THEORIES OF PERSONALITY

Summary of Concepts

THEORY PROPONENT CONCEPTS

PSYCHOANALYSIS SIGMUND FREUD Sex and Aggression Twin cornerstones
Unconscious - Beyond our awareness
- Drives, urges, and instincts.
Preconscious - Not conscious but ready when needed.
- Sometimes difficult to convey.
Conscious
- Mental elements in awareness at any given point in
time.

Id -das or “it”
- Pleasure principle
- Instant gratification.
-Selfish, pleasure-seeking structure

Ego -das ichor “i”

-reality principle
-Person’s sole source of communication in the outside
world.
-Decision making, the executive branch of personality.
-Takes into consideration ID, EGO, SUPEREGO, and
EXTERNAL WORLD.
-Use of regression and other defense mechanisms
against anxiety since it has contact with the outside
world.

Superego - Non-realistic and idealistic principle

- No contact with the outside world and so, it is very
unrealistic in its demands for perfection.
- Learned through rules and regulations of parents
so, it will not develop if the parents will not show
proper conduct before 5 years old.
THEORIES OF PERSONALITY

Summary of Concepts
Neurotic Anxiety -unknown danger
Moral Anxiety -the conflict between ego and superego
Defense Mechanism - Strategies that the go uses to defend itself against the
anxiety produced by conflicts of everyday life.
Denial -A person refuses and denies to experience something if
the situation is too much to handle.
Ex: Smokers refuse to admit that smoking is bad for
health.
Repression -Exclusion of unpleasant or unwanted experiences,
emotions, or ideas from conscious awareness.
Ex: A person who was bullied does not want to recall the
event anymore.
Fixation -Permanent attachment of libido onto an earlier more
primitive stage of development.
Ex: Nail biting
Reaction-formation -Expressing an id impulse that is opposite of the once
that is truly driving a person.
Ex: Ana is angry but pretends that she is happy.
Displacement -Shifting id impulse to a substitute object that is
available.
Ex: You are mad at your boss and so, you kicked your
dog.
Rationalization -Reinterpreting behavior to make it more acceptable and
less threatening.
Ex: “I could have won the race but the track was wet”
Regression - Redirecting to an earlier, less frustrating period of
like and dispersing childish and dependent behavior.
Ex: temper tantrum
Projection -Attributing a disturbing impulse to someone else.
Ex: You hate someone but superego tells you that it
is bad and so, you solve the problem by believing
that they are the ones who hate you.
Introjection - Positive qualities of another person into their own
ego. You attribute someone’s qualities to yourself.
 THEORIES OF PERSONALITY

Summary of Concepts
Ex: You have to baby sit your baby brother while your
mother is gone and so, you attribute your mother’s
qualities to you as if you are her.

Sublimation - Altering or displacing id impulses by diverting

instinctual energy into socially acceptable behavior.
- For Freud, it is the highest level of ego defense.
Ex: Divert libido to writing poems.
Oral Stage -Birth to 1
mouth (id is dominant)
*Oral Receptive Phase
*Oral Sadistic Phase
Anal Stage -1 to 3
-Toilet (external reality)
*Early Anal Period
*late Anal Period
*Anal Character
*Anal Triad
Phallic Stage -4 to 5
-Incestuous Fantasies, Oedipus complex, anxiety,
superego development
*Male Phallic Stag
*Female Phallic Stage
Latency Stage -5 to puberty
-Sublimation of sex instincts
Genital Stage -Sex-role identity
-Reproduction is possible
-vagina and penis envy is a sought after object.
Dream Analysis -transform the manifest content of dreams to the more
important latent content.
Cocaine as pain reliever -Sigmund Freud, a young doctor, discovered marvelous
results to his severe depression after taking it.
THEORY PROPONENT CONCEPTS
INDIVIDUAL PSYCHOLOGY ALFRED ADLER Striving for Success -community benefit
THEORIES OF PERSONALITY

Summary of Concepts
-actions of people who are motivated by highly
developed social interest.
Striving for Superiority -personal gain
-people who strive for personal superiority over others.
Fictions -An imagined or potential goal that guides behavior.
-Our strive is not based on reality but on our subjective
perception of it.
Organ Dialect -body’s organs “speak a language which is usually more
expressive and discloses the individual’s opinion more
clearly than words are able to do”
Social Interest -innate potential to cooperate with other people in order
to achieve personal and social goals.
Style of Life -unique patterns of character, behavior, and habits.
Creative Power -ability to create an appropriate type of styles.
Safeguarding Tendencies -a counterpart to defense mechanism
-people create patterns to protect their exaggerated self-
esteem against public disgrace.
Excuses -”Yes, but” or “If only”
Aggression -to safeguard their exaggerated superiority complex.
Depreciation -undervalue other people’s achievements and to
overvalue one’s own.
Accusation -blame others for one’s failures and seek revenge.
Self-accusation -self-torture and guilt.
Withdrawal -when people run away from any difficult situation.
-safeguarding through distance.
Moving Backward -protect one’s goal of superiority by psychologically
reverting to a more secure period of life.
-To elicit sympathy, offered to generously to pampered
children.
Standing still -Doing nothing.
-Avoid all responsibilities by ensuring themselves against
any threat or failure.
Hesitating -Procrastination eventually give them the excuse to say
“It’s too late now”
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Summary of Concepts
Constructing obstacles -Least severe
-build a strawhouse to show that they can knock it down.
Masculine Protest -overemphasize the importance of being manly.
-the idea of weakness and dependency is seen as
feminine.
Family Constellation -birth order, gender of siblings, age spread.
*First born/Oldest
*Second born
*Youngest
*Only Child
Early Recollections -Memories from our childhood that Adler used to
understand his clients more.
-Markers of our “self”
THEORY PROPONENT CONCEPTS
ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY CARL JUNG Personal Unconscious - reservoir of forgotten or suppressed experiences that
have lost their intensity for some reason (i.e.
unpleasantness, disturbing, trivial)
Collective Unconscious -deepest level of the psyche containing the accumulation
of inherited experiences of our human and pre-human
ancestors
Archetypes -images of universal experiences contained in the
collective unconscious (primordial images)
Persona -public face or role
Shadow -dark side/ contains primitive animal instinct
Anima -feminine aspects of the male psyche
Animus -masculine aspect of the female psyche
Great Mother -the archetype of nourishment and destructiion
Wise Old Man -the archetype of wisdom and meaning
Hero -a conqueror who vanquishes evil, but who has a single
fatal flaw
Self -unity, integration and harmony of the total personality
Self-realization -person who is continually developing, learning new
skills, and moving toward it
-adaption to both internal and external worlds
THEORIES OF PERSONALITY

Summary of Concepts
Attitudes -predisposition to act or react in a characteristic direction
-each person has both an introverted and extraverted
attitude
Introversion -orientation toward one’s thoughts or feelings
Extraversion -orientation toward the external world and other people
Functions -there are four functions: sensing, thinking, feeling, and
intuiting, which can form eight possible orientations or
types
Thinking -conscious judgment of experiences (true or false)
-recognize its meaning
Feeling -evaluation based on pleasant or unpleasant (like or
dislike)
-knowing the value and worth
Sensation -experiencing through the senses
-tells people that something exists
Intuition -experience based on a hunch (not external stimulus)
-allows people to know about it without knowing how
they know
Child -divided into three substages:
1. the anarchic: characterized by chaotic and sporadic
consciousness; “islands of consciousness”; enter
consciousness as primitive images
2. the monarchic: characterized by the development of
the ego and by the beginning of logical and verbal
thinking; children see themselves as objectively and
often refer to themselves in the third person
3. dualistic: ego as perceiver arises during this phase
when the ego is divided into the objective and subjective;
children refer to themselves as first person and are
aware of their existence as separate individuals
Youth -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
THEORIES OF PERSONALITY

Summary of Concepts
-major difficulty facing youth is to overcome the natural
tendency to cling to the narrow consciousness of
childhood, thus avoiding present problems
-conservative principle: desire to live in the past
Middle Life -begins at approximately 35 or 40
-present middle-aged people with increasing anxieties,
middle life is also a period of tremendous potential
-this step often, but not always, involves a mature
religious orientation, especially a belief in some sort of
life after death
Old Age -believed that death is the goal of life and that life can be
fulfilling only when death is seen in this light
-backward orientation: clinging desperately to goals and
lifestyles of the past and going through the motions of
life aimlessly
-treated these middle-aged or older patients through
helping them establish new goals and find meaning in
living by first finding meaning in death
Word Assessment Test, -word association: projective technique; person responds
Symbolic Therapy to a stimulus word with whatever comes to mind
Technique (Dream -symptom analysis: similar to catharsis; symptoms
Analysis, Play Therapy, reported by patient; based on free associations to the
Myths, Symbolic Life), symptoms
Active Imagination, -dream analysis: interpretation of dreams to uncover
Psychotherapy, MBTI unconscious conflicts
-MBTI: assessment based on jung’s attitudes and
psychological types; developed by katherine cook briggs
and isabel briggs (1920s)
-dream analysis: felt that certain dreams offered proof
for the existence of the collective unconscious; included
big dreams (have special meaning for all people), typical
dreams (common to all people), and earliest dreams
remembered
-active imagination: requires a person to begin with any
 THEORIES OF PERSONALITY

Summary of Concepts
impression- a dream image, vision, picture, or fantasy-
and to concentrate until the impression begins to move
-psychotherapy: identified 4 basic approaches to therapy;
help neurotic patients become healthy and to encourage
healthy people to work independently toward self-
realization; countertransference (describe a therapist’s
feelings toward a patient
1. confession of a pathogenic secret
2. involves interpretation, explanation, and
elucidation
3. education of patients as social beings
4. transformation: therapist must first be
transformed into a healthy human being,
preferably by undergoing psychotherapy
Complexes -pattern of emotions and part of the personal
unconscious
-may be conscious or unconscious
Synchronicity -express a concept that belongs to him: the acausal
connection of two or more psychic and physical
phenomena
THEORY PROPONENT CONCEPTS
OBJECT RELATIONS MELANIE KLEIN Object any person or thing where aim is satisfied
THEORY
Phantasies - mental representation of child’s experience
- develops in relation to events
- serves as form of basis for baby and
understanding for an adult
Good breast - the breast wherein feelings of love and comfort
are greatly associated with
Bad Breast - the breast wherein feelings of rage and
destruction are greatly associated with
Positions - infant’s ways of dealing with internal and
external objects
- method of infants to organize their experiences
THEORIES OF PERSONALITY

Summary of Concepts
Paranoid-Schizoid Position - a method of organizing for infants that revolve
around experiences that have feeling of being
paranoid due to the thought of persecution and
splitting internal and external objects into
categories such as good and bad
Depressive Position - a child recognizes that an object that they lovee
and hate are now one.
Psychic Defense - uncomfortable states of mind
Mechanisms - strategies wherein it protects the child’s go
against the anxiety caused by their own
destructive fantasies
Introjection - good objects protect the infant from anxiety
- bad objects are introjected in order for infants to
gain control over them
Projection - seeing one's feelings and impulses in another
person and not within one’s body
- used by infants to avoid anxiety
Splitting - allow to tolerate good and bad things about
oneself by separating them
Projective Identification - a combination of other defense mechanisms
wherein infants split parts that are unacceptable
then project it onto another object and then
introject it to themselves in a changed form
Internalizations - concept wherein an individual takes in aspects
off their external world and then organize those
aspects in a meaningful system
Ego - aids internalization in sensing anxiety, using
defense mechanism, and form object relations
within both domains of fantasy and reality
- one’s ego can be unified if only splitted into two
parts which one part deals with life instinct and
relate with the death instinct
Superego - has the characteristics of being harsh and cruel
- precedes the oedipus complex
 THEORIES OF PERSONALITY

Summary of Concepts
Oedipus Complex - begins during the earliest months of one’s life
and reaches its climax during the genital stage
- the significant part of the oedipus complex is the
child’s fear to retaliate towards their parents in
order to fulfill their fantasy in emptying the
parent’s body
- in a child’s Oedipal years, it is important that
they harbor positive feelings towards their
parents
- establishes different attitudes, a positive attitude
for good objects while avoiding the bad objects
- Oedipal development is different for male and
females
Penis Envy - happens when a little girl wishes to internalize
her father’s penis in order for her to bear a child
from him
THEORY PROPONENT CONCEPTS
INDIVIDUATION MARGARET MAHLER Normal Autism -first major developmental stage
-spans the period from birth until about age 3 or 4 weeks
-period of absolute primary narcissism in which an infant
is unaware of any other person
-”objectless stage”: a time when an infant naturally
searches for the mother’s breast

Normal Symbiosis -infants realize that they cannot satisfy their own needs,
they begin to recognize their primary caregiver and to
seek a symbiotic relationship with her
-second developmental stage
Separation-Individuation -third major developmental stage
-spans the period of about 4-5 months until 30-36th
month
-children become psychologically separated from their
mothers, achieve a sense of individuation, and begin to
develop feelings of personal identity
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Summary of Concepts
ATTACHMENT THEORY JOHN BOWLBY Protest - First stage of separation anxiety
- Infants will cry when their primary caregiver is
not within their field of sight which will result to
not allowing other people to soothe them and
search for their caregiver
Apathy and Despair - Second stage of separation anxiety
- When the infant is still separated from their
caregiver, they will become sad, quiet, and
apathetic
Emotional Detachment - Last stage of separation anxiety and only
happens in humans
- The child becomes detached from other people
and especially, their caregivers and will even
avoid them. Children who reach this stage will no
longer feel sad when their caregiver leaves them
and may develop long lasting effects even when
they reach adulthood.
STRANGE SITUATION MARY AINSWORTH Anxious-Avoidant -infants stay calm when their mother leaves; they accept
the stranger, and when their mother returns, they ignore
and avoid her
Insecure Attachment -infants appeared very independent; would not use
mother as secure base but rather ignore her; would not
seek proximity or would not be upset if the mother left
Secure Attachment -infants are happy and enthusiastic and initiate contact
Anxious-Ambivalent/ -infants are ambivalent; unusually upset and when their
resistant Attachment mother returns they seek contact with her but reject
attempts at being soothed
Disorganized/ Disoriented -describes children who express a mix of behaviors, like
Attachment nervousness or avoidance, when their caregiver or
parent approaches them
THEORIES OF PERSONALITY

Summary of Concepts