Freud and Neo-Freudians in Personality Development

FREUD AND NEO-FREUDIANS IN PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT

Freud was the first to comprehensively study personality and pathologies associated with one s personality. He studied a few patients extensively and uncovered the talking cure, which was the basis for modern psychotherapy. He compared the mind to an iceberg, of which only a small proportion is the conscious mind. About 90 percent is unconscious. Things like Freudian slips of the tongue were felt to be related to things deep within one s subconscious.

Freud believed that personality is based on conflicts that arise between two different forces. These are biological, aggressive, and pleasure-seeking drives, and internalized control over these drives. Freud labeled three factors or systems in the mind. These were the id, the ego, and the superego. The id is subconscious, which is primitive urges or drives. It is present from the time of birth and represents urges related to thirst, hunger, and sex. It seeks immediate gratification.

The superego is like the internal parent, that understands right from wrong and is the person s conscience. It judges and controls one s behaviors, which can lead to self-pride, or guilty feelings, depending on the superego s success. The ego is rational and is part of the personality seen by others. It balances the controversy between the id and the superego.

As you can imagine, the superego and the id are in continual conflict so it takes the ego to find a rational middle ground between them. Those with a healthy personality have a strong ego. Any imbalance in this personality system is considered likely to result in neurosis. Strong superegos involve being guilty and denying the person s ability to have pleasure, while strong ids can indicate a psychopath.

According to Freud, people have certain defense mechanisms or protections they use to defend themselves. These are largely anxiety-reducing factors that are subconscious. Everyone, even healthy individuals, use defense mechanisms. Some of these include the following:

• Denial—refusal to accept unpleasant events in one’s reality.

• Displacement—the transfer of unacceptable urges onto a less threatening target person.

• Projection—having unacceptable feelings blamed on another.

• Rationalization—justifying a behavior by substituting acceptable reasons for lessacceptable ones.

• Reaction formation—decreasing anxiety by adopting contrary beliefs to what one really believes.

• Regression—going back to less mature coping strategies.

• Repression—having the suppression of painful thoughts and memories.

While defense mechanisms are common, overuse of these mechanisms is not considered healthy. With defense mechanisms such as repression, overwhelming memories are sent to the subconscious, even though they may lead to symptoms later in life. With reaction formation, a person may say and do things that are the opposite of what they actually believe.

We have already talked about Freud s psychosexual stages of development; however, they apply to one s personality as well. These, as you remember, are the oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital stages of development. Many criticize these stages and you should know that they were developed within the concept of the cultural and social climate of the early 20th century in Vienna, Austria.

With the oral stage, deficits in this stage lead to conflicts related to things like smoking, overeating, and alcohol abuse. In the anal stage, problems can lead to what Freudians refer to as the anal-retentive personality. These types of people are perfectionistic. The phallic stage can lead to gender identity and relationship problems. Only those who have issues in the latency phase and genital phase generally have few problems later in life.

There are several researchers who are considered neo-Freudians because they basically believe parts of what Freud set out to show but have less of an emphasis on sex. Alfred Adler founded individual psychology and first proposed the idea of the inferiority complex. He believed that people are driven by an attempt to gain superiority over others, which helps them to form personality.

Adler saw childhood development as largely based on social needs and the need to work together with others. There are three social tasks that Adler believed people should attain: occupational tasks, societal tasks, and love or intimacy tasks. It was believed that social motives rather than sexual ones drove the personality. He also believed that birth order affects a person s personality.

Carl Jung was also a Neo-Freudian. His theory was that of analytical psychology, which was the balance between the conscious and unconscious thinking. It was felt that the work in doing this happens throughout life as one integrates unconscious thoughts into one s consciousness. There is the concept of the collective unconscious, which involves archetypes or universal themes found in everyone in different cultures. The approaches of extroversion and introversion were first proposed by Jung. People are believed to fall somewhere on a continuum between being introverted and extroverted.

Karen Horney was also a Neo-Freudian. She believed that every person had the ability to achieve self-realization and that people should move toward a healthier self rather than focus on the past. She studied how children deal with unconscious anxiety. Some coping strategies include moving toward people, which is the seeking of positive affection from one s parents, moving against people, which involves bullying and aggressive behavior, and moving away from people, which involves avoidance and isolation from others.