Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Theories

Advanced Theories of Personality carries 20 percent of the Psychologist Licensure Examination that RA 10029 requires you to pass, and no cluster of that subject is tested more heavily than the psychodynamic tradition. Every theory you meet later, whether trait, humanistic, or behavioral, defines itself for or against Freud, so mastering this lesson pays off twice: once on the direct items about Freud, Jung, and Adler, and again on the compare items that ask how a later theorist broke away. The board rarely wants a bare definition. It gives you a behavior, a term, or a stage and asks you to match it to the right theorist. Learn the distinctions cleanly and you bank easy points.

Freud: the founder

The structural model

Freud divided the personality into three systems. The id is the primitive, wholly unconscious reservoir of drives, running on the pleasure principle and demanding immediate gratification. The ego develops to deal with reality, operating on the reality principle and mediating between the id, the superego, and the outside world. The superego is the internalized moral authority, made of the conscience (what is punished) and the ego ideal (what is rewarded), and it pushes toward perfection. Anxiety arises when the id and superego pull against each other, and the ego protects itself with defense mechanisms.

The topographic model

Keep this separate from the structural model. The topographic model describes levels of awareness: the conscious (what you notice right now), the preconscious (memories and thoughts not in mind but easily recalled), and the unconscious (repressed material that drives behavior yet stays out of reach). Structural is id, ego, superego. Topographic is conscious, preconscious, unconscious. The board loves to swap the two.

Psychosexual stages

Personality forms as libido centers on different body zones. Oral (birth to about one year), fixation shows as smoking, overeating, or dependency. Anal (one to three), fixation yields either rigid orderliness or messiness. Phallic (three to six), the stage of the Oedipus complex in boys and its female counterpart, with identification resolving the conflict. Latency (six to puberty), drives lie dormant. Genital (puberty onward), mature adult sexuality. Fixation results from too little or too much gratification at a stage.

Defense mechanisms

The ego wards off anxiety unconsciously. Repression pushes threatening material out of awareness. Denial refuses to accept a painful reality. Projection attributes one's own unacceptable impulse to someone else. Displacement redirects a feeling onto a safer target. Sublimation channels an impulse into a socially valued activity and is the most adaptive. Reaction formation expresses the opposite of the true impulse. Rationalization invents an acceptable reason for an unacceptable act. Regression retreats to an earlier stage of behavior under stress.

Jung: analytical psychology

Carl Jung split from Freud over the nature of the unconscious. He kept a personal unconscious (an individual's repressed and forgotten material) but added a deeper collective unconscious, an inherited layer shared by all humans that holds archetypes, universal thought forms. Key archetypes: the persona (the social mask), the shadow (the dark, unacceptable side), the anima (the feminine within the male), the animus (the masculine within the female), and the self (the archetype of unity and the goal of individuation, becoming whole). Jung also coined introversion and extraversion as basic attitudes.

Adler: individual psychology

Alfred Adler rejected Freud's focus on sex and built a holistic, social, future-oriented theory. He held that everyone begins life with inferiority feelings and is motivated by a striving for superiority, meaning completeness and mastery, not dominance over others. People compensate for weakness, develop a unique style of life, and are guided by a creative self. The mark of health is social interest (Gemeinschaftsgefuhl), a concern for the welfare of the community. Adler also proposed that birth order shapes personality: the firstborn can feel "dethroned" by a new sibling, the second child is often competitive, the youngest may be pampered, and the only child may prefer adult company.

The neo-Freudians

Karen Horney grounded neurosis in basic anxiety, the feeling of being isolated and helpless in a potentially hostile world. People cope through three trends: moving toward people (compliance, seeking approval), moving against people (aggression, control), and moving away from people (detachment). She rejected Freud's penis envy as biology and stressed culture instead.

Erik Erikson extended development across the whole lifespan in eight psychosocial stages, each a crisis to resolve: trust vs mistrust, autonomy vs shame and doubt, initiative vs guilt, industry vs inferiority, identity vs role confusion (adolescence), intimacy vs isolation, generativity vs stagnation, and integrity vs despair.

Object relations theorists (Melanie Klein, Margaret Mahler, Donald Winnicott) shifted focus to early relationships internalized as mental images. Mahler described separation and individuation from the mother, and Winnicott spoke of the "good enough mother."

Comparison table

Theorist	View of the unconscious	Core motive	Signature terms
Freud	Personal, full of repressed sexual and aggressive drives	Sex and aggression (libido)	Id, ego, superego, psychosexual stages
Jung	Personal plus an inherited collective layer	Individuation, wholeness	Archetypes, collective unconscious, shadow
Adler	Downplayed; behavior is conscious and goal directed	Striving for superiority, social interest	Inferiority, style of life, birth order
Horney	Shaped by culture and early security	Security, coping with basic anxiety	Basic anxiety, three trends
Erikson	Present but development is psychosocial	Resolving lifespan crises, identity	Eight stages, identity vs role confusion

Common traps

• Confusing Jung's collective unconscious (inherited, shared by all people) with Freud's personal unconscious (built from one person's repressed material).
• Mixing up displacement (redirect a feeling to a safer target), projection (attribute your own impulse to another person), and sublimation (channel the impulse into a valued activity).
• Treating inferiority feelings (Adler, a normal universal motivator) as the same as an inferiority complex (Adler, the pathological failure to compensate) or as Horney's basic anxiety.
• Assuming the term Electra complex was Freud's. Freud described the girl's phallic-stage conflict, but the label Electra was Jung's coinage.
• Reading reaction formation (acting the opposite of the real impulse) as denial (refusing to acknowledge reality at all).

Recap

Sort every item by theorist first. Freud owns structure (id, ego, superego), the psychosexual stages, and the defense mechanisms, all driven by the unconscious and by sex. Jung owns the collective unconscious and the archetypes. Adler owns inferiority, striving for superiority, social interest, and birth order. The neo-Freudians moved the field toward culture (Horney), the whole lifespan (Erikson), and early relationships (object relations). Match the term to the name and the harder compare items answer themselves.