Psychodynamic Theories

Tuesday, 9 October 2018 12:34 PM

Freud: Psychoanalysis
• Overview
o Why so interesting?
▪ Sex and Aggression (twin cornerstones) are still popular
▪ Spread of theory
▪ Brilliant Use of Language
o Based on his experiences with patients, his analysis of his own dreams, and his vast readings
▪ Observation leads to theory
▪ Psychoanalysis could not be subjected to eclecticism (aka don’t change it or deviate from it)
o Not really a scientist (though he considered himself one)
▪ Relied on deductive reasoning more than on research methods
▪ Made subjective observations and on a small number of patients
▪ NO quantifiable data and observation under controlled conditions
▪ Used case study approach
• Influences in his life
o Good relationship with mother (lead to observe that this relationship was the most perfect)
o Birth and Death of his brother (death wish for their younger sibling)
o Charcot who used hypnosis to treat hysteria (psychogenic and sexual origins of hysteria)
o Breurer who taught catharsis (development of free association technique)
• Topographic Model (Levels of Mental Life)
o Unconscious
▪ Contains all drives, urges, or instincts that are beyond our awareness but motivate us
▪ Often not aware of the mental processes of overt behavior
▪ Explanation for the meaning behind dreams, slips of tongue, and forgetting
▪ Can enter into consciousness after being disguised or distorted enough
▪ Unconscious image -> primary censor -> final censor -> conscious
➢ May often no longer resemble the original thought (instead are pleasant, nonthreatening)
➢ Images usually have sexual or aggressive motifs
➢ Suppression (unconscious) while Repression (ego defense)
➢ Suppression -> anxiety
➢ Anxiety -> stimulates repression (forcing of unwanted, anxiety-ridden experiences into the unconscious)
▪ Phylogenetic Endowment - originate from experiences of our early ancestors that have been passed on
➢ Note: similar to Jung’s concept of collective unconscious (BUT this was Freud’s last resort while Jung placed a big importanc e in it)
▪ Unconscious mind of one person can communicate with the unconscious of another
▪ NOT inactive or dormant (CONSTANTLY strive to be conscious)
o Preconscious
▪ All elements that are not conscious BUT can become conscious either quite readily or with some difficulty
▪ Two sources:
➢ Conscious Perception – attention based
➢ Unconscious - induces anxiety when recognized, may be disguised
o Conscious
▪ Mental elements in awareness at any given point in time
▪ Directly available to us
▪ Comes from 2 different directions:
➢ Perceptual Conscious System – turned toward the outer world and acts as medium for perception of external stimuli
➢ Within Mental Structures – includes nonthreatening stimuli from preconscious and heavily disguised images from unconscious
• Structural Model (Provinces of the Mind)
o Id
▪ Has no contact with reality
▪ Strives constantly to reduce tension by satisfying basic desire
▪ Function: seek pleasure (pleasure principle)
▪ Personification: newborn infant (seeks gratification without regard for what is possible and proper)
▪ Illogical and can simultaneously entertain incompatible ideas
▪ No morality (Amoral)
▪ Energy is from basic drives
▪ Operates through the primary process (reduce tension by satisfying desires)
▪ Dependent on the development of a secondary process (bring it to contact with external world)
o Ego
▪ ONLY region in contact with reality
▪ Grows out of the id during infancy (first two years of life) and becomes sole source of communication with the outside world
▪ Reality Principle
▪ Decision-making/executive branch of personality
▪ Can make decision on all three levels (conscious, preconscious, and unconscious)
▪ Must take into consideration: ego’s demands, superego’s demands, and the external world
▪ Becomes anxious when it takes on the conflicting demands -> repression and defense mechanisms to defend against anxiety
▪ Becomes differentiated when infant learn to distinguish themselves from the outer world (self -awareness)
▪ Ego is at the mercy of the id (stronger energy)
▪ Energy is borrowed from the id
o Superego
▪ Origin: During 5/6 years, they identify with parents and learn what to do and what not to do
▪ Represents the moral and ideal aspects
▪ Guided by moralistic (against the id's pleasure principle) and idealistic (against the ego's reality principle) principles
▪ Grows out of the ego and has no energy of its own
▪ NO contact with the outside world (unrealistic demands)
▪ Two subsystems:
➢ Conscience – What we should NOT do
➢ Ego-Ideal – What we should do
▪ Acts to control sexual and aggressive impulses through repression (orders ego to do so)
▪ Develops after the Oedipal phase of development
▪ Feelings produced:
➢ Guilt – ego acts CONTRARY to what the superego wants (conscience)
➢ Feelings of inferiority – ego CAN’T meet the superego’s demand (ego-ideal)

Theories of Personality Page 1

 ➢ Feelings of inferiority – ego CAN’T meet the superego’s demand (ego-ideal)
▪ NOT concerned with happiness
▪ Strives blindly and unrealistically TOWARD PERFECTION
▪ Like the id: ignorant of, and unconcerned with, the practicality of its requirements
• Dynamics of Personality
o People are motivated to seek pleasure and to reduce tension and anxiety
o Motivation is derived from psychical and physical energy that springs from basic drives
o Drives
▪ “Trieb” = drive or a stimulus within the person
▪ CONSTANT motivational force
▪ Drives originate in the id and are under the control of the ego
▪ Characterized by:
➢ Impetus – amount of force it exerts
➢ Source – region of the body in a state of excitation or tension
➢ Aim – seek pleasure by removing that excitation or reducing the tension
➢ Object – person/thing that serves as the means through which the aim is satisfied
▪ Libido
➢ Life instinct
➢ Eros: sex drive
➢ Aim: Pleasure (not limited to genital satisfaction)
➢ Entire body is invested in libido
➢ Erogenous zones: mouth, anus, and genitals
➢ Path by which the aim is reached can be varied (passive or active, temporarily or permanently inhibited)
➢ ALL pleasurable activity is traceable to the sexual drive
➢ Object: Object or person can be easily transformed or displaced
➢ Forms
❖ Narcissism
◆ Object libido (eventually, develop a greater interest in other people)
◆ Primary Narcissism – infants’ libido are invested on their own ego (similar to egocentrism in infancy)
◆ Secondary Narcissism – redirect their libido to the self during puberty (preoccupation with physical appearance)
❖ Love
◆ When people invest their libido on an object/person other than themselves
◆ Overt sexual love - in infancy, for mother (primary caregiver)
◆ Aim-inhibited - sexual love is repressed for family members
◆ Accompanies by narcissistic tendencies
❖ Sadism
◆ Need for sexual pleasure by inflicting pain or humiliation on another
◆ Dependent on others
◆ Perverted: sexual aim becomes secondary to the destructive aim
❖ Masochism
◆ Experience sexual pleasure from suffering pain and humiliation
◆ Less dependent on other people
◆ Perverted: sexual aim becomes secondary to the destructive aim
▪ Thanatos
➢ Aim: Return the organism to an inorganic state
❖ Final aim: self-destruction
➢ Can take many forms
➢ Present in everyone and explains wars, atrocities, and religious persecution
➢ Also explains the need for barriers that people have erected to check aggression
o Anxiety
▪ Felt, affective, unpleasant state accompanied by a physical sensation that warns the person against impending danger
▪ Often vague and hard to pinpoint
▪ ONLY EGO can produce anxiety (BUT can be influenced)
➢ Neurotic Anxiety – apprehension about an unknown danger (FROM ID IMPULSES)
➢ Moral Anxiety – from conflict between ego and superego
➢ Realistic Anxiety – unpleasant, nonspecific feeling involving a possible danger (similar to fear) (FROM EXTERNAL WORLD)
▪ Ego-preserving mechanism (signals that danger is at hand)
▪ Self-regulating (precipitates repression which reduces anxiety)
• Defense Mechanisms
o Dealing with unwanted thoughts and desires
o Natural and universal
o When carried to the extreme they lead to compulsive repetitive, and neurotic behavior
o More defensive we are = less psychic energy to satisfy id impulses
o Repression
▪ Forces threatening feelings into the unconscious
▪ Most basic/important and involved in other mechanisms
▪ What happens after?
➢ May remain unchanged in the unconscious
➢ Could force their way into the conscious in their unaltered form (cause anxiety)
➢ Expressed in displaced or disguised forms
▪ May find an outlet in dreams, slips of tongue, or other defense mechanisms
o Intellectualization - remove the emotional content, bring things in without anxiety
o Reaction Formation
▪ Adopt a disguise that is directly opposite its form
▪ Exaggerated character and its obsessive and compulsive form
▪ Limited to a single object
o Displacement
▪ Redirect unacceptable urges onto a variety of people or objects
▪ Also involved in dream formation
o Fixation
▪ Remaining at the present, more comfortable psychological stage
▪ Permanent attachment of the libido onto an earlier, more primitive stage of development
o Regression
▪ Revert back to an earlier stage
▪ Common and usually seen in children
▪ Usually temporary
o Projection
▪ Seeing in others unacceptable feelings or tendencies that actually resides in one’s own unconscious

Theories of Personality Page 2

 ▪ Seeing in others unacceptable feelings or tendencies that actually resides in one’s own unconscious
▪ Attribute unwanted impulse to an external object
▪ Paranoia – extreme type of projection; powerful delusions of grandeur and persecution
o Introjection
▪ People incorporate positive qualities of another person into their own ego
▪ Introject characteristics that they see as valuable and will make them feel better
o Sublimation
▪ Repression of the genital aim of Eros by substituting a cultural or social aim
▪ Helps both the individual and the social group
▪ Expressed in creative cultural accomplishments
▪ Part of all human relationships and all social pursuits
• Stages of Development
o Infantile Period
▪ Infants possess a sexual life and go through a period of pregenital sexual development
▪ NOT capable of reproduction and is exclusively autoerotic
▪ Oral Phase
➢ Oral-Receptive Phase
❖ Aim: Incorporate or receive into one’s body the object-choice
❖ Needs are usually satisfied with minimum frustration or anxiety
❖ More likely to experience feelings of frustration and anxiety as result of scheduled feedings, increased time lapses between feedings, and weaning
❖ Accompanied by feelings of ambivalence toward their love object and increased ability of the ego to defend itself against anx iety and the environment
➢ Oral-Sadistic Period
❖ Emergence of teeth
❖ First autoerotic experience: thumb sucking
▪ Anal Phase
➢ Anus becomes the erogenous zone
➢ Fuller development of the aggressive drive
➢ Satisfaction gained through aggressive behavior and through the excretory function
➢ Early Anal Period
❖ Receives satisfaction by destroying or losing objects
❖ Destructive drive > erotic drive
➢ Late Anal Period
❖ Erotic pleasure from defecating (friendly interest toward their feces)
❖ Accepted: grown into generous and magnanimous adults
❖ Rejected: withhold their feces until the pleasure becomes painful and erotically stimulating
◆ Anal Character – receive erotic satisfaction by keeping and possessing objects and by arranging them in an excessively neat and orderly fashio n
◆ Anal Triad – Orderliness, Stinginess, and Obstinacy
❖ Girls: anal eroticism -> penis envy -> give birth to a baby
◆ Penis, feces, and baby: elongated, and referred to as “little one”
▪ Phallic Phase
➢ At 3 or 4 years of age
➢ Genital area becomes the erogenous zone
➢ DICHOTOMY BETWEEN MALE AND FEMALE DEVELOPMENT
➢ Anatomy is Destiny
➢ Children suppress their conscious desire to masturbate AT THE END OF THIS PERIOD
➢ Male Oedipus Complex
❖ Forms an identification with the father -> develops a sexual desire for his mother
◆ When they recognize the inconsistency, they give up identification with their father -> sees his father as his rival
❖ Rivalry toward the father and incestuous feelings toward the mother
❖ Complete Oedipus Complex – ambivalent condition wherein affection and hostility coexist
❖ Castration Complex
◆ Castration Anxiety – fear of losing the penis
◆ Young boy becomes aware of the absence of penis in girls -> boy concludes that girls had their penis cut off ->boy thinks that girls has their penis cut off as
punishment for masturbating or desiring their mother -> repress their impulses toward sexual activity
◆ Only happens when the boy’s ego is mature enough
◆ Present in ALL boys
◆ Phylogenetic endowment may supply the missing gaps
❖ Surrender incestuous desires -> feelings of tender love -> develop a primitive superego
➢ Female Oedipus Complex
❖ Discover that boys have a penis -> penis envy (may last for years)
◆ Penis Envy may be expressed as a wish to be a boy or to have a man -> wish to have a baby (especially a boy)
❖ Girl identifies with her mother -> hostility toward mother (girl holds their mother responsible for her lack of a penis) -> libido is turned to her father (can satisfy
her wish for a penis by having a baby)
❖ Simple Female Oedipus Complex – desire for sexual intercourse with the father and feelings of hostility toward the mother
◆ NO PARALLEL exists with male Oedipus complex
◆ Resolved when a girl gives up masturbatory activity, surrenders her sexual desire for her father, and identifies again with t he mother
❖ Acknowledge their castration and recognize their inferiority, they rebel by:
◆ Give up their sexuality and develop hostility toward their mother
◆ Cling defiantly to their masculinity, hope for a penis, and be a man
◆ Develop normally
❖ Girls’ superego ARE WEAKER, MORE FLEXIBLE, AND LESS SEVERE
◆ Castration Anxiety COMES AFTER Oedipus Complex (boys) VS Castration Anxiety(Penis Envy) COMES BEFORE Oedipus Complex (girls)
◆ Girls: NO TRAUMATIC SHOCK (incomplete resolution)
o Latency Period
▪ Dormant psychosexual development
▪ Due to: parents’ attempts to punish or discourage sexual activity (direct their energy toward school, friendships, hobbies, a nd other nonsexual activities)
▪ May have roots in phylogenetic endowment
▪ Reinforced through constant suppression by parents and teachers and by internal feelings of shame, guilt, and morality
▪ Libido shows itself in social and cultural accomplishments
o Genital Period
▪ Signaled by puberty
▪ Difference from infantile period
➢ Direct their sexual energy toward another person
➢ Reproduction is possible
➢ Vagina obtains the same status as the penis
➢ Sexual Drive takes on a more complete organization and component drives are integrated
➢ Eros may continue to be repressed, sublimated, or expressed in masturbation or other sexual acts
Maturity

Theories of Personality Page 3

 o Maturity
▪ Stage attained by everyone who reaches physical maturity
▪ Psychological maturity – after a person has passed through the earlier developmental periods in an ideal manner
➢ Seldom happens
➢ Balance among the structures of the mind, with their ego controlling their id and superego but allow for some reasonable desi res and demands
➢ Consciousness plays an important role
• Applications
o Therapeutic Technique
▪ Early
➢ Active Approach (Pressure Technique)
➢ Abandoned (highly coercive)
▪ Later
➢ Goal: Uncover repressed memories through free association and dream analysis
➢ Purpose: to strengthen the ego
➢ Free Association – verbalize every thought that comes to their mind
❖ Purpose: arrive at the unconscious
➢ Libido must be freed to work in the service of the ego
➢ Transference – strong sexual or aggressive feelings, positive or negative, that patients develop toward their analyst during the course of t reatment
❖ Merely transferred to them from patients’ earlier experience
❖ Negative Transference – form of hostility must be recognized to overcome any resistance to treatment
◆ Resistance – variety of unconscious responses used by patients to block their own progress in therapy
➢ Limitations:
❖ Not all old memories COULD/SHOULD be brought into the consciousness
❖ Treatment is not as effective with psychoses/constitutional illnesses
❖ A patient may later develop another psychic problem
➢ Psychoanalysis could be used in conjunction with other therapies
➢ Ideal: use their psychic energy to perform ego functions and have an expanded ego
o Dream Analysis
▪ Transform manifest content of dreams to the more important latent content
▪ Manifest Content – surface meaning
▪ Latent Content – unconscious material
▪ All dreams are wish fulfillments
➢ Except for those suffering from a traumatic experience
▪ Formed in the unconscious but try to work their way into the conscious
➢ Condensation – manifest content is not as extensive as the latent content (unconscious material has been abbreviated or condensed before app earing on the manifest
content)
➢ Displacement – dream image is replaced by some other idea only remoted related to it
▪ Can inhibit or reverse the dreamer’s affect
▪ Methods:
➢ Ask patients to relate their dream and all their associations to it
➢ Use of dream symbols
➢ Purpose: trace the dream formation backward until the latent content was reached
▪ MOST reliable approach to the study of unconscious processes and referred to it as the “royal road” to knowledge of the uncon scious
▪ Three typical anxiety dreams:
➢ Embarrassment dream of nakedness
❖ Origin: early childhood experience of being naked in the presence of adults
❖ Indifference of spectators fulfills the infantile wish that the witnessing adults refrain from scolding
❖ Nakedness fulfills the wish to exhibit oneself
➢ Dreams of death of a beloved person
❖ Younger person: expressing the wish for the destruction of a younger sibling
❖ Older person: fulfilling the Oedipal wish for the death of a parent
➢ Dreams of failing an examination
❖ Usually occur when the dreamer is anticipating a difficult task
❖ Wish to be free from worry over a difficult task
o Freudian Slip
▪ Reveal a person’s unconscious intentions
▪ Have meaning
▪ Opposing action: from unconscious and from the preconscious (product of BOTH)

Adler: Individual Psychology

• Overview
Adler Freud
Motivation Social Interests and Striving for Success or Superiority Sex and Aggression
Agency Largely responsible for their personality Little or no choice in shaping their personality
Present Behavior Shaped by people’s view of the future Shaped by past experiences
Emphasis Conscious (awareness) Unconscious

• Introduction
o Why not popular?
▪ Did not establish a tightly run organization to perpetuate his theories
▪ Not a gifted writer
▪ Views were incorporated into later theorists
o People are born with weak and inferior bodies -> feelings of inferiority and dependence on others
o A feeling of unity with others (social interest) IS INHERENT in people and the ULTIMATE STANDARD for psychological health
• Striving for Success or Superiority
o The one dynamic force behind people’s behaviors is the striving for success or superiority
o SINGLE drive: striving for success or superiority
o Psychologically unhealthy people: strive for personal superiority
o Psychologically healthy people: seek success for all humanity
o Each individual is guided by a final goal
o The Final Goal
▪ Either personal superiority or the goal of success for all humankind
▪ Fictional and has no objective existence
▪ UNIFIES personality and renders all behavior COMPREHENSIBLE
▪ PRODUCT of the creative power (people’s ability to freely shape their behavior and create their own personality)

Theories of Personality Page 4

 ▪ PRODUCT of the creative power (people’s ability to freely shape their behavior and create their own personality)
➢ By 4 or 5 years of age, their creative power has developed to the point they can set their final goal
➢ NEITHER genetically nor environmentally determined
▪ Reduces the pain of inferiority feelings and points the person in either superiority or success
▪ Children:
➢ Neglected or pampered children: goal remains unconscious
➢ Children who experience love and security: goal is conscious and clearly understood
▪ People may create and pursue many preliminary goals
➢ Often conscious but their connection with the final goal may be unknown
➢ When the final goal is known, all actions make sense and each subgoal takes on new significance
o The Striving Force as Compensation
▪ Strive for success or superiority as a means of compensation for feelings of inferiority/weakness
▪ “Blessed” with small, weak, and inferior bodies
▪ Physical deficiencies ignite feelings of inferiority because people possess an innate tendency toward completion or wholeness
▪ Continually pushed by the need to overcome inferiority feelings and pulled by the desire for completion
▪ INNATE but nature and direction are due both to feelings of inferiority and to the goal of superiority
▪ Compensation for the deficit feeling (but deficit feeling exists due to tendency toward completion)
▪ Must be developed
➢ At age 4 or 5, children start by setting a direction to the striving force and by establishing a goal
➢ Goal provides guidelines for motivation, shaping psychological development, and giving it an aim
▪ Goal may take on ANY form
➢ People formulate their own definition of success
➢ Creative power is responsible for people’s personality
o Striving for Personal Superiority
▪ Little or no concern with others
▪ Goals are personal
▪ Strivings are motivated largely by exaggerated feelings of personal inferiority, or the presence of an inferiority complex
▪ May be hidden behind social concern
o Striving for Success
▪ Motivated by social interest and the success of all humankind
▪ Maintain a sense of self but can see the daily problems from society’s viewpoint
▪ Social progress is more important than personal credit
▪ Sense of personal worth is tied to their contributions to society
• Subjective Perceptions
o People’s subjective perceptions shape their behavior and personality
o Manner by which they strive is shaped by subjective perceptions of reality (fictions)
o Fictionalism
▪ Most important: goal of superiority or success (guides our style of life and gives unity to our personality)
▪ Vaihinger: fictions are ideas that have no real existence, yet they influence people as if they existed
▪ Fictions have a powerful influence on people’s lives
▪ Teleology – explanation of behavior in terms of its final purpose or aim
➢ Concerned with future goals or ends
➢ Fictions bestow a purpose on all actions and responsible for a consistent pattern
o Physical Inferiorities
▪ Being small, weak, and inferior -> developing a fiction about how to overcome these deficiencies
▪ Physical handicaps become meaningful when they stimulate subjective feelings of inferiority which serve as an impetus toward perfection or completion
▪ Alone DO NOT CAUSE a particular style of life (they provide present motivation for reaching future goals)
• Unity and Self-Consistency of Personality
o Personality is unified and consistent
o EACH person is unique and indivisible
o FUNDAMENTAL UNITY of personality and inconsistent behavior DOES NOT EXIST
o Organ Dialect
▪ Deficient organ expresses the direction of the individual’s goal
▪ Body’s organs speak a language which is usually more expressive and discloses the individual’s opinions
▪ Disturbance of one part of the body affects the entire person
o Conscious and Unconscious
▪ Conscious and unconscious are harmonious
▪ Unconscious: part of the goal that is neither clearly formulated nor completely understood
▪ Conscious: are understood and regarded by the individual as helpful in the striving for success
• Social Interest
o The value of all human activity must be seen from the viewpoint of social interest
o Social feeling or community feeling
o Feeling of oneness with all humanity and implies membership in the social community of all people
o Strives for perfection for all people
o Attitude of relatedness with humanity in general and an empathy for each member of the human community
o Manifests itself as cooperation with others for social advancement
o NATURAL CONDITION of the human species and the adhesive that binds society together
o NECCESSITY for perpetuating the human species
o Origins
▪ Rooted as potentiality in everyone but must be developed
▪ Originates from the mother-child relationships during early months of infancy
▪ Two parents:
➢ Mother: develop a bond that encourages a child’s mature social interest and fosters a sense of cooperation
o Should have a genuine and deep-rooted love for her child
➢ Father: demonstrate a caring attitude toward his wife as well as other people
o Cooperate on equal footing with child’s mother in caring for the child
o Emotional detachment: warped sense of social interest, a feeling of neglect, and possibly a parasitic attachment to the mothe r
o Paternal authoritarianism: unhealthy style of life
▪ Effects of the early social environment are EXTREMELY important
o Importance
▪ SOLE criterion of human values
▪ ONLY gauge
▪ STANDARD to be used in determining the usefulness of life
▪ Healthy individuals = genuine concern about people and have a goal of success that encompasses the well -being of all people
▪ NOT synonymous with charity and unselfishness
• Style of Life
The self-consistent personality structure develops into a person's style of life

Theories of Personality Page 5

 o The self-consistent personality structure develops into a person's style of life
o Refers to the flavor of a person's life
o Includes: goals, self-concept, feelings for others, and attitude toward the world
o PRODUCT of the interaction of heredity, environment, and creative power
o Well established by age 4 or 5
o Need NOT be narrow or rigid (sign of psychological illness)
o Psychologically healthy = can choose new options at any point in life
o Express their social interest through action
o 3 Major Problems: Neighborly love, Sexual Love, and Occupation (Cooperation, personal courage and willingness to make a contribution to the welfare of another)
• Creative Power
o Style of Life is molded by people's creative power
o EACH person - empowered with the freedom to create their own style of life
o ALL people are responsible for who they are and how they behave
o MAKES EACH person a free individual
o Movement toward a goal, movement with a direction
o EVERY child is born with a unique genetic makeup and soon comes to have social experiences different from those of any other human
o We react AND act on the environment and cause it to react to us
o Heredity and environment = brick BUT design is up to us
o We are our own architects and can build either a useful or useless style of life
• Abnormal Development
o General Description
▪ Factor: Underdeveloped social interest
▪ Tend to:
➢ Set their goals too high - exaggerated feelings of inferiority and basic insecurity
➢ Live in their own private world - approach social relationships from a private angle, view the world as not aligned with social realities, "private meaning"
➢ Have a rigid and dogmatic style of life - consequence of narrowed perspectives and rigid striving for unrealistic goals
o External Factors in Maladjustment
▪ Exaggerated Physical Deficiencies
➢ Congenital or a result of injury/disease
➢ NOT SUFFICIENT to lead to maladjustment (MUST be accompanied by accentuated feelings of inferiority)
➢ Develop exaggerated feelings of inferiority because they overcompensate for their inadequacy
▪ Pampered Style of Life
➢ HEART of most neuroses
➢ Weak social interest but a strong desire to perpetuate the pampered, parasitic relationship they had
➢ Believe that they are entitled to be first in everything
➢ Have a private vision
➢ They feel unloved (lack of love = doing too much form them and treating them incapable of solving their own problems)
▪ Neglected Style of Life
➢ Relative concept (no one feels totally neglected or completely unwanted)
➢ Little social interest
➢ Distrustful of other people and unable to cooperate for the common welfare
➢ More suspicious and more likely to be dangerous to others
o Safeguarding Tendencies
▪ Patterns of behavior to protect their exaggerated sense of self-esteem against public disgrace
▪ Enables people to hide their inflated self-image and maintain their current style of life
▪ LARGELY CONSCIOUS and shield a person's self-esteem
▪ Usually only found in neurotics
▪ Self-defeating
▪ Excuses
➢ "Yes, but" or "If only" format
➢ Protect a weak (but artificially inflated) sense of self-worth and deceive people into believing that they are more superior
▪ Aggression
➢ Depreciation
❖ Tendency to undervalue other people's achievements and to overvalue one's own
❖ Ex: criticism and gossip
❖ Belittle another so that the other person will be placed in a favorable light
➢ Accusation
❖ Tendency to blame others for one's failures and to seek revenge
❖ Element of aggressive accusation in all unhealthy lifestyles
❖ Act to cause the people around them to suffer more than they do
➢ Self-Accusation
❖ Self-torture and guilt
❖ Self-torture: masochism, depression, and suicide (means of hurting people close to them)
❖ Guilt: aggressive, self-accusatory behavior
▪ Withdrawal
➢ When people run away from difficulties
➢ Moving backward
❖ Psychologically reverting to a more secure period of life
❖ Similar to regression (usually conscious and directed to maintain an inflated goal of superiority)
❖ Designed to elicit sympathy
➢ Standing Still
❖ NOT as severe
❖ Simply do not move in any direction (AVOID responsibility by ensuring themselves against any threat or failure)
❖ They never do anything to prove that they cannot accomplish their goals
❖ Doing nothing = safeguard their self-esteem and protect themselves against failure
➢ Hesitating
❖ Procrastinations
❖ Most compulsive behaviors are attempts to waste time
❖ Allows neurotic individuals to preserve their inflated sense of self-esteem
➢ Constructing Obstacles
❖ LEAST severe
❖ By overcoming obstacle, they protect their self-esteem and their prestige
❖ If they fail, they can always resort to an excuse
o Masculine Protest
▪ Psychic life of women is essentially the same as that of men and that a male -dominated society is not natural but an artificial product of historical development
▪ Cultural and social practices influence many men and women to overemphasize the importance of being manly
▪ Origins
➢ Both men and women place an inferior value on being a woman

Theories of Personality Page 6

 ➢ Both men and women place an inferior value on being a woman
➢ Women adjust in different ways which result from cultural and social influences (NOT FROM INHERENT PSYCHIC DIFFERENCES)
▪ Adler, Freud, and the Masculine Protest
➢ Women want more or less the same things men want
➢ Feminist
• Applications
o Family Constellations
▪ Birth order, gender of their siblings, and the age spread between them
▪ Firstborn
➢ Intensified feelings of power and superiority, high anxiety, and overprotective tendencies
➢ An only child for a time and experiencing a traumatic dethronement
➢ Aged 3 years or older: incorporate dethronement into an established style of life
➢ Less than 3 years old: hostility and resentment will be largely unconscious
▪ Secondborn
➢ Begin life in a better situation for developing social interest and cooperation
➢ Shaped by their perception of older child's attitude toward them
➢ Toward moderate competitiveness and having a healthy desire to overtake the older rival
▪ Youngest
➢ Most pampered and run the risk of being problem children
➢ Strong feelings of inferiority and lack a sense of independence
➢ Highly motivated to exceed older siblings
▪ Only child
➢ Competes against parents
➢ Exaggerated sense of superiority and an inflated self-concept
➢ Lack well-developed feelings of cooperation and social interest
➢ Possess a parasitic attitude
➢ Expect others to pamper and protect them
o Early Recollections
▪ People reconstruct the events to make them consistent with a theme or pattern that runs throughout their lives
▪ ALWAYS consistent with people's style of life and that their subjective account of these experiences yields clues to understa nding both their final goal and their present style
of life
▪ Recollections of early experience are shaped by present style of life
o Dreams
▪ Any interpretation of any dream must be tentative and open to reinterpretation
▪ If one interpretation doesn’t feel right, try another
▪ Dreams are self-deceptions and not easily understood by the dreamer
o Psychotherapy
▪ Psychopathology results from lack of courage, exaggerated feelings of superiority, and underdeveloped social interest
▪ Purpose: enhance courage, lessen feelings of superiority, and encourage social interest
▪ Everybody can accomplish everything
▪ Warm, nurturing attitude encourages patients to expand their social interest into sexual love, friendship, or occupation
▪ Treating them in front of an audience (understand that their problems are community problems -> enhance social interest)
▪ Friendly and permissive attitude toward the patient

Jung: Analytical Psychology

• Overview
o Assumption: Occult phenomena can and do influence the lives of everyone
o Each of us is motivated not only by repressed experiences but ALSO by certain emotionally toned experiences inherited from our ancestors (Collective Unconscious)
▪ Includes elements that we have never experienced individually but which have come down to us from our ancestors
▪ Archetypes - highly developed
o Compendium of Opposites
▪ Both introverted and extraverted, rational and irrational, male and female, conscious and unconscious, and pushed by past eve nts and pulled by future expectations
• Psychic Energy
o Libido - broad, undifferentiated life energy (diffuse and general)
o Psyche - narrower psychic energy that fuels the work of personality (psychological activities are carried out)
▪ Teleological, innately purposeful
▪ Seeks growth, wholeness and equilibrium
o Principles of Physics applied to psychic energy
▪ Principle of Opposites - the antithesis and opposition of entities is the primary motivator of behavior and generator of energy (sharper polarities -> greater amounts of energy
produced)
▪ Principle of Equivalence - energy used to do something is not lost, but shifted into another part of personality (other part is of equal psychic value o r ends up to flow into the
unconscious)
▪ Principle of Entropy - equivalization of energy differences (tendency toward a balance or equilibrium in personality)
• Levels of the Psyche
o HAS BOTH conscious and unconscious
o MOST important part of unconscious springs from the distant past of human existence (Collective Unconscious)
o Conscious
▪ Images that are sensed by the ego
▪ Ego - center of consciousness (NOT the core of personality)
➢ Self - center of personality but is largely unconscious (the goal toward which the psyche is oriented)
▪ Consciousness plays a minor role
▪ Healthy individuals are in contact with their conscious world but they also allow themselves to experience their unconscious self (to reach individuation)
o Personal Unconscious
▪ All repressed, forgotten, or subliminally perceived experiences of one particular individual
▪ Formed by our individual experience (UNIQUE to each of us)
▪ Complexes - emotionally toned conglomeration of associated ideas
➢ Largely personal but may also be derived from human's collective experience
➢ May be partly unconscious and may stem from both personal and collective unconscious
o Collective Unconscious
▪ Has roots in ancestral past of the entire species
▪ Never repressed out of consciousness
▪ Inherited and pass from one generation to the next as psychic potential
▪ Contents are more or less the same for people in ALL cultures
▪ Contents are active and influence a person's thoughts, emotions, and actions
▪ Responsible for myths, legends, and religious beliefs
▪ Produces "big dreams" (dreams with meaning beyond the individual dreamer and that are filled with significance for people of every time and place)
▪ Refers to humans' innate tendency to react in a particular way whenever their experiences stimulate a biologically inherited response tendency

Theories of Personality Page 7

 ▪ Refers to humans' innate tendency to react in a particular way whenever their experiences stimulate a biologically inherited response tendency
▪ Come into the world with inherited predispositions to act or react in certain ways if their present experiences touch on thes e biologically based predispositions
▪ People have as many inherited tendencies as they have typical situations
▪ Forms without content (possibility of a certain type of perception and action) -> more repetition -> develop some content -> archetypes
o Archetypes
▪ Ancient or archaic images that derive from the collective unconscious
▪ Emotionally toned collections of associated images (SIMILAR to complexes but are generalized and from the collective unconsci ous)
▪ Instinct - unconscious physical impulse toward action (Archetypes are the psychic counterpart of instinct)
▪ Have a biological basis but originate through the repeated experiences of humans' early ancestors
▪ When a personal experience corresponds to latent primordial image -> activation of archetype
▪ Expresses itself through dreams, fantasies, and delusions
➢ Dreams - main source of archetypal material
➢ Hallucinations of psychotic patients
▪ Persona
➢ Side of personality that people show to the world
➢ Refers to the mask worn by actors in early theater
➢ NOT our complete self
❖ Identify too much with persona -> remain unconscious of our individuality and blocked from attaining self-realization
➢ Psychological health = balance between demands of society and what we truly are
❖ Oblivious of one's persona = underestimate the importance of society
❖ Unaware of one's deep individuality = society's puppet
▪ Shadow
➢ Archetype of darkness and repressions
➢ Represents the qualities that we do not wish to acknowledge but attempt to hide from ourselves and others
➢ Consist of morally objectionable tendencies and a number of constructive and creative qualities
➢ First Test of Courage: Know our shadow
▪ Anima
➢ All humans are psychologically bisexual and possess both a masculine and feminine side
➢ Feminine side of men (feeling and mood)
➢ Overcome the anima = overcome intellectual barriers, delve into the far recesses of their unconscious, and realize the femini ne side of their personality
➢ Second Test of Courage: Know our anima
➢ Originated from early men's experiences with women that combined to form a generalized picture of woman
➢ Influences the feeling side in man and is the explanation for certain irrational moods and feelings
➢ Soul Image: Eros (love) - earth and water
▪ Animus
➢ Masculine archetype in women
➢ Symbolic of thinking and reasoning
➢ Capable of influencing the thinking of a woman yet does not belong to her
➢ Responsible for thinking and opinion in women
➢ Explanation for irrational thinking and illogical opinions
➢ Appears in dreams, visions, and fantasies
➢ Soul Image: Logos (reason) - air and fire
➢ Over-identification: Sol Niger (Black Sun)
▪ Great Mother
➢ Derivative of anima
➢ Associated with both positive and negative feelings
➢ Two opposing forces: fertility and nourishment and power and destruction
➢ Related to the archetype of rebirth
▪ Wise Old Man
➢ Derivative of animus
➢ Archetype of wisdom and meaning
➢ Symbolizes humans' pre-existing knowledge of the mysteries of life
➢ UNCONSCIOUS and cannot be directly experienced by a single individual
➢ Dominated: may gather a large following of disciples by using verbiage that sounds profound but makes little sense
➢ Symbolized by life itself
▪ Hero
➢ Powerful person who fights against great odds to conquer or vanquish evil
➢ Often undone by some seemingly insignificant person or event
➢ Heroic deeds can be performed only by someone who is vulnerable
➢ When they emerge victorious = frees us from feelings of impotence and misery and serves as a model for the ideal personality
➢ Symbolically overcomes the darkness of pre-human consciousness
▪ Self
➢ Inherited tendency to move toward growth, perfection, and completion
➢ ARCHETYPES OF ARCHETYPES (pulls together the other archetypes and unites them through self -realization)
➢ Possesses conscious and personal unconscious components (mostly formed by collective unconscious)
➢ Symbolized by a person's ideas of perfection, completion, and wholeness
❖ Ultimate symbol: mandala (Strivings of the collective unconscious for unity, balance, and wholeness)
➢ Includes both personal and collective unconscious
➢ Balance between consciousness and total self
❖ Too much consciousness = lack the soul spark of personality
❖ Overpowered by unconscious = pathological and one-sided personalities
➢ Each person has in the collective unconscious a concept of the perfect, unified self
❖ Mandala represents the perfect self
❖ Psychotic patients experience an increasing number of mandala motifs at the time they are undergoing a period of serious psychotic disorder
➢ To attain self-realization:
❖ Overcome the fear of the unconscious
❖ Prevent the persona from dominating the personality
❖ Recognize the shadow
❖ Face the animus/anima
• Dynamics of Personality
o Causality and Teleology
▪ Does motivation spring from past causes or from teleological goals?
▪ Causality - present events have their origin in previous experience
▪ Teleology - present events are motivated by goals and aspirations for the future that directs a person's destiny
▪ Both forces
o Progression and Regression
▪ Progression - adaptation to the outside world which involves the forward flow of psychic energy
➢ React consistently to a given environmental conditions

Theories of Personality Page 8

 ➢ React consistently to a given environmental conditions
▪ Regression - adaptation to the inner world which involves the backward flow of psychic energy
➢ Activates the unconscious psyche
▪ Both are essential to achieve self-realization
• Psychological Types
o Attitudes
▪ Predisposition to act or react in a characteristic situation
▪ Each person has both (one may be conscious and the other is unconscious)
▪ Introversion
➢ Turning inward of psychic energy with an orientation toward the subjective
➢ Tuned in to their inner world (biases, fantasies, dreams, and individualized perceptions)
➢ Perceive the world selectively and with their own subjective view
▪ Extraversion
➢ Turning outward of psychic energy so that a person is oriented toward the objective and away from the subjective
➢ More influenced by their surroundings than their inner world
➢ Focus on the objective attitude while suppressing the subjective
➢ Pragmatic and well-rooted in the realities of everyday life
➢ Overly suspicious of the subjective attitudes
o Functions
▪ Sensing, Feeling, Thinking, and Intuiting
▪ Attitude + Function = Types
Function Extraversion Introversion
Thinking (Recognize meaning) Rely heavily on concrete thoughts but may React to external stimuli yet interpreted
- logical intellectual activity that use abstract thought transmitted from through internal meaning
produces a chain of ideas without - results in unproductive thoughts that
- understand the meaning of things - no individual interpretation = facts are useless to other people
- logic and careful mental activity with no originality or creativity
Feeling (tells its value or worth) Use of objective data to make evaluations Base their judgments primarily on subjective
- Process of evaluating an idea or event - Extends values and widely accepted perceptions rather than objective facts
- Closer in meaning to valuing standards - Ignores traditional opinions and beliefs
- Value of conscious activity - May appear artificial, shallow, and - People feel uncomfortable around
unreliable them
Sensing (something exists) Perceive external stimuli objectively Largely influenced by their subjective
- Receives physical stimuli and transmits sensations
them to perceptual consciousness - May results in hallucinations or esoteric
- Based on perception and incomprehensible speech
Intuiting (know without knowing) Oriented toward facts in the external Guided by unconscious perception of facts
- Perception beyond the workings of world that are subjective and have little
consciousness - Subliminal perceptions resemblance to reality
- Involves creative interpretation - Suppresses sensation and follows
hunches
- Novelty of thought

• Development of Personality
o Develops through a series of stages that culminate in individuation or self-realization
o Emphasis on second half of life (bring together the various aspects of personality and attain self-realization)
o Psychological health is related to their ability in achieving balance between poles of opposing processes
o Stages
▪ Childhood
➢ Early morning sun = full of potential but lacking in brilliance (consciousness)
➢ Anarchic Phase
❖ Chaotic and sporadic consciousness
❖ Islands of consciousness exist but there is no connection among these islands
➢ Monarchic Phase
❖ Development of the ego and the beginning of logical and verbal thinking
❖ Islands of consciousness are bigger, more numerous, and have a primitive ego
❖ Children see themselves objectively and refer to themselves in the third person
➢ Dualistic Phase
❖ Ego as perceives arises (divided into objective and subjective)
❖ Islands of consciousness become continuous land
❖ Refer to themselves in the first person and aware of their existence as separate individuals
▪ Youth
➢ Morning Sun = climbing toward the zenith but unaware of the impending decline
➢ Period of increased activity, maturing sexuality, growing consciousness, and recognition that the problem -free era of childhood is gone
➢ Difficulty: overcome the natural tendency to cling to the narrow consciousness of childhood (conservative principle)
▪ Middle Life
➢ Early afternoon sun = brilliant but headed for the sunset
➢ Period of tremendous potential
➢ Give up their extraverted goals of youth and move in to the introverted direction of expanded consciousness
➢ Must look forward to the future with hope and anticipation, surrender the lifestyle of youth, and discover new meaning in mid dle life
▪ Old Age
➢ Evening sun = consciousness is markedly dimmed
➢ Death is the goal of life and that life can be fulfilling only when death is seen in this light
➢ Establish new goals and find meaning in living by first finding meaning in death
o Self-Realization
▪ Process of becoming an individual or whole person
▪ Process of integrating the opposite poles into a single homogenous individual
▪ Have: achieved realization of the self, minimized their persona, recognized their animus or anima, acquired a workable balanc e between introversion and extraversion
▪ Elevated all four function to a superior position
▪ Extremely rare and is achieved only by people who are able to assimilate their unconscious into their total personality
▪ Achieve a balance between all aspects of personality
▪ Able to contend with both external and internal worlds
• Method of Investigation
o Study of personality was not the prerogative of any single discipline
Word Association Test

Theories of Personality Page 9

 o Word Association Test
▪ Uncover feeling-toned complexes
▪ Based on the principle that complexes create measurable emotional responses
▪ Types of reaction indicate that the stimulus has touched a complex
o Dream Analysis
▪ Dreams have meaning and should be taken seriously
▪ People used symbols to represent a variety of concepts
▪ Unconscious and spontaneous attempt to know the unknowable, comprehend a reality that can only be expressed symbolically
▪ Purpose: Uncover elements from personal and collective unconscious and to integrate them into consciousness to facilitate sel f-realization
▪ Dreams are compensatory
▪ Certain dreams are proof for the existence of the collective unconscious
➢ Big dreams, typical dreams, and earliest dreams remembered
o Active Imagination
▪ Requires a person to begin with any impression and to concentrate until the impression begins to move
▪ Person must follow these images to wherever they lead and courageously face these autonomous images and freely communicate wi th them
▪ Purpose: reveal archetypal images emerging from the unconscious
o Psychotherapy
▪ 4 basic approaches
➢ Confession of a pathogenic secret (catharsis)
➢ Interpretation, explanation and elucidation (Freud)
➢ Education of patients as social beings (Adler)
➢ Transformation (Jung)
▪ Therapist must first be transformed into a healthy human being and have an established philosophy of life before attempting t o help individuals move toward self-realization
▪ Employed in patients who are in the second half of their life, with moral and religious problems, and with finding a unifying philosophy of life
▪ Purpose: help neurotic patients become healthy and to encourage healthy people to work independently toward self -realization
▪ Treatment varied according to age, stage of development, and particular problem of the patient
▪ Admitted the importance of transference and recognized countertransference

Klein: Object Relations Theory

• Overview
o Built on careful observations of young children
o Importance of the first 4 to 6 MONTHS after birth
o Infant's drives are directed to an object
o Child's relation to the breast is fundamental and serves as a prototype for later relations to whole objects
o Tendency of infants to relate to partial objects -> experiences having an unrealistic or fantasy-like quality that affects all later interpersonal relations
o Focus: role of early fantasy in the formation of interpersonal relationships
• Introduction
o Offspring of Freud's instinct theory:
▪ Less emphasis on biologically based drives and more importance on consistent patterns of interpersonal relationships
▪ More maternal, stressed the intimacy and nurturing of the mother
▪ Human contact and relatedness as the prime motive of human behavior
o Internal psychic representations of early objects that have been introjected are then projected onto one's partner
o Infant's real or fantasized early relations with the mother or the breast become a model for ALL later interpersonal relationships
• Psychic Life of the Infant
o Infants have an inherited predisposition to reduce the anxiety they experience as a result of conflict produced by the forcesof the life instinct and the power of the death instinct
o Innate readiness to act or react presupposes the existence of phylogenetic endowment
o Phantasies
▪ Possess an ACTIVE phantasy life
▪ Psychic representations of unconscious id instincts
▪ Possess unconscious images of good and bad
▪ Unconscious phantasies connected to the breast continue to exert an impact on psychic life but newer ones emerge as well
➢ Shaped by both reality and inherited predispositions
▪ May be contradictory
o Objects
▪ Humans have innate drives or instincts
▪ Drives have some objects
▪ Children related to these external objects, both in fantasy and reality
▪ Earliest object relations: breasts (-> face and hands)
▪ Infant INTROJECT these external objects
➢ Fantasies of internalizing the object in concrete and physical terms
➢ Objects have a power of their own
• Positions
o CONSTANT engaging in a basic conflict between the life instinct and the death instinct
o Infant organize their experiences into positions (ways of dealing with both internal and external objects)
o Can alter back and forth
o Represent normal social growth and development
o Paranoid-Schizoid
▪ Alternating experiences of gratification and frustration threaten the existence of the infant's ego
▪ Desire to control the breast by devouring and harboring it < -> innate destructive urges create fantasies of destroying it
➢ Leads to splitting of the ego (retains parts of its instincts while deflecting parts of it onto the breast)
➢ Fears the persecutory breast
➢ Desires to keep the ideal breast
▪ Includes both paranoid feelings of being persecuted and a splitting of internal and external objects into the good and the ba d
▪ During the first 3 or 4 months of life
▪ Ego's perception of the external world is subjective and fantastic (persecutory feelings are considered paranoid)
▪ Keep the good breast and bad breast separate
➢ Rage and destructive feelings = bad breast
➢ Love and comfort = good breast
▪ Biological predisposition to attach a positive value to nourishment and the life instinct and to assign a negative value to h unger and the death instinct
➢ Splitting serves as a type of prototype for subsequent development of ambivalent feelings toward a single person
▪ Primitive, unconscious fashion
o Depressive
▪ Begins at the 5th or 6th month
▪ Begins to view external objects as a whole and to see that good and bad can exist in the same person
▪ Develops a more realistic picture of the mother and recognizes that she is an independent person who can be both good and bad
▪ Ego is beginning to mature -> can tolerate some of its own destructive feelings

Theories of Personality Page 10

 ▪ Ego is beginning to mature -> can tolerate some of its own destructive feelings
▪ Realize that the mother might go away and be lost forever
➢ Desires to protect her and keep her from the dangers of its own destructive forces
➢ BUT ego is NOT mature enough to realize it lacks the capacity to protect the mother -> experience guilt for its previous destructive urges
▪ Feelings of anxiety over losing a loved object coupled with a sense of guilt for wanting to destroy that object
▪ Recognize that the loved object and hated object are the same
➢ Reproach themselves for previous destructive urges and desire to make reparation for these attacks
➢ Able to feel empathy for her
▪ Resolved when children fantasize that they have made reparation for their previous transgressions and when they recognize tha t their mother will not go away permanently
but will return after each departure
➢ Children close the split between good and bad mother
➢ Can experience and display their own love for her
• Psychic Defense Mechanisms
o To protect the ego against anxiety aroused by their own destructive fantasies
o Originate with oral-sadistic anxieties concerning the breast
o Introjection
▪ Fantasize taking into their body those perceptions and experiences that they have had with the external object
▪ Begins with an infant's first feeding
▪ When dangerous objects are introjected, they become internal persecutors
▪ NOT accurate representations of the real objects but are colored by children's fantasies
o Projection
▪ Fantasy that one's own feelings and impulses actually reside in another person and not within one's body
▪ Alleviate the unbearable anxiety of being destroyed by dangerous internal forces
▪ Project BOTH good and bad images onto external objects (especially their parents)
▪ Can also project GOOD impulses
▪ Allows people to believe that their own subjective opinions are true
o Splitting
▪ Keeping apart incompatible impulses
▪ In order to split the good and bad objects, the ego MUST be split
▪ Principle of the "good me" and the "bad me" (enables them to deal with both pleasurable and destructive impulses)
▪ Can have a positive or a negative effect on the child
➢ Enables people to seem both positive and negative aspects of themselves, evaluate their behavior as good or bad, and to diffe rentiate between likeable and unlikeable
people
➢ Excessive and inflexible splitting -> pathological repression
o Projective Identification
▪ Infants split off unacceptable parts of themselves, project them into another object , and finally introject them back into t hemselves in a changed or distorted form
▪ Taking the object back = feel that they have become like that object
▪ EXIST only in the world of interpersonal relationships
• Internalizations
o Person takes in aspects of the external world and then organizes those introjections into a psychologically meaningful framework
o Ego
▪ Sense of self
▪ Reaches maturity at a much earlier stage
▪ Early ability to sense both destructive and loving forces and to manage them through splitting, projection, and introjection
▪ Unorganized at birth BUT can feel anxiety, use defense mechanisms, and form early object relations in both phantasy and reali ty
▪ Evolves with infant's first experience with feeding
▪ Introjection of good and bad breast provides a focal point for expansion of the ego
▪ FIRST object relation becomes the PROTOTYPE for ego's future development and later interpersonal relations
▪ Must be split first before united
➢ Innate strive for integration BUT forced to deal with opposing forces
➢ Dual image allows them to manage the good and bad aspects of external objects
➢ As they mature, their perceptions become more realistic, they no longer see the world in terms of partial objects, and their egos become more integrated
o Superego
▪ Difference from Freud:
➢ Emerges much earlier in life
➢ NOT an outgrowth of the Oedipus Complex
➢ Much more harsh and cruel
▪ Early superego produces terror
➢ Infants experience anxiety -> mobilize libido against the death instinct -> ego is forced to defend itself against its own action
➢ Extreme violence is a reaction to the ego's aggressive self-defense against its own destructive tendencies
➢ Responsible for many antisocial and criminal tendencies in adults
▪ 5th or 6th year
➢ Arouses guilt
➢ Transformed into a realistic conscience
▪ GROWS ALONG with the Oedipus Complex and emerges as realistic guilt after the Oedipus Complex has been resolved
o Oedipus Complex
▪ Difference from Freud:
➢ Begins at an earlier age (begins during the earliest months of life, overlaps with oral and anal stages, and reaches its clim ax at the genital stage)
➢ Significant fear of retaliation from their parent for their fantasy of emptying the parent's body
➢ Importance of retaining positive feelings toward BOTH parents
➢ During its early stages, it serves the same need for both genders (establish a good relationship with the good object and to avoid the bad object)
▪ Female
➢ See mother's breast as both good and bad -> view the breast more positively -> Sees the whole mother as good -> fantasize how babies are made -> imagines father's
penis feeding her mother with babies -> positive relationship with penis and fantasize that her father will give her babies
➢ Smoothly: adopt a feminine position and has a positive relationship with both parents
➢ Go wrong:
❖ Sees the mother as a rival -> fantasize robbing her mother of her father's penis and stealing her babies -> paranoid fear that her mother will retaliate
❖ Penis envy stems from the girl's wish to internalize her father's penis and to receive a baby from him
➢ NO evidence that girls blame their mother for bringing her in without a penis
▪ Male
➢ See mother's breast as both good and bad -> shifts some of his oral desire to his father's penis(feminine position) -> heterosexual relationship with his mother ->
develop oral-sadistic impulses toward his father -> arouse castration anxiety and fear of retaliation -> avoid sexual relations with his mother
❖ Passive homosexual position is a prerequisite for the boy's development of a healthy heterosexual relationship
➢ Resolved: Castration Anxiety and having a positive relationship with both parents
• Later Views
o Mahler’s
▪ Children's sense of identity rests on a three-step relationship with their mother
➢ Normal Autism

Theories of Personality Page 11

 ➢ Normal Autism
❖ Basic needs cared for by their mother
❖ Absolute narcissism in which an infant in unaware of any other person
➢ Normal Symbiosis
❖ Develop a safe symbiotic relationship with an all-powerful mother
❖ Mutual cuing of mother and infant
❖ Infant can recognize the mother's face and can perceive her pleasure or distress
➢ Separation-Individuation
❖ Emerge from their mother's protective circle and establish their separate individuality
❖ Experience the world as being more dangerous
❖ 4 substages:
◆ Differentiation - bodily breaking away from the mother-infant symbiotic orbit
◆ Practicing - distinguish their body from their mother's, establish a specific bond with their mother, and begin to develop an autonomous ego
◆ Rapprochement - desire to bring their mother and themselves back together (physically and psychologically)
◆ Libidinal Object Constancy - develop a constant inner representation of their mother so that they can tolerate being physically separate from her
▪ Psychological birth begins during the first weeks of postnatal life and continues for the next 3 years or so
➢ Child becomes an individual separate from their primary caregiver, an accomplishment that leads ultimately to a sense of iden tity
o Kohut’s
▪ Children develop a sense of self during early infancy when parents and others treat them as if they had an individualized sen se of identity
▪ Human relatedness are at the core of human personality
▪ Infants need adults to satisfy BOTH physical and psychological needs
▪ Self as the center of the individual's psychological universe
▪ Infants are naturally narcissistic
➢ Need to exhibit the grandiose self
❖ Established when the infant related to a mirroring self-object who reflects approval of its behavior
➢ Need to acquire an idealized image of one or both parents
➢ Both are necessary for development of a healthy personality (MUST CHANGE as the child grows older)
o Bowlby’s
▪ Infants' attachment to their mother and the consequences of being separated from their mother
▪ Attachments formed during childhood have an important impact on adulthood
▪ Stages of Separation Anxiety
➢ Protest Stage - cry, resist soothing by other people, and search for their caregiver
➢ Despair Stage - become quiet, sad, passive, listless and apathetic
➢ Detachment - become emotionally detached from other people
▪ Assumptions
➢ A responsive and accessible caregiver must create a secure base for the child
➢ A bonding relationship becomes internalized and serves as a mental working model on which future relationships and love relat ionships are built
❖ Attachment style is a relationship between two people
o Ainsworth
▪ Type of attachment style an infant develops toward its caregiver
▪ How infants react when the mother returns
▪ 3 attachment styles:
Type of Attachment When Mother leaves Infants' Reaction when mother returns Meaning
Secure Attachment Cry Happy, enthusiastic, and initiate contact Confident in accessibility and responsiveness of caregiver
Anxious Resistant Unusually upset Seek contact BUT reject attempts being soothed Inconsistent responsiveness
Anxious Avoidant Stay calm Ignore and avoid mother
• Psychotherapy
o BOTH healthy and disturbed children should be psychoanalyzed
o Negative transference is essential toward successful treatment
o Substituted play therapy for dream analysis and free association
o Aim: reduce depressive anxieties and persecutory fears and mitigate the harshness of internalized objects
▪ Encouraged patients to reexperience early emotions and fantasies (but therapists point out differences between reality and fa ntasy)
▪ Allow patients positive and negative transference

Horney: Psychoanalytic Social Theory

• Overview
o Assumption that social and cultural conditions, especially childhood experiences, are largely responsible for shaping personality
o Do not have their needs for love and affection satisfied -> basic hostility toward parents -> suffer from basic anxiety
o Styles of relating to others:
▪ Moving toward people
▪ Moving against people
▪ Moving away from people
o Compulsive behavior generates an intrapsychic conflict:
▪ Idealized self-image
➢ Neurotic search for glory
➢ Neurotic claims
➢ Neurotic pride
▪ Self-Hatred
• Introduction
o Culture, especially early childhood experiences, plays a leading role in shaping personality
o Horney VS Freud
▪ Criticisms on Freud
➢ Strict adherence to orthodox psychoanalysis would lead to stagnation in theoretical though and therapeutic practice
➢ Objected to Freud's ideas on feminine psychology
➢ Psychoanalysis should move beyond instinct theory and emphasize the importance of cultural influences in shaping personality
❖ Neuroses are not the result of instincts but rather the person's attempt to find paths through a wilderness full of unknown d angers
▪ Optimistic view on humanity
o Impact of Culture
▪ Cultural influences as the PRIMARY bases for both neurotic and normal personality development
▪ Modern culture is based on competition among individuals
▪ Competitiveness -> basic hostility -> feelings of isolation -> intensified needs for affection -> overvalue love -> development of neuroses
▪ Western society contributes:
➢ Cultural teaching of kinship but run contrary to another prevailing attitude (aggressiveness and drive to win or be superior)
➢ Demands for success and achievement are nearly endless
➢ Tells people that they are free but freedom of most people is greatly restricted

Theories of Personality Page 12

 ➢ Tells people that they are free but freedom of most people is greatly restricted
▪ Contradictions provide intrapsychic conflicts that threatens psychological health of normal people and provide insurmountable obstacles for neurotics
o Importance of Childhood Experiences
▪ Age from which the vast majority of problems arise
▪ Experiences can be traced to lack of genuine warmth and affection
▪ Difficult childhood is responsible for neurotic needs
➢ Needs become the only means to gain feelings of safety
➢ NO SINGLE experience is responsible for later personality
➢ TOTALITY of early relationships molds personality development
▪ Primarily responsible for personality development
• Basic Hostility and Basic Anxiety
o People need favorable conditions for growth
▪ Warm and loving environment (NOT permissive)
▪ Experience both genuine love and healthy discipline -> feelings of safety and satisfaction -> permits them to grow in accordance with their real self
▪ Parent's inability or unwillingness to love their child -> not satisfying child's needs for safety and satisfaction -> basic hostility toward their parents -> repress their hostility ->
profound feelings of insecurity and vague sense of apprehension (basic anxiety)
➢ Basic Anxiety - a feeling of being isolated and helpless in a world conceived as potentially hostile
o Inexplicably interwoven
▪ Reciprocal influence may intensify a neurosis
o Basic Hostility - hostile pattern which develops from basic anxiety where the infant feels dependent on the parent figure despite lack of affection or threat of abuse
▪ Childhood feelings of rejection or neglect by parents, or defense against basic anxiety
▪ Out of fear, anxiety is repressed for security or survival
▪ Expressed as neurosis and hostility toward others instead of parental figures
o Basic Anxiety
▪ When hostility is repressed, leads to profound feelings of insecurity and vague sense of apprehension
▪ NOT a neurosis (but it is the nutritive soil out of which neurosis may develop over time)
▪ Constant and unrelenting
▪ Permeates all relationships with others and leads to unhealthy ways of trying to cope with people
o 4 ways to protect themselves
▪ Affection - a strategy that does not always lead to authentic love but purchased through self -effacing compromise, material goods, or sexual favors
▪ Submissiveness - submit either to people or to institutions
▪ Striving for power, prestige, or possession
➢ Power - defense against the real or imagined hostility of others and takes the form of a tendency to dominate others
➢ Prestige - protection against humiliation and is expressed as tendency to humiliate others
➢ Possession - buffer against destitution and poverty and manifests itself as tendency to deprive others
▪ Withdrawal - Developing independence from others or by becoming emotionally detached from them
▪ All people use them to some extent BUT it becomes unhealthy when people feel compelled to rely on them and unable to employ a variety of interpersonal strategies
▪ Compulsion is characteristic of ALL neurotic drives
• Compulsive Drives
o Neurotics
▪ Experience problems to a greater degree and compulsively repeat the same strategy
▪ Cannot change their behavior by free will but must continually and compulsively protect themselves against basic anxiety
o Neurotic Needs
▪ Characterize neurotics in their attempts to reduce basic anxiety
▪ For Affection and Approval - attempt indiscriminately to please others
▪ For a powerful partner - try to attach themselves to a powerful partner (includes overvaluation of love and a dread of being alone or deserted)
▪ To Restrict one's life within narrow borders - strive to remain inconspicuous, to take second place, and to be content with very little
▪ For Power - manifests itself as the need to control others and to avoid feelings of weakness or stupidity
▪ To exploit others - evaluate others on the basis of how they can be used and exploited
▪ For social recognition or prestige - try to be first, to be important, or to attract attention to themselves
▪ For personal admiration - need to be admired for what they are rather than for what they possess
▪ For ambition and personal achievement - strong drive to be the best
▪ For self-sufficiency and independence - strong need to move away from people
▪ For perfection and unassailability - receive proof of their self-esteem and personal superiority
o Neurotic Trends
▪ Basic attitude toward oneself and others
Healthy individuals Neurotic individuals
Conscious of their strategies Unaware of their basic attitude
Free to choose their actions Forced to act
Experience mild conflict Experience severe and insoluble conflict
Can choose a variety of strategies Limited to a single trend
▪ Moving Toward People
➢ Behave in a compliant manner as protection against feelings of helplessness
➢ Neurotic need to protect oneself against feelings of helplessness
➢ Employ either or both the first
➢ Neurotic needs (Strive for affection and approval of others or they seek a powerful partner who will take responsibility for their lives)
➢ Involves a complex of strategies
▪ Moving Against People
➢ Acts of aggression in order to circumvent the hostility of other
➢ Appear tough or ruthless
➢ Motivated by a strong need to exploit others and to use them for their own benefit
➢ Play to win and take little pleasure in the work itself
➢ Basic motivation is the need for power, prestige, and personal ambition
▪ Moving Away From People
➢ Adopt a detached manner to alleviate feelings of isolation
➢ Expression of needs for privacy, independence, and self-sufficiency
➢ Find associating with others an intolerable strain
➢ Compulsively driven to move away from people, to attain autonomy and separateness
➢ Intensified need to be strong and powerful
➢ Prefer that their hidden greatness be recognized without any effort on their part
• Intrapsychic Conflicts
o Intrapsychic processes originate from interpersonal experiences
o Become part of their belief systems and take on lives of their own, separate from the intrapsychic conflict which produced them
o Idealized Self-Image
▪ Attempt to solve conflicts by painting a godlike picture of oneself
▪ An environment of discipline and warmth -> feelings of security and self-confidence and a tendency to move toward self-realization

Theories of Personality Page 13

 ▪ An environment of discipline and warmth -> feelings of security and self-confidence and a tendency to move toward self-realization
▪ Feeling alienated from themselves, people need to acquire a stable sense of identity -> create an idealized self-image (extravagantly positive view of themselves that exists
only in their personal belief system)
▪ Endow themselves with infinite powers and unlimited capabilities
▪ NOT a global construction
▪ Glorify and worship themselves in different ways
▪ As idealized self-image becomes solidified -> believe in the reality of that image
➢ Lose touch with their real self and use the idealized self as the standard for self -evaluation
➢ Move toward actualizing their IDEALIZED SELF
▪ Neurotic Search for Glory
➢ Begin to incorporate it into all aspects of their lives
➢ Comprehensive drive toward actualizing the ideal self
➢ Self-Idealization - content of Idealized Self-Image
➢ Need for perfection
❖ Drive to mold the whole personality into the idealized self
❖ Tyranny of the should - erecting a complex set of shoulds and should nots
➢ Neurotic Ambition
❖ Compulsive drive toward superiority
❖ Channel their energies into those activities that are most likely to bring success
➢ Drive toward vindictive triumph
❖ Put others to shame or defeat them through one's very success or to attain the power to inflict suffering on them
❖ Most destructive element
❖ May be disguised as a drive for achievement or success
❖ Grows out of the childhood desire to take revenge for real or imagined humiliations
▪ Neurotic Claims
➢ Believe that they are entitled to be treated in accordance with their idealized view of themselves
➢ Grow out of normal needs and wishes
❖ Not met -> indignant, bewildered and unable to comprehend why others have not granted their claims
▪ Neurotic Pride
➢ A false pride based not on a realistic view of the true self but on a spurious image of the idealized self
➢ Based on an idealized image
➢ Usually loudly proclaimed in order to protect and support a glorified view of one's self
o Self-Hatred
▪ Irrational and powerful tendency to despise one's real self
▪ Can never be happy with themselves because when they realize that they real self does not match the insatiable demands of the ir idealized self, they will begin to hate and
despise themselves
▪ Relentless demands on the self
➢ Tyranny of the should
➢ Continue to push themselves toward perfection because they believe they should be perfect
▪ Merciless Self-Accusation
➢ Constantly berate themselves, grandiose expressions, questioning own motivations, taking credit for improbable events
▪ Self-Contempt
➢ Belittling, disparaging, doubting, discrediting, and ridiculing oneself
➢ Prevents people from striving for improvement or achievement
▪ Self-Frustration
➢ Shackled by taboos against enjoyment
➢ Stems from self-hatred and is designed to actualize an inflated self-image
▪ Self-Torment
➢ people's main intention is to inflict harm or suffering on themselves
▪ Self-Destructive Actions and Impulses
➢ Can be: physical/psychological, conscious/unconscious, acute/chronic, or carried out in action/enacted only in the imaginatio n
• Feminine Psychology
o Psychic differences in men and women are due to cultural and social expectations (NOT due to anatomy)
▪ Women are culturally inferior (NOT biologically)
o Basic anxiety is at the core of men's need to subjugate women and women's wish to humiliate men
o Oedipus Complex
▪ Due to certain environmental conditions
▪ Found only in some people and is an expression of the neurotic need for love
▪ Child's main goal is security
o Penis Envy does not exist
o Many women possess a masculine protest
▪ Wish for all those qualities or privileges which in our culture are regarded as masculine
o Not so important to try to find the answer to the question about differences as to understand and analyze the real significance of this keen interest in feminine nature
• Psychotherapy
o Goal: help patients gradually grow in the direction of self-realization
▪ Have patients give up their idealized self-image, relinquish their neurotic search for glory, and change self -hatred to an acceptance of the real self
o Therapist: convince patients that their present solutions are perpetuating rather than alleviating the core neurosis
o Successful therapy is built on self-analysis and self-understanding
o Use of dream interpretation and free association
▪ Dreams are attempts to solve conflicts
▪ Free association: eventually reveals patients' idealized self -image and persistent but unsuccessful attempts at accomplishing it
o Gradually develop confidence in their ability to assume responsibility for their psychological development

Fromm: Humanistic Psychoanalysis

• Overview
o Modern-day people have been torn away from their prehistoric union with nature and with one another, yet they have the power of reasoning, forethought, and imagination
o Lack of animal instincts + presence of rational thoughts = freaks
o Self-awareness contributes to feelings of loneliness, isolation, and homelessness
o Strive to unite with nature and with their fellow human beings
o Assume: humanity's separation from the natural world has produced feelings of loneliness and isolation (Basic Anxiety)
o Evolutionary view of humanity
▪ Loss of animal instincts <-> increase in brain development that permitted self-awareness, imagination, planning, and doubt
o Rise of capitalism
▪ Resulted in feelings of anxiety, isolation, and powerlessness
▪ Cost of freedom exceeded its benefits
➢ Escape from freedom into interpersonal dependencies
➢ Move to self-realization through productive love and work

Theories of Personality Page 14

 ➢ Move to self-realization through productive love and work
• Basic Assumptions
o Individual personality can be understood only in the light of human history
o Human Dilemma
▪ Acquired the ability to reason but have been torn away from their union with nature
▪ Become separate from nature and yet have the capacity to be aware of themselves as isolated beings
▪ Ability to reason is both a blessing and a curse
➢ Permits humans to survive
➢ Forces them to attempt to solve basic insoluble dichotomies (Existential Dichotomies)
❖ Between life and death
❖ Capable of conceptualizing the goal of complete self-realization but unable to reach that goal
❖ People are ultimately alone, yet we cannot tolerate isolation
• Human Needs
o Only distinctive human needs can move people toward a reunion with the natural world
o Emerged during the evolution of human culture (grew out of attempts to find an answer to their existence and to avoid becoming insane)
o Healthy individuals: better able to find ways of reuniting to the world by productively solving human needs
o Relatedness
▪ Drive for union with another person or other persons
▪ Submission
➢ Transcend the separateness of his individual experience by becoming part of somebody or something bigger than himself and exp eriences his identity in connection
with the power to which he has submitted
▪ Power
➢ Welcome submissive partners
➢ Submissive person + domineering person = symbiotic relationship
❖ BUT it blocks growth toward integrity and psychological health
❖ Drawn to one another by a desperate need for relatedness
❖ Unconscious feelings of hostility for one another
▪ Love
➢ ONLY route by which a person can become united with the world and achieve individuality and integrity
➢ Union with somebody, or something outside oneself under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one's ow n self
➢ Two people become one yet remain two
➢ Four basic elements:
❖ Care - care for that person and be willing to take care of them
❖ Responsibility - willingness and ability to respond to each other's physical and psychological needs
❖ Respect - respect them for who they are and avoids the temptation of trying to respect them
❖ Knowledge - see them from their own point of view
o Transcendence
▪ Urge to rise above a passive and accidental existence and into the realm of purposefulness and freedom
▪ By create life or destroying it
▪ Malignant Aggression - kill for reasons other than survival
o Rootedness
▪ Need to establish roots or to feel at home again in the world
▪ When humans evolved
➢ Lost their home in the natural world
➢ Capacity for thought enabled them to realize that they were without a home
➢ Unbearable feelings of isolation and helplessness
▪ By: actively and creatively relate to the world and become whole or integrated or fixation (tenacious reluctance to move beyo nd the protective security provided by one's
mother)
▪ Can also be seen phylogenetically
➢ Incestuous feelings are based in the deep-seated craving to remain in, or to return to, the all-enveloping womb, or to the nourishing breasts
o Sense of Identity
▪ Capacity to be aware of ourselves as a separate entity
▪ Torn away from nature -> need to form a concept of our self
▪ Rise of capitalism -> given only a minority of people freedom
➢ Identity of most people still resides in their attachment to others or to institutions
▪ Neurotics: try to attach themselves to powerful people or to social or political institutions
▪ Healthy people: do not have to surrender their freedom and individuality in order to fit into society because they possess an authentic sense of identity
o Frame of Orientation
▪ Need a road map, a frame of orientation, to make their way through the world
▪ A means of organizing stimuli and expectancies in order to make sense of them
▪ Either through rational or irrational goals
▪ Enables people to organize various stimuli that impinge on them
▪ No goal = useless
▪ Goal or object of devotion focuses people's energies in a single direction, enables us to transcend our isolated existence, a nd confers meaning to their lives
Human Needs Negative Components Positive Components
Relatedness Submission/Domination Love
Transcendence Destructiveness Creativeness
Rootedness Fixation Wholeness
Sense of Identity Adjustment to a group Individuality
Frame of Orientation Irrational Goal Rational Goal
• The Burden of Freedom
o Reason is both responsible for feelings of isolation and loneliness and enables humans to become reunited with the world
o Burden of freedom = free from the security
o Results in basic anxiety (a feeling of being alone in the world)
o Mechanisms of Escape
▪ Authoritarianism
➢ Tendency to give up the independence of one's own individual self and to fuse one's self with somebody or something outside o neself, in order to acquire the strength
which the individual is lacking
➢ Two forms:
❖ Masochism - results from basic feelings of powerlessness, weakness, and inferiority and aimed at joining the self to a more powerful pers on/institution
❖ Sadism - aimed at reducing basic anxiety through achieving unity with another person or persons
◆ More neurotic and socially harmful
◆ Need to make others dependent on oneself and to gain power over those who are weak
◆ Compulsion to exploit others, to take advantage of them, and to use them for one's benefit or pleasure
◆ Desire to see others suffer, either physically or psychologically

Theories of Personality Page 15

 ◆ Desire to see others suffer, either physically or psychologically
▪ Destructiveness
➢ Rooted in feelings of aloneness, isolation, and powerlessness
➢ Seeks to do away with other people
➢ Destroy other people and objects -> attempt to restore lots feelings of power (BUT they eliminate much of the outside world)
▪ Conformity
➢ Give up their individuality and become whatever other people desire them to be
➢ They do not know what they want, think, or feel
➢ More conform = more powerless they feel (cycle repeats itself)
o Positive Freedom
▪ Spontaneous and full expression of both their rational and emotional possibilities
▪ Represents a successful solution to the human dilemma
▪ People overcome the terror of loneliness, achieve union with the world, and maintain individuality
▪ Components: love and work
• Character Orientation
o Person's relatively permanent way of relating to people and things
o Personality - totality of the inherited and acquired psychic qualities which are characteristic of one individual and which make the individual unique
o Character - relatively permanent system of all noninstinctual strivings though which man relates himself to the human and natural world
o Acquire and use things (assimilation) and by relating to self and others (socialization)
o Non-productive Orientations
▪ Fail to move people closer to positive freedom and self-realization
▪ Receptive
➢ Source of all good lies outside themselves
➢ Only way to relate to the world is to receive things
➢ Want others to shower them with love, ideas, and gifts
▪ Exploitative
➢ Source of all good is outside themselves
➢ Aggressively take what they desire
➢ Willing to express an opinion but it usually had been pilfered
▪ Hoarding
➢ Seek to save that which they have already obtained
➢ Hold everything inside and do not let go of anything
➢ Tend to live in the past and are repelled by anything new
▪ Marketing
➢ Outgrowth of modern commerce
➢ See themselves as commodities, with their personal value dependent on their exchange value
➢ Must see themselves in constant demand
➢ "I am as you desire me?
➢ Without a past or a future and have no permanent principles or values
o The Productive Orientation
▪ Work
➢ See it as a means of creative self-expression
➢ Use work as a means of producing life's necessities
▪ Love
➢ Care, respect, knowledge, and responsibility
➢ Biophilia - passionate love for life and all that is alive
➢ Self-love must come first
▪ Reason
➢ Concerned interest in another person or object
• Personality Disorders
o Psychologically disturbed people are incapable of love and have failed to establish union with others
o Necrophilia
▪ Denote an attraction to death
▪ Hate humanity
▪ Destructive behavior is a reflection of their basic character
▪ Revolves around death, destruction, disease, and decay
o Malignant Narcissism
▪ Impedes the perception of reality so that everything belonging to the narcissistic person is highly valued and everything bel onging to another is devalued
▪ Preoccupied with themselves
➢ May lead to hypochondriasis (obsessive attention to one's health)
❖ Moral hypochondriasis (preoccupation with guilt about previous transgressions
▪ Depression - of being worthless, when the criticism is overwhelming such that rage is turned inward
o Incestuous Symbiosis
▪ Extreme dependence on the mother of mother surrogate
▪ Exaggerated form of mother fixation
▪ Inseparable from the hose person
▪ Feel anxious and frightened if their relationship is threatened
▪ Distorts reasoning powers, destroys the capacity for authentic love, and prevents people from achieving independence and inte grity
o Syndrome of Decay - possess all three personality disorders
• Psychotherapy
o Aim: for patients to come to know themselves
o Should be built on personal relationship between the therapist and the patient
▪ Must relate as one human being to another with utter concentration and utter sincerity
o Dreams are expressed in symbolic language
o Should not be too scientific in understanding the patient

Erikson: Post-Freudian Theory

• Overview
o Extended Freud's infantile developmental stages into adolescence, adulthood, and old age
o Each stage has a specific psychosocial struggle which contributes to the formation of personality
o From adolescence onward, that struggle takes the form of an identity crisis (a turning point in one's life that may either strengthen or weaken personality)
o Placed more emphasis on both social and historical influences
• The Ego
o A POSITIVE force that creates a self-identity, a sense of I
o Helps us adapt to the various conflicts and crises of life and keeps us from losing our individuality to the leveling forces of society
o Unifies our personality and guards against indivisibility
o Partially unconscious organizing agency that synthesizes our present experiences with past self-identities and also with anticipated images of self

Theories of Personality Page 16

 o
o Person's ability to unify experiences and actions in an adaptive manner
o 3 aspects:
▪ Body Ego - experiences with our body (how different our physical self is from other people)
▪ Ego Ideal - image we have of ourselves in comparison with an established ideal
▪ Ego Identity - image we have of ourselves in the different social roles we play
o Society’s Influence
▪ Ego emerges from and is largely shaped by society
▪ Different societies tend to shape personalities that fir the needs and values of their culture
▪ Pseudospecies - an illusion perpetrated and perpetuated by a particular society that it is somehow chosen to be the human species
o Epigenetic Principle
▪ Implies a step-by-step growth of fetal organs
▪ Ego develops throughout the various stages of life
▪ Each stage developing at its proper time
➢ One stage emerges from and is built upon a previous stage, but it does not replace that earlier stage
• Stages of Psychosocial Development
o Basic Points
▪ Growth takes place according to the epigenetic principle (one component part arises out of another and has its own time of as cendancy
▪ Interaction of opposites
➢ Conflict between a syntonic element and a dystonic element
▪ At each stage, the conflict between syntonic and dystonic elements produce and ego quality or ego strength (basic strength)
▪ Too little basic strength at any one stage results in a core pathology for that stage
▪ Biological aspect of human development
▪ During each stage, especially from adolescence onward, personality development is characterized by an identity crisis
➢ Turning point, a crucial period of increased vulnerability and heightened potential
➢ Opportunity for either adaptive or maladaptive adjustment
o Infancy
▪ Approximately the first year of life
▪ Time of incorporation (through various sense organs)
▪ Oral-Sensory Mode
➢ Two modes of incorporation: receiving and accepting what is given
➢ Early training in interpersonal relations which help them learn to become givers themselves
▪ Basic Trust VS Basic Mistrust
➢ Significant interpersonal relation: primary caregiver (mother)
❖ If their pattern of accepting things corresponds with culture's way of giving things -> basic trust
❖ No correspondence between their oral-sensory needs and their environment -> basic mistrust
➢ Some ratio of trust and mistrust is critical to people's ability to adapt
▪ Hope
➢ Having both painful and pleasant experiences, infants learn to expect that future distresses will meet with satisfactory outc omes
➢ Core pathology: withdrawal (retreat from the outside world and begin the journey toward serious psychological disturbance)
o Early Childhood
▪ Approximately 2nd to 3rd years of life
▪ Receive pleasure from mastering the sphincter muscle but also from mastering other body functions
▪ Develop a sense of control over their interpersonal environment
▪ Time of experiencing doubt and shame
▪ Anal-Urethral Mode
➢ Learn to control their body, especially in relation to cleanliness and mobility
➢ Time of contradiction
▪ Autonomy VS Shame and Doubt
➢ Likely to find a culture that attempts to inhibit some of their self -expression
➢ Have a ratio of both (but more of autonomy)
❖ Too little autonomy -> difficulties in subsequent stages
➢ Autonomy grows out of basic trust
➢ Shame - feeling of self-consciousness, of being looked at and exposed
➢ Doubt - feeling of not being certain, the feeling that something remains hidden and cannot be seen
➢ Shame and Doubt grow out of basic mistrust
▪ Will
➢ Beginning of free will and willpower
➢ Only develop will when their environment allows them some self -expression
➢ Too little will and too much compulsivity carry forward into the play age as lack of purpose and into school age as lack of c onfidence
o Play Age
▪ Approximately aged 3 to 5 years
▪ Identify with their parents, develop locomotion, language skills, curiosity, imagination, and the ability to set goals
▪ Genital-Locomotor Mode
➢ Oedipus Complex is a drama played out in the child's imagination and includes the budding understanding of some basic concept s
➢ Increasing facility at locomotion
➢ Play shows initiative and imagination
➢ Will is developing into activity with a purpose
➢ Cognitive abilities allow them to manufacture elaborate fantasies
❖ Fantasies may also produce guilt
▪ Initiative VS Guilt
➢ Adopt an intrusive head-on mode of approaching the world
➢ Some goals must be repressed or delayed which made lead to guilt
➢ A ratio between the two should be desired
▪ Purpose
➢ Interests have a direction
➢ Set goals and pursue them with purpose
➢ Period of developing a conscience and beginning to attach labels
➢ Core Pathology: Inhibition
o School Age
▪ Approximately from age 6 to 12/13
▪ Social world of children is expanding beyond family
▪ Wish to know becomes strong and is tied to their basic striving for competence
▪ Latency
➢ Sexual latency allows children to divert their energies to learning the technology of their culture and the strategies of the ir social interactions
➢ Begin to form a picture of themselves as competent or incompetent (origin of EGO IDENTITY)
▪ Industry VS Inferiority
➢ Time of tremendous social growth
➢ Industry - willingness to remain busy with something and to finish a job

Theories of Personality Page 17

 ➢ Industry - willingness to remain busy with something and to finish a job
➢ If their work is insufficient, they acquire a sense of inferiority
➢ People can successfully handle the crisis of any given stage even though they were not completely successful in previous stag es
▪ Competence
➢ Confidence to use one's physical and cognitive abilities to solve the problems that accompany school age
➢ Lays the foundation for cooperative participation in productive adult life
➢ Core Pathology: Inertia (regress to an earlier stage of development)
o Adolescence
▪ Period from puberty to young adulthood
▪ ONE of the most crucial developmental stages
➢ Person must gain a firm sense of ego identity
▪ Period of social latency
▪ Adaptive phase of personality development
▪ Puberty
➢ Genital maturation
➢ Triggers expectations of adult roles yet ahead
▪ Identity VS Identity Confusion
➢ Strive to find out who they are and who they are not
➢ Young people draw from a variety of earlier self-images that have been accepted or rejected
➢ Identity strengthens into a crisis as young people learn to cope with the psychosocial conflict
➢ Crisis - turning point, a crucial period of increased vulnerability and heightened potential
➢ Emerges from two sources:
❖ Adolescents' affirmation or repudiation of childhood verifications
❖ Their historical and social contexts which encourage conformity to certain standards
➢ Defined both positively and negatively
➢ Identity Confusion
❖ Includes a divided self-image, an inability to establish intimacy, a sense of time urgency, a lack of concentration on required tasks, and a rejectio n of family or
community standards
❖ Young people must experience doubt and confusion about who they are before they can evolve a stable identity
❖ Too much can lead to pathological adjustment in the form of regression to earlier stages of development
➢ Proper ratio:
❖ Faith in some sort of ideological principle
❖ Ability to freely decide how we should behave
❖ Trust in our peers and adults who give us advice regarding goals and aspirations
❖ Confidence in our choice of an eventual occupation
▪ Fidelity
➢ Faith in one's ideology
➢ Have confidence in their own religious, political, and social ideologies
➢ Must learn to trust others before they can have faith in their own view
➢ Core pathology: Role Repudiation
❖ Blocks one's ability to synthesize various self-images and values into a workable identity
❖ Diffidence - extreme lack of self-trust or self-confidence
❖ Defiance - act of rebelling against authority
o Young Adulthood
▪ About age 19 to 30
▪ Acquire the ability to fuse that identity with the identity of another person while maintaining their sense of individuality
▪ Acquisition of intimacy at the beginning and generativity at the end
▪ Genitality
➢ Expression of one's search for identity and is basically self-striving
➢ Mutual trust and a stable sharing of sexual satisfactions with a loved person
➢ Chief psychosexual accomplishment of young adulthood and exists only in an intimate relationship
▪ Intimacy VS Isolation
➢ Ability to fuse one's identity with that of another person without fear of losing it
➢ Mature intimacy means an ability and willingness to share a mutual trust
❖ Involve sacrifice, compromise, and commitment within a relationship of two equals
➢ Isolation - incapacity to take chances with one's identity by sharing true intimacy
❖ Some degree is essential before one can acquire mature love
▪ Love
➢ Mature devotion that overcomes basic differences between men and women
➢ Also contains some degree of isolation
➢ Means commitment, sexual passion, cooperation, competition, and friendship
➢ Core pathology: exclusivity
o Adulthood
▪ About age 31 to 60
▪ Period when people begin to take their place in society and assume responsibility for whatever society produces
▪ Procreativity
➢ Assume that there is an instinctual drive to perpetuate the species
➢ Includes assuming responsibility for the care of offspring that result from sexual contact (NOT just about genital contact)
➢ Demands more than procreating offspring (includes caring for one's children as well as other people's children)
❖ Includes working productively to transmit culture from one generation to the next
▪ Generativity VS Stagnation
➢ The generation of new beings as well as new products and new ideas
➢ Concerned with establishing ad guiding the next generation
➢ Need to instruct
❖ Unity of ego identities leads to a gradual expansion of interest
❖ One-to-one intimacy is no longer enough
❖ Evolutionary drive to make a contribution to succeeding generations and to ensure the continuity of human society
➢ Antithesis: Self-absorption and stagnation
▪ Care
➢ Widening commitment to take care of the persons, the products, and the ideas one has learned to care for
➢ Natural desire emerging from the conflict between generativity and stagnation
➢ Core pathology: rejectivity
❖ Unwillingness to take care of certain persons and groups
❖ Manifested as self-centeredness, provincialism, or pseudospeciation
o Old Age
▪ About age 60 to end of life
▪ Generalized Sensuality
➢ To take pleasure in a variety of different physical sensations

Theories of Personality Page 18

 ➢ To take pleasure in a variety of different physical sensations
➢ May also include a greater appreciation for the traditional lifestyle of the opposite sex
➢ Dependent on one's ability to hold things together
▪ Integrity VS Despair
➢ A feeling of wholeness and coherence, an ability to hold together one's sense of I -ness despite diminishing physical and intellectual powers
➢ Despair - to be without hope
▪ Wisdom
➢ Informed and detached concern with life itself in the face of death itself
➢ Exhibit an active but dispassionate interest
➢ Draws from and contributes to the traditional knowledge passed from generation to generation
➢ Concerned with ultimate issues
➢ Core pathology: Disdain
❖ A reaction to feeling in an increasing state of being finished, confused, and helpless

Stage Psychosexual Mode Psychosocial Crisis Significant interpersonal relations Basic Strength Core Pathology
Infancy Oral-Sensory Mode Basic Trust VS Basic Mistrust Primary Caregiver Hope Withdrawal
Early Childhood Anal-Urethral Mode Autonomy VS Shame and Doubt Parents Will Compulsion
Play Age Genital-Locomotor Mode Initiative VS Guilt Family Purpose Inhibition
School Age Latency Industry VS Inferiority Neighborhood, School Competence Inertia
Adolescence Puberty Identity VS Identity Confusion Peers Fidelity Role Repudiation
Young Adulthood Genitality Intimacy VS Isolation Sexual Partners, Friends Love Exclusivity
Adulthood Procreativity Generativity VS Stagnation Household Care Rejectivity
Old Age Generalization of Sexual Modes Hope VS Despair All humanity Wisdom Disdain

Theories of Personality Page 19

 Humanistic/Existential Theories
Tuesday, 9 October 2018 4:41 PM

Maslow: Holistic/Dynamic Theory

• Overview
o Assume: whole person is constantly being motivated by one need or another and that people have the potential to grow toward psychological health (self-actualization)
o To attain this: satisfy lower level needs
o Criticized psychoanalysis and behaviorism for their limited views on humanity and their inadequate understanding of psychologically healthy person
▪ Believe that humans have a higher nature than either views suggested
• Maslow’s View of Motivation
o Assumptions:
▪ Holistic Approach to Motivation (WHOLE person is motivated)
▪ Motivation is usually complex (Person's behavior may spring from several separate motives)
▪ People are continually motivated by one need or another
▪ All people everywhere are motivated by the same basic needs (Manner in which people obtain these needs may vary)
▪ Needs can be arranged on a hierarchy
o Hierarchy of Needs
▪ Assume: lower level needs must be satisfied or at least relatively satisfied before higher level needs become motivators
▪ Conative Needs - have a striving or motivational character
▪ Aka basic needs
▪ Can be arranged in a hierarchy with each ascending step representing a higher needs but one less basic to survival
▪ Lower level needs have prepotency over higher level needs
▪ Physiological Needs
▪ Includes water, food, oxygen, maintenance of body temperature, and so on
▪ MOST prepotent
▪ ONLY need that can be completely satisfied or even overly satisfied
▪ Recurring in nature
▪ Safety Needs
▪ Includes physical security, stability, dependency, protection, and freedom from threatening forces
▪ Also includes needs for law, order, and structure
▪ CANNOT be overly satiated
▪ Children are usually more motivated by this need (not successful -> basic anxiety)
▪ Love and Belongingness Needs
▪ Includes desire for friendship, with for a mate and children, and need to belong to a family, club, or neighborhood
▪ Includes some aspects of sex and human contact and the need to give and receive love
▪ People
➢ Have this need adequately satisfied from early years
 When denied love, they do not panic
 Have confidence that they are accepted by those important to them
➢ Have never experienced love and belongingness
 Incapable of giving love
 Will eventually devalue love and take its absence for granted
➢ Have received love and belongingness only in small doses
 Strongly motivated to seek it
▪ Children need love in order to grow psychologically and attempts to satisfy this need is straightforward and direct
▪ Adults' attempts disguised
▪ Esteem Needs
▪ Includes self-respect, confidence, competence, and the knowledge that others hold them in high esteem
▪ Two levels:
➢ Reputation - Perception of the prestige, recognition, or fame a person has achieved in the eyes of others
➢ Self-Esteem - person's own feelings of worth and confidence (based on real competence)
▪ Self-Actualization Needs
▪ Includes self-fulfillment, the realization of all one's potential, and a desire to become creative in the full sense of the world
▪ Become fully human
▪ Express their basic human needs and do not allow them to be suppressed by culture
▪ Become independent form the lower level needs
▪ Once esteem needs are met, they do not always move on to the level of self-actualization
➢ Not embracing the B-values
o Aesthetic Needs
▪ Not universal
▪ Need for beauty and aesthetically pleasing experiences
▪ When not met, may lead to illness
▪ When met, may lead to psychological health
o Cognitive Needs
▪ Desire to know, to solve mysteries, to understand, and to be curious
▪ When blocked, all needs are threatened
▪ When met, may lead to psychological health
o Neurotic Needs
▪ Always leads to pathology and stagnation
▪ Nonproductive
▪ Perpetuate an unhealthy style of life and have no value in striving for self-actualization
▪ Reactive (compensation for unsatisfied basic needs)
o General Discussion of Needs
▪ The more a lower level need is satisfied, the greater the emergence of the next level need
▪ Needs emerge gradually and a person may be simultaneously motivated by needs from two or more levels
▪ Reversed Order of Needs
▪ Usually more apparent than real
▪ Unmotivated Behavior
▪ All behaviors have a cause but some behaviors are not motivated
▪ NOT all determinants are motives
▪ Examples are conditioned reflexes, maturation, or drugs
▪ Motivation is limited to the striving for the satisfaction of some need
▪ Much of expressive behavior is unmotivated

Theories of Personality Page 20

 ▪ Much of expressive behavior is unmotivated
▪ Expressive and Coping Behavior
▪ Expressive Behavior
➢ Often unmotivated
➢ An end in itself and serves no other purpose than to be
➢ Usually unconscious and takes place naturally
➢ NO goal or aims
▪ Coping Behavior
➢ ALWAYS motivated and aimed at satisfying a need
➢ Conscious, effortful, learned, and determined by the external environment
➢ Serves some goal or aim
➢ Always motivated by some deficit need
▪ Deprivation of Needs
▪ Lack of satisfaction of any of the basic needs leads to some kind of pathology
▪ Metapathology - absence of values, the lack of fulfillment, and the loss of meaning in life
▪ Instinctoid Nature of Needs
▪ Needs that are innately determined even though they can be modified by learning
▪ Criterion:
➢ Thwarting these needs produces pathology
➢ Persistent and satisfaction leads to psychological health
➢ Species-specific
➢ Can be molded, inhibited, or altered by environmental influence
▪ Comparison of Higher and Lower Needs
▪ Higher level needs and lower level needs are instinctoid
▪ Differences
➢ Higher level needs are later on the phylogenetic or evolutionary scale
 Appear later during the course of individual development
➢ Higher level needs produce more happiness and more peak experiences
 Satisfaction of higher level needs is more subjectively desirable to those who have experienced both
• Self-Actualization
o Maslow’s Quest for Self-Actualizing Person
▪ Handicaps:
▪ Trying to find a personality syndrome that had never been clearly identified
▪ Many of the people he wanted to study refused to participate in his research
▪ Read biographies of famous people
▪ Why are we not all self-actualizing?
o Criteria for Self-Actualization
▪ Free from psychopathology
▪ Neither neurotic or psychotic nor have the tendency toward psychological disturbances
▪ Progressed through the hierarchy of needs
▪ Embracing of the B-values
▪ Full use and exploitation of talents, capacities, potentialities, and etc.
o Values of Self-Actualizers
▪ B-values - indicators of psychological health and are opposed to deficiency needs
▪ Metamotivation - expressive behavior that is associated with the B-values
▪ 14 values : truth, goodness, beauty, wholeness or the transcendence of dichotomies, aliveness or spontaneity, uniqueness, perfection, completion, justice and order,
simplicity, richness or totality, effortlessness, playfulness or humor, and self-sufficiency or autonomy
▪ When metaneeds are not met -> existential illness
o Characteristics of Self-Actualizing People
▪ ALL humans have the potential for self-actualization
▪ More Efficient Perception Of Reality
▪ Can more easily detect phoniness in others
▪ Can see both positive and negative traits in others
▪ Less afraid and more comfortable with the unknown
▪ Acceptance of Self, Others, and Nature
▪ Accept themselves for who they are
▪ Accept others and have bot compulsive need to instruct, inform, or convert
▪ Accept nature and do not expect perfection
▪ Spontaneity, Simplicity, and Naturalness
▪ Unconventional
▪ No need to erect a complex veneer designed to deceive the world
▪ Unpretentious and not afraid to express their emotions
▪ Problem-Centering
▪ Interest in problems outside themselves
▪ Task-oriented
▪ Can develop a mission in life, a purpose for living that spreads beyond self-aggrandizement
▪ The Need for Privacy
▪ Quality of detachment that allows them to be alone without being lonely
▪ No desperate need to be surrounded by other people
▪ Self-movers
▪ Autonomy
▪ Depend on themselves for growth
▪ Achieved only through satisfactory relations with others
▪ Inner peace and security
▪ Continued Freshness of Appreciation
▪ Appreciate again and again
▪ See with a fresh vision such everyday phenomena
▪ Appreciation of their possessions
▪ The Peak Experience
▪ Quite natural and part of the human makeup
▪ See the whole universe as unified or all in one piece and they see clearly their place in the universe
▪ Feel more humble and more powerful at the same time
▪ Disorientation in time and space, a loss of self-consciousness, an unselfish attitude, and an ability to transcend everyday polarities
▪ Unmotivated, nonstriving, and nonwishing

Theories of Personality Page 21

 ▪ Unmotivated, nonstriving, and nonwishing
▪ Has a lasting effect on one's life
▪ Gemeinschaftsgefuhl
▪ Caring attitude toward other people
▪ Identify with all other people and have a genuine interest in helping others
▪ Retain a feeling of affection for human beings in general
▪ Profound Interpersonal Relations
▪ Deep and profound feelings of individuals
▪ Nurturant feeling toward people in general
▪ Choose healthy people as friends and avoid dependent or infantile people
▪ The Democratic Character Structure
▪ Friendly and considerate with other people
▪ Unaware of superficial differences among people
▪ Desire and ability to learn from anyone
▪ Discrimination between Means and Ends
▪ Clear sense of right and wrong conduct and have little conflict about basic values
▪ Set their sights on ends rather than means
▪ Enjoy doing something for its own sake
▪ Philosophical Sense of Humor
▪ Nonhostile sense of humor
▪ Intrinsic to the situation rather than contrived (spontaneous)
▪ Creativeness
▪ Creative in some sense of the word
▪ Keen perception of truth, beauty, and reality
▪ Resistance to Enculturation
▪ Sense of detachment from their surroundings and are able to transcend a particular culture
▪ Autonomous (follow their own standards of conduct)
▪ Do not waste energy fighting against insignificant customs and regulations of society
▪ More individualized and less homegenized than others
o Love, Sex, and Self-Actualization
▪ Self-actualizing people are capable of both giving and receiving love and are no longer motivated by the kind of deficiency love
▪ B-Love - love for the essence or being of the other
▪ NOT dominated by sex
• Philosophy of Science
o Humanistic, holistic approach that is not value free and that has scientists who care about the people and topics they investigate
o Should place more emphasis on the study of the individual and less on the study of large groups
o Desacralization - type of science that lacks emotion, joy, wonder, awe, and rupture
o Called for scientists to put values, creativity, emotion, and ritual back in to their work
o Resacralize science - instill it with human values, emotion, and ritual
o Taoistic Attitude for psychology - non-interfering, passive and receptive
o Psychologists: be healthy people, able to tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty
o Better to do poorly that which is important
• Measuring of Self-Actualization
o Person Orientation Inventory
▪ 2 scales: Time Competence/Time Incompetence Scale and the Support Scale
▪ Quite resistant to faking
▪ Problems:
▪ Long
▪ Forced-choice items can engender hostility
o Short Index for Self-Actualization
▪ 15 items
o Brief Index of Self-Actualization
▪ 4 factors: Core Self-Actualization, Autonomy, Openness to Experience, and Comfort with Solitude
• The Jonah Complex
o Fear of being one's best
o Attempts to run away from one's destiny (like Jonah in the Bible)
o Represents a fear of success, a fear of being one's best, and a feeling of awesomeness in the presence of beauty and perfection
o Why run away?
▪ Human body is not strong enough to endure the ecstasy of fulfillment for any length of time
▪ Appalled by their own arrogance (who am I to think I can do all these things?)
• Psychotherapy
o Aim: Embrace the Being-values
o Must be free from their dependency on others so that their natural impulse toward growth and self-actualization could become active
o Follow from the client's position on the hierarchy of needs
o Largely an interpersonal process
▪ Healthy interpersonal relationship between the client and the therapist

Rogers: Person-Centered Theory

• Overview
o Built his theory on the scaffold provided by experiences as a therapist
o Advocated a balance between tender-minded and hardheaded studies
o Did not feel comfortable with the notion of a theory
• Person-Centered Theory
o Client-centered - Rogers' therapy
o Person-centered - Rogers' personality theory
o Basic Assumptions
▪ Formative Tendency
▪ There is a tendency for all matter, both organic and inorganic, to evolve from simpler to more complex form
▪ A creative process is in operation
▪ Actualizing Tendency
▪ Tendency within all humans to move toward completion or fulfillment of potentials
▪ ONLY motive people possess
▪ Actualization involves the whole person
▪ Maintenance

Theories of Personality Page 22

 ▪ Maintenance
➢ Includes basic needs and also the tendency to resist change and to seek the status quo
➢ Expressed in people's desire to protect their current, comfortable self-concept
▪ Enhancement
➢ Willing to learn and to change
➢ Need to become more, to develop, and to achieve growth
➢ Expressed in a variety of forms
▪ NOT limited to humans
▪ Realized only under certain conditions
➢ Involved in a relationship with a person who is congruent, or authentic, and who demonstrates empathy and unconditional positive regard
➢ Does permit them to actualize their innate tendency to move toward self-fulfillment
➢ BOTH NECESSARY AND SUFFICIENT conditions
➢ Only humans have a concept of self and have the potential for self-actualization
o The Self and Self-Actualization
▪ Begins when a portion of their experience becomes personalized and differentiated in awareness as I or me experiences
▪ Begin to evaluate experiences as positive or negative (criterion: actualizing tendency)
▪ Tendency to actualize the self begins to evolve
▪ Self-actualization - subset of the actualization tendency
▪ Actualization tendency - organismic experiences of the individual (refers to the whole person)
▪ Self-actualization - tendency to actualize the self as perceive in awareness
▪ The Self-Concept
▪ All those aspects of one's being and one's experiences that are perceived in awareness by the individual
▪ NOT IDENTICAL with the organismic self
▪ Once people form their self-concept, they find change and significant learning quite difficult (denied or accepted only in distorted form)
▪ The Ideal Self
▪ One's view of self as one wishes to be
▪ Contains all those attributes that people aspire to possess
▪ Incongruence - wide gap between the ideal self and the self-concept
o Awareness
▪ Without awareness the self-concept and the ideal self would not exist
▪ The symbolic representation of some portion of our experience
▪ Levels of Awareness
▪ Experienced below the threshold and are either ignored or denied
▪ Accurately symbolized and freely admitted to the self-structure
➢ Both nonthreatening and consistent with the existing self-concept
▪ Perceived in a distorted form
➢ Experience is not consistent with our view of self
▪ Denial of Positive Experience
▪ Many people have difficulty accepting genuine compliments and positive feedback
▪ Compliments seldom have a positive influence on the self-concept of the recipient
➢ Also implies the right of that person to criticize or condemn
o Becoming a Person
▪ Make contact with another person
▪ Develop positive regard (a need to be loved, liked, or accepted by another person)
▪ Develop positive self-regard (experience of prizing or valuing one's self)
▪ Once positive self-regard is established, it becomes independent of the continual need to be loved
o Barriers to Psychological Health
▪ Conditions of Worth
▪ Love and accept them only if they meet people's expectations and approval
▪ Arises when the positive regard of a significant other is conditions, when the individual feels that in some respect he/she is prized and in others not
▪ Become the criterion by which we accept or reject our experiences
➢ Gradual assimilation into our self-structure
➢ Eventually we begin to evaluate experiences on this basis
▪ Learn to disregard our own organismic valuations and to look beyond ourselves for direction and guidance
▪ Degree of introjecting the value of others, we tend to be incongruent
▪ External evaluations - perceptions of other people's view of us
➢ Do not foster psychological health
➢ Prevent us from being completely open to our own experiences
▪ Incongruence
▪ Begins when we fail to recognize our organismic experiences as self-experiences
➢ Do not accurately symbolize organismic experiences into awareness because they appear to be inconsistent with our self-concept
▪ Source of psychological disorders
▪ Vulnerability
➢ Greater incongruence = greater vulnerability
➢ Unaware of the discrepancy between their organismic self and their significant experience
➢ Often behave in ways that are incomprehensible
▪ Anxiety and Threat
➢ Experienced as we gain awareness of incongruence
➢ Dim awareness that the discrepancy may become conscious -> anxious -> more aware of incongruence -> threat
 Anxiety - state of uneasiness or tension whose cause is unknown
 Threat - awareness that our self is no longer whole or congruent
➢ Can represent steps toward psychological health
▪ Defensiveness
▪ Protection of the self-concept against anxiety and threat by the denial and distortion of experiences inconsistent with it
▪ Distortion - misinterpret an experience in order to fit it into some aspect of our self-concept
▪ Denial - refuse to perceive an experience in awareness, or at least we keep some aspect of it from reaching symbolization
▪ Keeps our perception of our organismic experiences consistent with our self-concept
▪ Disorganization
▪ When defenses fail -> behavior becomes disorganized or psychotic
▪ Experience is too obvious or occurs too suddenly ->behavior becomes disorganized
▪ Can sometimes behave consistent with their organismic experience or with their shattered self-concept
• Psychotherapy
o For psychological growth to occur, a person must come into contact with a therapist who is congruent and whom they perceive as providing an atmosphere of
unconditional acceptance and accurate empathy

Theories of Personality Page 23

 unconditional acceptance and accurate empathy
o Conditions
▪ Come into contact with a congruent therapist who also possesses empathy and unconditional positive regard -> client must perceive these characteristics in the
therapist -> contact must be of some duration
▪ Insistence that the conditions are BOTH necessary and sufficient
▪ Counselor Congruence
▪ Exists when a person's organismic experiences are matched by an awareness of them and by an ability and willingness to express these feelings
▪ Means to be real or genuine, to be what one truly is
▪ A complete human being
➢ Not static
➢ Not afraid to feel and express different emotions
▪ Involves: feelings, awareness, and expressions
▪ Incongruence can:
➢ Breakdown between feelings and awareness
➢ Discrepancy between awareness of an experience and the ability or willingness to express it to another
▪ More effective: if they communicate genuine feelings
▪ Different degrees of congruence exist
▪ Unconditional Positive Regard
▪ Need to be liked, prized, or accepted by another person exists without any conditions or qualifications
▪ Experiencing a warm, positive and accepting attitude toward what is the client
▪ NO: possessiveness, evaluations, and reservations
➢ Non-possessiveness: care about another without smothering or owning that person
➢ No restrictions or reservations
▪ Remains constant and unwavering
▪ Regard - close relationship and that the therapist sees the client as an important person
▪ Positive - direction of the relationship is toward warm and caring feelings
▪ Unconditional - positive regard is no longer dependent on specific client behavior and does not have to be continually earned
▪ Empathic Listening
▪ Therapists accurately sense the feelings of their clients and are able to communicate these perceptions
▪ Empathy - means temporarily living in the other's life, moving about in it delicately without making judgments
▪ Check the accuracy of their sensing by trying them out on the client
▪ Facilitates personal growth within the client
➢ Enables clients to listen to themselves and become their own therapists
▪ Empathy is NOT equal to sympathy
o Process
▪ Stages of Therapeutic Change
▪ Stage 1
➢ Unwillingness to communicate anything about oneself
➢ Extremely rigid and resistant to change
➢ Do not recognize any problems and refuse to own any personal feelings or emotions
▪ Stage 2
➢ Slightly less rigid
➢ Discuss external events and other people but still disown or fail to recognize their own feelings
➢ Talk about personal feelings as objective phenomena
▪ Stage 3
➢ More freely talk about the self, although still as an object
➢ Talk about feelings and emotions in the past or the future (NOT their present feelings)
➢ Refuse to accept their emotions and responsibility for their decisions
▪ Stage 4
➢ Talk about deep feelings but not ones presently felt
➢ Begin to question values that have been introjected from others
➢ Start to see the incongruence between their perceived self and their organismic experiences
➢ Accept more freedom and responsibility
➢ Tentatively allow themselves to be involved in a relationship with the client
▪ Stage 5
➢ Undergo significant change and growth
➢ Can express their feelings in the present although they have not accurately symbolized these
➢ Beginning to rely more on an internal locus of evaluation
➢ Greater differentiation of feelings and develop nuances among them
➢ Begin to make their own decisions and to accept responsibility for their choices
▪ Stage 6
➢ Dramatic growth and an irreversible movement toward becoming fully functioning or self-actualizing
➢ Freely allow into awareness those experiences that they had previously denied or distorted
➢ More congruent and able to match their present experiences with awareness and with open expression
➢ Rely on the organismic self as the criterion for evaluating experiences
➢ Physiological loosening
➢ Begin to develop Unconditional Positive Self-Regard
➢ SIGNALS THE END TO THERAPY
▪ Stage 7
➢ Become fully functioning "Persons of Tomorrow"
➢ Generalize their in-therapy experience to their world beyond therapy
➢ Organismic self becomes the locus for evaluating experiences
➢ Become congruent, possess unconditional positive self-regard, and are able to be loving and empathic toward others
▪ Theoretical Explanation
▪ Experience being prized and unconditionally accepted -> realize that they are loveable -> prize themselves and accurately understand themselves -> perceived
self becomes more congruent with their organismic experience -> acquire the same therapeutic characteristics -> being their own therapist
o Outcomes
▪ Less defensive and more open to experience -> clearer picture of themselves and a more realistic view of the world -> more accurate view of their potentials ->
narrowed gap between self-ideal and the real-self -> experience less physical and psychological tension (less vulnerable to threat and less anxious) -> take ownership
of their experiences -> more accepting of others -> more congruent in relationships with others
• The Person of Tomorrow
o More adaptable
o Open to their experiences, accurately symbolizing them in awareness
▪ Trust in their organismic selves

Theories of Personality Page 24

 ▪ Trust in their organismic selves
o Tendency to live fully in the moment
▪ Existential living - tendency to live in the moment
o Remain confident of their own ability to experience harmonious relations with others
o More integrated, more whole, with no artificial boundary between conscious and unconscious processes
o Basic trust of human nature
o Enjoy a greater richness in life
• Philosophy of Science
o Science begins and ends with the subjective experience
o Scientists:
▪ Must have many characteristics of the person of tomorrow
▪ Should be completely involved in the phenomena being studied
o Begins when an intuitive scientist starts to perceive patterns among phenomena
▪ Leads to formulate testable hypothesis -> methodology (rigorously controlled, empirical, and objective) -> communicate findings (subjective)

May: Existential Psychology

• Overview
o Rooted in philosophy
o Saw people as living in the world of present experiences and ultimately responsible for who they become
o People lack the courage to face their destiny, and in the process of fleeing from it, they give up much of their freedom
o Healthy people: challenge their destiny, cherish their freedom, and live authentically with other people and with themselves
o Recognize the inevitability of death and have the courage to live life in the present
• Background of Existentialism
o Kierkegaard
▪ Concerned with the increasing trend in postindustrial societies toward the dehumanization of people
▪ Concerned with BOTH the experiencing person and the person's experience
▪ Balance between freedom and responsibility
▪ Acquisition of freedom and responsibility is at the expense of anxiety
o What is Existentialism?
▪ Existence over Essence
▪ Existence - to emerge or to become
▪ Essence - a static immutable substance
▪ People's essence is their power to continually redefine themselves through the choices they make
▪ Opposes the split between subject and object
▪ People are both subjective and objective and must search for the truth by living active and authentic lives
▪ People search for some meaning to their lives
▪ Ultimately each of us is responsible for who we are and who we become
▪ We are each alone
▪ It is our choice
▪ Antitheoretical
▪ Theories further dehumanize people and render them objects
▪ Authentic experience takes precedence over artificial explanations
o Basic Concepts
▪ Being-in-the-World
▪ Adopt a phenomenological approach (we exist in a world that can be best understood from our own perspective)
▪ Dasein - to exist in the world (AKA being-in-the-world)
▪ Many people suffer from anxiety and despair brought on by their alienation from themselves or from their world
▪ As people strive to gain power over nature, they lost touch with their relationship to the natural world
▪ Alienation is the illness of our time
➢ Separation from nature
➢ Lack of meaningful interpersonal relations
➢ Alienation from one's authentic self
▪ Modes:
➢ Umwelt - world of objects and things and would exist even if people had no awareness
 World of nature and natural law (includes biological drives)
 Cannot escape umwelt, just learn to live with it
➢ Mitwelt - world of people
 Must relate to people as people
➢ Eigenwelt - one's relationship with oneself
 To be aware of oneself as a human being and to grasp who we are as we relate to the world of things and world of people
▪ Healthy people: live in all three modes simultaneously
▪ Nonbeing
▪ Dread of not being
▪ Life is more vital when we confront the possibility of death
▪ We nevertheless will experience nonbeing in other forms
▪ Provokes us to live defensively and to receive less from life
➢ We are afraid of nonbeing and so we shrivel up our being
➢ We escape the dread of nonbeing at the expense of a constricted existence
▪ Better alternative: face the inevitability of death and to realize that nonbeing is an inseparable part of being
• Anxiety
o Arises when people are faced with the problems of fulfilling their potentialities
o Much of human behavior is motivated by an underlying sense of dread and anxiety
o Failure to confront death serves as a temporary escape from the anxiety or dread of nonbeing
o Experience anxiety when they become aware that their existence or some value identified with it might be destroyed
o Subjective state of the individual's becoming aware that their existence can be destroyed, that the can become nothing
o Can spring either from an awareness of one's nonbeing or a threat to some value essential to one's existence
o Acquisition of freedom inevitably leads to anxiety
▪ Freedom cannot exist without anxiety (and vice versa)
o Normal Anxiety
▪ Which is proportionate to the threat, does not involve repression, and can be confronted constructively on the conscious level
▪ As people change, they experience normal anxiety
o Neurotic Anxiety
A reaction which is disproportionate to the threat, involves repression and other forms of intrapsychic conflict, and is managed by various kinds of blocking-off of

Theories of Personality Page 25

 o
▪ A reaction which is disproportionate to the threat, involves repression and other forms of intrapsychic conflict, and is managed by various kinds of blocking-off of
activity and awareness
▪ Experiences whenever values become transformed into dogma
• Guilt
o Arises when people deny their potentialities, fail to accurately perceive the needs of fellow humans, or remain oblivious to their dependence on the natural world
o BOTH anxiety and guilt are ontological (refer to the nature of being and NOT to feelings arising from specific situations or transgressions)
o 3 forms:
▪ Umwelt - arise from a lack of awareness of one's being-in-the-world
▪ Undiscerning reliance on others
▪ Aka separation guilt (Similar to Fromm's Human Dilemma)
▪ Mitwelt - inability to perceive accurately the world of others
▪ We can only see people through our own eyes and can never perfectly judge the needs of these people
▪ Eigenwelt - denial of our own potentialities or with our failure to fulfill them
▪ Grounded in our relationship with self (similar to Maslow's Jonah Complex)
o Can have positive or negative effect on personality
o Refusal to accept guilt leads to it becoming neurotic or morbid
• Intentionality
o Structure that gives meaning to experience and allows people to make decisions about the future
o No intentionality = no choice
o Action implies intentionality (and vice versa)
o Bridge between subject and object
o Sometimes unconscious
• Care, Love, and Will
o Care
▪ Means to recognize that person as a fellow human being, to identify with that person's pain or joy, guilt or pity
▪ Active process (it DOES matter)
▪ Source of love and will
o Love
▪ To care, to recognize the essential humanity of the other person, to have an active regard for that person's development
▪ Delight in the presence of the other person and affirming of their value and development as much as one's own
o Will
▪ The capacity to organize one's self so that movement in a certain direction or toward a certain goal may take place
▪ NOT WISH
o Union of Love and Will
▪ Modern society is suffering from an unhealthy division of love and will
▪ Love has become associated to sensual love or sex
▪ Will has come to mean a dogged determination or will power
▪ As will develops, it manifests itself as opposition, the first no (positive assertion of self)
▪ Parents see it negatively so they stifle the child's self-assertion (dissociate will from love)
▪ Task: Unite Will and Love
o Forms of Love
▪ Sex
▪ Biological function that can be satisfied through sexual intercourse or some other release of sexual tension
▪ Sex has become a problem
▪ Eros
▪ Psychological desire that seeks procreation or creation through an enduring union with a love one
▪ Wish to establish a lasting union
▪ Built on care and tenderness
▪ Philia
▪ Eros is built on the foundation of philia
▪ Intimate nonsexual friendship between two people
▪ Cannot be rushed
▪ Agape
▪ Philia needs agape
▪ Esteem for the other, a concern for the other's welfare beyond any gain that one can get out of it
▪ Altruistic love
▪ Undeserved and unconditional
• Freedom and Destiny
o Assert freedom and confront destiny
o Freedom Defined
▪ Comes from an understanding of destiny
▪ Possibility of changing
▪ Entails being able to harbor different possibilities in one's mind even though it is not clear at the moment which way one must act
o Forms of Freedom
▪ Existential Freedom
▪ Freedom of doing (freedom of action)
▪ Freedom to act on the choices that one makes
▪ Essential Freedom
▪ Freedom of being
▪ Existential freedom makes essential freedom more difficult
o What is Destiny?
▪ The design of the universe speaking through the design of each one of us
▪ Our destination, our terminus, our goal
▪ Within the boundaries of destiny, we have the power to choose, and this power allows us to confront and challenge our destiny
▪ We cannot erase our destiny but we can choose how to respond to it
o Freedom and Destiny are intertwined
▪ Give birth to each other
• The Power of Myth
o Urgent need for myths
o Conscious and unconscious belief systems that provide explanation for personal and social problems
o Stories that unify a society
o People communicate through:
▪ Rationalistic Language
▪ Myths

Theories of Personality Page 26

 ▪ Myths
o Comparable to Jung's concept of collective unconscious (myths are archetypal patterns in human experience)
• Psychopathology
o Apathy and emptiness are malaise of modern times
o Most people feel alienated from the world, from others, and especially from themselves
o Sense of insignificance -> apathy and state of diminished consciousness
o Lack of communication (inability to know others and to share oneself with them)
o Psychologically disturbed individuals:
▪ Deny their destiny -> lose their freedom
▪ Erect neurotic symptoms to renounce freedom
▪ Symptoms narrow the person's world
▪ Represent a proper and necessary adjustment by which one's Dasein can be preserved
• Psychotherapy
o Should make people more human
o Help them expand their consciousness so that they will be in a better position to make choices (lead to simultaneous growth of freedom and responsibility)
o Purpose: Set people free
o Must be concerned with helping people experience their existence
o Therapist should:
▪ Offer their own humanity
▪ Establish a one-to-one relationship that enables patients to become more aware of themselves and to live more fully in their world
▪ I-thou relationship
▪ Both viewed as subjects
▪ Has empathy for the patient's experience and is open to the patient's subjective world
▪ Confronting and challenge the patient

Henry Murray: Personology

• Overview
o Two distinct features:
▪ Sophisticated approach to human needs
▪ Data source on which he based his theory
• Principles of Personology
o Personality is rooted in the brain
▪ Cerebral physiology guides and governs every aspect of the personality
▪ Everything on which personality depends exists in the brain
o Idea of tension reduction
▪ Process of acting to reduce tension is satisfying
▪ Tension-free existence is a source of distress
▪ We generate tension to have the satisfaction of reducing it
o Individual's personality continues to develop over time and is constructed of all the events that occur during the course of that person's life
o Personality changes and progresses
o An individual human being is like no other person, like some other person, and like every other person
• Divisions of Personality
o Id
▪ Repository of all innate impulsive tendencies
▪ Provides energy and direction to behavior and is concerned with motivation
▪ Includes acceptable and desirable impulses
▪ Strength various among individuals
o Superego
▪ Internalization of the culture's values and norms, by which rules we come to evaluate and judge our behavior and that of others
▪ Imposed on children at an early age by parents and authority figures
▪ Also shaped by peer group, culture's literature and mythology
▪ Continues to develop throughout life
▪ NOT IN CONSTANT CONFLICT WITH ID (id also has good forces)
▪ Ego-ideal - provides us with long-range goals for which to strive
▪ Develops simultaneously with the superego
▪ What we could become at our best
▪ Sum of ambitions and aspirations
o Ego
▪ Rational governor of personality
▪ Central organizer of behavior
▪ Consciously reasons, decides, and will the direction of behavior
▪ Arbiter between id and superego (integrate the two)
• Needs: The Motivators of Behavior
o Involves physiochemical force in the brain that organizes and directs intellectual and perceptual abilities
o Can arise from internal processes or from events in the environment
o Arouse a level of tension -> organism tried to reduce this tension by satisfying this need (Needs energize and direct behavior)
o Types of Needs
▪ Primary VS Secondary Needs
▪ Primary - arise from internal bodily states and includes those needed for survival
▪ Secondary - arise indirectly from primary needs
➢ Develop after primary needs
➢ Concerned with emotional satisfaction
▪ Reactive VS Proactive Needs
▪ Reactive - involve a response to something specific to the environment and are aroused only when that object appears
▪ Proactive - do not depend on the presence of a particular object
➢ Spontaneous needs that elicit appropriate behavior whenever they are aroused
o Characteristics of Needs
▪ Differ in terms of the urgency with which they impel behavior (NEED PREPOTENCY)
▪ Fusion of needs - needs that are complementary and can be satisfied by one behavior or a set of behaviors
▪ Subsidiation - a situation in which one need is activated to aid in satisfying another need
▪ Press - the influence of the environment and past events on the current activation of a need
▪ Thema - a combination of press and need that brings order to our behavior
▪ Formed through early childhood experiences

Theories of Personality Page 27

 ▪ Formed through early childhood experiences
▪ Becomes a powerful force in determining personality
▪ Largely unconscious
▪ Gives coherence, unity, order, and uniqueness to our behavior
• Personality Development in Childhood
o Complexes
▪ A normal pattern of childhood development that influences that adult personality
▪ Everyone experiences these 5 complexes
▪ Abnormal: manifested in the extreme
o Stages of Development
▪ Claustral Stage
▪ Fetus in the womb is secure, serene, and dependent
▪ Simple Claustral Complex - desire to be in small, warm, dark places that are safe and secluded
▪ Insupport Claustral Complex - feelings of insecurity and helplessness that cause the person to fear open spaces, falling, drowning, fires, earthquakes, or simply
any situation involving novelty and change
▪ Anti-Claustral Complex - need to escape from restraining womblike conditions
▪ Oral Stage
▪ Oral Succorance Complex - combination of mouth activities, passive tendencies, and the need to be supported and protected
▪ Oral Aggression Complex - oral and aggressive behaviors
▪ Oral Rejection Complex - vomiting, being picky with food, eating little, fearing oral contamination, desiring seclusion, and avoiding dependence on others
▪ Anal Stage
▪ Anal Rejection Complex - preoccupation with defecation, anal humor, and feces-like material
▪ Anal Retention Complex - accumulating, saving, and collecting things, and in cleanliness, neatness, and orderliness
▪ Urethral Stage
▪ Urethral Complex - excessive ambition, a distorted sense of self-esteem, exhibitionism, bedwetting, sexual cravings, and self-love
➢ AKA Icarus Complex
▪ Genital/Castration Stage
▪ Castration Complex
• Questions about Human Nature
o Goal: Satisfaction derived from acting to reduce the tension
o Personality is determined by our needs and by the environment
▪ Each person is unique but similarities also exist
o Shaped by our inherited attributes and by our environment
o Optimistic view on human nature
• Assessment in Murray's Theory
o OSS Assessment Program
▪ For employee selection
o Thematic Apperception Test
▪ A set of ambiguous pictures depicting simple scenes
▪ Asked to compose a story that describes the people and objects in the picture
▪ Derived from Freud's projection

Theories of Personality Page 28

 Dispositional Theories
Tuesday, 9 October 2018 4:42 PM

Allport: Psychology of the Individual

• Overview
o Emphasized the uniqueness of the individual
o Objected to trait and factor theories
o Willingness to study in depth a single individual (morphogenic science)
▪ VS Nomothetic methods -gather data on groups of people
o Advocated an eclectic approach
o A broad, comprehensive theory is preferable to a narrow, specific theory
o Argued against particularism
o No theory is completely comprehensive, and psychologists should always realize that much of human nature is not included in any single theory
• Approach to Personality Theory
o What is Personality?
▪ Dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine his characteristic behavior and thought
➢ Dynamic organization - integration or interrelatedness of the various aspects of personality (Personality is organized and patterned)
➢ Dynamic - always subject to change
➢ Determine - personality is something and does something
➢ Characteristic - individual or unique
❖ All persons stamp their unique mark or engraving on their personality, and their characteristic behavior and thought set them apart from all other
people
▪ Human beings are both product and process
▪ Pattern coexists with growth
▪ Both physical and psychological
o What is the Role of Conscious Motivation?
▪ Importance of conscious motivation
▪ Healthy adults are generally aware of what they are doing and their reasons for doing so
▪ Inclined to accept self-reports at face value
▪ Did not ignore the existence or the importance of unconscious processes
o What are the Characteristics of a Healthy Person?
▪ Mature Personality
➢ Proactive behavior
➢ More likely than disturbed one to be motivated by conscious processes
➢ Have experience a relatively trauma-free childhood
▪ Requirements
➢ Extension of the sense of self
➢ Warm relating of self to others
➢ Emotional Security or self-acceptance
➢ Realistic perception of their environment
➢ Insight and humor
➢ Unifying philosophy of life
• Structure of Personality
o Basic units or building block
o Personal Dispositions
▪ Common Traits - general characteristics held in common by many people
➢ Can be inferred from factor analytic studies or by various personality inventories
➢ Provide the means by which people within a given culture can be compared to one another
▪ Personal dispositions - a generalized neuropsychic structure (peculiar to the individual), with the capacity to render many stimuli functionally equivalent, and to
initiate and guide consistent forms of adaptive and stylistic behavior
➢ Permits the study on a single individual
▪ Levels of Personal Disposition
➢ Continuum from those that are most central to those that are of only peripheral importance to a person
➢ Cardinal Dispositions
❖ An eminent characteristic or ruling passion so outstanding that it dominates their lives
❖ Obvious and cannot be hidden
❖ Every action in a person's life revolves around this one cardinal disposition
❖ Most people do not have one but those who have are often known for it
➢ Central Dispositions
❖ Those that would be listed in an accurate letter of recommendation written by someone who knew the person quite well
❖ People usually have several
❖ 5 to 10 central dispositions that friends and close acquaintances would agree are descriptive of that person
➢ Secondary Dispositions
❖ Less conspicuous but greater in number
❖ Not central to personality yet occur with some regularity and are responsible for much of one's specific behavior
▪ Motivational and Stylistic Dispositions
➢ ALL personal dispositions are dynamic such that they have motivational power
➢ Motivational Dispositions - intensely experienced dispositions
❖ Receive their motivation from basic needs and drives
❖ Initiate action
➢ Stylistic Dispositions - personal dispositions that are less intensely experienced
❖ Guide action
➢ Similar to Maslow's Expressive and Coping Behavior (NO DISTINCT DIVISION between the two )
o Proprium
▪ Behavior and characteristics that people regard as warm, central, and important to their lives
▪ Not the whole personality
▪ Nonpropriate behaviors:
➢ Basic drives and needs that are ordinarily met and satisfied without much difficulty
➢ Tribal customs
➢ Habitual behaviors
▪ Includes those aspects of life that a person regards as important to a sense of self-identity and self-enhancement

Theories of Personality Page 29

 ▪ Includes those aspects of life that a person regards as important to a sense of self-identity and self-enhancement
▪ Includes values, part of conscience that is personal and consistent with one's adult belief
• Motivation
o Most people are motivated by present drives and are aware of what they are doing and have some understanding of why they are doing it
o Peripheral Motives - reduce a need
o Propriate Strivings - seek to maintain tension and disequilibrium
o A Theory of Motivation
▪ Useful theory assume that people not only react to their environment BUT also shape their environment and cause it to react to them
▪ Personality is a growing system, allowing new elements to constantly enter into and change the person
▪ Must allow for proactive behavior
▪ Must view people as consciously acting on their environment in a manner that permits growth toward psychological health
▪ Criterion
➢ Will acknowledge the contemporaneity of motives
➢ Pluralistic theory-allows motives of many types
➢ It will ascribe dynamic force to cognitive processes
➢ Allow for the concrete uniqueness of motives
o Functional Autonomy
▪ Explanation for the myriad of human motives
▪ Represents a theory of changing
▪ Some, but not all, human motives are functionally independent from the original motive responsible for the behavior
▪ Commonsense belief that people who hold that they do things simply because they like to do them
▪ Adult motives are built primarily on conscious, self-sustaining, contemporary system
▪ What begins as one motive may grow into a new one that is historically continuous with the original but functionally autonomous from it
▪ PerseveratIve Functional Autonomy
➢ Based on simple neurological principles
➢ Found in animals as well
➢ Examples: Addiction, Uncompleted tasks
▪ Propriate Functional Autonomy
➢ Master system of motivation that confers unity on personality
➢ Self-sustaining motives that are related to proprium
▪ Criterion for Functional Autonomy
➢ Extent that it seeks new goals (aka the behavior will continue even as the motivation for it changes)
▪ Processes that are not Functionally Autonomous
➢ Biological Drives
➢ Motives directly linked to the reduction of basic drives
➢ Reflex actions
➢ Constitutional Equipment
➢ Habits in the process of being formed
➢ Patterns of behavior that require primary reinforcement
➢ Sublimations that can tied to childhood sexual desires
➢ Some neurotic or pathological symptoms
• The Study of the Individual
o Morphogenic Science
▪ Nomothetic - seeks general laws
▪ Idiographic - that which is peculiar to a single case
▪ Morphogenic - patterned properties of the whole organism and allows for intraperson comparisons

McCrae and Costa’s Five Factor Trait Theory

• Overview of Trait and Factor Theories
o How can personality best be measured?
o How many traits or personal dispositions does a single person have?
o Factor Analytic Approach
o 5 traits continue to emerge from factor analytic techniques
• Raymond Cattell
o Used an inductive method of gathering data
▪ Began with no preconceived bias concerning the number of traits or types
o Used 3 different media of observation to examine people from as many angles as possible
▪ L data - person's life data derived from observations made by other people
▪ Q data - self-reports from questionnaires and other techniques designed to allow people to make subjective descriptions of themselves
▪ T data - objective tests which measure performance
o Divided traits into common traits and unique traits
▪ Also source traits from surface traits
▪ Classified into: temperament (how a person behaves), motivation (why one behaves), and ability (how far or how fast one can perform)
o Yielded 35 primary traits (23-normal, 12-pathological)
• Basics of Factor Analysis
o Make specific observations of many individuals -> quantify observations -> determine which of these variables are related to which other variables and to what extent
(correlation coefficient) -> factor analysis -> determine the extent to which each individual score contributes to various factors
o Either Unipolar (from zero to a large amount) or Bipolar (extend from one pole to an opposite pole)
o Orthogonal Rotation - at right angles to each other
o Oblique Method - angle less than or more than 90
• The Big Five: Taxonomy or Theory?
o Model -> Theory
• In Search of the Big Five
o Using factor analytic technique to examine the stability and structure of personality
o Five Factors Found
▪ NEO-PI
o Description of the Five Factors
▪ Personality traits are bipolar and follow a bell-shaped distribution
▪ Neuroticism and extraversion are the two strongest
▪ Openness to Experience - distinguishes people who prefer variety from those who have a need for closure and who gain comfort in their association with familiar
people and things
▪ Agreeableness - distinguishes soft-hearted people from ruthless ones

Theories of Personality Page 30

 ▪ Agreeableness - distinguishes soft-hearted people from ruthless ones
▪ Conscientiousness
• Evolution of the Five-Factor Theory
o A new modern theory should be able to incorporate the change and growth of the field as well as be grounded in the current empirical principles
o Units of the Five-Factor Theory
▪ Core Components
➢ Basic Tendencies
❖ Universal raw material of personality capacities and dispositions that are generally inferred rather than observed
❖ May be inherited, imprinted by early experience or modified by disease or psychological intervention
❖ Define the individual's potential and direction
❖ Basis in biology and their stability over time and situation
❖ HOW quickly we learn
➢ Characteristic Adaptations
❖ Acquired personality structures that develop as people adapt to their environment
❖ Flexible
❖ Can be influenced by external influences
❖ All acquired and specific skills
❖ WHAT we learn
❖ Directly influence dispositions and tendencies
❖ Differ from culture to culture
➢ Self-Concept
❖ Consists of knowledge, views, and evaluations of the self
❖ Includes personal myths
▪ Peripheral Components
➢ Biological Bases
❖ Genes, hormones, and brain structures
❖ Single causal influence on personality traits
❖ Eliminates any role that the environment may play in the formation of basic tendencies (NO DIRECT ROLE)
➢ Objective Biography
❖ Everything the person does, thinks, or feels across the whole lifespan
❖ What has happened in people's live rather than their view or perception of their experience
❖ Every behavior or response becomes part of the cumulative record
➢ External Influences
❖ How we respond to the opportunities and demands of the context
❖ Function of: characteristics adaptations and their interaction with external influences
o Basic Postulates
▪ For Basic Tendencies
➢ Individuality - adults have a unique set of traits and that each person exhibits a unique combination of trait patterns
➢ Origin - All personality traits are the result solely of endogenous (internal) forces
➢ Development - Traits develop and change through childhood, but in adolescence their development slows, and by early to mid-adulthood, change in
personality nearly stops altogether
➢ Structure - Traits are organized hierarchically from narrow to specific to broad and general
▪ For Characteristic Adaptations
➢ Over time, people adapt to their environment by acquiring patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that are consistent with their personality traits and
earlier adaptations
➢ Maladjustment - our responses are not always consistent with personal goals or cultural values
➢ Plasticity - Basic traits may change over time in response to biological maturation, changes in the environment, or deliberate interventions

Theories of Personality Page 31

 Biological/Evolutionary Theories
Tuesday, 9 October 2018 4:42 PM

Eysenck’s Biologically Based Factor Theory

• Overview
o Derived three dimensions of personality
o Individual differences in people's personalities were biological, and not merely psychological aspects of personality
o Differences in biology -> differences along the 3 factors
o Evidence for biological basis
▪ Temperament
➢ Biologically based tendency to behave in particular ways from very early in life
▪ Behavioral Genetics
➢ Scientific study of the role of heredity in behavior
➢ Use: twin-adoption studies and gene-by-environment studies
▪ Brain Imaging Techniques
➢ EEG and fMRI
• Eysenck’s Factor Theory
o Strong psychometric and biological components
o Criteria for Identifying Factors
▪ Psychometric Evidence for the factor's existence must be established
➢ Corollary: factor must be reliable and replicable
▪ Possess heritability and must fit an established genetic model
▪ Make sense from a theoretical point of view
➢ Deductive method
▪ Possess social relevance
➢ Have a relationship with socially relevant variables
o Hierarchy of Behavior Organization
▪ Four-level hierarchy
▪ Specific Acts or Cognitions
➢ Individual thoughts or behaviors that may or may not be characteristic of a person
▪ Habitual Acts or Cognition
➢ Responses that recur under similar conditions (reliable or consistent)
▪ Traits - important semi-permanent personality dispositions
➢ Several related habitual responses
▪ Types or superfactors - made up of several interrelated traits
• Dimensions of Personality
o All three factors as part of normal personality structure
o All are bipolar
o Each factor is unimodally distributed
o Extraversion
▪ Characterized primarily by sociability and impulsiveness
▪ Primary cause is cortical arousal level
➢ Extravert: lower level of cortical arousal -> higher sensory thresholds -> lesser reaction to sensory stimulation
➢ Introvert: higher level of cortical arousal -> lower sensory thresholds -> Greater reaction to sensory stimulation
o Neuroticism
▪ Strong hereditary component
▪ Diathesis-stress model of psychiatric illness (higher neuroticism = less stress needed)
o Psychoticism
▪ High = high predisposition to succumb to stress and develop a psychotic illness
• Measuring Personality
o Maudsley Personality Inventory - E and N (has correlation)
o Eysenck Personality Inventory - E and N (independent), has a Lie scale to detect faking
o Eysenck Personality Questionnaire - E, N, and P
o Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised
• Biological Bases of Personality
o All have powerful biological determinants
o Evidence
▪ Found identical factors among people in various parts of the world
▪ Individuals tend to maintain their position over time on the different dimensions of personality
▪ Studies of twins show a higher concordance between identical twins than between same -gender fraternal twins
Have both antecedents and consequences

Theories of Personality Page 32

 o Have both antecedents and consequences
▪ Antecedents - genetic and biological
▪ Consequences - experimental variables
• Personality as a Predictor
o Traits can combine with one another and with other factors to predict a variety of social behavior
o Personality and Behavior
▪ Not proven by studies (a more complex relationship might exist)
o Personality and Disease
▪ Diseases are caused by an interaction of many factors

Theories of Personality Page 33

 Learning-Cognitive Theories
Tuesday, 9 October 2018 4:42 PM

Skinner: Behavioral Analysis

• Overview
o Behaviorism - emerged from laboratory studies of animals and humans
▪ E.L. Thorndike and John Watson
o Behavior Analysis - minimized speculation and focused almost entirely on observable behavior
▪ Private behaviors are all observable by the person experiencing them
▪ Aka radical behaviorism - a doctrine that avoids all hypothetical constructs
o Determinist (rejected the notion of volition of free will)
o Environmentalist (must explain behavior based on environmental stimuli)
• Precursors to Skinner’s Scientific Behaviorism
o E.L. Thorndike
▪ Learning takes place mostly because of the effects that follow a response (Law of Effect)
▪ Responses to stimuli that are followed immediately by a satisfier tend to be stamped in
▪ Responses to stimuli that are followed immediately by an annoyer tend to be stamped out
▪ Rewards strengthen the connection between a stimulus and a response, punishments do no usually weaken the connection
o John Watson
▪ Concepts of consciousness and introspection must play no role in the scientific study of human behavior
▪ Human behavior can be studied objectively
▪ Goal of psychology: predict and control behavior (best be accomplished by limiting psychology to the objective study of habits formed through stimulus-response connections)
• Scientific Behaviorism
o Human behavior should be studied scientifically
o Behavior can best be studied without reference to needs, instincts, or motives
o Avoid internal mental factors and confine itself to observable physical events
o DID NOT deny the existence of internal states (they are just not the explanation for behavior)
o Philosophy of Science
▪ Allows an INTERPRETATION of behavior but not an EXPLANATION for its causes
▪ Begins with the simple and eventually evolves generalized principles that permit an interpretation of the more complex
o Characteristics of Science
▪ Cumulative
➢ We have more knowledge now than we did back then
▪ Attitude that values empirical observation
➢ Most critical characteristic
➢ Disposition to deal with facts rather than with what someone has said about them
➢ Rejects authority (MUST stand the test of empirical observation)
➢ Demands intellectual honesty
➢ Suspends judgment until clear trends emerge
➢ Skepticism and willingness to suspend judgment are essential
▪ Search for order and lawful relationships
➢ All science begins with an observation of single events and then attempts to infer general principles and laws from those events
➢ Scientific method: prediction, control, and description
• Conditioning
o Classical Conditioning
▪ A response is drawn out of the organism by a specific, identifiable stimulus
▪ NS + US -> UR (repeat)
➢ CS -> CR
▪ Little Albert
o Operant Conditioning
▪ A behaviors is made more likely to recur when it is immediately reinforced
▪ How most humans learn behavior
▪ Key: immediate reinforcement of a response
▪ Reinforcement increases the probability that the same behaviors will occur again
▪ Changes the frequency of a response or the probability that a response will occur
▪ 3 conditions: antecedent, behavior, and consequence
▪ Shaping
➢ Procedure in which the experimenter or the environment first rewards GROSS approximations of the behavior, then CLOSER approximations, and finally the desire behavior
➢ Process of reinforcing successive approximations gradually shapes the final complex set of behaviors
➢ Why does it work?
❖ Behavior is continuous so that the organism moves slightly beyond the previously reinforced response (which becomes the standard for reinforcement)
➢ Always takes place in some environment and the environment has a selective role in shaping and maintaining behavior
❖ History of differential reinforcement results in operant discrimination
❖ Stimulus Generalization - a response to a similar environment in the absence of previous reinforcement
▪ Reinforcement
➢ Two effects: strengthens the behavior and rewards the person
➢ Exist in the environment
➢ Any behavior that increases the probability that the species or the individual will survive tends to be strengthened
➢ Positive
❖ Any stimulus that, when ADDED to a situation, INCREASES the probability that a given behavior will occur
❖ Each has the capacity to increase the frequency of a response
❖ Humans: reinforcement is haphazard (makes learning inefficient)
 What consequences are reinforcing and which ones are not
➢ Negative
❖ REMOVAL of an AVERSIVE stimulus from a situation which INCREASES the probability that the preceding behavior will occur
❖ Still strengthens behavior
▪ Punishment
➢ Presentation of an aversive stimuli or the removal of a positive stimuli
➢ DOES NOT strengthen a response NOR does it weaken it
➢ Effects are less predictable than those of reward
➢ Effect of Punishment
❖ Control of human and animal behavior is better served by positive and negative reinforcement than by punishment
❖ Merely suppresses the tendency to behave in the undesirable behavior (NOT tell them what to do instead)
❖ Conditioning of a negative feeling
 Associates a strong aversive stimuli with the behavior being punished
❖ Spread of its effects
 Any stimulus associated with the punishment may be suppressed or avoided
➢ Punishment VS Reinforcement

Theories of Personality Page 34

 ➢ Punishment VS Reinforcement
❖ Two types: Presentation of an aversive stimulus or removal of a positive reinforcer
❖ Derive either from natural consequences or from human imposition
❖ Means of controlling behavior
▪ Conditioned and Generalized Reinforcers
➢ Conditioned Reinforcers
❖ Environmental stimuli that are not by nature satisfying but become so because they are associated with primary reinforcers
➢ Generalized Reinforcers
❖ Associated with more than one primary reinforcer
❖ 5 examples: attention, approval, submission of others, and tokens(money)
▪ Schedules of Reinforcement
➢ Any behavior followed immediately by the presentation of a positive reinforcer or the removal of an aversive stimulus tends thereafter to occur more frequently
➢ Frequency is subject to the conditions under which training occurred (especially to the various schedules of reinforcement)
➢ Continuous schedule - reinforced for every response
❖ Increases the frequency of a response
❖ Inefficient use of the reinforcer
➢ Intermittent Schedule - reinforced for some response
❖ More efficient use of reinforcer
❖ Responses are more resistant to extinction
❖ Based on the behavior of the organism or on the elapsed time
❖ Fixed Ratio
 Reinforced intermittently according to the number of responses it makes
 Ratio - ratio of responses to reinforcers
❖ Variable Ratio
 Reinforced after every nth response
 Reinforced after the nth response on the average
❖ Fixed Interval
 Reinforced for the first response following a designated period of time
❖ Variable Interval
 Reinforced after the lapse of random or varied periods of time
 Result in more responses per interval
▪ Extinction
➢ Four Reasons:
❖ Forgotten during the passage of time
❖ Interference of preceding or subsequent learning
❖ Punishment
❖ Extinction - tendency of a previously acquired response to become progressively weakened upon nonreinforcement
➢ Operant Extinction - experimenter systematically withholds reinforcement of a previously learned response until the probability of that response diminishes to zero
❖ Depends largely on the schedule of reinforcement under which learning occurred
➢ Behavior trained on an intermittent schedule is much more resistant to extinction
❖ Behavior appears to be self-perpetuating
❖ Higher rate of responses per reinforcement, the slower the rate of extinction
• The Human Organism
o An understanding of the behavior of laboratory animals can generalize to human behavior
o Psychology must be confined to a scientific study of observable phenomena, name behavior
o Must begin with the simple and move to the more complex
o Natural Selection
▪ Human personality is the product of a long evolutionary history
▪ Behavior is determined by genetic composition and especially by our personal histories of reinforcement
▪ Shaped by the contingencies of survival
▪ Individual behavior that is reinforcing tends to be repeated (that which is not, tends to be dropped)
▪ Those beneficial to the species tended to survive
▪ Contingencies of reinforcement and the contingencies of survival interact, and some behaviors that are individually reinforcing also contribute to the survival of the species
▪ Not every remnant of natural selection continues to have survival value
▪ Probably responsible for only a small number of people's actions (contingencies of reinforcement account for most human behavior)
o Cultural Evolution
▪ Selection is responsible for cultural practices that have survived
▪ Humans do not make a cooperative decision to do what is best for the society, but those societies whose members behaved cooperatively tended to survive
▪ A cultural practice evolved that was reinforcing to the group
▪ Not all are adaptive
o Inner States
▪ Self-Awareness
➢ Humans not only have consciousness but are also aware of it
➢ Behavior is a function of the environment (which also includes within one's skin)
❖ Each person is subjectively aware of their own thoughts, feelings, recollections, and intentions
▪ Drives
➢ Refer to the effects of deprivation and satiation and to the corresponding probability that the organism will respond
▪ Emotion
➢ Behavior should not be attributed to emotions
➢ Contingencies of survival and the contingencies of reinforcement
▪ Purpose and Intention
➢ Exist within the skin but they are not subject to direct outside scrutiny
➢ A felt, ongoing purpose may be reinforcing
➢ Are physically felt stimuli within the organism
o Complex Behavior
▪ Even the most abstract and complex behavior is shaped by natural selection, cultural evolution, or the individual's history of reinforcement
▪ Higher Mental Processes
➢ Covert behaviors that take place within the skin BUT not inside the mind
➢ Amenable to the same contingencies as overt behavior
➢ The variables are environmental
▪ Creativity
➢ Similar with natural selection
➢ Concept of mutation
➢ Result of random or accidental behaviors that happen to be rewarded
➢ Due to differences in genetic endowment and to experiences that have shaped their creative behavior
▪ Unconscious Behavior
➢ Accepted the idea of unconscious BEHAVIOR
➢ Nearly all our behavior is unconsciously motivated
➢ Labeled unconscious when people no longer think about it
▪ Dreams

Theories of Personality Page 35

 ▪ Dreams
➢ Covert and symbolic forms of behavior that are subject to the same contingencies of reinforcement
➢ Dream behavior is reinforcing when repressed sexual or aggressive stimuli are allowed expression
▪ Social Behavior
➢ Groups DO NOT behave, only individuals do
➢ Individuals establish groups because they have been rewarded for doing so
➢ 3 reasons why people remain in groups:
❖ Some group members are reinforcing them
❖ May not possess the means to leave the group
❖ Reinforcement may occur on an intermittent schedule
o Control of Human Behavior
▪ Environment is responsible for behavior
▪ Social Control
➢ Groups exercise control over their members (written/unwritten laws, rules, and customs)
➢ Each of us is controlled by a variety of social forces and techniques
❖ Operant Conditioning
 Positive reinforcement
 Negative reinforcement
 2 techniques of punishment
❖ Describing contingencies
 Involves language to inform people of the consequences of the not -yet emitted behavior
 Includes threat and promises
 Advertising - designed to manipulate people to purchase certain products
❖ Deprivation and satiation
❖ Physical restraint
 Acts to counter the effects of conditioning
 Results in behavior contrary to that which would have been emitted
▪ Self-Control
➢ Manipulate the variables within their own environment and thus exercise some measure of self-control
➢ Contingencies do not reside within the individual and cannot be freely chosen
➢ Use physical aids
➢ Change their environment
➢ Arrange their environment so that they can escape from an aversive stimulus only by producing the proper response
➢ Take drugs
➢ Do something else
• The Unhealthy Personality
o Techniques of social control and self-control sometimes produce detrimental effects -> inappropriate behavior and unhealthy personality development
o Counteracting Strategies
▪ Escape - people withdraw from the controlling agent physically or psychologically
▪ Revolt - behave more actively, counteracting the controlling agent
▪ Use passive resistance - more subtle and more irritating to the controllers
o Inappropriate Behaviors
▪ Follow from self-defeating techniques of counteracting social control or from unsuccessful attempts at self-control
▪ Learned (shaped by positive and negative reinforcement and especially by the effects of punishment)
▪ Includes:
➢ Excessively vigorous behavior
➢ Excessively restrained behavior
➢ Blocking out reality
➢ Self-deluding responses
➢ Self-punishment
• Psychotherapy
o One of the chief obstacles blocking psychology's attempt to become scientific
o Therapist is a controlling agent
o Shaping of behavior takes time (mold desirable behavior by reinforcing slightly improved changes in behavior)
o Play an active role in the treatment process

Bandura: Social Cognitive Theory

• Overview
o Takes chance encounters and fortuitous events seriously (how we react to an expected meeting or event is more powerful than the event itself)
o Basic Assumptions:
▪ Plasticity - flexibility to learn a variety of behaviors in diverse situations
➢ More emphasis on vicarious learning
▪ Triadic Reciprocal Causation Model (includes behavioral, environment, and personal factors)
➢ Environmental factors: chance encounters and fortuitous events
▪ Agentic Perspective - humans have the capacity to exercise control over the nature and quality of their lives
➢ Concept of self-efficacy, proxy agency, and collective efficacy
▪ People regulate their conduct through both external and internal factors
▪ In a morally ambiguous situation, people typically attempt to regulate their behavior through moral agency
• Learning
o Humans are quite flexible and capable of learning a multitude of attitudes, skills, and behaviors and that a good bit of those learnings are a result of vicarious experiences
o Observational Learning
▪ Observation allows people to learn without performing any behavior
▪ Learn through observing the behavior of other people
▪ Much more efficient than learning through direct experience
▪ Modeling
➢ Involves adding and subtracting from the observed behavior and generalizing from one observation to another
➢ Involves cognitive processes symbolically representing information and storing it for use at a future time
➢ Characteristics of the model are important
➢ Characteristics of the observer affect the likelihood of modeling
➢ Consequences of the behavior being modeled may have an effect on the observer
▪ Processes Governing Observational Learning
➢ Attention
❖ More likely to attend to people who we associate with
❖ Attractive models
❖ Nature of behavior being modeled affects our attention
➢ Representation
❖ Must be symbolically represented in our memory
❖ Verbal coding speeds the process of observational learning
Also helps rehearse the behavior symbolically

Theories of Personality Page 36

  Also helps rehearse the behavior symbolically
➢ Behavior Production
❖ How can I do this?
❖ What am I doing?
❖ Am I doing things right?
➢ Motivation
❖ Most effective when learners are motivated to perform the modeled behavior
o Enactive Learning
▪ Complex human behavior can be learned when people think about and evaluate the consequences of their behaviors
▪ Consequences serve as:
➢ Inform us of the effects of our actions
➢ Motivate our anticipatory behavior (capable of symbolically representing future outcomes and acting accordingly)
➢ Serve to reinforce behavior
❖ Complex behavioral patterns are greatly facilitated by cognitive intervention
• Triadic Reciprocal Causation
o Person, Environment, and Behavior
▪ Person - cognitive factors (people have some capacity to select or restructure their environment)
o Reciprocal - triadic interaction of forces
o Relative potency of the three varies with the individual and the situation
o Chance Encounters and Fortuitous Events
▪ People cannot predict or anticipate all possible environmental changes
▪ Chance Encounter - unintended meeting of persons unfamiliar to each other
▪ Fortuitous Event - an environmental experience that is unexpected and unintended
▪ Chance encounters influence people at point E (environment) and adding to the mutual interaction of person, behavior, and environment
▪ Not uncontrollable (can make chance happen)
• Human Agency
o Human agency is the essence of humanness
o People are self-regulating, proactive, self-reflective, and self-organizing and that they have the power to influence their own actions to produce desired consequences
o Active process
o Core Features
▪ Intentionality - acts a person performs intentionally
➢ People continually change their plans as they become aware of the consequences of their actions
▪ Forethought - to set goals, to anticipate likely outcomes of their actions, and to select behaviors that will produce desired outcomes and avoid undesirable ones
➢ Enables people to break free from the constraint of their environment
▪ Self-reactiveness - monitor their progress toward fulfilling those choices
➢ Goals: specific, within a person's ability to achieve, and reflect potential accomplishments that are not too far in the future
▪ Self-reflectiveness - can think about and evaluate their motivations, values, and the meanings of their life goals, and they can think about the adequacy of their own thinking
➢ Self-efficacy - their beliefs that they are capable of performing actions that will produce a desired effect
o Self-Efficacy
▪ Influence what courses of action they choose to pursue, how much effort they will invest in activities, how long they will persevere in the face of obstacles and failure experiences,
and their resiliency following setbacks
▪ NOT the sole determinant
▪ What is Self-Efficacy?
➢ People's belief in their capability to exercise some measure of control over their own functioning and over environmental events
➢ Foundation of human agency
➢ NOT EXPECTATION of our action's outcome
➢ NOT refer to the ability to execute basic motor skills
➢ NOT imply that we can perform the behaviors without anxiety, stress, or fear
➢ NOT aspirations
➢ NOT a global or generalized concept
❖ Varies from situation to situation
➢ Combines with environment
Responsive Environment Unresponsive Environment
High Self-Efficacy Successful outcomes Intensify efforts to change the environment
Low Self-Efficacy Become depressed Feel apathy, resignation, and helplessness
▪ What Contributes to Self-Efficacy?
➢ Mastery Experiences
❖ Most influential
❖ Past performances
❖ Successful -> raise in self-efficacy
❖ Failure -> lower self-efficacy
❖ Successful performance raises self-efficacy in proportion to the difficulty of the task
❖ Task successfully accomplished by oneself are more efficacious than those completed with the help of others
❖ Failure is most likely to decrease self-efficacy when we know that we put forth our best effort
❖ Failing under conditions of high emotional arousal or distress is not as self-debilitating as failure under maximal conditions
❖ Failure prior to establishing a sense of mastery is more detrimental to feelings of personal efficacy than later failure
❖ Occasional failure has little effect on efficacy
➢ Social Modeling
❖ Raised when we observe the accomplishments of another person of equal competence, and lowered when we see a peer fail
❖ Effects are not as strong as those of personal performance in raising levels of efficacy
➢ Social Persuasion
❖ Limited
❖ Can raise or lower self-efficacy
❖ Person MUST believe the persuader
❖ If the activity one is being encouraged to try is within one's repertoire of behavior
❖ Directly related to the perceived status and authority of the persuader
❖ Most effective when combined with successful performance
➢ Physical and Emotional States
❖ Strong emotional state ordinarily lowers performance (likely to have lower efficacy expectancies)
❖ Reduction in anxiety or an increase in physical relaxation can facilitate performance
 Higher arousal = lower self-efficacy
 Perceived realism of arousal
 Nature of the task
o Proxy Agency
▪ Indirect control over those social conditions that affect everyday living
▪ Successful functioning involves a blend of reliance on proxy agency in some areas of functioning
▪ Can accomplish their goal by relying on other people
▪ Relying too much on other people, they may weaken their sense of personal and collective efficacy
Collective Agency

Theories of Personality Page 37

 o Collective Agency
▪ People's shared beliefs in their collective power to produce the desired results
▪ How to measure:
➢ Combine individual members' evaluations of their personal capabilities to enact behaviors that benefit the group
➢ Measure the confidence each person has in the group's ability to bring about a desired outcome
▪ Springs from the personal efficacy of many individuals working together (also includes how well people believe they can work in a group)
▪ Different culture have different levels of collective efficacy and work more productively under different systems
▪ Factors:
➢ Transnational world
➢ Technology
➢ Complex social machinery, with layers of bureaucracy
➢ Scope and magnitude of human problems
• Self-Regulation
o High levels of self-efficacy = confident in their reliance on proxies, and possess solid collective efficacy -> capacity to regulate their own behavior
o Use both reactive and proactive strategies
▪ Reactively attempt to reduce the discrepancies between their accomplishments and goals
▪ Proactively set newer and higher goals for themselves
o Processes that contribute:
▪ Possess limited ability to manipulate the external factors that feed into the reciprocal paradigm
▪ Capable of monitoring their own behavior and evaluating it in terms of both proximal and distant goals
o External Factors
▪ Provide us with a standard for evaluating our own behavior
▪ Providing the means for reinforcement
o Internal Factors
▪ Self-Observation - Must be able to monitor our own performance
▪ Judgmental Process - helps us regulate our behavior through the process of cognitive mediation
➢ Personal Standards - evaluate our performances without comparing them to the conduct of others
➢ Referential performances - compare our performance to a single individual or to a standard norm
➢ Valuation of activity - more important = more effort exerted
➢ Performance Attribution - how we judge the causes of our behavior
▪ Self-Reaction - respond negatively or positively to their behaviors depending on how these behaviors measure up to their personal standard
➢ Create incentives for their own actions through self-reinforcement or self-punishment
➢ Relies on the use of our cognitive ability to mediate the consequences of behavior
➢ People work to attain rewards and to avoid punishments according to self-erected standards
o Moral Agency
▪ Aspects
➢ Doing no harm to people
➢ Proactively helping people
▪ Moral precepts predict moral behavior only when those precepts are converted to action
▪ Selective activation - operate only if they are activated
▪ Disengagement of internal control - process of justifying the morality of their actions so that they can separate or disengage themselves from the consequences of their behavior
➢ Allow people to engage in inhuman behaviors while retaining their moral standards
▪ Redefine the Behavior
➢ Cognitive restructuring that allows them to minimize or escape responsibility
➢ Moral Justification - culpable behavior is made to seem defensible or noble
➢ Make advantageous or palliative comparisons between that behavior and the greater atrocities committed by others
➢ Euphemistic labels
▪ Disregard or Distort the Consequences of Behavior
➢ Minimize the consequences of their behavior
➢ Disregard or ignore the consequences of their actions
➢ Distort or misconstrue the consequences of their actions
▪ Dehumanize or Blame the Victims
▪ Displace or Diffuse Responsibility
➢ Displacement - minimize the consequences of their actions by placing responsibility on an outside source
➢ Diffuse responsibility - spread it so thin that no one person is responsible
• Dysfunctional Behavior
o Depression
▪ Set their goals too high -> likely to fail -> depression -> undervalue their own accomplishments
▪ Self-Observation - misjudge their own performances or distort their memory of past accomplishments
▪ Judgmental Processes - make faulty judgments
▪ Self-Reactions - treat themselves badly and judge themselves harshly
o Phobias
▪ Learned by direct contact, inappropriate generalization, and observational experiences
▪ Due to television and other news media
▪ Maintained by consequent determinants (negative reinforcement)
o Aggression
▪ Acquired through the observation of others, direct experiences with positive and negative reinforcement, training or instruction, and bizarre beliefs
▪ Reasons for continuing aggressive behaviors:
➢ Enjoy inflicting injury on the victim (positive reinforcement)
➢ Avoid or counter the aversive consequences of aggression by others (negative reinforcement)
➢ Receive injury or harm for not behaving aggressively (punishment)
➢ Live up to their personal standards of conduct by their aggressive behavior (self-reinforcement)
➢ Observe others receiving rewards for aggressive acts or punishment for nonaggressive behaviors
▪ Aggressive actions ordinarily lead to further aggression (Bobo Doll)
• Therapy
o Deviant behaviors are initiated and maintained because they continue to serve a purpose
o Goal: self-regulation
▪ Introduce strategies designed to induce specific behavioral changes, to generalize those changes to other situations, and to maintain those changes by preventing relapse
o First step is to instigate some change in behavior
o Then generalize specific changes
o Basic Treatment Approaches:
▪ Overt or vicarious modeling
▪ Covert or cognitive modeling - therapist trains patients to visualize models performing fearsome behavior
▪ Enactive memory - requires patients to perform those behaviors that previously produced incapacitating fears
o Cognitive mediation
Rotter and Mischel: Cognitive Social Learning Theory
o Assume: cognitive factors help shape how people will react to environmental forces
Suggest that one's expectations of future events are prime determinants of performance

Theories of Personality Page 38

 o Suggest that one's expectations of future events are prime determinants of performance
o Rotter: interaction of people with their meaningful environments
o Mischel: cognitive factors play important roles in shaping personality
Rotter: Social Learning Theory
• Introduction
o Basic Hypotheses:
▪ Humans interact with their meaningful environment
➢ Reaction to the environment depends on the meaning/importance that they attach to an event
➢ Reinforcements are given meaning by the individual's cognitive capacity
➢ Human behavior stems from the interaction of environmental and personal factors
▪ Human personality is learned
➢ Personality is not set or determined at any particular age of development
➢ Can be changed or modified as long as people are capable of learning
➢ We are always responsive to change through new experiences
▪ Personality has a basic unity
➢ Personalities possess relative stability
➢ Learn to evaluate new experiences on the basis of previous reinforcement
➢ Consistent evaluation leads to greater stability and unity of personality
▪ Motivation is goal directed
➢ Best explanation for human behavior lies in people's expectations that their behaviors are advancing them toward goals
❖ People are most strongly reinforced by behaviors that move them in the direction of anticipated goals
❖ Empirical Law of Effect - defines reinforcement as any action, condition, or event which affects the individual's movement toward a goal
▪ People are capable of anticipating events
➢ Use their perceived movement in the direction of the anticipated event as a criterion for evaluating reinforcers
• Predicting Specific Behaviors
o Behavior Potential
▪ Likelihood that a given behavior will occur in a particular situation
▪ Possibility that a particular response will occur at a given time and place
▪ Several behavior potentials of varying strengths exist in any psychological situation
▪ A function of both expectancy and reinforcement value
o Expectancy
▪ Person's expectations of being reinforced
▪ Person's expectation that some specific reinforcement or set of reinforcements will occur in a given situation
▪ Subjectively held by a person
▪ Can be:
➢ Generalized - learned through previous experiences with a particular response or similar responses and are based on the belief that certain behaviors will be followed by
positive reinforcement
➢ Specific - combination of a specific expectancy and the generalized expectancy
▪ Function of both generalized and specific expectancy
▪ Partially determines the amount of effort people will expend
o Reinforcement Value
▪ Person's preference for a particular reinforcement
▪ Preference a person attaches to any reinforcement when the probabilities for the occurrence of a number of different reinforcements are all equal
▪ When expectancies and situational variables are held constant, reinforcement values predict behavior
▪ Individual's perception contributes to the positive or negative value of an event (internal reinforcement)
➢ External reinforcement - events, conditions, or actions in which one's society or culture places a value
▪ One's need
➢ Specific reinforcement tends to increase in value as the need it satisfies becomes stronger
▪ Expected consequences for future reinforcements
➢ People are capable of using cognition to anticipate a sequence of events leading to some future goal and that the ultimate go al contributes to the reinforcement value of
each event in the consequence
➢ Reinforcement-reinforcement sequences - clusters of reinforcement
▪ Goal oriented
➢ Goals with the highest reinforcement value are most desirable
o Psychological Situation
▪ Complex pattern of cues that a person receives during a specific time period
▪ Part of the external and internal world to which a person is responding
▪ People respond to cues within their perceived environment
➢ Cues serve to determine for them the certain expectancies
▪ Not limited by time
o Basic Prediction Formula
▪ The potential for behavior x to occur in situation 1 in relation to reinforcement a is a function of the expectancy that behavior x will be followed by reinforcement a in situation 1
and the value of reinforcement a in situation 1
• Predicting General Behaviors
o Generalized Expectancies
o Needs
▪ Any behavior or set of behaviors that people see as moving them in the direction of a goal
▪ Indicators of the direction of behavior
▪ Categories of Needs
➢ Each category represents a group of functionally related behaviors
➢ Recognition-Status - need to be recognized by others and to achieve status in their eyes
➢ Dominance - need to control behavior of others
➢ Independence - need to be free of the domination of others
➢ Protection-Dependency - opposite of independence
➢ Love and Affection - needs for acceptance by others that go beyond recognition and status to include some indicators that other people have warm, positive feelings for
them
➢ Physical Comfort - most basic need
▪ Need Components
➢ Need Potential
❖ Possible occurrence of a set of functionally related behaviors directed toward satisfying the same or similar goals
❖ Analogous to behavior potential
❖ Cannot be measured through observation of behavior
➢ Freedom of Movement
❖ One's overall expectation of being reinforced for performing those behaviors that are directed toward satisfying some general need
❖ Analogous to expectancy
➢ Need Value
❖ Degree to which she/he prefers one set of reinforcements to another
❖ Mean preference value of a set of functionally related reinforcements

Theories of Personality Page 39

 ❖ Mean preference value of a set of functionally related reinforcements
❖ Analogous to reinforcement value
o General Prediction Formula
▪ Need potential is a function of freedom of movement and need value
▪ Allows for people's history of using similar experiences to anticipate present reinforcement
o Internal and External Control of Reinforcement (locus of control)
▪ People have the ability to see a causal connection between their own behavior and the occurrence of the reinforcer
▪ Both the situation and the person contribute to feelings of personal control
▪ Internal-External Control Scale
➢ Attempts to measure the degree to which people perceive a causal relationship between their own efforts and environmental consequences
➢ High in internal control: source of control resides within themselves and exercise a high level of personal control in most situations
➢ High in external control: believe that their life is largely controlled by forces outside themselves
➢ INDICATORS of generalized expectancies (NOT determinants of behavior)
➢ Refers to generalized expectancies (not specific and cannot predict achievement in a specific situation)
➢ Implies a GRADIENT of generalization
➢ Extreme scores on either direction is bad
o Interpersonal Trust Scale
▪ A generalized expectancy held by an individual that the word, promise, oral or written statement of another individual or group can be relied on
▪ NOT gullibility nor the belief that people are naturally good
▪ High trust: essential for survival of civilization
• Maladaptive Behavior
o Any persistent behavior that fails to move a person closer to a desired goal
o Arises from the combination of high need value and low freedom of movement (goals are too high in relation to one's ability to achieve them)
o Why do people have low freedom of movement?
▪ Lack information or ability to perform those behaviors
▪ Make a faulty evaluation of the present situation
▪ Generalize from one situation to other
• Psychotherapy
o Problems in human learning in a social situation
o Goal: bring freedom of movement and need value into harmony (reduce defensive and avoidance behaviors)
o Changing Goals
▪ Help patients understand the faulty nature of their goals and teach them constructive means of striving toward realistic goals
▪ Problems that follow from inappropriate goals
➢ Two or more important goals may be in conflict
❖ Alter need value -> behavior becomes more consistent and experience greater freedom of movement
➢ Destructive goals
❖ Persistently pursue self-destructive goals that result in failure and punishment
❖ Point out the detrimental nature of this pursuit
➢ Set their goals too high
❖ Continually frustrated when they cannot reach or exceed them
❖ Get the patient to realistically reevaluate and lower exaggerated goals by reducing the reinforcement values of these goals
o Eliminating low expectancies
▪ Low Freedom of Movement
➢ Lack the skills or information needed to successfully strive toward their goals
❖ Therapist instructs them in more effective techniques for solving problems and satisfying needs
➢ Faulty evaluation of the present situation
❖ Help them make distinctions and teach her techniques
➢ Inadequate generalizations
❖ Teach them to discriminate between realistic shortcomings in one area and successful behaviors in other situations
▪ Teach patients to look for alternative courses of actions
▪ Look at the long-range consequences of their behaviors and to understand that many maladaptive behaviors produce secondary gains that outweighthe patient's present
situation
▪ Have patients enter into a previously painful social situation and to remain as quiet as possible and observe (to learn motives)
▪ Active participant in a social interaction with the patient
▪ Eventually patients must learn to solve their own problems

Mischel: Cognitive-Affective Theory

• Introduction
o Cognitive abilities and specific situations play a major role in determining behavior
o Cognitive-affective personality theory - behavior stems from relatively stable personal dispositions and cognitive-affective processes interacting with a particular situation
• Background of the Cognitive-Affective Personality System
o Consistency Paradox
▪ Belief that people's behavior is relatively consistent, yet empirical evidence suggests much variability in behavior
▪ Many people assume that global personality traits will be manifested over a period of time and also from one situation from another
▪ Some basic traits do persist over time BUT little evidence exists that they generalize from one situation to another
▪ Objected to attempts to attribute behavior to these global traits
▪ Research has failed to support the consistency of personality traits across situation
➢ Researchers must aggregate measures of behavior (must obtain a sum of many behaviors)
▪ Specific behaviors will not accurately predict personality traits
o Person-Situation Interaction
▪ Most people have some consistency in their behavior but the situation has a powerful effect on behavior
▪ Many dispositions can be stable over a long period of time
▪ Specific situation interacts with the person's competencies, interests, goals, values, expectancies, and so forth to predict behavior
▪ Personal dispositions influence behavior ONLY under certain conditions and in certain situations
➢ Behavior is caused by people's perception of themselves in a particular situation
▪ Behavior is shaped by personal dispositions plus a person's specific cognitive and affective processes
▪ People readily recognize the interrelationship between situations and behavior and that they intuitively follow a conditionalview of dispositions
• Cognitive-Affective Personality System
o Predicts a person's behavior will change from situation to situation but in a meaningful manner
o If A, then X; If B, then Y
o Takes into account the long history of observed variability in behavior and the intuitive conviction that personality is stable
o Behavioral signature of personality - consistent manner of varying their behavior in particular situations
▪ Has a signature that remains stable across situations even as their behavior changes
o Behavior Prediction
▪ If personality is a stable system that processes the information about the situations, external or internal, then it follows that as individuals encounter different situations, their
behaviors should vary across situations
▪ Assumes temporal stability and that behaviors may vary from situation to situation
▪ Prediction of behavior rests on knowledge of how and when various cognitive-affective units are activated
o Situation Variables
▪ Relative influence of situation variables and personal qualities can be determined by observing the uniformity or diversity of people's responses in a given situation

Theories of Personality Page 40

 ▪ Relative influence of situation variables and personal qualities can be determined by observing the uniformity or diversity of people's responses in a given situation
➢ Different people act in the same way = situation variables are more powerful than personal characteristics
➢ Similar events that have different reactions = personal qualities override situational ones
➢ Both the situation and various cognitive-affective components of personality play a role in determining behavior
o Cognitive-Affective Units
▪ Cause them to interact with their environment with a relatively stable pattern of variation
▪ Encoding Strategies
➢ People's ways of categorizing information from received stimuli
➢ Use cognitive processes to transform these stimuli into personal constructs
➢ Different people encode the same events differently
➢ The same person may encode the same event differently in different situations
➢ Stimulus inputs are substantially altered by what people selectively attend, how they interpret their experience, and the way in which they categorize those inputs
▪ Competencies and Self-Regulatory Strategies
➢ Depends in part on the potential behaviors available to use, our beliefs of what we can do, our plans and strategies for enacting behaviors, and our expectancies for success
➢ Competencies - vast array of information we acquire about the world and our relationship to it
➢ We selectively construct or generate our own version of the real world
➢ Acquire a set of beliefs about our performance capabilities
➢ Generally more stable temporally and cross-sectionally than other cognitive-affective units
➢ People use self-regulatory strategies to control their own behavior through self-imposed goals and self-produced consequences
➢ Enables them to plan, initiate, and maintain behaviors even when environmental support is weak or nonexistent
▪ Expectancies and Beliefs
➢ How people behave depends on their specific expectancies and beliefs about the consequences of each of the different behavioral possibilities
➢ Knowledge of people's hypotheses or beliefs concerning the outcome of any situation is a better predictor of behavior than is knowledge of their ability to perform
➢ Previous experience + observation = learn to enact behaviors that they expect will result in the most subjectively values outcome
➢ No information: enact behaviors that received the greatest reinforcement in past similar situations
➢ Stimulus-outcome expectancies
❖ Refers to the many stimulus conditions that influence the probable consequences of any behavior pattern
❖ Help us predict what events are likely to occur following a certain stimuli
➢ Inconsistent behavior: inability to predict other people's behavior
▪ Goals and Values
➢ Active and goal directed
➢ Subjective goals, values, and preferences
➢ Most stable
❖ Emotion-eliciting properties
▪ Affective Responses
➢ Includes emotions, feelings, and physiological reactions
➢ Inseparable from cognitions

Kelly: Psychology of Personal Construct

• Overview
o Metatheory - theory about theories
o All people anticipate events by the meanings or interpretations that they place on those events (constructs)
o People exist in a real world, but their behavior is shaped by their gradually expanding interpretation or construction of that world
o Construe the world is their own way, and every construction is open to revision or replacement
o People are constantly active and that their activity is guided by the way they anticipate events
• Kelly’s Philosophical Position
o Behavior is based on reality and people's perception of reality
o The universe is real but that different people construe it in different ways
o Personal constructs - ways of interpreting and explaining events (hold the key to predicting behavior)
o Theory of people's construction of events
o Person as Scientist
▪ Perception of reality is colored by your personal constructs
▪ All people make observations, construe relationships among events, formulate theories, generate hypotheses, test those that are plausible, and reach conclusions from their
experiments
▪ Conclusions are not fixed or final (OPEN to reconsideration and reformulation)
o Scientist as Person
▪ Pronouncements of scientists should be regarded with skepticism
▪ Every scientific observation can be looked at from a different perspective
o Constructive Alternativism
▪ Assume: universe exists and that it functions as an integral unit, with all its parts interacting precisely with each other
➢ Universe is constantly changing so something is happening all the time
▪ Assume: people's thoughts also really exist and that people strive to make sense out of their continuously changing world
➢ Different people construe reality in different ways
➢ Same person is capable of changing their view of the world
▪ All of our present interpretations of the universe are subject to revision or replacement
▪ Facts can be looked at from different perspectives
▪ Interpretations have meaning in the dimension of time and what is valid at one time becomes false when construed differently at a later time
▪ Person holds the key to an individual's future
➢ Facts and conclusions carry meanings for us to discover
➢ We must assume responsibility for how we construe our worlds
• Personal Constructs
o People's interpretation of a unified, ever-changing world constitutes their reality
o All people continually create their own view of the world
o Personal constructs - means by which people make sense out of the world
▪ One's way of seeing how things are alike and yet different from other things
▪ Comparison and contrast must occur within the same context
Shape an individual's behavior
o All people attempt to validate their constructs
o Basic Postulates
▪ A person's processes are psychologically channelized by the ways in which (that person) anticipates events (people's behaviors are directed by the way they see the future)
▪ Person's processes - living, changing, moving human being
▪ Channelized - people move with a direction through a network of pathways or channels
▪ Ways of anticipating events - people guide their actions according to their predictions of the future
o Supporting Corollaries
▪ Similarities Among Events
➢ No two events are exactly alike, yet we construe similar events so that they are perceived as being the same
➢ Construction Corollary - a person anticipates events by construing their replications
❖ Forward looking
❖ People construe or interpret future events according to recurrent themes or replications

Theories of Personality Page 41

 ❖ People construe or interpret future events according to recurrent themes or replications
▪ Differences Among People
➢ Individuality Corollary
➢ Persons differ from each other in their construction of events
➢ Two people construe the same even in different ways (substance and form are different)
➢ Experiences can be shared and that people can find a common ground for construing experiences
▪ Relationships Among Constructs
➢ Organization Corollary
➢ People characteristically evolve, for (their) convenience in anticipating events, a construction system embracing ordinal relationships between constructs
➢ Different people organize similar events in a manner that minimizes incompatibilities and inconsistencies
➢ Ordinal relationship of constructs
▪ Dichotomy of Constructs
➢ Dichotomy Corollary
➢ A person's construction system is composed of a finite number of dichotomous constructs
➢ An either-or proposition
➢ To form a construct, people must be able to see similarities between events, but they must also contrast these events with their opposite pole
▪ Choice Between Dichotomies
➢ Choice Corollary
➢ People choose for themselves that alternative in a dichotomized construct through which they anticipate the greater possibility for extension and definition of future
constructs
➢ Make choices on the basis of how they anticipate events, and those choices are between dichotomous alternatives
➢ Choose actions that are most likely to extend their future range of choices
▪ Range of Convenience
➢ Range Corollary
➢ Constructs are finite and not relevant to everything
➢ A construct is convenient for the anticipation of a finite range of events only
➢ Difference from a concept
▪ Experience and Learning
➢ Experience Corollary
➢ A person's construction system varies as he/she successively construes the replications of events
➢ We look to the future and make guesses about what will happen
➢ We either validate our existing constructs or restructure these events to match our experience
➢ Restructuring of events allows us to learn from experiences
▪ Adaptation to Experience
➢ Modulation Corollary
➢ The variation in a person's construction system is limited by the permeability of the constructs within whose range of convenience the variants lie
➢ Extent to which people revise their constructs depends on the degree of permeability of the construct
➢ Permeable: new elements can be added to it
➢ All people modulate or adjust their personal construct
▪ Incompatible Constructs
➢ Fragmentation Corollary
➢ A person may successively employ a variety of constructive subsytems which are inferentially compatible with each other
➢ Superordinate systems may also change but those changes takes place within a still larger system
▪ Similarities Among People
➢ Commonality Corollary
➢ To the extent that one person employs a construction of experience which is similar to that employed by another, processes ar e psychologically similar to those of the other
person
➢ Merely construe their experiences in a similar fashion
➢ People with similar experiences are more likely to construe events along similar lines
➢ NO two people ever interpret experiences exactly the same
▪ Social Processes
➢ Sociality Corollary
➢ To the extent that people accurately construe the belief system of others, they may play a role in a social process involving those other people
➢ People communicate because they construe the constructions of others
➢ People are actively involved in interpersonal relations and realize that they are part of the other person's construction system
➢ Role - a pattern of behavior that results from a person's understanding of the constructs of others with whom that person is engaged in a task
❖ Core role - we define ourselves in terms of who we really are (gives us a sense of identity and provides us with guidelines for everyday living)
• Applications of Personal Construct Theory
o Abnormal Development
▪ Healthy people: validate their personal constructs against their experiences in the real world
▪ Unhealthy people: stubbornly cling to outdated personal constructs, fearing validation of any new constructs that would upsettheir present comfortable view of the world
▪ Disorder - any personal construction which is used repeatedly in spite of consistent invalidation (exists in the present)
▪ Complex construction system:
➢ Too permeable
➢ Too flexible
▪ Threat
➢ When they perceive that the stability of their basic constructs is likely to be shaken
➢ The awareness of imminent comprehensive change in one's core structure
▪ Fear
➢ More specific and incidental
▪ Anxiety
➢ The recognition that the events with which one is confronted lie outside the range of convenience of one's construct system
➢ Exists when a person's incompatible constructs can no longer be tolerated and the person's construction system breaks down
▪ Guilt
➢ The sense of having lost one's core role structure
➢ When they behave in ways that are inconsistent with their sense of who they are
➢ No core role = no feelings of guilt
o Psychotherapy
▪ Psychological distress exists whenever people have difficulty validating their personal constructs, anticipating future events, and controlling their present environment
▪ People should be free to choose the courses of action most consistent with their prediction of events
▪ Client sets the goal (active participants and the therapist's role is to assist them to alter their construct systems)
▪ Fixed-role therapy
➢ Help clients change their outlook on life by acting out a predetermined role
➢ Creative process that allows clients to gradually discover previously hidden aspects of themselves
o The Rep Test
▪ Role Construct Repertory Test
▪ Discover ways in which people construe significant people in their lives
▪ Designed to assess personal construct

Theories of Personality Page 42

Culture and Personality
Saturday, 13 October 2018 11:55 AM

Culture and Personality Approach

• Psychological anthropology
• Ruth Benedict - patterns of Culture, 1934
○ Southwest pueblos of Mexico: Dionysian(prone to excesses), Apollonian (disciplined)
• Lead to national character studies (WWII: interest in what makes the opponents think)
○ National character - perception that each culture has a modal personality type, and that most members share aspects of this
○ Not correlated with actual, aggregate personality levels
▪ Unfounded stereotypes, but exist to maintain national identity
Cultural Typologies
• Nations as proxies - one country, one culture
• Harry Triandis
○ Individualist Cultures
○ Collectivist Culture
○ Greater within than between culture differences
Culture as shared meaning systems
• Views about the world
• Meanings of behaviors and situations
• Cultural groups differ in the goals, values, and beliefs that are psychologically available and chronically accessible
• Meanings that are relevant in a given situation become activated and influence subsequent behavior
• Interpreting others' emotion
○ Japanese: voice
○ Dutch: facial expression
More within- than between-culture variability
• Personal meaning system derived from the cultural meaning system, but not taken in its entirety
• Individual experiences

Theories of Personality Page 43

Sikolohiyang Pilipino
Tuesday, 9 October 2018 4:43 PM

Teorya ng Pagkatao
• Virgilio G. Enriquez, 1970s (purist language situation)
○ Enriquez was a social psychologist - level of the interpersonal
• Personalidad - mababaw
○ Persona - mask, pakitang-tao
• Pagkatao - personality +
○ Malalim
○ Pagka + tao = quality of being (quality or level of being human
○ Moving from personality to personhood (like the humanists, holistic)
• Values approach: meaning system
○ Personal, the PMS - identidad bilang tao
○ Cultural, rooted in the CMS - identitdad bilang tao
• Values = mithiin (goal) - values are goal-based beliefs of what we want to happen
○ Nais or gusto nating mangyari
○ Paniniwala: cognitive and affective aspects
○ Mithiin as prinsipyo
• Values are transituational like traits, beliefs like attitudes
○ Traits are not beliefs
○ Values are positive and idealized
• Kapwa as core value
○ Hindi katulad ng "other"
○ Overlap between the self and the other - shared identity
○ Core value in being the foundation of all others
• Pakikiramdam as pivotal value
○ Pagbabago ng oryentasyon
○ Change or balance between self- and other-orientation
○ Pagbubukas o pagsasara ng loob sa ibang tao (disclosure, pagbubukas-loob)
○ Manhid: pagsasara ng loob (absence of pakikiramdam)
○ Activate relevant values given the situation
• Surface Values
○ Nasa ibabaw kaya madali o unang nakikita - pero mababaw
○ Accommodative
▪ Hiya - nagpapanatili sa mga social (nakakahiya) o moral conventions (kahiya-hiya)
▪ Utang na loob - nagpapanatili sa commitment sa mga karelasyon
▪ Pakikisama - nagpapadulas ng relasyon (facilitate) ((at the beginning of a relationship, abandoned at deeper levels)
▪ Other-oriented
○ Confrontative
▪ Bahala na - hindi pagiging fatalistiko, "risk-taking"
▪ Lakas ng loob - pagpapakita ng tibay ng loob sa harap ng kawalan ng katiyakan
▪ Pakikibaka - paggiit ng sariling paninindigan
▪ Self-oriented
• Kagandahang-loob
○ Orients the self to the faceless and nameless bigger society
• Social Values
○ Karangalan
▪ Panlabas: puri
▪ Panloob: dangal - more indicative and essential of personhood (loob is more important in our culture)
○ Katarungan - iba sa pagsusubod sa batas -> katotohanan, katuwiran, karapatan
○ Kalayaan - hindi pulitikal na kalayaan -> kalayaan mula sa kahirapan
▪ Kalayawan, layaw -> comfortable life
• Speaking to our culture and reality as a nation

Split-Level Christianity
• Christian - animist dualist existing beliefs
• Generally, competing beliefs that coexist
• Transpersonal Worldview -> materyal at espiritwal na daigdig
○ Maraming di mapaliwanag na kaganapan ay kagagawan ng mga espiritu
○ Sapi (patong), sanib (complete merging), etc. - change in personality not due to psychopathology -> culture-bound syndrome
○ Pagpaparamdam
○ Iba and utak sa isip -> pwedeng makakuha ng kaalaman sa labas sa karaniwang kamalayan

Theories of Personality Page 44

Theories of Personality Page 45