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Subject PSYCHOLOGY

Paper No and Title Paper No 5: Personality Theories

Module No and Title Module No 7: Introduction to the Psychodynamic Domain

Module Tag PSY_P5_M7

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Learning Outcomes

2. Introduction

3. Development of the Psychoanalytic Movement

4. Neo-Freudian Psychoanalysis

5. Basic Understanding of Human Nature

6. Methodology

7. Summary

PSYCHOLOGY Paper No 5: Personality Theories

Module No 7: Introduction to the Psychodynamic Domain
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1. Learning Outcomes
After studying this module, you shall be able to

 Trace the development of the psychoanalytic movement

 Learn about the primary contributions of Neo-Freudians
 Gain an understanding of human nature from the psychodynamic perspective.
 Learn about the methodology used.

2. Introduction
Psychodynamic perspective originated with the work of Sigmund Freud and dominated thinking
about personality, mental disorders and psychotherapy for the first half of the 20th century. The
term ‘psychodynamics’ was used by Freud to describe the processes of the mind as the flow of
libidinal energy. Psychodynamic theory is built on the basic mechanistic postulate that there
exists a mental energy system that is governed by the physical principles of conservation of
energy. The theory is deterministic and lays emphasis on the unconscious determinants of
behavior, early childhood experiences, and interpersonal relationships to explain human behavior
and to treat people suffering from mental illnesses.

Psychoanalysis was once the most popular domain of psychology. It could be said with certain
surety that it was Sigmund Freud and the popularity of his approach that gave psychology the
thrust it needed when it was emerging as a discipline. Although most contemporary academicians
choose to drop it out of the mainstream psychology, the reaches of Freud’s notions are so far and
wide that they are embedded in the very evolution of psychology. The original Freudian theory
was criticized and many of his own disciples deflected from him, bringing their own concepts and
widening the psychodynamic approach. Starting from the neo-Freudians, the psychoanalytic
school has evolved from classical psychoanalysis and the contemporary notions are much
different from the original Freudian specifics.

3. Development of the psychoanalytic movement

In the initial years of his practice, Freud used hypnosis on his patients, a method he borrowed
from Jean Charcot. Working with Joseph Breuer, he developed the “talking cure” or free
association in the treatment of hysteria. The use of free association eventually led Freud to
theorize about the unconscious and the concept of repression. He developed dream analysis as a
means of tapping into the unconscious realm. These were the beginnings of his new found
“psychoanalysis”.

Freud engaged in self analysis; delving into his own dreams, emotions, memories. This reflection
convinced him of the importance of infantile sexuality and led to the development of the
psychosexual stages and the concept of the Oedipus complex. Then he began to develop the
levels of consciousness and the structure of personality.

Freud regularly delivered lectures at the University of Vienna and his ideas began to gather
followers. A small group of interested physicians began to gather in his apartment every
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Wednesday, and this came to be known as the Wednesday

Psychological Society. Among these initial followers were
Wilhelm Stekel, Max Kahane, Rudolf Reitler and Alfred Adler, who later developed their own
perspectives. Gradually the membership increased but Freud remained the society’s sole patron.

In 1906, Freud began correspondence with Jung, an already established psychiatrist in Zurich
who had set up a similar society in Zurich. Freud saw him as his crown prince and in 1910, he
was elected as the president of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). But Jung’s
thinking was markedly different from Freud’s, being more concerned with religion, spirituality
and moral concerns. They had a bitter fall out eventually.

In 1908, the society was renamed ‘The Vienna Psychoanalytic Society’. As the reach became
international, the first International Psychoanalytic Congress was held in April, 1908. The first
journal of psychoanalysis was launched in 1909, with Jung as its editor. In 1910, a sister society
formed in Russia and in the next year, the society admitted its first female members.

Freud gave a series of lectures in the United States in 1909, which marked the spread of the
psychoanalytic movement to the continent. Freud remarked to Jung who was touring with him,
“They do not realize that we are bringing them the plague”. The event attracted much attention
and led to the founding of the American Psychoanalytic Association by James Putnam in 1911.

4. Neo-Freudian Psychoanalysis
The psychoanalytic tradition was carried forward by several followers of Freud, some devout and
remaining true to his classical theory and others who initially followed and later disagreed with
him. Some were bothered by Freud’s emphasis on the importance of sexuality and the idea that
sexual issues are important even in infancy. Others took issue with Freud’s over-emphasis on the
unconscious processes or with the fact that he didn’t give enough attention to the ego (Carver &
Scheier, 1996). Several early members of the movement who swerved away established their own
factions and so began the psychodynamic perspective. The neo-Freudians include Alfred Adler,
Carl Jung, Anna Freud (Freud’s daughter), Melanie Klein, Karen Horney, Otto Rank, Sandor
Ferenczi, Heinz Hartmann, Erich Fromm and Harry Sullivan among others. Some of these
personalities went on to develop their own substantial theories markedly different from Freud’s
and offering new insights into the human unconscious and psyche.

Neo-Freudians, broadly speaking, made the following changes in Freud’s psychoanalytic view of
personality:

i. They put greater emphasis on ego functions, including ego defenses, development of the
self, conscious thought processes and personal mastery.
ii. They view social variables as playing a greater role in shaping personality.
iii. They put less emphasis on the importance of general sexual urges or libidinal energy.
iv. They have extended personality development beyond childhood to include the entire life
span.

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4.1 Carl Jung’s analytical psychology

Jung believed in the occult and mysticism, and that each of us is motivated not only by repressed
experiences but also by certain emotionally toned experiences inherited from our ancestors. He
introduced the concept of the collective unconscious and gave much importance to symbolism
and archetypes. The personality or psyche, as Jung calls it, consists of separate but interacting
systems; the ego, the personal unconscious and its complexes, the collective unconscious and its
archetypes, the persona, the anima/animus and the shadow. The self is the fully developed and
unified personality. Jung’s theory is a compendium of opposites. People are introverted and
extraverted; rational and irrational; male and female; conscious and unconscious; and pushed by
past events while being pulled by future expectations (Feist & Feist, 2008).

4.2 Alfred Adler’s individual psychology

Adler’s theory emphasizes the role of striving for superiority and the importance of caring and
concern for others (Carver & Scheier, 1996). He gave much emphasis to social relationships
within the family as children grow up and held that the position within the family is extremely
important in determining how an individual deals with reality, and therefore in determining the
personality. 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. It refers to the need
to live in harmony with others and Adler believed social interest is important to be a complete
person. He presented a more hopeful view of man than the orthodox analysts did.

4.3 Karen Horney’s Psychoanalytic Social Theory

Horney began as an orthodox Freudian but broke with Freud over his interpretations of the female
oedipal complex (or the Electra complex; discussed in the next module). Her theory of
personality emphasizes the social and cultural influences, rather than the biological ones, in the
formation of the self (McAdams, 2001). Culture, especially early childhood experiences, plays a
leading role in shaping personality. She agreed with Freud that early childhood traumas are
important, but she differed from him in her insistence that social rather than biological forces are
paramount in personality development. According to her, children whose needs for love and
affection have not been satisfied during childhood develop basic hostility toward their parents
and, as a consequence, suffer from basic anxiety.

4.4 Erich Fromm’s Humanistic Psychoanalysis

Fromm developed a neo-Freudian theory that emphasizes social and cultural forces in the
formation of personality. He blended insights about human nature drawn from both Freud and
Karl Marx to develop an integrative theory that attempts to link personal needs, character types,
societal structures, and the movement of history (McAdams, 2001). The humanistic
psychoanalysis assumes that humanity’s separation from the natural world has produced feelings
of loneliness and isolation, a condition called basic anxiety. Fromm’s basic thesis is that modern-
day people have been torn away from their prehistoric union with nature and also with one
another, yet they have the power of reasoning, foresight, and imagination. This combination of
lack of animal instincts and presence of rational thought makes humans the freaks of the universe.
Self awareness contributes to feelings of loneliness, isolation, and homelessness. To escape from
these feelings, people strive to become reunited with nature and with their fellow human beings
(Feist & Feist, 2008).

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4.5 Harry Stack Sullivan’s Interpersonal Theory

Sullivan believed that people develop their personality within a social context. Without other
people humans would have no personality. He insisted that knowledge of the human personality
can be gained only through the scientific study of interpersonal relations (Feist & Feist, 2008). He
came up with an interpersonal theory of personality that focused on how people cope with anxiety
by developing a self-system in infancy and how they seek to overcome loneliness in later
childhood through deep intimacy with friends (McAdams, 2001). He emphasizes the importance
of various developmental stages - infancy, childhood, the juvenile era, preadolescence, early
adolescence, late adolescence, and adulthood and how the person’s ability to establish intimacy
with another person at each of these stages determines the development of personality.

4.6 Erik Erikson’s Psychosocial Theory

Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development that spans the entire life, vis-à-vis until adulthood
as proposed by Freud, is a model of development that gained widespread influence. There are
eight successive stages, and at each stage a specific psychosocial struggle contributes to the
formation of personality. He also introduced the concept of “identity” and “generativity” into the
study of personality (McAdams, 2001). Erikson differed from Freud in his conceptualization of
developmental stages not only by conceiving it as a lifelong process, but he also placed more
emphasis on both social and historical influences.

4.7 Ego Psychology: Anna Freud, Heinz Hartmann

Anna Freud applied psychoanalytic principles to treatment of children and expanded the
psychoanalytic understanding of defense mechanisms. She is viewed as an ego psychologist for
her relative emphasis on the adaptive powers of the ego or self (McAdams, 2001). Her book The
Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, published in 1936, in which she expanded and clarified the
operation of the defense mechanism, is a basic work in ego psychology (Schultz & Schultz,
2008). And although Freud did give the idea of defense mechanisms, the credit for the full
development and articulation of the topic goes to Anna Freud.

Heinz Hartmann is called the father of ego psychology. He led the movement in psychoanalysis
away from Freud’s original emphasis on instinctual drives and towards a strengthening of ego as
an adaptive and effective agent in the personality.

4.8 Object Relation Theories: Melaine Klein, Margaret Mahler

The primary emphasis of object relations theories is on personal relations rather than instinctual
needs, as did Freud. The object relations theorists accept social and environmental factors as
influences on personality.

Melanie Klein is regarded as one of the primary object relations theorists, a group of theories
focusing on the individual’s relations to other people. The concept of object relations traces back
to Freud’s idea of cathexis, but it has been greatly transformed. Freud saw cathexis as the creation
of a psychic bond from the ego to an external ‘object’. The object relation theories focus on such
bonds, but only for people as objects (Carver & Scheier, 1996). Klein argued that infants
experience strong feelings of love and hate towards others, which becomes the basis for the
establishment of internalized objects or unconscious representations of important people in one’s
life. These emotionally charged objects reside within the unconscious but influence behavior in
profound ways (McAdams, 2001).

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Margaret Mahler was primarily concerned with the

psychological birth of the individual that takes place during the
first three years of life, a time when a child gradually surrenders security for autonomy (feist &
Feist, 2008). She delineated the process of separation or individuation during this crucial stage.
She introduced the term psychological birth, which meant that the child becomes an individual
separate from his or her primary caregiver, an accomplishment that leads ultimately to a sense of
identity.

4.9 Heinz Kohut’s self psychology

Kohut emphasized the process by which the self evolves from a vague and undifferentiated image
to a clear and precise sense of individual identity. His theory resembles the object relations
theories and he focused on the early mother-child relationship as the key to understanding later
development (Feist & Feist, 2008). He believed that human relatedness, not innate instinctual
drives, is at the core of human personality.

As can be seen, these theories widened the reaches of the psychoanalytic tradition beyond Freud’s
original panorama and strengthened its evolution into a major school of psychology.

5. Basic Understanding of Human Nature

The psychodynamic school has offered a wide array of viewpoints regarding personality and its
development. There is a lot of theoretical dissonance among various psychoanalysts and there are
differences even within Freud’s own complexly construed theories. In spite of this, we can
identify some salient features of the psychodynamic theories that rest upon a common basic
understanding of human nature.

1. Emphasis on the unconscious: A primary common assumption is that of the

unconscious. Human behavior is determined not only by conscious thoughts and
efforts. In fact the major determinants of behavior and the conflicts that precipitate
anxiety in our lives are beyond our consciousness (McAdams, 2001).
2. Dynamic libidinal energy-system: Personality is seen as an energy-system (from
which the term “psychodynamics” is derived), as there is an exchange and
transformation of energy within the personality. This exchange of libidinal energy
follows the principle of conservation of energy that forms the basis of Freud’s theory.
It states that "the total amount of energy in any given physical system is always
constant; energy quanta can be changed but not annihilated, and consequently when
energy is moved from one part of the system, it must reappear in another part". Freud
borrowed the idea from Ernst Brucke, an influential contemporary.
3. Determinism: All behaviour is determined by the interplay of intra-psychic events
(psychic determinism). McAdams says “All human behavior and experience is
determined by forces over which we have little control. These powerful forces exist
within us, for the most part, and can typically be traced back to primitive and basic
issues rooted in childhood.”
4. Anxiety and conflict: Human life and experience is ridden with anxiety that arises
due to the constant conflict between the unconscious forces and determinants of
behavior. This viewpoint assumes a negativistic outlook where life is full of anxiety
and misery and humans are essentially helpless beings who have no control over the
unconscious forces that render their lives so. The only way we can help ourselves is
through the method of psychoanalytic interpretation, by which we can gain at least

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some insight about our most pertinent unconscious

issues and overcome challenges in our lives that
precipitate on account of these.
5. Influence of childhood experiences on development of adult personality:
Psychodynamic theory gives emphasis to childhood experiences as shaping up the
adult individual’s behavior and personality. In Freudian theory, this is explicitly
stated through the psychosexual stages of development. Erikson’s theory also gives
development in stages and the early years are conceptualized as having major
influence on how development will occur throughout lifetime. Other theorists may
not have been so explicit in terms of the importance of childhood experiences but
their theories do incorporate some elements; for instance Adler’s notions of order of
birth and sibling rivalry.

To summarize, according to the psychoanalytic tradition, all human beings are: “self conscious,
social beings, wrestling with the intractable conflicts that pervade our worlds and inhabit our
minds” (McAdams, 2001).

6. Methodology
The methodology in the psychodynamic approach is anything but quantitative. Since the
approach involves uncovering the hidden meanings that underlie people’s behavior,
psychodynamic psychologists primarily work by gathering large amounts of qualitative data. The
case study method is the most widely used. The psychologist engages in analyzing the
individual’s behavioral symptoms and employs different techniques like dream analysis and free
association to gain insights about the underlying meanings. The repetitive themes, ideas and
symbolisms reflecting unconscious motives are then identified.

Naturally, a methodology of this kind involves a lot of subjectivity and there is a lack of empirical
evidence. Theorists may build theories by favorably interpreting the qualitative data they have
collected with a lack of objectivity. These constitute the major criticisms concerning the
methodology used in the psychodynamic approach.

An example of psychodynamic research is Freud’s (1909) case study of ‘Little Hans’, who had a
phobia of horses. Freud interpreted the boy’s phobia as being a displaced fear of his Father and
his fear of being bitten by a horse as a manifestation of his castration anxiety. Freud identified a
number of symbolic links that Hans had unconsciously made between his father and horses and
used his analysis as evidence for the existence of the Oedipus complex in boys.

Let us now examine the methodology in classical psychoanalysis and how it led to the
development of Freudian theory.

Freud, based on his clinical observations and in-depth studies, was convinced that intra-psychic
events played an important role in motivating behavior. These may be aware to the person or at
the unconscious level. He initially used therapeutic methods like electrotherapy, then hypnotic
suggestion and later the cathartic method. He believed that every human action has cause and a
purpose that can be unearthed by employing techniques like dream analysis, hypnosis and free-
association.

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Free association is the major therapeutic process in which the

patient says whatever comes to his or her mind without
censoring it in any way. Freud believed that through this uncensored talking, the secrets of the
unconscious would be gradually revealed. The person is encouraged to say anything aloud as
thoughts arise in the mind, regardless of whether it is illogical, inappropriate, embarrassing or
seemingly unimportant.

Freud believed that important insights could be gained about personality by analyzing the
individual’s dreams. A major process of dream analysis is translating the manifest content of a
dream into its latent or unconscious meaning. Some symbols in dreams are idiosyncratic, i.e. in
order to understand them, you need to know about the meaning the dreamer himself attaches to
those symbols. Other symbols are more universal (Carver & Scheier, 1996).

These techniques were initially intended by Freud as a therapeutic means to treat his patients with
hysteria and neurosis. Later on, the methods came in hand in the development of his theory, since
much of it had to do with the unconscious. “He primarily studied mental disorder and went on to
the analysis of the etiological factors. The etiological research shed light on child psychology and
the laws of human growth and development. Then came a general theory of personality dynamics,
then a study of the human nature through the ages and a theory that deals with the impact of
society, culture and religion on personality” (Wolman, 2011). Ultimately psychoanalysis,
originally meant as a psychotherapeutic technique became a psychological system of thought.

7. Summary
 The psychodynamic domain constitutes the body of theories that have evolved from and
including the classical psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud. We have traced the
development of the psychoanalytic movement, how it began with a few members and
grew into an international association, eventually spreading to the US. The followers of
Freud or the neo-Freudians dealt with their disagreements with Freud by recasting his
ideas in their own words and also widening the breadth of the school, thereby collectively
instituting the psychodynamic approach.
 The psychodynamic approach although comprising of several different theories with
quite different ways of conceptualizing the human psyche, have some common basic
assumptions and postulates by virtue of which they belong to the psychodynamic school.
This includes the emphasis on the unconscious, the deterministic view of human
behavior, the dynamic libidinal energy system, the conflicts and tension between the
unconscious forces that manifest in behavioral symptoms, the anxiety resulting from
these tensions, and the influence of childhood experiences in the development of the adult
person.
 The methodology used in the psychodynamic approach is purely qualitative and mostly
involves extensive case studies. The subjectivity and lack of empirical evidence inherent
in this methodology has been subject to much criticism. The main goal of the qualitative
method is to identify underlying meanings of behavior by identifying recurrent themes,
ideas and symbolisms. The techniques of free association and dream analysis were used
by Freud to achieve the goal of gaining insight into the unconscious motives and
determinants of individuals’ behaviors.

PSYCHOLOGY Paper No 5: Personality Theories

Module No 7: Introduction to the Psychodynamic Domain