves.
Sadism - the need for sexual pleasure by inflicting
pain or humiliation on another person.
Masochism - experience sexual pleasure from
suffering pain and humiliation inflicted either by
themselves or by others.
2. Aggression - aim of the destructive drive, is to
return the organism to an inorganic state.
Anxiety - a felt, affective, unpleasant state
accompanied by a physical sensation that warns the
person against impending danger.
● Neurotic anxiety - defined as apprehension about
an unknown danger.
● Moral anxiety - stems from the conflict between
the ego and the superego.
● Realistic anxiety - closely related to fear. It is
defined as an unpleasant, nonspecific feeling
involving a possible danger.
DEFENSE MECHANISMS
● All defense mechanisms protect the ego against
anxiety.
I. Repression - involves in blocking and pushing
unacceptable or threatening feelings, wishes,
or experiences into the unconscious.
II. Reaction Formation – Involves substituting
behaviors, thoughts or feelings that are the
direct opposite of unacceptable ones.
III. Displacement - Involves transferring feeling
about, or response to, an object that causes
anxiety to another person or object that is less
threatening.
IV. Fixation - the permanent attachment of the
libido onto an earlier, more primitive stage of
development.
V. Regression - Once the libido has passed a
developmental stage, it may, during times of
 stress and anxiety, revert back to that earlier
stage.
VI. Projection - falsely and unconsciously
attributes your own unacceptable feelings,
traits, or thoughts to individuals or objects.
VII. Introjection - people incorporate positive
qualities of another person into their own ego.
VIII. Sublimation - Which is a type of displacement,
involves redirecting a threatening or forbidden
desire, usually sexual into a socially acceptable
one.
STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT
● Infantile Period - most important assumptions is
that infants possess a sexual life and go through a
period of pre-genital sexual development during
the first 4 or 5 years after birth.
Oral Phase - Infants obtain life-sustaining
nourishment through the oral cavity, but beyond that,
they also gain pleasure through the act of sucking.
Anal Phase - this period is characterized by
satisfaction gained through aggressive behavior and
through the excretory function.
Phallic Phase - a time when the genital area becomes
the leading erogenous zone. (Oedipus complex)
● Latency Period - a period of dormant
psychosexual development.
● Genital Period - Puberty signals a reawakening of
the sexual aim and the beginning of the genital
period.
● Maturity - The genital period begins at puberty
and continues throughout the individual’s
lifetime.
APPLICATIONS OF PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY
● Free association - patients are required to
verbalize every thought that comes to their mind,
no matter how irrelevant or repugnant it may
appear.
● Dream analysis - to transform the manifest
content of dreams to the more important latent
content.
● Freudian Slips - Freud believed that many
everyday slips of the tongue or pen, misreading,
incorrect hearing, misplacing objects, and
temporarily forgetting names or intentions are
not chance accidents but reveal a person’s
unconscious intentions.
● Transference - the strong sexual or aggressive
feelings, positive or negative, that patients
develop toward their analyst during the course of
treatment.
Adler: Individual Psychology
Individual psychology presents an optimistic view of
people while resting heavily on the notion of social
interest, that is, a feeling of oneness with all
humankind.
STRIVING FOR SUCCESS OR SUPERIORITY
● Striving for superiority - striving superiority for
their own selves over others. (inferiority complex)
● Striving for success - motivated by social interest.
The Final Goal - individuals are strive towards a
personal goal which is superiority or success. The final
goal is fictional and has no objective existence.
Creative power - people’s ability to freely shape their
behavior and create their own personality. Style of life
is molded by people’s creative power.
THE STRIVING FORCE AS COMPENSATION
● People strive for superiority or success as a means
of compensation for feelings of inferiority or
weakness.
SUBJECTIVE PERCEPTIONS
● People’s subjective perceptions shape their
behavior and personality.
1. Fictionalism - This subjective, fictional final goal
guides our style of life, gives unity to our
personality.
Teleology is an explanation of behavior in terms of its
final purpose or aim. It is opposed to causality, which
considers behavior as springing from a specific cause.
2. Physical Inferiorities - even after they attain
size, strength, and superiority, they may act as if
they are still small, weak, and inferior.
UNITY AND SELF-CONSISTENCY OF PERSONALITY
Personality is unified and self-consistent.
● Organ Dialect - the deficient organ expresses the
direction of the individual’s goal.
● Conscious and Unconscious - the harmony
between conscious and unconscious actions.
SOCIAL INTEREST
● Gemeinschaftsgefühl - feeling of oneness with all
humanity.
● Social interest is the natural condition of the
human species and the adhesive that binds
society together.
STYLE OF LIFE
The self-consistent personality structure develops into
a person’s style of life.
● It includes a person’s goal, self-concept, feelings
for others, and attitude toward the world.
ABNORMAL DEVELOPMENT
The one factor underlying all types of maladjustments
is underdeveloped social interest.
External Factors in Maladjustment
1. Exaggerated Physical Deficiencies - People with
exaggerated physical deficiencies sometimes
develop exaggerated feelings of inferiority
because they overcompensate for their
inadequacy.
2. Pampered Style of Life - They expect others to
look after them, overprotect them, and satisfy
their needs.
3. Neglected Style of Life - Children who feel
unloved and unwanted are likely to borrow
heavily from these feelings in creating a
neglected style of life.
Safeguarding Tendencies
● Enable people to hide their inflated self-image
and to maintain their current style of life.
1. Excuses - These excuses protect a weak—but
artificially inflated—sense of self-worth and
deceive people into believing that they are
more superior than they really are.
2. Aggression - some people use aggression to
safeguard their exaggerated superiority
complex, that is, to protect their fragile self-
esteem.
Depreciation is the tendency to undervalue other
people’s achievements and to overvalue one’s own.
Accusation is the tendency to blame others for one’s
failures and to seek revenge, thereby safeguarding
one’s own tenuous self-esteem.
Self-accusation is marked by self-torture and guilt.
3. Withdrawal - safeguarding through distance.
Moving backward is the tendency to safeguard one’s
fictional goal of superiority by psychologically
reverting to a more secure period of life.
Standing still - People who stand still simply do not
move in any direction; thus, they avoid all
responsibility by ensuring themselves against any
threat of failure.
Hesitating - . Some people hesitate or vacillate when
faced with difficult problems.
Constructing obstacles - By overcoming the obstacle,
they protect their self-esteem and their prestige.
MASCULINE PROTEST
According to Adler, cultural and social practices—not
anatomy—influence many men and women to
overemphasize the importance of being manly, a
condition he called the masculine protest.
APPLICATIONS OF INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY
1. Family Constellation - their birth order, the
gender of their siblings, and the age spread
between them.
Firstborn children - are likely to have intensified
feelings of power and superiority, high anxiety, and
overprotective tendencies.
Secondborn children - the personalities of
secondborn children are shaped by their perception of
the older child’s attitude toward them.
Youngest children - are often the most pampered
and, consequently, run a high risk of being problem
children.
Only children are in a unique position of competing,
not against brothers and sisters, but against father
and mother.
2. Early Recollections - To gain an understanding
of patients’ personality, Adler would ask them
to reveal their early recollections.
3. Dreams - Although dreams cannot foretell the
future, they can provide clues for solving
future problems.
4. Psychotherapy - the chief purpose of Adlerian
psychotherapy is to enhance courage, lessen
 feelings of inferiority, and encourage social
interest.
Jung: Analytical Psychology
Jung’s psychodynamic theory, which emphasizes the
collective unconscious and archetypes.
LEVELS OF THE PSYCHE
● Conscious - conscious images are those that are
sensed by the ego, whereas unconscious elements
have no relationship with the ego.
● Personal Unconscious - embraces all repressed,
forgotten, or subliminally perceived experiences
of one particular individual.
● Collective Unconscious – consist of ancient
memory traces and symbols that are passed on by
birth and are shared by all peoples in all cultures.
Archetypes - are ancient or archaic images that derive
from the collective unconscious
1. Persona - The side of personality that people
show to the world is designated as the persona.
2. Shadow - the archetype of darkness and
repression, represents those qualities we do not
wish to acknowledge but attempt to hide from
ourselves and others.
3. Anima - The feminine side of men and is
responsible for many of their irrational moods and
feelings.
4. Animus – The masculine side of women, is
responsible for irrational thinking and illogical
opinions in women.
5. Great Mother – archetype of fertility and
destruction.
6. Wise old man – archetype of the intelligent but
deceptive voice of accumulated experiences.
7. Hero – the unconscious image of a persona who
conquers an evil foe but who also has a tragic
flaw.
8. Self – the archetype of completeness, wholeness
and perfection.
DYNAMICS OF PERSONALITY
Causality and Teleology
● Causality holds that present events have their
origin in previous experiences.
● Teleology holds that present events are
motivated by goals and aspirations for the future
that direct a person’s destiny.
Progression and Regression
● Progression - Adaptation to the outside world
involves the forward flow of psychic energy and is
called progression.
● Regression - adaptation to the inner world relies
on a backward flow of psychic energy and is called
regression.
PSYCHOLOGICAL TYPES
Attitudes - a predisposition to act or react in a
characteristic direction.
● Introversion - the turning inward of psychic
energy with an orientation toward the
subjective.
● Extraversion - the attitude distinguished by the
turning outward of psychic energy so that a
person is oriented toward the objective and
away from the subjective.
Functions
Sensing tells people that something exists;
Thinking enables them to recognize its meaning;
Feeling tells them its value or worth; and
Intuition allows them to know about it without
knowing how they know.
Thinking - Logical intellectual activity that produces a
chain of ideas.
● Extraverted thinking - people rely heavily on
concrete thoughts, but they may also use
abstract ideas if these ideas have been
transmitted to them from without, for example,
from parents or teachers.
● Introverted thinking - people react to external
stimuli, but their interpretation of an event is
colored more by the internal meaning they
bring with them than by the objective facts
themselves.
Feeling - describe the process of evaluating an idea or
event.
● Extraverted feeling people use objective data to
make evaluations.
● Introverted feeling people base their value
judgments primarily on subjective perceptions
rather than objective facts.
Sensing - The function that receives physical stimuli
and transmits them to perceptual consciousness is
called sensation.
● Extraverted sensing people perceive external
stimuli objectively, in much the same way that
these stimuli exist in reality.
● Introverted sensing people are largely
influenced by their subjective sensations of
sight, sound, taste, touch, and so forth.
Intuiting - Intuition involves perception beyond the
workings of consciousness.
● Extraverted intuitive people are oriented
toward facts in the external world.
● Introverted intuitive people are guided by
unconscious perception of facts that are
basically subjective and have little or no
resemblance to external reality.
DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY
Jung believed that personality develops through a
series of stages that culminate in individuation, or
self-realization.
Stages of Development
1. Childhood - (1) the anarchic, (2) the monarchic,
and (3) the dualistic.
2. Youth - The period from puberty until middle life.
Period of increased activity, maturing sexuality,
growing consciousness, and recognition that the
problem-free era of childhood is gone forever.
3. Middle Life - Although this decline can present
middle-aged people with increasing anxieties,
middle life is also a period of tremendous
potential.
4. Old Age - As the evening of life approaches,
people experience a diminution of consciousness
just as the light and warmth of the sun diminish at
dusk.
Self-Realization - Psychological rebirth, also called self-
realization or individuation, is the process of
becoming an individual or whole person.
JUNG’S METHODS OF INVESTIGATION
1. Word Association Test - The word association
test is based on the principle that complexes
create measurable emotional responses.
2. Dream Analysis - The purpose of Jungian dream
interpretation is to uncover elements from the
personal and collective unconscious and to
integrate them into consciousness in order to
facilitate the process of self-realization.
3. Active Imagination - The purpose of active
imagination is to reveal archetypal images
emerging from the unconscious.
PSYCHOTHERAPY - identified four basic approaches to
therapy.
1. Cathartic method practiced by Josef Breuer and
his patient Anna O. For patients who merely have
a need to share their secrets, catharsis is effective.
2. The second stage involves interpretation,
explanation, and elucidation. (Freud)
3. The third stage, therefore, is the approach
adopted by Adler and includes the education of
patients as social beings.
4. Jung suggested a fourth stage, transformation. By
transformation, he meant that the therapist must
first be transformed into a healthy human being,
preferably by undergoing psychotherapy.
Klein: Object Relations Theory
According to Klein, the child’s relation to the breast is
fundamental and serves as a prototype for later
relations to whole objects, such as mother and father.
PSYCHIC LIFE OF THE INFANT
Infants do not begin life with a blank slate but with an
inherited predisposition to reduce the anxiety they
experience as a result of the conflict produced by the
forces of the life instinct and the power of the death
instinct.
● Phantasies - These phantasies are psychic
representations of unconscious id instincts.
● Objects - Drives, of course, must have some
object. Thus, the hunger drive has the good
breast as its object, the sex drive has a sexual
organ as its object, and so on.
POSITIONS
In their attempt to deal with this dichotomy of good
and bad feelings, infants organize their experiences
into positions, or ways of dealing with both internal
and external objects.
1. Paranoid-Schizoid Position - To control the
good breast and to fight off its persecutors, the
infant adopts the paranoid-schizoid position, a
way of organizing experiences that includes
both paranoid feelings of being persecuted and
a splitting of internal and external objects into
the good and the bad.
 2. Depressive Position - The feelings of anxiety
over losing a loved object coupled with a sense
of guilt for wanting to destroy that object.
PSYCHIC DEFENSE MECHANISMS
● Introjection - Klein simply meant that infants
fantasize taking into their body those perceptions
and experiences that they have had with the
external object, originally the mother’s breast.
● Projection - Projection is the fantasy that one’s
own feelings and impulses actually reside in
another person and not within one’s body.
● Splitting - Infants can only manage the good and
bad aspects of themselves and of external objects
by splitting them, that is, by keeping apart
incompatible impulses.
● Projective Identification - infants split off
unacceptable parts of themselves, project them
into another object, and finally introject them
back into themselves in a changed or distorted
form.
INTERNALIZATIONS - When object relations theorists
speak of internalizations, they mean that the person
takes in (introjects) aspects of the external world and
then organizes those introjections into a
psychologically meaningful framework.
● Ego – Klein believed that although the ego is
mostly unorganized at birth, it nevertheless is
strong enough to feel anxiety, to use defense
mechanisms, and to form early object relations in
both phantasy and reality.
● Superego - First, it emerges much earlier in life;
second, it is not an outgrowth of the Oedipus
complex; and third, it is much more harsh and
cruel.
● Oedipus Complex - For both girls and boys, a
healthy resolution of the Oedipus complex
depends on their ability to allow their mother and
father to come together and to have sexual
intercourse with each other.
LATER VIEWS ON OBJECT RELATIONS
Mahler’s (Margaret S. Mahler) work was concerned
with the infant’s struggle to gain autonomy and a
sense of self;
Kohut’s (Heinz Kohut), with the formation of the self;
Bowlby’s (John Bowlby’s Attachment Theory), with
the stages of separation anxiety; and
Ainsworth’s (Mary Ainsworth and the Strange
Situation), with styles of attachment.
PSYCHOTHERAPY
Play therapy - believing that young children express
their conscious and unconscious wishes through play
therapy.
The aim of Kleinian therapy is to reduce depressive
anxieties and persecutory fears and to mitigate the
harshness of internalized objects.
Horney: Psychoanalytic Social Theory
Horney insisted that social and cultural influences
were more important that biological ones.
The Importance of Childhood Experiences
● Although later experiences can have an
important effect, especially in normal individuals,
childhood experiences are primarily responsible
for personality development.
BASIC HOSTILITY AND BASIC ANXIETY
● If parents do not satisfy the child’s needs for
safety and satisfaction, the child develops
feelings of basic hostility toward the parents.
● Basic anxiety - defined as “a feeling of being
isolated and helpless in a world conceived as
potentially hostile”
● Four general ways that people protect
themselves against this feeling of being alone in
a potentially hostile world
1. Affection, a strategy that does not always
lead to authentic love.
2. Submissiveness - Neurotics who submit to
another person often do so in order to gain
affection.
3. Neurotics may also try to protect themselves
by striving for power, prestige, or
possession.
Power is a defense against the real or imagined
hostility of others and takes the form of a tendency to
dominate others;
Prestige is a protection against humiliation and is
expressed as a tendency to humiliate others;
Possession acts as a buffer against destitution and
poverty and manifests itself as a tendency to deprive
others.
4. Withdrawal - Neurotics frequently protect
themselves against basic anxiety either by
developing an independence from others or
by becoming emotionally detached from
them.
COMPULSIVE DRIVES