Module 4

CHAPTER 3

A Psychodynamic Theory: Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory of Personality Questions to be Addressed in this Chapter Sigmund Freud (1856–1939): A View of the Theorist Freud's View of the Person Freud's View of the Science of Personality Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory of Personality Major Concepts Review Chapter Focus The number one player on the tennis team is getting ready to play for the state title. She has never met her opponent before, so she decides to introduce herself before the match. She strolls onto the court where her opponent is warming up and says. “Hi, I'm Amy. Glad to beat you.” You can imagine how embarrassed Amy was! Flustered, she corrected her innocent mistake and walked over to her side of the court to warm up. “Wow,” Amy thought, “where did that come from?” Was Amy's verbal slip so innocent? Freud wouldn't have thought so. In his view, Amy's silly mistake was actually a very revealing display of unconscious aggressive drives. Freud's psychoanalytic theory is illustrative of a psychodynamic and clinical approach to personality. Behavior is interpreted as a result of the dynamic interplay among motives, drives, needs, and conflicts. The research consists mainly of clinical investigations as shown in an emphasis on the individual, in the attention given to individual differences, and in attempts to assess and understand the total individual. Contemporary researchers, however, devote much attention to the challenge of studying psychodynamic processes in the experimental laboratory. Questions to be Addressed in this Chapter How did Freud develop his theory, and how did historical and personal events shape this development? What are the key features of Freud's theoretical model of the human mind? How do people protect themselves against experiences of anxiety, and in what ways (according to Freud) are these anxiety‐reduction strategies a centerpiece of personality dynamics? How important is early childhood experience for later personality development? Sigmund Freud (1856–1939): A View of the Theorist Sigmund Freud was born in Moravia (in what is now the city of Fribor of the Czech Republic) in 1856. His family soon moved to Vienna, where he spent most of his life. Freud was the first child of his parents, but his father, 20 years older than his mother, had two sons by a previous marriage. His parents then had seven more children after his birth. Within this large group of family members, the intellectually precocious Sigmund was his mother's favorite—and he knew it. Later in life, Freud famously commented, from experience, that a man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother “keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success” (Freud, 1900, p. 26). As a boy, Freud had big dreams. He wanted to become a great general or government official. But anti‐Semitism limited the possibility for advancement in these fields for Freud, who was Jewish. He thus pursued a career in medicine instead. Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna Freud. Both contributed to the development of psychodynamic conceptions of personality. Freud's medical training, at the University of Vienna, profoundly shaped his later theorizing about personality. A key figure in this training was a professor of physiology named Ernst Brücke, who took part in an intellectual movement known as mechanism. The mechanist movement addressed questions about the nature and possibilities of the science of biology. It is best understood by contrasting it with an opposing movement, “vitalism.” Vitalists argued that biological science could not fully explain biological life because life arose from nonmaterial forces (like a soul, or spirit, that animates an otherwise lifeless body). Mechanists argued that the principles of natural science could, in fact, provide comprehensive explanation. Basic physical and chemical factors could fully explain the functioning of organisms, including life itself (Gay, 1998). The mechanist position, which is taken for granted today, opened the door for a complete natural science of persons. Brücke's rejection of vitalism and embrace of the scientific principles of mechanism provide a foundation for the dynamic view of personality Freud developed later in life (Sulloway, 1979). After earning his medical degree, Freud worked in the field of neurology. Some of his early research involved a comparison of adult and fetal brains. He concluded that the earliest structures persist throughout life—a view that was a precursor to his later views of personality development. However, for financial reasons, including the need to support a family, Freud abandoned his research career and became a practicing physician. In 1897, the year following his father's death, Freud was plagued by periods of depression and anxiety. To understand his problems, Freud began an activity that proved utterly fundamental to the development of psychoanalysis: a self‐analysis. Freud analyzed the contents of his own experiences, concentrating in particular on his dreams, which he thought would reveal unconscious thoughts and desires. He continued this self‐analysis throughout his life, devoting the last half hour of each workday to it. In his therapeutic work, Freud tried various techniques to uncover psychological causes of his patient's problems. One was hypnosis, which he learned about from the renowned French psychiatrist Jean Charcot. But finding that not all patients could be hypnotized, he explored other methods. The one that proved crucial to his work was free association. In the free‐association technique, the person being analyzed allows all of his or her thoughts to come forth without inhibition or falsification of any kind. By letting thoughts flow freely, one may discover hidden associations among ideas. For Freud, the free‐association technique was both a therapy and a scientific method; it provided the primary evidence for his theory of personality. In 1900, Freud published his most significant work, The Interpretation of Dreams. Here, Freud no longer was concerned merely with treating patients. He was developing a theory of mind—a conceptual model of the mind's basic structures and working principles. The book, though brilliant, was slow to catch on; in its first eight years of publication, The Interpretation of Dreams sold only 600 copies. Freud's views about the psychology of childhood (which you'll learn below) were ridiculed. Medical institutions that taught Freud's views were boycotted. An early follower, Ernest Jones, was forced to resign a neurological appointment for inquiring into the sexual life of his patients, in the manner that Freud's theory suggested. At a personal level, during World War I, Freud lost his financial savings and feared for the lives of two sons in the war. In 1920, a daughter, age 26, died. This historical context may have partly contributed to Freud's development, at age 64, of a theory of the death instinct—a wish to die, in opposition to the life instinct or a wish for survival. Yet Freud persevered and gradually achieved widespread recognition. Lectures in the United States in 1909 greatly enhanced his profile outside of Europe. An International Psychoanalytic Association was founded in 1910. During these and subsequent years, Freud published prolifically, had a waiting list of patients, and achieved increasing fame. Thanks to his efforts and those of his followers, by the time of his death in London on September 23, 1939 (he had fled Vienna a year earlier to escape the Nazis), he was an international celebrity. Today, Freud's ideas and his psychoanalytic terminology are known even to people who never have read a word of his writing or taken a single psychology course. Among 20th‐century figures, Freud's contributions to Western intellectual life are exceeded perhaps only by those of Einstein. Many glorify Freud as a compassionate, courageous genius. Others, noting his battles and breaks with colleagues, see him as an authoritarian, intolerant figure (Fromm, 1959). Whatever one's view of his personality, Freud unquestionably pursued his work with great courage. He bravely presented personal details of his own life to illustrate his theory. He withstood the criticism of colleagues and the scorn of society at large. He did this, as he wrote to an associate, “in the service” of “a dominating passion … a tyrant [that] has come my way … it is psychology” (Gay, 1998, p. 74). Freud's View of the Person Throughout this book, when we introduce a theory of personality, we first will review the life of the theorist (as above for Freud). Then, prior to detailing the given theory's treatment of personality structures and processes, we will present its overall view of the person. Each major theory of personality contains a broad conception of human nature, or a view of the person. We present these conceptions at the outset for two reasons: (1) They provide a foundation for understanding. You quickly will gain knowledge of the most important ideas of a given theory—knowledge you can build upon when reading subsequent material. (2) These “View of the Person” sections answer a question you might be asking yourself: “Why should I bother to learn about this personality theory?” The answer is that, in all cases in this book, the given personality theory addresses big ideas: the nature of mind, human nature, and society. These “big picture” ideas are summarized in the View of the Person sections of the text. The Mind as an Energy System Freud's theory of personality is fundamentally a theory of mind—a scientific model of the overall architecture of mental structures and processes. In formulating a model of mind, Freud explicitly “[considers] mental life from a biological point of view” (Freud, 1915/1970, p. 328). He recognizes the mind as part of the body, asks what the body is like, and derives principles of mental functioning from overall principles of physiological functioning. As we noted, to Freud, the body is a mechanistic energy system. It follows, then, that the mind, being part of the body, also is a mechanistic energy system. The mind gets mental energies from the overall physical energies of the body. An energy‐system view of mind contrasts with alternative perspectives one could adopt. For example, instead, one could view the mind as an information system. In an information system, material is merely stored somewhere and drawn upon when needed. Information on the hard drive of your computer, or information written into a book on the shelf of a library, is like this—it merely sits there inertly, in storage, to be accessed as needed. In Freud's energy model, however, mental contents do not merely sit in storage inertly. Mental contents do things. The mind contains instinctual drives that are “piece[s] of activity” that exert “pressure … [an] amount of force” (Freud, 1915/1970, p. 328) on the overall psychic apparatus. The overall mind, then, is a system that contains and directs these energetic forces. If one takes this view, then the major scientific problem is to explain what happens to mental energy: how it flows, gets sidetracked, or becomes dammed up. Freud's view of mental energy includes three core ideas. One is that there is a limited amount of energy. If much energy is used in one way, less is available for other purposes. Energy used for cultural purposes, for example, is no longer available for sexual purposes, and vice versa. A second idea is that energy can be blocked from one channel of expression and, if it is blocked, the energy does not “just go away.” Instead, it gets expressed in some other manner, along a path of least resistance. Finally, fundamental to Freud's energy model is the idea that the mind functions to achieve a state of quiescence (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983). Bodily needs create a state of tension, and the person is driven to reduce that tension to return to a quiet internal state. A simple example is that if you are lacking food, you experience the state of tension we call hunger, and this drives you to seek some object in the environment that satisfies your hunger, eliminating the tension and returning you to a state of quiescence. (Of course, Freud explores examples of dramatically greater complexity than this one, as you will see.) The goal of all behavior, then, is the pleasure that results from the reduction of tension or the release of energy. The personality theory of Freud that you will learn about in this chapter is basically a detailed model of the personality structures and processes that are responsible for this dynamic flow of mental energy. Why the assumption that the mind is an energy system? It derives from developments in physics in Freud's time. The 19th‐century physicist Hermann von Helmholtz had presented the principle of conservation of energy: Matter and energy can be transformed but not destroyed. Not only physicists but also members of other disciplines were studying the laws of energy changes in systems. Freud's medical training included the idea that human physiology could be understood in terms of physical forces that adhere to the principle of conservation of energy. The age of energy and dynamics provided scientists with a new conception of humans: “that man is an energy system and that he obeys the same physical laws which regulate the soap bubble and the movement of the planets” (Hall, 1954, pp. 12–13). Freud developed this general view into a well‐specified theory of personality. In psychoanalysis, then, ideas have mental energy that remains stored in the mind; that is, the energy is conserved within the mind. However, under special circumstances, the energy associated with an idea can be released. The question of how this occurs is central to psychoanalytic theory. Interestingly, the answer to this question did not first come from Freud but from an associate of his, the Viennese physician Joseph Breuer. In the summer of 1882, in an event of incalculably great importance to the development of psychoanalytic thought, Breuer told Freud about a patient of his named Anna O. Anna O. suffered from a bizarre collection of symptoms whose biological causes could not be determined: partial paralysis, blurred vision, persistent cough, and difficulty conversing in her native language, German, despite being able to speak fluently in her second language, English. Symptoms of this sort are known as hysterical symptoms, that is, symptoms of the disorder hysteria. Since the days of ancient Greek medicine, the term hysteria has been used to refer to a disorder in which people experience physical symptoms (especially involving disturbed motor movement or perceptual experience) that are caused by emotional problems rather than by ordinary physical disease or disability (Owens & Dein, 2006). In contemporary psychology and psychiatry, hysteria is known as conversion disorder, because an emotional problem is transformed, or converted, into a psychological problem involving motor movement or perception. (Conversion disorder is also known as a type of “somatic” disorder because psychological content affects the functioning of the body, or soma.) Anna O. herself stumbled upon a treatment for her hysterical symptoms. She found that she would experience relief from a symptom if she could trace it to a traumatic event in her past. If she managed to become aware of a long‐forgotten event that was the original cause of the symptom, and if she relived the original emotional trauma associated with that event, the symptom would then either be reduced in severity or completely go away. Breuer, and then Freud, referred to this psychological experience as a catharsis. Catharsis refers to a release and freeing of emotions by talking about one's problems. (In colloquial terms, we might say that in catharsis, the person gets an experience “off his chest” or gets it “out of his system.”) By re-experiencing a traumatic event that she had stored away in her memory, Anna O. experienced a cathartic release of the pent‐up mental energy that was causing her symptoms. Freud applied the cathartic method of treating hysterical symptoms to his own patients and reported great success. The notion of catharsis has two implications for understanding the human mind. One is that, to Freud, it further confirms his view that the mind is an energy system. It is the release of the energy associated with long‐forgotten memories that allows for the patient's improvement. The second implication is the following. Before a cathartic experience, Freud's patients appeared totally unaware that their symptoms were caused by the contents of their mind. The traumatic events that originally caused their symptoms seemingly were completely forgotten. Yet the symptoms continued. This means that mental contents of which people were unaware were continuously active within their own minds. The mind, then, appears to have more than one part. It not only has a region of ideas of which people are consciously aware but also a more mysterious, hidden region of ideas that lie outside of awareness. Freud refers to these ideas as unconscious. Freud's notion (which we review in detail below) that our day‐to‐day psychological life is governed by ideas that are unconscious revolutionized people's understanding of human nature. Personality and the Brain Hysteria (Conversion Disorder) When you first learn about hysteria, it probably sounds kind of weird. People experience disruptions in movement or perception—paralysis; blurred vision—that are caused by emotional problems. Could this be true? One reason it might not be true is that people are faking. Maybe they really have emotional problems, but, if nobody is paying attention to their problems, they feign injury or illness to attract more attention from others. When Freud first started studying hysteria, some of his peers in fact thought that hysterics were fakers. How could you find out if hysterical symptoms are real or fake? One possibility is to turn to contemporary evidence on personality and the brain. Researchers (Voon Brezing, Gallea, & Hallet 2010) have used brain‐imaging techniques to study patients with conversion disorder (the contemporary term for hysteria; Owens & Dein, 2006). They studied 16 people diagnosed with the disorder. These individuals exhibited unexplained motor‐movement symptoms such as tremors, tics, or abnormal movements when walking. The researchers compared this group of patients to a group of 16 psychologically and biologically healthy volunteers. Individuals from both groups had their brains scanned using fMRI (see Chapter 2) as they viewed pictures of faces that were displayed on a video screen. The faces displayed varying emotions: happiness, fear, or neutral (i.e., an emotionally neutral facial expression). With this research procedure, the researchers could determine whether brain activity in patients and healthy volunteers differed in response to emotional stimuli. There are, logically, two types of results. One possibility is that the brains of the two groups of people (patients and healthy volunteers) would not differ. The other, of course, is that their brains would differ, and perhaps in a way that revealed a biological basis for the connection hypothesized by Freud: a connection between emotional distress and symptoms of hysteria. And differ they did. Brain activation among conversion disorder patients differed from brain activation in healthy volunteers when emotional faces were displayed (Voon et al., 2010). The nature of the difference is fascinating. Within the brains of patients, there were stronger connections between regions of the brain associated with emotion and those associated with motor movement—exactly what Freud might have expected! As the researchers explain, these connections could generate the symptoms of the disorder. Among conversion disorder patients, emotional arousal would connect to, and disrupt, the normal functioning of those parts of the brain that produce motor movements. Subsequent research results similarly led to the conclusion that, in conversion disorder, regions of the brain involved in emotional response may “hijack” (Voon et al., 2011, p. 2402) the brain's normal systems for controlling movements of the body. This research employed a technology unimaginable in Freud's day. But it revealed exactly the sort of connection between emotion and bodily movement that he had in mind all along. The Individual in Society A second major aspect of Freud's view of the person concerns the relation between the individual and society. Freud's view contrasts with an alternative perspective that had been central to Western culture. The alternative sees people as essentially good. Society, however, corrupts them. People are born innocent but experience a world of temptations and fall from grace. This is the story of the Old Testament: Adam and Eve, created in God's image, are born with inherent innocence and goodness but are corrupted through the temptation of Satan. This view also is prominent is Western philosophy. The great French philosopher Rousseau argued that, prior to the development of contemporary civilization, people were relatively content and experienced primarily feelings of compassion toward others. Civilization, he thought, changed things for the worse by creating competition for resources that, in turn, fostered feelings of jealousy and suspicion. Freud's ideas were radical. In his time, people commonly thought that human development followed a path “from good to evil”: people were born innocent but corrupted by society ‐ a lesson illustrated by the Biblical story of Adam and Eve. But Freud proposed that people were born with sexual and aggressive drives and that the role of society was to constrain these basic instincts. Freud turned this conception on its head. In psychoanalysis, sexual and aggressive drives are an inborn part of human nature. Individuals, functioning according to a pleasure principle, seek the pleasurable gratification of those drives. The role of society is to curb these biologically natural tendencies. A major function of “civilization [is] to restrict sexual life” (Freud, 1930/1949, p. 51). Society teaches the child that biologically natural drives are socially unacceptable, and society maintains social norms and taboos that drive this lesson home. Civilized society, then, does not cause innocent children to “fall from grace.” Children are far from grace when born; they possess erotic desires and aggressive drives that society takes steps to restrict. The response of civilization to these sexual drives of the individual is akin to the response of a politically dominant segment of society trying to maintain its power against a suppressed underclass: “Fear of a revolt by the suppressed elements drives it to stricter precautionary measures” (Freud, 1930/1949, p. 51). Freud's overall theory, then, includes not only a radical view of the mind but also this equally radical rethinking of the relation between the individual and society. Freud's View of the Science of Personality Freud's view of science, within the study of personality, is complex. On the one hand, he was completely committed to a natural science of persons. Physics was his model. Freud was “passionately committed to a scientific model that would mirror physics, the paragon of the natural sciences” (Tauber, 2010, p. 27). This commitment caused Freud to appreciate the relationship between theory and research and the need for theoretical concepts that are sharply defined. Yet, in the conduct of his work, Freud proceeded in ways that you might not expect for someone so thoroughly committed to a scientific worldview. Scientists often construct theories carefully and only after accumulating great bodies of evidence. Freud, however, theorized boldly. He created a theory of enormous breadth, based on a body of evidence—his encounters with his patients—that was relatively narrow. Freud looked forward to scientific advances, in his lifetime and beyond, that might confirm his core insights. A second way in which Freud's work violates one's expectations about a scientific worldview concerns the type of data that he did, and did not, draw upon. Unlike all the other personality theorists you will learn about in this book, Freud neither ran experiments in a laboratory nor created or used standard psychological tests. He placed faith in only one of the three forms of evidence you learned about in Chapter 2: case study evidence. Freud analyzed case studies via the method of free association. This evidence, he felt, was necessary and sufficient for building a scientific theory of personality. The free‐association method pursued by Freud and his followers provided a wealth of information about individual clients. Probably no other method in psychology even approximates the information about the individual that is yielded in a psychoanalytic case study. Yet contemporary scientists generally doubt that the evidence it yields is sufficient for theory building. They particularly question Freud's lack of interest in laboratory research. “Instead of training scientists,” one scholar writes, “Freud ended up training practitioners in a relatively fixed system of ideas” (Sulloway, 1991, p. 275). Only after Freud's lifetime did large numbers of research psychologists investigate the psychoanalytic phenomena through experimental methods; you'll see their findings later in our coverage of psychoanalytic theory. Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory of Personality Chapter 1 explained that personality theories address personality (1) structures, (2) processes, and (3) development. Let's see how Freud's theory addresses these three topics now. Structure Freud's goal in analyzing personality structure was to provide a conceptual model for understanding the human mind. He asked, “What are the basic structures of the mind, and what do they do?” The highly original answers he provided are complex. Freud provided not one but two conceptual models of the mind; the models complemented one another. One model addressed levels of consciousness: Are the contents of mind something that we are aware of (conscious) or not (unconscious)? The other concerns functional systems in the mind: What does a given mental system do? We review these models in turn. CURRENT QUESTIONS What Price the Suppression of Exciting Thoughts? Freud suggested that the price of progress in civilization is increased inhibition of the pleasure principle and a heightened sense of guilt. Does civilization require such an inhibition? What are the costs to the individual of efforts to suppress wishes and inhibit “unbridled gratification” of desires? Research by Daniel Wegner and his associates suggests that the suppression of exciting thoughts may be involved in the production of negative emotional responses and the development of psychological symptoms such as phobias (irrational fears) and obsessions (preoccupation with uncontrollable thoughts). In this research, subjects were told not to think about sex. Trying not to think about sex produced emotional arousal, just as it did in subjects given permission to think about sex. Although arousal decreased after a few minutes in both groups, what followed differed for subjects in the two groups. In the first group, the effort to suppress exciting thoughts led to the intrusion of these thoughts into consciousness and the reintroduction of surges of emotion. This was not found when subjects were given the opportunity to think about sex. The researchers suggest that the suppression of exciting thoughts can promote excitement; that is, the very act of suppression may make these thoughts even more stimulating than when we purposefully dwell on them. In sum, such efforts at suppression may not serve us well either emotionally or psychologically. Source: Petrie Booth, & Pennebaker (1998), Wegner (1992, 1994), Wegner et al. (1990). Levels of Consciousness and the Concept of the Unconscious What's going on in your mind? What thoughts are in your head? We generally answer this question by paying attention to our flow of thinking; for example, right now, you may be thinking about the material in this chapter or about things you would prefer to be doing if you didn't have to read this chapter for class. This flow of thoughts—the mental contents that you are aware of just by paying attention to your own thinking—are called “conscious” thoughts. One of Freud's great insights is that the flow of conscious thoughts is not a complete answer to the question, What's going on in your mind? Far from it. To Freud, conscious thoughts are just a fragment of mental contents—a tip of the iceberg. According to psychoanalytic theory, there are substantial variations in the degree to which we are aware of mental phenomena. Freud proposed three levels of awareness. The conscious level, as noted, includes thoughts of which we are aware at any given moment. A preconscious level contains mental contents of which we easily could become aware if we attended to them. For example, before reading the present sentence, you probably were not thinking about your phone number; it was not part of your consciousness. But you easily could think of your phone number (indeed, you may be doing so right now!); it is a simple matter to attend to information that is in the preconscious and to bring it to consciousness. The third level is the unconscious. Unconscious mental contents are parts of the mind of which we are unaware and cannot become aware except under special circumstances. Why not? According to Freud, it is because they are anxiety provoking. We possess thoughts and desires that are so traumatic or socially unacceptable that consciously thinking about them provokes anxiety. “The reason why such ideas cannot become conscious is that a certain force opposes them” (Freud, 1923, p. 4). Our desire to protect ourselves from the anxiety these thoughts elicit forces them to reside outside of conscious awareness, in the unconscious. Freud was not the first person to recognize that parts of mental life are unconscious. He was, however, the first to explore qualities of unconscious life in scientific detail and to explain a range of everyday behavior in terms of unconscious mental forces. How did he do this? Freud attempted to understand the properties of the unconscious by analyzing a variety of psychological phenomena: slips of the tongue, neuroses, psychoses, works of art, rituals. Of particular importance was his analysis of dreams. Dreams The content of dreams vividly reveals that the mind contains unconscious contents that differ dramatically from conscious thinking. In psychoanalytic theory, dreams have two levels of content: a manifest content, which is the storyline of a dream, and a latent content, which consists of the unconscious ideas, emotions, and drives that are manifested in the dream's storyline. What Freud found in analyzing dreams is that unconscious life can be utterly bizarre. The unconscious is alogical (opposites can stand for the same thing). It disregards time (events of different periods may coexist). It disregards space (size and distance relationships are neglected so that large things fit into small things and distant places are brought together). It deals in a world of symbols, where many ideas may be telescoped into a single word and where a part of any object may stand for many things. Through processes of symbolization, a penis can be represented by a snake or nose; a woman by a church, chapel, or boat; and an engulfing mother by an octopus. An everyday action such as writing may symbolize a sexual act: The pen is the male organ and the paper is the woman who receives the ink (the semen) that flows out in the quick up‐and‐down movements of the pen (See Groddeck, 1923/1961). Freud's theory of dreams had a second component. In addition to positing two levels of dreams—their manifest and latent content—Freud proposed a particular relation between the two levels. The latent content consists of unconscious wishes. The manifest content is a wish fulfillment; the storyline of the dream (the manifest content) symbolically represents the fulfillment of unconscious wishes that it may be impossible to fulfill in everyday waking life. In the dream, the person can satisfy a hostile or sexual wish in a disguised and therefore safe way. A vengeful unconscious desire to kill someone, for example, may be expressed in a dream of a battle in which a particular figure is killed. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud analyzes a large number of dreams in the style of a detective, with each element of the dream treated as a clue to the underlying wish that the dream represents, but in disguised form. The Motivated Unconscious Although Freud believed the unconscious to be a region of mind that stores mental contents, it is critical to recognize that the nature of the storage is very different than, for example, the storage of books in a library. In a library, books are assigned their place based on logical grounds (a library classification system). Once on the shelf, the books just sit there doing nothing (until someone takes one off the shelf). The unconscious is nothing like this. It is not purely logical. And the material does not “just sit there”. The unconscious is highly motivated. Motivational principles come into play in two respects. First, mental contents enter the unconscious for motivated reasons. The unconscious stores ideas that are so traumatic that, if they were to remain in conscious awareness, they would cause psychological pain. These thoughts might include, for example, memories of traumatic life experiences; feelings of envy, hostility, or sexual desire directed toward a forbidden person; or a desire to harm a loved one. In keeping with our basic desire to pursue pleasure and avoid pain, we are motivated to banish such thoughts from awareness. Second, thoughts in the unconscious influence ongoing conscious experience. Indeed, that statement may be the best one‐line summary of Freud's fundamental message to the world. Our ongoing psychological experiences—our conscious thoughts, feelings, and actions—are, according to Freud, fundamentally determined by mental contents of which we are unaware, the contents of the unconscious. Why did we have a strange slip of the tongue? A dream that seems to make no sense? A sudden experience of anxiety when nothing anxiety provoking seemed to be happening? Strong feelings of attraction toward, or repulsion from, someone we just met? Feelings of guilt that seem irrational because we can't figure out anything that we did wrong? All such cases, to Freud, are motivated by unconscious mental forces. Relevant Psychoanalytic Research The unconscious is never observed directly. What evidence, then, supports the idea of an unconscious part of the mind? Let us review the range of evidence that might be considered supportive of the concept of the unconscious, beginning with Freud's clinical observations. Freud realized the importance of the unconscious after observing hypnotic phenomena. As is well known, people under hypnosis can recall things they previously could not. Furthermore, they perform actions under posthypnotic suggestion without consciously knowing that they are behaving in accordance with that suggestion; that is, they fully believe that what they are doing is voluntary and independent of any suggestion by another person. When Freud discarded the technique of hypnosis and continued with his therapeutic work, he found that often patients became aware of memories and wishes previously buried. Frequently, such discoveries were associated with painful emotion. It is indeed a powerful clinical observation to see a patient suddenly experience tremendous anxiety, sob hysterically, or break into a rage as he or she recalls a forgotten event or gets in touch with a forbidden feeling. Thus, it was clinical observations such as these that suggested to Freud that the unconscious includes memories and wishes that not only are not currently part of our consciousness but are “deliberately buried” in our unconscious. What of experimental evidence? In the 1960s and 1970s, experimental research focused on unconscious perception or what was called perception without awareness. Can the person “know” something without knowing that he or she knows it? For example, can the person hear or perceive stimuli, and be influenced by these perceptions, without being aware of these perceptions? Currently, this is known as subliminal perception, or the registration of stimuli at a level below that required for awareness. For example, in some early research, one group of subjects was shown a picture with a duck image shaped by the branches of a tree. Another was shown a similar picture but without the duck image. For both groups, the picture was presented at a rapid speed so that it was barely visible. This was done using a tachistoscope, an apparatus that allows the experimenter to show stimuli to subjects at very fast speeds, so that they cannot be consciously perceived. The subjects then were asked to close their eyes, imagine a nature scene, draw the scene, and label the parts. Would the two groups differ, that is, would subjects in the group “seeing” the picture with the duck image draw different pictures than would subjects in the other group? And, if so, would such a difference be associated with differential recall as to what was perceived? What was found was that more of the subjects viewing the duck picture had significantly more duck‐related images (e.g., “duck,” “water,” “birds,” “feathers”) in their drawings than did subjects in the other group. However, these subjects did not report seeing the duck during the experiment, and the majority even had trouble finding it when they were asked to look for it. In other words, the stimuli that were not consciously perceived still influenced the imagery and thoughts of the subjects (Eagle, Wolitzky, & Klein, 1966). Research by Weinberger (Siegel & Weinberger, 2009; Weinberger & Siegel, 2011) suggests that exposure to feared stimuli, outside of awareness, can be of therapeutic value. In this research, subjects with a fear of spiders were exposed to pictures of spiders below the level of awareness. They then were engaged in a test of how close they would come to being willing to touch an actual tarantula. Relative to subjects exposed to neutral outdoor scenes, again below the level of awareness, those exposed to the pictures of spiders were significantly more able to make approach behaviors toward the feared object. Note that the mere fact that people can perceive and be influenced by stimuli of which they are unaware does not suggest that psychodynamic or motivational forces are involved. Is there evidence that such is or can be the case? Two relevant lines of research can be noted. The first, called perceptual defense, involves a process by which the individual defends against the anxiety that accompanies actual recognition of a threatening stimulus. In a relevant early experiment, subjects were shown two types of words in a tachistoscope: neutral words such as apple, dance, and child and emotionally toned words such as rape, whore, and penis. The words were shown first at very fast speeds and then at progressively slower speeds. A record was made of the point at which the subjects were able to identify each of the words and their sweat gland activity (a measure of tension) in response to each word. These records indicated that subjects took longer to recognize the emotionally toned words than the neutral words and showed signs of emotional response to the emotionally toned words before they were verbally identified (McGinnies, 1949). Despite criticism of such research (e.g., Did subjects identify the emotionally toned words earlier but were reluctant to verbalize them to the experimenter?), there appears to be considerable evidence that people can, outside of awareness, selectively respond to and reject specific emotional stimuli (Erdelyi, 1985). Another line of research has examined a phenomenon called subliminal psychodynamic activation (Silverman, 1976, 1982; Weinberger, 1992). In this work, researchers attempt to stimulate unconscious wishes without making them conscious. This generally is done by presenting material that is related to either threatening or anxiety‐alleviating unconscious wishes and then observing participants' subsequent reactions. The material is shown for extremely brief periods of time, in theory, long enough to activate the unconscious wish but short enough so that it is not recognized consciously. In the case of threatening wishes, the material is expected to stir up unconscious conflict and thus to increase psychological disturbance. In the case of an anxiety‐alleviating wish, the material is expected to diminish unconscious conflict and thus to decrease psychological disturbance. For example, the content “I Am Losing Mommy” might be upsetting to some subjects, whereas the content “Mommy and I Are One” might be reassuring. In a series of studies, Silverman and colleagues produced such subliminal psychodynamic activation effects. In one study, this method was used to present conflict‐intensifying material (“Loving Daddy Is Wrong”) and conflict‐reducing material (“Loving Daddy Is OK”) to female undergraduates. For subjects prone to conflict over sexual urges, the conflict‐intensifying material, presented outside of awareness, was found to disrupt memory for passages presented after the subliminal activation of the conflict. This was not true for the conflict‐reducing material or for subjects not prone to conflict over sexual urges (Geisler, 1986). The key point here is that the content that is upsetting or relieving to various groups of subjects is predicted beforehand on the basis of psychoanalytic theory and that the effects occur only when the stimuli are perceived subliminally or unconsciously. Another interesting use of the subliminal psychodynamic activation model involves the study of eating disorders. In the first study in this area, healthy college‐age women and women with signs of eating disorders were compared in terms of how many crackers they would eat following subliminal presentation of three messages: “Mama Is Leaving Me,” “Mama Is Loaning It,” “Mona Is Loaning It” (Patton, 1992). Based on psychoanalytic theory, the hypothesis tested was that subjects with an eating disorder struggle with feelings of loss and abandonment in relation to nurturance and therefore would seek substitute gratification in the form of eating the crackers once the conflict was activated subliminally through the message “Mama Is Leaving Me.” Indeed, the eating disorder subjects who received the abandonment stimulus (“Mama Is Leaving Me”) below threshold showed significantly more cracker eating than subjects without an eating disorder or subjects with an eating disorder exposed to the abandonment stimulus above threshold. This study was replicated with the additional use of pictorial stimuli—a picture of a sobbing baby and a woman walking away along with the “Mommy Is Leaving Me” message and a picture of a woman walking along with the neutral stimulus, in this case “Mommy Is Walking.” Once more, significantly more crackers were eaten by the women with eating disorders subliminally exposed to the abandonment phrase and picture than by the women with eating disorders exposed to these stimuli above threshold or by the women without an eating disorder exposed to the stimuli above or below threshold (Gerard, Kupper, & Nguyen, 1993). Some view the research on perceptual defense and subliminal psychodynamic activation as conclusive experimental evidence of the importance of psychodynamic, motivational factors in determining what is “deposited into” and “kept in” the unconscious (Weinberger, 1992). However, the experiments have frequently been criticized on methodological grounds, and at times some of the effects have been difficult to replicate or reproduce in other laboratories (Balay & Shevrin, 1988, 1989; Holender, 1986). Current Status of the Concept of the Unconscious The concept of a motivated unconscious is central to psychoanalytic theory. But how is this idea viewed more generally by psychologists in the field? At this point, almost all psychologists, whether psychoanalytic or otherwise, would agree that many mental events occur outside of conscious awareness and that unconscious processes influence what we attend to and how we feel. A leading researcher who is not a follower of psychoanalytic theory concluded that “unconscious influences are ubiquitous. It is clear that people sometimes consciously plan and act. More often than not, however, behavior is influenced by unconscious processes; that is, we act and then, if questioned, make our excuses” (Jacoby, Lindsay, & Toth, 1992, p. 82). So does this mean that most contemporary psychologists are Freudians? Not at all. Research does indicate that much of mental life occurs outside of consciousness. But, as many writers emphasize (Kihlstrom, 2002), this fact does not necessarily support Sigmund Freud's particular conception of the unconscious—a conception based on an energy model of mind and in which two primary forms of unconscious mental energy drive a spectrum of psychological processes. CURRENT APPLICATIONS Motivated Unconscious Processes in Political Judgments When you think about candidates for political office, how do you think? Are your thoughts analytical, rational, and calm—free from emotions and motivations that might color your conclusions? Freud's theory of personality suggests that our thinking is never free from emotional and motivational biases. Just as we psychologically defend against information threatening to ourselves, we may defend against information threatening to our favored candidates. Evidence of this comes from research conducted during a U.S. presidential election (Westen, Blagov, Havenski, Kilts, & Hamann, 2006). Researchers presented to participants information threatening to one of three target persons: (1) a political candidate they favored, (2) the opposing candidate, or (3) a well‐known but neutral figure (e.g., a famous athlete). While they were exposed to, and made judgments about, this information, participants' brain activity was recorded using fMRI. Participants' psychological and biological responses differed depending on whether the threatening information related to their favored candidate. First, consider the psychology. When thinking about information threatening to their favored candidate, participants were defensive. They judged that such information cast a bad light on the opposing candidate but that it did not have the same negative implications for their favored candidate. And what about the biology? When participants were making judgments about information threatening to their preferred candidate, regions of the brain associated with emotional response were particularly active. Emotional reactions, then, appeared to drive defensive information processing. Another study provides evidence not only that motivated reasoning about political candidates can occur but that it can occur unconsciously (Weinberger & Westen, 2008). This research built on earlier evidence that stimuli presented subliminally (outside of awareness) can affect the likability ratings of a target presented afterward in awareness. The research was inspired by an actual 2000 Bush campaign advertisement, which subliminally presented (perhaps accidentally) the word RATS in association with Democrats. Could such a subliminal (unconscious) presentation affect one's political views? In this research, conducted over the Internet, subjects completed an information page and then were presented with one of four subliminal stimuli: RATS, STAR (rats spelled backward), ARAB, or XXXX, followed by a photograph of a young man above perceptual threshold. Next, subjects were asked to evaluate the young man, presented as a political candidate, on a number of characteristics (e.g., honesty, competence, appeal as a candidate). Would the subliminal presentation of the four stimuli lead to different judgments concerning the supposed candidate? First, the investigators checked whether the participants could perceive the subliminal stimulus and threw out the data for the few for whom this was the case. In other words, the results pertained only to those subjects for whom the subliminal stimuli of interest were indeed perceived outside of awareness. Would the four subliminal stimuli affect ratings of the “candidate”? Would the effect be the same? As predicted, subliminal presentation of the RATS stimulus led to a more negative evaluation of the hypothetical candidate than did any of the other stimuli. In other words, there could be unconscious processing of information that affected subsequent judgments. In sum, the two experiments together supported the psychoanalytic view of motivated unconscious processing of information. The Psychoanalytic Unconscious and the Cognitive Unconscious Many research studies of unconscious processes demonstrate nonconscious influences on behavior, as Freud would have predicted. On the other hand, the content of the unconscious material in these studies have little, if anything, to do with the material studied by Freud. The findings from these studies, then, indicate the existence of unconscious influences, but these are unconscious influences that may have little to do with the psychological experiences discussed by Freud. This distinction—between the traumatic sexual and aggressive unconscious content of interest to Freud, and the relatively mundane unconscious content studied by many contemporary researchers in personality and social psychology—suggests that one should distinguish between the psychoanalytic unconscious and what has been called the cognitive unconscious (Kihlstrom, 2008; Pervin, 2003). As we have seen, the psychoanalytic view of the unconscious emphasizes the irrational, illogical nature of unconscious functioning. In addition, analysts presume that the contents of the unconscious mainly involve sexual and aggressive thoughts, feelings, and motives. Finally, analysts emphasize that what is in the unconscious is there for motivated reasons, and these contents exert a motivational influence on daily behavior. In contrast to this perspective, according to the cognitive view of the unconscious, there is no fundamental difference in quality between unconscious and conscious processes. According to this view, unconscious processes can be as intelligent, logical, and rational as conscious processes. Second, the cognitive view of the unconscious emphasizes the variety of contents that may be unconscious, with no special significance associated with sexual and aggressive contents. Third, related to this perspective, the cognitive view of the unconscious does not emphasize motivational factors. According to the cognitive view, cognitions are unconscious because they cannot be processed at the conscious level, because they never reached consciousness, or because they have become overly routinized and automatic. For example, tying one's shoe is so automatic that we no longer are aware of just how we do it. We act similarly with typing and where letters are on the keyboard. Many of our cultural beliefs were learned in such subtle ways that we cannot even spell them out as beliefs. As noted in Chapter 1, we are not even aware of them until we meet members of a different culture. However, such unconscious contents are not kept there for motivated reasons. Nor do they necessarily exert a motivational influence on our behavior, although such an influence is possible. Indeed, there is a growing literature on what are called implicit motives, that is, motives that operate outside of awareness, as distinguished from explicit motives that operate within awareness. It is interesting that measures of conscious, explicit motives and measures of unconscious, implicit motives have little relation to one another and predict different kinds of behavior (Schultheiss, 2008). Finally, there is evidence that subliminal stimuli can affect our thoughts and feelings, but these stimuli need not be of special psychodynamic significance such as a threatening wish (Klinger & Greenwald, 1995; Nash, 1999) (Table 3.1). TABLE 3.1 Comparison of Two Views of the Unconscious: Psychoanalytic and Cognitive Psychoanalytic View Emphasis on illogical, irrational unconscious processes Content emphasis on motives and wishes Emphasis on motivated aspects of unconscious functioning Cognitive View Absence of fundamental difference between conscious and unconscious processes Content emphasis on thoughts Focus on nonmotivated aspects of unconscious functioning Many of these contrasting views are captured in the following statement by J. F. Kihlstrom, a leading proponent of the cognitive view of the unconscious: The psychological unconscious documented by latter‐day psychology is quite different from what Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalytic colleagues had in mind in Vienna. Their unconscious was hot and wet; it seethed with lust and anger; it was hallucinatory, primitive, and irrational. The unconscious of contemporary psychology is kinder and gentler than that and more readily bound and rational, even if it is not entirely cold and dry. Source: Kihlstrom, Barnhardt, and Tataryn (1992, p. 788). Although efforts have been made to integrate the psychoanalytic and cognitive views of the unconscious (Bornstein & Masling, 1998; Epstein, 1994; Westen & Gabbard, 1999), differences remain. In sum, although the importance of unconscious phenomena is recognized and the investigation of such phenomena has become a major area of research, the uniquely psychoanalytic view of the unconscious remains questionable for many, perhaps most, nonpsychoanalytic investigators. Concurrent with these differing views, research on the brain by neuroscientists (Chapter 9) has come upon findings of interest to both psychoanalysts and cognitive scientists. First, there is evidence that events of early childhood may leave an emotional memory that influences later functioning without the person having a conscious memory of the event. This is because a part of the brain, the amygdala, is involved at that point in time but prior to the development of more mature brain structures involved in memory, such as the hippocampus (Nadel, 2005). Beyond this, there is evidence of neural systems that are capable of keeping unwanted memories out of awareness, the kind of motivated forgetting emphasized by psychoanalysts (Anderson et al., 2004). Findings such as these will help to clarify just which parts of the psychoanalytic and cognitive views of the unconscious make most scientific sense. Id, Ego, and Superego In 1923, Freud significantly augmented his theorizing by presenting a second model of mind. He did not abandon his prior distinctions among conscious, preconscious, and unconscious regions of mind, yet he judged that “these distinctions have proved to be inadequate” (Freud, 1923, p. 7). The inadequacy was the following. For Freud, there seemed to exist a psychological agency (the ego, see below) that had two important qualities. On the one hand, it was unitary in its functioning. It did a single type of thing in a coherent, consistent manner. Yet, on the other hand, it varied in its degree of consciousness. Sometimes its functioning involved conscious processes, but sometimes it functioned unconsciously. This clearly was a problem for psychoanalytic theory. Freud needed to capture the unitary quality of this psychological agency, and the distinction among levels of consciousness did not do it. Freud needed another conceptual tool. The one he forged proved to be among the most enduringly important features of psychoanalytic theory: the distinction among the id, the ego, and the superego. Each is a distinct mental system that carries out a particular type of psychological function. The id is the original source of all drive energy—the “great reservoir” (Freud, 1923, p. 20) of mental energies. The psychological functions toward which the id directs these energies are very simple. The id seeks the release of excitation or tension. It carries out a mental function described previously: the reduction of tension in order to return to a quiet internal state. In carrying out this function, the id operates according to the pleasure principle, which is particularly simple to define: The id pursues pleasure and avoids pain. The point is that the id does not do anything else. It does not devise plans and strategies for obtaining pleasure or wait patiently for a particularly pleasing object to appear. It does not concern itself with social norms and rules; “it is totally non‐moral” (Freud, 1923, p. 40). The id seeks immediate release of tension, no matter what. The id cannot tolerate frustration. It is free of inhibitions. It has qualities of a spoiled child: It wants what it wants when it wants it. The id seeks satisfaction in either of two ways: through action or merely through imagining that it has gotten what it wants. To the id, the fantasy of gratification is as good as the actual gratification. In terms of the regions of mind outlined previously by Freud, the id functions entirely outside of conscious awareness. It is “unknown and unconscious” (Freud, 1923, p. 14). In marked contrast to the id is the superego. The functions of the superego involve the moral aspects of social behavior. The superego contains ideals for which we strive, as well as ethical standards that will cause us to feel guilt if we violate them. The superego, then, is an internal representation of the moral rules of the external, social world. It functions to control behavior in accord with these rules, offering rewards (pride, self‐love) for “good” behavior and punishments (guilt, feelings of inferiority) for “bad” behavior. The superego may function on a very primitive level, being relatively incapable of reality testing—that is, of modifying its action depending on circumstances. In such cases, the person is unable to distinguish between thought and action, feeling guilty for thinking something even if it did not lead to action. Furthermore, the individual is bound by black–white, all–none judgments, and by the pursuit of perfection. Excessive use of words such as good, bad, judgment, and trial express a strict superego. But the superego can also be understanding and flexible. For example, people may be able to forgive themselves or someone else if it is clear that something was an accident or done under severe stress. In the course of development, children learn to make such important distinctions and to see things not only in all‐or‐none, but also right‐or‐wrong, black‐or‐white terms. The third psychoanalytic structure is the ego. Whereas the id seeks pleasure and the superego seeks perfection, the ego seeks reality. The ego's function is to express and satisfy the desires of the id in accordance with two things: opportunities and constraints that exist in the real world and the demands of the superego. Whereas the id operates according to the pleasure principle, the ego operates according to the reality principle: Gratification of the instincts is delayed until a time when something in reality enables one to obtain maximum pleasure with the least pain or negative consequences. As a simple example, sexual drives in the id may impel you to make a sexual advance toward someone you find attractive. But the ego may stop you from acting impulsively; the ego would monitor reality, judging whether there is any chance that you might actually succeed and delaying action until it develops a strategy that might bring success. According to the reality principle, the energy of the id may be blocked, diverted, or released gradually, all in accordance with the demands of reality and the superego. Such an operation does not contradict the pleasure principle but, rather, represents a temporary suspension of it. In Freud's psychoanalytic theory, personality structures conflict. The ego tries to satisfy the desired of the id, while also attending to constraints established by the superego. The ego has capabilities that the id does not. The ego can distinguish fantasy from reality. It can tolerate tension and create compromises through rational thought. Unlike the id, it changes over time, with more complex ego functions developing over the course of childhood. Although the ego may sound like the decision‐making “chief executive” of personality, Freud thought that the ego was weaker than the metaphor of an “executive” implies. The ego instead is “like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse” (Freud, 1923, p. 15). It is the horse (the id) who provides all the energy. The rider tries to direct it, but, ultimately, the more powerful beast may end up going wherever it wants. In sum, Freud's ego is logical, rational, and tolerant of tension. In its actions, it must conform to the dictates of three masters: the id, the superego, and the world of reality. The concepts of conscious, unconscious, id, ego, and superego are highly abstract. Freud knew this. He did not intend to imply that there are three gremlin‐like beings running around in your head. Instead, he judged that mental life involves the execution of three distinct psychological functions, and he posited an abstract mental system that executes each of the functions. The nature of these structures becomes clearer and less abstract when one also considers the psychological processes through which their functions are carried out. We turn to these processes now. Process The process aspects of personality theory are, as we have noted, concerned with motivational dynamics. Freud's view of mental (psychic) energy is thoroughly biological. In psychoanalytic theory, the source of all psychic energy lies in states of excitation within the body. These states seek expression and tension reduction. These states are called instincts, or drives. Though both words have been used when Freud's writing has been translated into English, the term drive captures Freud's idea better than does the term instinct. The word instinct commonly is used to describe a fixed pattern of action (e.g., a bird instinctually builds a nest). In contrast, a drive is a source of energy that can motivate any of a variety of specific actions depending on the opportunities and constraints that are presented in a given environment. This idea, of drives, is what Freud had in mind when discussing personality processes. Within this framework, two questions naturally arise: (1) How many basic human instinctual drives are there, and what are they? (2) What happens to the energy associated with these drives? In other words, how is it expressed in everyday experience and action? Freud answers the first question by presenting a theory of life and death instincts. He answers the second by analyzing the dynamics of functioning and mechanisms of defense. Life and Death Instincts Daily life consists of a wide array of activities: work, time with friends, education, time with romantic partners, sports, arts, music, and so forth. Since most people engage in each of these activities, one might suppose that there is a basic human instinct for each one (an instinct to work, to have friends, to become educated, etc.). But this sort of “multi‐instinct model” is not the sort of theory that Freud pursued. Instead, throughout his career, Freud tried to explain the diversity of human activity in terms of a very small number of instincts. He tried to achieve theoretical parsimony (as we discussed in Chapter 1), with the diverse complexities of human behavior being understood through a relatively simple theoretical formulation. Freud's thoughts about the exact nature of mental drives changed during his career. In an earlier view, he proposed ego instincts, relating to tendencies toward self‐preservation, and sexual instincts, relating to tendencies toward preservation of the species. In a later view—which stands as the final, classic psychoanalytic model—there were still two instincts, but they were the life instinct and death instinct. The life instinct includes drives associated previously with both the earlier ego and sexual instincts; in other words, the life instinct impels people toward the preservation and reproduction of the organism. Freud gave a name to the energy of the life instinct: libido. The death instinct is the very opposite of the life instinct. It involves the aim of the organism to die or return to an inorganic state. At an intuitive level, it may immediately strike you that the notion of a “death instinct” is unusual, if not implausible. Why would people have an instinct to die? Such intuitions would match those of many psychologists, including many psychoanalysts; the death instinct remains one of the most controversial and least accepted parts of psychoanalytic theory. Yet the idea of a death instinct was consistent with some ideas of 19th‐century biology with which Freud was familiar (Sulloway, 1979); it reflected Freud's idea that a basic tendency of the organism is to seek a state of calmness. It also is consistent with observations of the human condition. Sadly, many people escape psychological problems through suicide, which can be understood as a manifestation of a drive to die. Furthermore, Freud felt that the death instinct was often turned away from oneself and directed toward others in acts of aggression. This occurs so commonly that some analysts refer to the instinct as an aggressive instinct. This model of motivation processes is highly integrated with Freud's model of psychoanalytic structures. The sexual and aggressive drives are parts of one of the psychoanalytic structures, namely, the id. The id, as you will recall, is the first of the personality structures, that is, the one with which we are born. An implication, then, is that sexual and aggressive drives are part of the basic human nature with which we are born. We do not have to learn to have sexual and aggressive drives; we are born with them. To Freud, our psychological lives are essentially powered by these two basic drives. The Dynamics of Functioning If one posits only two instinctual drives, one faces an intellectual puzzle: How can one account for the diversity of motivated human activities, many of which do not seem obviously related to sex or aggression? Freud's creative solution to this problem was to posit that a given instinctual drive could be expressed in a wide variety of ways. Mechanisms of the mind, can redirect the energy to diverse activities. In the dynamics of functioning, what exactly can happen to one's instincts? They can, at least temporarily, be blocked from expression, expressed in a modified way, or expressed without modification. For example, affection may be a modified expression of the sexual instinct, and sarcasm a modified expression of the aggressive instinct. It is also possible for the object of gratification of the instinct to be changed or displaced from the original object to another object. Thus, the love of one's mother may be displaced to the wife, children, or dog. Each instinct may be transformed or modified, and the instincts can combine with one another. Football, for example, can gratify both sexual and aggressive instincts; in surgery there can be the fusion of love and destruction. It should already be clear how psychoanalytic theory is able to account for so much behavior on the basis of only two instincts. It is the fluid, mobile, changing qualities of the instincts and their many alternative kinds of gratification that allow such variability in behavior. In essence, the same instinct can be gratified in a number of ways, and the same behavior can have different causes in different people. Virtually every process in psychoanalytic theory can be described in terms of the expenditure of energy in an object or in terms of a force inhibiting the expenditure of energy, that is, inhibiting gratification of an instinct. Because inhibition involves an expenditure of energy, people who direct much of their efforts toward it end up feeling tired and bored. The interplay between expression and inhibition of instincts forms the foundation of the dynamic aspects of psychoanalytic theory. The key to this theory is the concept of anxiety. In psychoanalytic theory, anxiety is a painful emotional experience representing a threat or danger to the person. In a state of “free‐floating” anxiety, individuals are unable to relate their state of tension to a specific danger; in contrast, in a state of fear, the source of threat is known. According to the theory, anxiety represents a painful emotion that acts as a signal of impending danger to the ego; that is, anxiety, an ego function, alerts the ego to danger so that it can act. The psychoanalytic theory of anxiety states that at some point, the person experiences a trauma, an incident of harm or injury. Anxiety represents a repetition of the earlier traumatic experience but in miniature form. Anxiety in the present, then, is related to an earlier danger. For example, a child may be severely punished for some sexual or aggressive act. Later in life, this person may experience anxiety in association with the inclination to perform the same sexual or aggressive act. The earlier punishment (trauma) may or may not be remembered. In structural terms, what is suggested is that anxiety develops out of a conflict between the push of the id instincts and the threat of punishment by the superego. That is, it is as if the id says, “I want it,” the superego says, “How terrible,” and the ego says, “I'm afraid.” Anxiety, Mechanisms of Defense, and Contemporary Research on Defensive Processes Anxiety is such a painful state that we are incapable of tolerating it for very long. How are we to deal with such a state? If, as Freud suggests, our minds harbor sexual and aggressive instincts that are socially unacceptable, then how do we manage not to be anxious all the time? Freud's answer to this question constitutes one of the most enduring aspects of his theory of personality. He proposed that we mentally defend ourselves against anxiety‐provoking thoughts. People develop defense mechanisms against anxiety. We develop ways to distort reality and exclude feelings from awareness so that we do not feel anxious. These defense mechanisms are functions carried out by the ego; they are a strategic effort by the ego to cope with the socially unacceptable impulses of the id. Some things are too terrible to be true. Source: Bob Dylan. Denial Freud distinguished among a number of distinct defense mechanisms. Some of them are relatively simple, or psychologically primitive, whereas others are more complex. A particularly simple defense mechanism is denial. People may, in their conscious thoughts, deny the existence of a traumatic or otherwise socially unacceptable fact; the fact is so “terrible” that they deny that it is “true,” as Dylan's lyric suggests. People may begin using the defense mechanism of denial in childhood. There may be denial of reality, as in a boy, who, in fantasy, denies a lack of power, or denial of an internal impulse, as when an irate person protests, “I do not feel angry.” The saying that someone “doth protest too much” specifically references this defense. Denial of reality is commonly seen where people attempt to avoid recognizing the extent of a threat. The expression “Oh, no!” upon hearing of the death of a close friend represents the reflex action of denial. Children have been known to deny the death of a loved animal and long afterward to behave as if it were still alive. When Edwin Meese, former attorney general in the Reagan administration, was asked how much he owed in legal bills, he replied, “I really don't know. It scares me to look at it, so I haven't looked at it.” The mother of former U.S. President Bill Clinton was quoted as saying, “When bad things happen, I brainwash myself to put them out of my mind. Inside my head, I construct an airtight box. I keep inside it what I want to think about and everything else stays behind the walls. Inside is white, outside is black. The only gray I trust is the streak in my hair.” A friend of one of the authors organizes her mail into three “in boxes” on her desk that are labeled “Unimportant Stuff,” “Important Stuff,” and “Stuff I'm Afraid to Look At.” Initially, such avoidance may be conscious, but later it becomes automatic and unconscious, so that the person is not even aware of “not looking.” Denial of reality is also evident when people say or assume that “it can't happen to me” in spite of clear evidence of impending doom. This defense was seen in Jews who were victims of the Nazis. A book (Steiner, 1966) about the Nazi concentration camp Treblinka describes how the population acted as if death did not exist, in spite of clear evidence to the contrary. The extermination of a whole people was so unimaginable that individuals could not accept it. They preferred to accept lies rather than to bear the terrible trauma of the truth. Is denial necessarily a bad thing? Should we always avoid self‐deception? Psychoanalysts generally assume that although the mechanisms of defense can be useful in reducing anxiety, they also are maladaptive by turning the person away from reality. Thus, psychoanalysts view “reality orientation” as fundamental to emotional health and doubt that distortions about oneself and others can have value for adaptive functions (Colvin & Block, 1994; Robins & John, 1996). Yet, some psychologists suggest that positive illusions and self‐deceptions can be adaptive. Positive illusions about one's self, about one's ability to control events, and about the future can be good, perhaps essential, for mental health (Taylor & Brown, 1994; Taylor et al., 2000). The answer to these differing views appears to depend on the extent of distortion, how pervasive it is, and the circumstances under which it occurs. For example, it may be helpful to have positive illusions about oneself as long as they are not too extreme. And denial and self‐deception may provide temporary relief from emotional trauma and help the person avoid becoming overwhelmed by anxiety or depression. Denial may be adaptive where action is impossible, as when a person is in a situation that cannot be altered (e.g., a fatal illness) but is maladaptive when it prevents one from taking constructive action to alter a situation that can be changed. Projection Another relatively primitive defense mechanism is projection. In projection, what is internal and unacceptable is projected out and seen as external. People defend against the recognition of their own negative qualities by projecting them onto others. For example, rather than recognize hostility in the self, an individual sees others as being hostile. Much laboratory research has been devoted to the study of projection. At first, researchers found it difficult to demonstrate the phenomenon in the lab (Halpern, 1977; Holmes, 1981). However, in more recent years, investigators have documented that, in fact, people tend to project their undesired psychological qualities onto others. Newman and colleagues have studied projection by analyzing specific thinking processes that might lead people to project their undesired qualities onto others (Newman, Duff, & Baumeister, 1997). The basic idea is that people tend to dwell on those features of themselves that they do not like. Whenever one dwells on a topic, the topic comes to mind easily—in the language of this research, the topic becomes “chronically accessible” (Higgins & King, 1981). So if you think that you are lazy, and you dwell on this feature of self, then the concept of laziness might come to mind relatively quickly and frequently for you. This reasoning puts one just one step away from the phenomenon of projection. This final step is that, whenever one interprets the actions of other people, one does so by using concepts in one's own mind. If one interprets others' actions using ideas that also are negative features of one's own self‐concept, then one ends up projecting these negative features onto others. To return to our example, if “laziness” comes to mind quickly for you, and you see a person sitting on a beach in the middle of a workday, you might conclude that this is a lazy person. Someone else, in contrast, might merely conclude that the person is relaxing, rather than being lazy. But note that central to the psychoanalytic view of projection is that the key personality feature is both projected onto others and denied as part of the self; that is, it is the other person that is lazy, not me. Experimental findings support this interpretation of projection (Newman et al., 1997). In this research, participants were exposed to bogus negative feedback on two personality attributes. They then were asked to try to suppress thoughts about one of the two attributes while they discussed the other one; such thought‐suppression instructions often backfire, causing people subsequently to about the personal quality that they were trying to suppress. Later in the experimental session, participants viewed a videotape that depicted a somewhat anxious‐looking individual. Participants were asked to rate this person on a series of personality trait dimensions. Findings revealed that participants projected their suppressed negative quality onto others. In other words, they judged that the other person possessed the negative personality attribute that they themselves had been trying not to think about earlier in the experiment. Although these findings fit with psychoanalytic thought, the authors rely on explanatory principles that are based on principles of social cognitive psychology (discussed in Chapters 12 and 13) rather than on principles of psychoanalysis. Isolation, Reaction Formation, and Sublimation In addition to denial and projection, another way to deal with anxiety and threat is to isolate events in memory or to isolate emotion from the content of a memory or impulse. In isolation, the impulse, thought, or act is not denied access to consciousness, but it is denied the normal accompanying emotion. For example, a woman may experience the thought or fantasy of strangling her child without any associated feelings of anger. The result of using the mechanism of isolation is intellectualization, an emphasis on thought over emotion and feeling, and the development of logic‐tight compartments. In such cases, the feelings that do exist may be split, as in the case where a man separates women into two categories—one with whom there is love but no sex and the other with whom there is sex but no love (Madonna–whore complex). People who use the defense mechanism of isolation also often use the mechanism of undoing. Here, the individual magically undoes one act or wish with another. “It is a kind of negative magic in which the individual's second act abrogates or nullifies the first, in such a manner that it is as though neither had taken place, whereas in reality both have done so” (A. Freud, 1936, p. 33). This mechanism is seen in compulsions in which the person has an irresistible impulse to perform some act (e.g., the person undoes a suicide or homicide fantasy by compulsively turning off the gas jets at home), in religious rituals, and in children's sayings such as “Don't step on the crack or you'll break your mother's back.” In reaction formation, the individual defends against expression of an unacceptable impulse by only recognizing and expressing its opposite. This defense is evident in socially desirable behavior that is rigid, exaggerated, and inappropriate. The person who uses reaction formation cannot admit to other feelings, such as overprotective mothers who cannot allow any conscious hostility toward their children. Reaction formation is most clearly observable when the defense breaks down, as when the man who “wouldn't hurt a fly” goes on a killing rampage. A defense mechanism that you may recognize in yourself is rationalization. Rationalization is a more complex, mature defense mechanism than a process such as denial in that in rationalization people do not simply deny that a thought or action occurred. In rationalization, people recognize the existence of an action but distort its underlying motive. Behavior is reinterpreted so that it appears reasonable and acceptable. The ego, in other words, constructs a rational motive to explain an unacceptable action that is actually caused by the irrational impulses of the id. Particularly interesting is that with rationalization the individual can express the dangerous impulse, seemingly without disapproval by the superego. Some of the greatest atrocities of humankind have been committed in the name of love. Through the defense of rationalization, we can be hostile while professing love, immoral in the pursuit of morality. Of course, to be truly effective as a defense mechanism, one must not be aware of this. Thus, you might use rationalization but be unaware of doing so. One might even say “Oh, I'm just rationalizing.” but not really mean it. According to the psychologist Dan Ariely (2012), most people lie on occasion or at some point commit a dishonest act. Yet, almost all consider themselves to be honest, moral individuals. How can this be? According to Ariely, people rationalize such acts through rationalizations such as “Everyone does it.”, “It was just a white lie.”, or “It was just a minor act—hardly constituting theft or cheating.” Another device used to express an impulse of the id in a manner that is free of anxiety is sublimation. In this relatively complex defense mechanism, the original object of gratification is replaced by a higher cultural goal that is far removed from a direct expression of the instinct. Whereas the other defense mechanisms meet the instincts head on and, by and large, prevent discharge, in sublimation, the instinct is turned into a new and useful channel. In contrast to the other defense mechanisms, here, the ego does not have to maintain a constant energy output to prevent discharge. Freud interpreted da Vinci's Madonna as a sublimation of his longing for his mother. Becoming a surgeon, butcher, or boxer can represent sublimations, to a greater or lesser degree, of aggressive impulses. Being a psychiatrist can represent a sublimation of ‘Peeping Tom’ tendencies. In all, Freud felt that the essence of civilization is contained in a person's ability to sublimate sexual and aggressive energies. Michelangelo worked on the Pietá for almost two years. Where did he get the energy? Freudian theory would suggest that, through the defense mechanism of sublimation, Michelangelo transformed sexual energy that was originally directed toward his mother into the artistic energy required to sculpt Jesus and Mary. Repression Finally, we come to the major defense mechanism of psychoanalytic theory: repression. In repression, a thought, idea, or wish is dismissed from consciousness. It is so traumatic and threatening to the self that it is buried in the unconscious, stored away in the depths of the mind. Repression is viewed as playing a part in all the other defense mechanisms and, like these other defenses, requires a constant expenditure of energy to keep that which is dangerous outside of consciousness. Freud first recognized the defense mechanism of repression in his therapeutic work. After many weeks or months of therapy, patients would remember traumatic events from their past (and experience a catharsis). Prior to recalling the event, the idea of the event, of course, was in the person's mind. But it was outside of the person's conscious awareness. Freud reasoned that the person first experienced the event consciously but that the experience was so traumatic that the individual repressed it. To Freud, these therapeutic experiences were sufficient evidence to establish the reality of repression. However, other investigators over the years have studied repression experimentally. An early study was done by Rosenzweig (1941). He varied the level of personal involvement in a task and then studied research participants' (in this case, college undergraduates) recall of their success or failure on the activity. When participants were personally involved with the experiment, they recalled a larger proportion of tasks that they had been able to complete successfully than tasks they had been unable to complete; they presumably repressed the experiences of failure. When the students did not feel threatened, they remembered more of the uncompleted tasks. In similar research conducted years later, women high in sex guilt and women low in sex guilt were exposed to an erotic videotape and asked to report their level of sexual arousal. At the same time, their level of physiological response was recorded. Women high in sex guilt were found to report less arousal than those low in sex guilt but to show greater physiological arousal. Presumably, the guilt associated with sexual arousal led to repression or blocking of awareness of the physiological arousal (Morokoff, 1985). Research supports the view that some individuals may be characterized as having a repressive style (Weinberger, 1990). They rarely report that they experience anxiety or other negative emotions; outwardly, they appear calm. However, their calmness appears to be bought at a price. Repressors react more to stress than do nonrepressors and are more prone to develop a variety of illnesses (Contrada, Czarnecki, & Pan, 1997; Derakshan & Eysenck, 1997). The cheerfulness of repressors sometimes masks high blood pressure and high pulse rates, which puts people at risk for illnesses such as heart disease and cancer (Denollet, Martens, Nyklicek, Conraads, & de Gelder, 2008). This fits with other evidence suggesting that a lack of emotional expressiveness is associated with increased risk of illness (Cox & MacKay, 1982; Levy, 1991; Temoshok, 1985, 1991). In sum, contemporary research has firmly established that people are sometimes motivated to banish from their conscious experience thoughts that are threatening or painful. As Freud would have expected, some people who consciously report that they are free from psychological distress harbor anxiety‐related thoughts and emotions of which they appear to be unaware. On the other hand, it is not clear that contemporary experimental research supports the exact conception of defenses put forth by Freud. In particular, it is hard to demonstrate in laboratory experiments that a defensive function is being served, that is, that the person is being protected from anxiety by the process being studied. Thus, for example, whereas practicing psychoanalysts find the evidence in support of the concept of repression compelling, experimental researchers find the evidence to be inconclusive. Growth and Development In Chapter 1, we noted that the study of personality development encompasses two distinct challenges: identifying (1) general patterns that characterize the development of most or all people and (2) factors that contribute to the development of differences among people. In his psychoanalytic theory, Freud combined these two concerns in a manner that was extraordinarily original. He proposed that all persons develop through a series of stages. He then proposed that events that occur at these stages are responsible for personality styles and differences among individuals in personality styles, which are evident throughout life. Early life experiences, and the particular stage at which these experiences occur, are said to have a permanent effect on personality; indeed, a strong psychoanalytic position would suggest that the most significant aspects of later personality are entirely determined by the end of the first five years of life. The Development of the Instincts and Stages of Development By now, you should be able to figure out the primary question that Freud would ask in studying development. If one embraces an energy model of mind in which behavior is in the service of instinctual drives, then major questions involve the development of instincts: What is the nature of the instincts that the individual experiences, and must cope with, during the course of development?

Once again, Freud's answer is thoroughly biological. He theorized, first, that instinctual drives tend to center on particular regions of the body, which he called  erogenous zones . He then suggested that the particular erogenous zone that is most important to biological gratification at a given point in time changes systematically across the course of development. At different points in development, in other words, one versus another part of the body is the primary focus of gratification. The resulting set of ideas is a theory of psychosexual stages of development. Development occurs in a series of distinct steps, or stages. And each stage is characterized by a bodily source of gratification. Freud's use of the word sexual in the phrase “psychosexual stages” corresponds more closely to our word sensual; each stage, then, is characterized by a distinct region of sensual gratification. Within that basic framework, the question is the number, and nature, of the stages.

Freud proposed that the first stage of development is one in which sensual gratification centers on the mouth. He called this the  oral stage  of development. Early oral gratification occurs in feeding, thumb‐sucking, and other mouth movements characteristic of infants. In adult life, traces of orality are seen in chewing gum, eating, smoking, and kissing. In the early oral stage, the child is passive and receptive. In the late oral stage, with the development of teeth, there can be a fusion of sexual and aggressive pleasures. In children, such a fusion of instinctual gratification is seen in the eating of animal crackers. In later life, we see traces of orality in various spheres. For example, academic pursuits can have oral associations within the unconscious: One is given “food for thought,” asked to “incorporate” material in reading, and told to “regurgitate” what has been learned on exams.

CURRENT QUESTIONS

Recovered Memories or False Memories?

Psychoanalysts suggest that through the defense mechanism of repression, people bury memories of traumatic experiences of childhood in the unconscious. They also suggest that under some conditions, such as psychotherapy, individuals can recall their forgotten experiences. On the other hand, others question the accuracy of adult recall of childhood experiences. The issue has reached headline proportions as individuals report recalling experiences of childhood sexual abuse and initiate lawsuits against individuals now recalled to be the perpetrators of the abuse. Although some professionals are convinced of the authenticity of these memories of sexual abuse, and suggest that a disservice is done to the person when we do not treat them as real, others question their authenticity and refer to them as part of a “false memory syndrome.” While some view the recovery of these memories as beneficial to those who previously repressed the trauma of abuse, others suggest that the “memories” are induced by the probing questions of therapists convinced that such abuse has taken place.

An article in a professional psychological journal asks: “What scientific basis is there for the authenticity of memories of sexual abuse that were ‘repressed’ but then ‘remembered’ with the help of a therapist? How are scientists, jurists, and distressed individuals themselves to distinguish true memories from false ones?” Answering these questions is difficult. On the one hand, we know that people can forget events that subsequently are remembered. This is obvious from one's own experiences in remembering events from one's past. Yet there is an alternative possibility that is intriguing—indeed, somewhat disturbing. It is that we might sometimes “recall” events that never occurred in the first place. We might sometimes have “false memories.”

Research documents that it is possible for people to experience false memories, that is, recollections of events that did not, in fact, occur. For example, Mazzoni and Memon ( 2003 ) conducted a study involving three experimental sessions that were each separated in time by one week. In the first session, adult research participants completed a survey in which they reported the likelihood that they had experienced each of a large series of life events in their childhood. In session two, the experimenters conducted an experimental manipulation involving two of the events from the survey. The two events were minor medical procedures: a tooth extraction and the removal of a skin sample from one's small finger. For one of the events, participants merely were exposed to a paragraph of information about the type of event. For the other event, participants were asked to imagine the event occurring. In the third session, participants completed the survey again and reported any memories they had of the two target events. The hypothesis was that imagining the events (i.e., forming a mental imagine of the event occurring in one's life years earlier) could cause people to believe that the event, in fact, had occurred.

This is what happened. Whether they had imagined the tooth extraction or the removal of a skin sample, participants were more likely to believe that the event had occurred and to imagine some aspects of the event if they merely had been asked to imagine it a week earlier. A critical aspect of this particular study is that one of the events, the skin sample removal, surely had never occurred to the participants; medical records in the area that the study was conducted indicated that physicians never employed the procedure. Thus, the findings showed that participants ended up remembering information (e.g., aspects of the physical setting, the medical personnel involved) about an event that never had occurred.

This sort of study does not resolve the question of whether the memories of a particular client in therapy are accurate or false. In individual cases, this issue surely will remain controversial. Psychologists have no reliable method of distinguishing between “recovered memories” and “false memories” in each individual case. However, the research does demonstrate that it is at least possible for people to “remember” events that demonstrably had not occurred.

Source: Loftus ( 1997 ), Mazzoni and Memon ( 2003 ), Williams ( 1994 ).

In the second stage of development, the  anal stage  (ages two and three), there is excitation in the anus and in the movement of feces through the anal passageway. The expulsion of the feces is believed to bring relief from tension and pleasure in the stimulation of the mucous membranes in that region. The pleasure related to this erogenous zone involves the organism in conflict. There is conflict between elimination and retention, between the pleasure in release and the pleasure in retention, and between the wish for pleasure in evacuation and the demands of the external world for delay. This last‐named conflict represents the first crucial conflict between the individual and society. Here, the environment requires the child to violate the pleasure principle or be punished. The child may retaliate against such demands by intentional soiling. Psychologically, the child may associate having bowel movements with losing something important, which leads to depression, or may associate bowel movements with giving a prize or gift to others, which may create feelings of power and control. In the phallic stage (ages four and five), excitation and tension are focused on the genitals. The biological differentiation between the sexes leads to psychological differentiation. The male child develops erections, and the new excitations in this area lead to increased interest in the genitals and the realization that the female lacks the penis. This leads to the fear that he may lose his penis—castration anxiety. The father becomes a rival for the affections of the mother, as suggested in the song “I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl That Married Dear Old Dad.” The boy's hostility toward the father is projected onto the father, with the consequent fear of retaliation. This leads to what is known as the Oedipus complex. According to the Oedipus complex, every boy is fated in fantasy to kill his father and marry his mother. The complex can be heightened by actual seductiveness on the part of the mother. Castration anxiety can be heightened by actual threats from the father to cut off the penis. These threats occur in a surprising number of cases. An interesting experimental illustration of the Oedipus complex is found in the subliminal psychodynamic activation studies we reviewed previously. As you read, in this research, stimuli are presented to subjects subliminally in a tachistoscope. Particular stimuli presumably activate unconscious conflicts. In one study, researchers included stimuli designed to activate Oedipal conflicts. They then examined the effects of Oedipal activation on males' performance in a competitive situation (Silverman, Ross, Adler, & Lustig, 1978). The stimuli chosen to intensify versus reduce Oedipal conflict were “Beating Dad Is Wrong” and “Beating Dad Is OK.” In addition, neutral stimuli (e.g., “People Are Walking”) were presented. These stimuli were presented tachistoscopically after participants engaged in a dart‐throwing competition. Participants were tested again for dart‐throwing performance following subliminal exposure to each type of stimulus. As expected, the two Oedipal stimuli had clear‐cut effects and in different directions: The “Beating Dad Is OK” stimulus produced higher scores than the neutral stimulus, whereas the “Beating Dad Is Wrong” stimulus produced lower scores. It is important to note that these results were not obtained when the stimuli were presented above threshold. The psychodynamic activation effects appear to operate at the unconscious level rather than at the conscious level. In addition, since these subliminal effects are not always found in psychological research, it is noteworthy that the authors emphasized that the experimental stimuli used and the responses measured must be relevant to the motivational state of the research participants. To ensure this in their work, participants were first primed with picture and story material containing Oedipal content. Developmental processes during the phallic stage differ for females versus males. According to Freud, females realize they lack a penis and blame the mother, the original love object. In developing penis envy, the female child chooses the father as the love object and imagines that the lost organ will be restored by having a child by the father.1 Whereas the Oedipus complex is abandoned in the boy because of castration anxiety, in the female, it is started because of penis envy. As with the male, conflict during this period is in some cases accentuated by the father's seductiveness toward the female child. And, as with the male, the female child resolves the conflict by keeping the father as a love object but gaining him through identification with the mother. Do children actually display Oedipal behaviors, or are these all distorted memories of adults, in particular of patients in psychoanalytic treatment? A study investigated this question through the use of parents' reports of parent–child interactions, as well as through the analysis of children's responses to stories involving parent–child interaction. It was found that at around age four, children show increased preference for the parent of the opposite sex and an increased antagonism toward the parent of the same sex. These behaviors diminish at around the age of five or six. What is interesting in this study is that although the researchers came from a differing theoretical orientation, they concluded that the reported Oedipal behaviors coincided with the psychoanalytic view of Oedipal relations between mothers and sons and between fathers and daughters (Watson & Getz, 1990). As part of the resolution of the Oedipus complex, the child identifies with the parent of the same sex. The child now gains the parent of the opposite sex through identification with, rather than defeat of, the parent of the same sex. The development of an identification with the parent of the same sex is a critical issue during the phallic stage and, more generally, is a critical concept in developmental psychology. In identification, individuals take on themselves the qualities of another person and integrate them into their functioning. In identifying with their parents, children assume many of the same values and morals. It is in this sense that the superego has been called the heir to the resolution of the Oedipus complex. According to Freud, all major aspects of our personality character develop during the oral, anal, and phallic stages of development. After the phallic stage, the child enters a latency stage during which, according to Freud, the child experiences a decrease in sexual urges and interest. The onset of puberty, with the reawakening of the sexual urges and Oedipal feelings, marks the beginning of the genital stage. Dependency feelings and Oedipal strivings that were not fully resolved during the pregenital stages of development now come back to rear their ugly heads. The turmoil of adolescence is partly attributable to these factors. According to Freud, successful progression through the stages of development leads to the psychologically healthy person—one who can love and work. Identification: In Freud's analysis of psychosexual development, the child eventually identifies with the same‐sex parent, taking on that parent's interests and values. Erikson's Psychosocial Stages of Development Freud devoted little attention to development after the early years of life. All “the action” in personality development, Freud thought, occurred by the end of the phallic stage. Other psychologists who were deeply sympathetic to Freud's overall model of personality thought he had underestimated the importance of personality development later in life. They tried, then, to understand later life development within a psychodynamic perspective. The most important of these theorists was Erik Erikson (1902–1994). Erikson believed that development was not merely psychosexual but also psychosocial. Stages of development include social concerns (Table 3.2). To Erikson, the first stage of personality development is significant not just because of the localization of pleasure in the mouth but because in the feeding situation a relationship of trust or mistrust is developed between the infant and the mother. Similarly, the anal stage is significant not only for the change in the nature of the major erogenous zone but also because toilet training is a significant social situation in which the child may develop a sense of autonomy or succumb to shame and self‐doubt. In the phallic stage, the child must struggle with the issue of taking pleasure in, as opposed to feeling guilty about, being assertive, competitive, and successful.

TABLE 3.2 Erikson's Eight Psychosocial Stages of Development and Their Implications for Personality Psychosocial Stage Age Positive Outcomes Negative Outcomes Basic trust vs. mistrust 1 year Feelings of inner goodness, trust in oneself and others, optimism Sense of badness, mistrust of self and others, pessimism Autonomy vs. shame and doubt 2–3 years Exercise of will, self‐control, able to make choices Rigid, excessive conscience, doubtful, self‐conscious shame Initiative vs. guilt 4–5 years Pleasure in accomplishments, activity, direction, and purpose Guilt over goals contemplated and achievements initiated Industry vs. inferiority Latency Able to be absorbed in productive work, pride in completed product Sense of inadequacy and inferiority, unable to complete work Identity vs. role diffusion Adolescence Confidence of inner sameness and continuity, promise of a career Ill at ease in roles, no set standards, sense of artificiality Intimacy vs. isolation Early adulthood Mutuality, sharing of thoughts, work, feelings Avoidance of intimacy, superficial relations Generativity vs. stagnation Adulthood Ability to lose oneself in work and relationships Loss of interest in work, impoverished relations Integrity vs. despair Later years Sense of order and meaning, content with self and one's accomplishments Fear of death, bitter about life, and what one got from it or what did not happen For Erikson (1950), the latency and genital stages are periods when the individual develops a sense of industry and success or a sense of inferiority and, perhaps most important of all, a sense of identity or a sense of role diffusion. The crucial task of adolescence, according to Erikson, is the establishment of a sense of ego identity, an accrued confidence that the way one views oneself has a continuity with one's past and is matched by the perceptions of others. In contrast to people who develop a sense of identity, people with role diffusion experience the feeling of not really knowing who they are, of not knowing whether what they think they are matches what others think of them, and of not knowing how they have developed in this way or where they are heading in the future. During late adolescence and the college years, this struggle with a sense of identity may lead to joining a variety of groups and to considerable anguish about the choice of a career. If these issues are not resolved during this time, the individual is, in later life, filled with a sense of despair: Life is too short, and it is too late to start all over again. Erik H. Erikson. In his research on identity formation, Marcia (1994) has identified four identity statuses. In identity achievement, the individual has established a sense of identity following exploration. Such individuals function at a high psychological level, being capable of independent thought, intimacy in interpersonal relations, complex moral reasoning, and resistance to group demands for conformity or group manipulation of their sense of self‐esteem. In identity moratorium, the individual is in the midst of an identity crisis. Such individuals are capable of high levels of psychological functioning, but are still struggling to answer the question of who they are, and thus are less prepared than the identity achievers to make commitments. In identity foreclosure, the individual is committed to an identity without having gone through a process of exploration. Such individuals tend to be rigid, highly responsive to group demands for conformity, and sensitive to manipulation of their self‐esteem. In identity diffusion, the individual lacks any strong sense of identity or commitment. Such individuals are very vulnerable to blows to their self‐esteem, often are disorganized in their thinking, and have problems with intimacy. In sum, Marcia suggests that individuals differ in how they go about handling the process of identity formation, with such differences being reflected in their sense of self, thought processes, and interpersonal relations. Although not necessarily establishing fixed patterns for later life, how the process of identity formation is handled is seen as having important implications for later personality development. Continuing with his description of the later stages of life and the accompanying psychological issues, Erikson suggests that some people develop a sense of intimacy, an acceptance of life's successes and disappointments, and a sense of continuity throughout the life cycle, whereas other people remain isolated from family and friends, appear to survive on a fixed daily routine, and focus on both past disappointments and future death. Although the ways in which people do and do not resolve these critical issues of adulthood may have their roots in childhood conflict, Erikson suggests that this is not always the case and that they have a significance of their own (Erikson, 1982). In sum, Erikson's contributions are noteworthy in three ways: (1) He has emphasized the psychosocial as well as the instinctual basis for personality development, (2) he has extended the stages of development to include the entire life cycle and has articulated the major psychological issues to be faced in these later stages, and (3) he has recognized that people look to the future as well as to the past and that how they construe their future may be as significant a part of their personality as how they construe their past. The Importance of Early Experience Psychoanalytic theory emphasizes the role of early life events for later personality development. Evidence of the importance of parenting practices when children are in need of psychological resources fits with this perspective (Pomerantz & Thompson, 2008). Many researchers, however, suggest a much greater potential for development and change in personality across the entire life span. Although the issue is complex, with no uniform consensus, many scholars highlight the fact that, to a degree not fully appreciated by Freud, changes in an individual's environment that occur later in life can bring about changes in personality (Kagan, 1998; Lewis, 2002). Indeed, in contrast to the themes established by Freud, a major trend in contemporary psychology is the study of personality dynamics across the entire course of life, from childhood to older adulthood (Baltes, Staudinger, & Lindenberger, 1999). The complexities of the issue can be illustrated with two studies. The first, conducted by a psychoanalyst (Gaensbauer, 1982), involved the study of affect development in infancy. The infant, Jenny, was first studied systematically when she was almost four months old. Prior to this time, at the age of three months, she had been physically abused by her father. At that time she was brought to the hospital with a broken arm and a skull fracture. She was described by hospital personnel as being a “lovable baby”—happy, cute, sociable—but also as not cuddling when held and as being “jittery” when approached by a male. Following this history of abuse, Jenny was placed in a foster home, where she received adequate physical care but minimal social interaction. This was very much in contrast with her earlier experience with her natural mother, who spent considerable time with her and breast‐fed her “at the drop of a hat.” The first systematic observation occurred almost a month after placement in the foster home. At this time, Jenny's behavior was judged to be completely consistent with a diagnosis of depression—lethargic, apathetic, disinterested, collapsed posture. A systematic analysis of her facial expressions indicated five discrete affects, each meaningfully related to her unique history. Sadness was noted when she was with her natural mother. Fearfulness and anger were noted when she was approached by a male stranger but not when approached by a female stranger. Joy was noted as a transient affect during brief play sequences. Finally, interest‐curiosity was noted when she interacted with female strangers. After she was visited in her foster home, Jenny was placed in a different foster home where she received warm attention. Following two weeks in this environment, she was again brought to the hospital for further evaluation, this time by her second foster mother. This time, she generally appeared to be a normally responsive infant. She showed no evidence of distress and even smiled at a male stranger. After an additional month at this foster home, she was brought to the hospital by her natural mother for a third evaluation. Generally, she was animated and happy. However, when the mother left the room, she cried intensely. This continued following the mother's return despite repeated attempts to soothe her. Apparently, separation from her natural mother continued to lead to a serious distress response. In addition, sadness and anger were frequently noted. At eight months old, Jenny was returned to her natural mother, who left her husband and received counseling. At the age of 20 months, she was described as appearing to be normal and having an excellent relation with her mother. However, there continued to be the problem of anger and distress associated with separation from her mother. These suggest that there was evidence of both continuity and discontinuity between Jenny's early emotional experiences and later emotional reactions. In general, she was doing well, and her emotional responses were within the normal range for infants of her age. At the same time, the anger reactions in response to separations and frustration appeared to be a link to the past. The psychoanalyst conducting the study suggested that perhaps isolated traumatic events are less important than the repeated experiences of a less dramatic but more persistent nature. In other words, the early years are important but more in terms of patterns of interpersonal relationships than in terms of isolated events. The second study, conducted by a group of developmental psychologists, assessed the relationship between early emotional relationships with the mother and later psychopathology (Lewis, Feiring, McGuffog, & Jaskir, 1984). In this study, the attachment behavior of boys and girls one year of age toward their mothers was observed. The observation involved a standardized procedure consisting of a period of play with the mother in an unstructured situation, followed by the departure of the mother and a period when the child was alone in the playroom, and then by the return of the mother and a second free play period. The behavior of the children was scored systematically and assigned to one of three attachment categories: avoidant, secure, or ambivalent. The avoidant and ambivalent categories suggested difficulties in this area. Then at six years of age, the competence of these children was assessed through the mothers' completion of a Child Behavior Profile. The ratings of the mothers were also checked against teacher ratings. On the basis of the Child Behavior Profile, the children were classified into a normal group, an at‐risk group, and a clinically disturbed group. What was the relation between early attachment behavior and later pathology? Two aspects of the results are particularly noteworthy. First, the relations for boys and girls differed. For boys, attachment classification at one year of age was significantly related to later pathology. Insecurely attached boys showed more pathology at age six than did securely attached boys. For girls, there was no relationship between attachment and later pathology. Second, the authors noted a difference between trying to predict pathology from the early data (prospective) as opposed to trying to understand later pathology in terms of earlier attachment difficulties (retrospective). If one starts with the boys who at age six were identified as being at risk or clinically disturbed, 80% would be found to have been assigned to the avoidant‐ or ambivalent‐attachment category at age one—a very strong statistical relationship. But, if one took all boys classified as insecurely attached (avoidant or ambivalent) at age one and predicted them to be at risk or clinically disturbed at age six, one would be right in only 40% of the cases. The reason for this is that far more of the boys were classified as insecurely attached than were later diagnosed as at risk or disturbed. Thus, the clinician viewing later pathology would have a clear basis for suggesting a strong relationship between pathology and early attachment difficulties. On the other hand, focusing on the data in terms of prediction would suggest a much more tenuous relationship and the importance of other variables. As Freud himself recognized, when we observe later pathology, it is all too easy to understand how it developed. On the other hand, when we look at these phenomena prospectively, we are made aware of the varied paths that development can follow. The Development of Thinking Processes The most prominent aspect of Freud's work on development is his theory of psychosexual stages (see Growth and Development in this chapter). In addition to the development of instinctual drives, however, Freud also addressed the development of thinking processes. Here, his work rests on a theoretical distinction between two different modes, or processes, of thinking; he called them primary and secondary process thought. Before defining these terms, we note that Freud, with this distinction, addressed an issue of enormously broad significance. It is, in essence, the question of how the mind works—the processes through which the mind deals with information. We might think that the human mind, like a computer, processes information in one basic way. Your personal computer processes information the same way whether the computer is new or old, and whether the information being processed is emotionally exciting or boring. No matter what, information is processed digitally in the machine's central processing unit. Maybe the human mind is like this, too. Then again, maybe it isn't—and Freud suggested it isn't. He concluded that the mind processes information in two distinctly different ways. In psychoanalytic theory, primary process thinking is the language of the unconscious. Primary process thought is illogical and irrational. In primary process thinking, reality and fantasy are indistinguishable. These features of primary process thought—an absence of logic, a confusion of appearance and reality—may seem so odd at first that you may reject this aspect of Freudian theory. Yet consider some examples. As you grew up, you only gradually developed the capacity for logical, rational thought. Very young children do not have the capacity to formulate logical arguments. Yet they clearly are thinking! This means that they must be thinking in a manner that lacks adult rationality and logic. To Freud, they are thinking via primary process thought. Consider dreams. Sometimes you wake up when having a nightmare. Your heart may be racing, and you may be in a cold sweat. If so, this means that your body was reacting to the contents of the dream, preparing its physiological systems to respond. But, of course, there is nothing to respond to: It's just a dream. This means that you were reacting to a fantasy as if it were real; in the dream, fantasy and reality are confused. Secondary process thinking is the language of consciousness, reality testing, and logic. It develops only after the child first has the capacity for primary process thought and thus is secondary. The development of this capacity parallels the development of the ego. With the development of the ego, the individual becomes more differentiated, as a self, from the rest of the world, and self‐preoccupation decreases. Contemporary psychologists have recognized, as did Freud, that the mind works according to more than one thinking process. Epstein (1994) has distinguished between experiential thinking and rational thinking. Experiential thinking, analogous to primary process thinking, is viewed as occurring earlier in evolutionary development and is characterized by being holistic, concrete, and heavily influenced by emotion. Often, it is used in interpersonal situations to be empathic or intuitive. Rational thinking, analogous to secondary process thinking, is viewed as occurring later in evolutionary development and is characterized as being more abstract, analytical, and following the rules of logic and evidence. For example, rational thinking would be used in solving mathematical problems. The potential conflict between the two systems of thought can be seen in an experiment in which subjects were asked to choose between drawing a winning red jelly bean from a bowl that contained 1 out of 10 red jelly beans and a bowl that contained 8 out of 100 red jelly beans (Denes‐Raj & Epstein, 1994). Having been told the proportion of red jelly beans in the two bowls, subjects knew that the rational thing to do was to select the bowl with the higher proportion—1 out of 10. Yet, despite this, many subjects felt that their chances were better with the bowl that contained more red jelly beans, despite the poorer odds. This conflict between what they felt and what they knew expressed the conflict between the experiential and rational thought systems. According to Epstein (1994), the two systems are parallel and can act in conjunction with one another as well as in conflict with one another. Other psychologists have suggested other, related, two‐part distinctions. Many contemporary psychologists, then, feel that Freud was fundamentally correct in positing more than one form of thought; they tend to differ from Freud in the details, that is, in their specific beliefs about the nature of the two aspects of thinking. The study of primary versus secondary process thought, then, is one in which Freud's ideas remarkably anticipated future developments in the field. This chapter has considered Freud's approach to three of the four topics addressed in a personality theory: structure, processes, and development. In our next chapter, we consider the fourth: psychopathology and clinical applications designed to improve people's lives. We also review alternative psychodynamic models developed throughout the 20th century and there in the 21st. MAJOR CONCEPTS Anal stage Anxiety Castration anxiety Catharsis Conscious Death instinct Defense mechanisms Denial Ego Energy system Erogenous zones Free association Genital stage Id Identification Isolation Latency stage Libido Life instinct Mechanism Oedipus complex Oral stage Penis envy Perception without awareness Perceptual defense Phallic stage Pleasure principle Preconscious Primary process Projection Rationalization Reaction formation Reality principle Repression Secondary process Sublimation Subliminal psychodynamic activation Superego Unconscious Undoing REVIEW Psychoanalytic theory illustrates a psychodynamic, clinical approach to personality. The psychodynamic emphasis is expressed in the interpretation of behavior as a result of the interplay among motives or drives. The clinical approach is expressed in the emphasis on material observed during intensive treatment of individuals. Freud posited a mechanistic, deterministic, energy‐based model of the mind. This model directly reflected the 19th‐century scientific and medical training Freud received. Freud built his theory on case study evidence. In his view, the in‐depth analysis of clinical cases was the only valid method for uncovering the dynamics of the conscious and unconscious mind. The core of Freud's theory is an integrated analysis of both personality structures and personality processes. The structures are three mental systems—the id, ego, and superego—which function according to different operating principles that inherently conflict with one another. The processes involve mental energy whose origin is in the id but whose expression is channeled, blocked, or distorted by the actions of the ego, working within constraints represented in the superego. Personality dynamics in psychoanalytic theory involve conflict. Impulsive drives in the id seek immediate expression, which conflicts with both the ego's desire to delay impulses to meet the constraints of reality and the superego's desire for actions that adhere to moral standards. Any given action, then, is a compromise among these competing desires of the different psychic agencies. Defense mechanisms are strategies employed by the ego to defend against the anxiety aroused by the unacceptable drives and desires of the id. In the psychoanalytic theory of personality development, the individual progresses through a series of developmental stages. Each stage involves a distinct region of the body that serves as a primary focus of sensual gratification. These stages of development occur early in life, in childhood. To a greater extent than any other theory, Freud's psychoanalytic theory suggests that the experiences of early childhood have an enduring, immutable influence on the personality characteristics of the individual. The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson attempted to broaden and extend psychoanalytic theory through an emphasis on the psychosocial stages of development. Note 1 Psychoanalytic theory has been criticized by feminists on a variety of grounds. Perhaps more than any other concept, the concept of penis envy is seen as expressing a chauvinistic, hostile view toward women. This issue will be addressed in Chapter 4 in the Critical Evaluation section.

CHAPTER 4

Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory: Applications, Related Theoretical Conceptions, and Contemporary Research Questions to be Addressed in this Chapter Psychodynamic Personality Assessment: Projective Tests Psychopathology Psychological Change The Case of Jim Related Theoretical Conceptions Contemporary Developments in Personality Theory: Neuropsychoanalysis Critical Evaluation Major Concepts Review Chapter Focus When you were a kid, did you ever play the cloud game? It had to be a day when there were big white fluffy clouds against the blue background of the sky. You would lie on your back in the grass with a friend and stare at the clouds until you “saw” something. If you tried long and hard enough, you could find all kinds of interesting things: animals, dragons, the face of an old man. Quite often, pointing out your discoveries to your friend was impossible. Exactly what you saw could only be seen by you. Why did you see the things you saw? It must have been something about you that you “projected” onto the cloud in the sky. This is the basic idea behind projective tests such as the Rorschach Inkblot Test and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). In this chapter, we focus on these tests because they are techniques of personality assessment associated with psychodynamic theory. Projective tests use ambiguous stimuli to elicit highly individualistic responses, which can then be interpreted by the clinician. This chapter also considers Freud's attempts to understand and explain the symptoms presented by his patients and his efforts to develop a systematic method of treatment. After considering more recent developments in psychoanalytic theory, including challenges to Freud's ideas from other psychodynamic theorists, we turn to a critical evaluation and summary. Questions to be Addressed in this Chapter How can one assess personality from a psychodynamic perspective? What, according to psychoanalysis, are the causes of psychopathology and the best methods for treating psychologically distressed persons? Why did some of Freud's early followers break with his approach, and what novel theoretical ideas did they advance? What recent developments in personality psychology are inspired by Freud's work, and what does contemporary scientific evidence say about Freud's original psychoanalytical enterprise? In the previous chapter, you learned the ideas that define Freud's psychoanalytic theory of personality. In this chapter, you will see what one can do with these ideas. This chapter discusses how the theoretical ideas of psychoanalysis can be applied to practical questions of personality assessment and psychological change in therapy. You will also see “what one can do with” Freud's ideas in a second sense of this phrase. Throughout the 20th century, a series of psychologists judged that, rather than apply Freud's ideas, it would be better to change them. These theorists retained some key features of Freud's thinking—especially the study of internal mental dynamics, or “psychodynamics”—but significantly modified and extended other aspects of his original theory. A second goal of this chapter is to review these post‐Freudian psychodynamic theories. Our coverage includes a contemporary theoretical development known as “neuropsychoanalysis.” A third goal of this chapter concerns contemporary research. More than was the case in Chapter 3, here we examine contemporary research on psychodynamic processes. At the end of the chapter, we evaluate Freud's psychoanalytic perspective from the perspective of current research findings. Psychodynamic Personality Assessment: Projective Tests We begin with a challenge that is central to both personality theory and clinical practice, namely, psychological assessment. The challenge, specifically, is to develop methods that shed light on the nature of an individual's personality, including causes of any psychological distress. Ideally, these methods would have two features. The first is obvious: They should be accurate, or valid (recall our discussion of validity in Chapter 2). The second is a bit more subtle. Assessment procedures should be quick and efficient. The clinician may need quickly to gain some insight into a client's personality in order to make preliminary treatment decisions. Consider for a moment the difficulties from a psychoanalytic perspective. If you want to assess someone's personality, what would you do? You obviously could not “just ask” someone about psychoanalytic content. Direct questions—for example, “How often do you think about killing one of your parents so you can have sex with the other one?”—are absurd for at least two reasons: (1) The person being tested can't answer the question (the relevant material is unconscious, and its mere mention activates defense mechanisms that protect the material from reaching consciousness), and (2) even if the person could answer them, he or she probably wouldn't want to; that is, most people would not want to reveal such aspects of their personality to others. Freud addressed this challenge by using, as his tool of assessment, the free‐association technique. However, even if one were to assume its validity—a big “if”—the free‐association method clearly does not meet the goal of efficiency. It may take weeks or months to develop a client–therapist relationship that is sufficiently strong that the client will reveal deep‐seated conflicts in free associations. Recognizing this reality, investigators inspired by Freud's theory sought new assessment methods. The most influential of these is a set of procedures known as projective tests. The Logic of Projective Tests The defining feature of projective tests is that the test items are ambiguous. The person being assessed is asked to respond to each of a series of ambiguous test items. In order to respond to the item, the person must interpret it; that is, he or she must figure out what the test item looks like or means. The fundamental logic behind the projective tests is that the person's interpretations will be revealing of his or her personality. It is thought, in other words, that the individual will “project” aspects of his or her own personality onto the test item when interpreting it (hence the name projective tests). This use of ambiguous test items is unlike other, more typical psychological questionnaires or surveys. When writing test items for a questionnaire, psychologists usually strive for clarity. A questionnaire item such as “Do you like things?” would usually be seen as a terrible test item because it is so ambiguous; “What things are you talking about?” the test‐taker might ask. But in projective assessment, this ambiguity is the very point of the test. The psychologist is interested in how the test‐taker constructs meaning out of the vague stimulus. The psychologist of course is not interested in responses to test items per se. Responses to the test items are interesting only because they might be revealing of the individual's typical style of thinking, which in turn is interesting because it may be revealing of underlying, unconscious psychodynamics. A key assumption in the use of projective tests, then, is that the individual's interpretation of test items during a testing session with the psychologist will be indicative of how the person interprets typically ambiguous circumstances in his or her daily life. Two projective tests have received particularly widespread use: the Rorschach Inkblot Test and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). Although these tests were not developed by Freud, they are related closely to psychoanalytic theory in three ways: Psychoanalytic theory emphasizes the complex organization of personality functioning. The theory views personality as a dynamic system through which the individual organizes and structures external stimuli. Projective testing procedures allow people to respond in complex ways as they interpret test stimuli. People don't just say “yes” or “no” in response to test items; instead, they formulate their own responses. The assessor thus can observe complex patterns of thinking, as required from a psychodynamic perspective. Psychoanalytic theory emphasizes the importance of the unconscious and defense mechanisms. In projective tests, the purpose of the test and the way it will be interpreted are hidden from the subject. The test thus may get behind the defenses of the test‐taker. Psychoanalytic theory emphasizes a holistic understanding of personality. The theorist is interested in the relations among parts of the person. Projective tests facilitate a holistic interpretation of the individual. The test is scored according to an overall patterning and organization of test responses rather than by interpreting any single response as an index of a particular personality characteristic. The Rorschach Inkblot Test Although inkblots had been used earlier, Hermann Rorschach, a Swiss psychiatrist, first fully grasped their potential for personality assessment. He put ink on paper and folded the paper so that symmetrical but ill‐defined forms were produced. He then showed these images to hospitalized patients. Through a process of trial and error, he identified inkblots that elicited different responses from different psychiatric groups. Rorschach settled on 10 such cards; the test, then, consists of 10 cards containing these inkblots.

When conducting the Rorschach test, the assessor only presents enough information to enable the person to complete the task. The test is presented as “just one of many ways used nowadays to try to understand people.” People are asked to look at each card and tell the assessor what they see represented on the card. They are free to focus on the whole image or any part of the inkblot. After asks people to explain why they felt that a given test item represented what they said it did. All responses are recorded.

In interpreting these responses, one is interested in how the response, or percept, is formed, the reasons for the response, and its content. Percepts that match the structure of the inkblot suggest a good level of psychological functioning that is well oriented toward reality. On the other hand, poorly formed responses that do not fit the structure of the inkblot suggest unrealistic fantasies or bizarre behavior. The content of subjects' responses (whether they see mostly animate or inanimate objects, humans or animals, and content expressing affection or hostility) makes a great deal of difference in interpreting the subjects' personalities. For example, the assessor would make different interpretations of two sets of responses—one where animals are seen repeatedly as fighting and a second where humans are seen as sharing and involved in cooperative efforts.

Content may be interpreted symbolically. An explosion may symbolize intense hostility; a pig, gluttonous tendencies; a fox, a tendency toward being crafty and aggressive; spiders, witches, and octopuses, negative images of a dominating mother; gorillas and giants, negative attitudes toward a dominating father; and an ostrich, an attempt to hide from conflicts (Schafer,  1954 ).

When interpreting test responses, each response is used to suggest hypotheses or possible interpretations about the individual's personality, and the hypotheses are checked against other responses by the individual. The examiner also notes any unusual behavior and uses this as a source of data for further interpretation. For example, a subject who constantly asks for guidance may be interpreted as dependent. A subject who seems tense, asks questions in a subtle way, and looks at the back of the cards may be interpreted as suspicious and possibly paranoid.

An imagine similar to that used in the Rorschach inkblot test.Rorschach inkblot test: The Rorschach interpreter assumes that the subject's personality is projected onto unstructured stimuli such as inkblots.

The Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)

A second widely used projective test is the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), developed by Henry Murray and Christina Morgan. The TAT consists of cards with scenes on them. Most scenes depict one or two people, though some are more abstract. The assessor presents these ambiguous scenes one after the other and, for each, asks the person to make up a story based on the scene. The story includes what is going on, the thoughts and feelings of the people in the scene, what led up to the scene, and the outcome.

Since the scenes are ambiguous, the individual's personality may be projected onto the stimulus as he or she interprets it and may be revealed in the stories told. “The test is based on the well‐recognized fact that when a person interprets an ambiguous social situation he is apt to expose his own personality as much as the phenomenon to which he is attending” (Murray,  1938 , p. 530). The assumption is that people are not aware they are talking about themselves when weaving stories about the pictures. Their defenses thus can be bypassed. TAT responses can be scored systematically according to a scheme developed by Murray, or on a more impressionistic basis.

The TAT has been used not only clinically but in experimental research, particularly in the area of human motivation. Research by the psychologist David McClelland and colleagues (McClelland, Koestner, & Weinberger,  1989 ) indicates that individual differences in motives, such as the motive to achieve, are uniquely revealed in the themes of stories created by research participants in response to TAT pictures. Motives measured by stimuli such as the TAT (implicit motives) result in different scores and predict different behaviors than motives measured by self‐report questionnaires (explicit motives) (Schultheiss,  2008 ).

Projective Tests: Do They Work?

Projective tests have been widely used by personality and clinical psychologists during the past half‐century. They have been administered to literally millions of persons (Lilienfeld, Wood, & Garb,  2000 ). Given their widespread use over the years, the natural question to ask is “Do they work?”

By “work,” in the context of psychological testing, one generally means “Do they predict important life outcomes?” In the terminology we introduced in  Chapter 2 , the question is whether the tests are valid. This question is more complicated than it sounds. There are at least two complications. The first is the possibility that projective tests predict some types of outcomes but not others. It might be impossible to give a simple yes or no answer to the question “Do projective tests work?” because they might work, or be valid, for predicting only some types of outcomes. A second complication is that there are different ways of scoring projective tests. Over the years, different psychologists have developed different schemes for interpreting and classifying people's responses to projective test items (Exner,  1986 ; Westen,  1990 ). It is possible, then, that some scoring systems might work well, whereas others might not.

These complications suggest that one cannot answer the question of whether projective tests work by considering only one or two isolated studies. Instead, what is required are comprehensive reviews of the various scoring schemes and the range of outcomes that the psychologist might wish to predict. A particularly extensive review of this sort was completed by Lilienfeld and colleagues (2000). These authors were attentive to the complexities involved in assessing the validity of projective tests. They reviewed research on a variety of projective methods, including the Rorschach and TAT, and on a variety of methods for scoring responses on these tests.

What did they find? On the one hand, their review indicated that some scoring methods are valid for some purposes. For example, when TAT stories are scored for the presence of themes related to achievement motivation, as suggested by psychologists such as David McClelland (McClelland, Koestner, & Weinberger,  1989 ), there is evidence that the TAT responses are correlated with measures of motivated behavior. However, such positive results proved to be exceptions. The review by Lilienfeld and colleagues (2000) indicated that projective tests commonly do not work. For example, although there may be a variety of ways to score Rorschach responses, the choice of scoring scheme seems not to make much difference; “the overwhelming majority of Rorschach indexes” (Lilienfeld et al.,  2000 , p. 54) were not consistently related to outcomes of interest. And although there may be some validity to methods for scoring achievement themes in TAT responses, “most TAT scoring systems” (p. 54), like the Rorschach systems, also lack validity.

These negative conclusions about the validity of projective tests are congruent with those of many other scholars (Dawes,  1994 ; Rorer,  1990 ) who have taken an objective look at research on projective tests and have found that they simply do not work well enough to be used in clinical practice. Indeed, the Lilienfeld group (2000) recommends that students of psychology no longer should obtain extensive training in the use of these tests and notes that a committee of the American Psychological Association has concurred that projective tests should not be a component of 21st‐century training in psychology.

Why don't projective tests work very well? That is, why is it that they rarely enable psychologists to predict life outcomes with high levels of accuracy? There are many possible reasons, but two stand out. The first concerns inter‐judge reliability: If two psychologists (two “judges”) score a person's responses to a projective test, will they agree with one another (will the judgments be reliable)? When using standard questionnaires, the reliability of scoring can be taken for granted; for example, if you take a multiple‐choice test, a person or a machine‐scoring system can score the test with perfect accuracy. But with projective tests, psychologists are not dealing with simple multiple‐choice responses but rather with complex verbal statements that must be interpreted. The psychologist's interpretations may reflect not only the thoughts of the person taking the test but also those of the psychologist who does the scoring. The thoughts, feelings, and interpretive biases of the psychologist may influence the scoring of the test. If different psychologists have different interpretive biases, then interjudge reliability will be low. Research indicates that projective tests often do suffer from this problem. The interjudge reliability of scoring is not sufficiently high. Even when using the most well‐developed of the Rorschach scoring systems, “only about half” of the Rorschach variables reach a “minimum acceptable threshold” of reliability (Lilienfeld et al., 2000, p. 33). If different psychologists do not even agree on how to score a person's test responses, then the scores that they compute are, of course, unlikely to yield accurate predictions of the person's behavior. A second limitation is that the content of the projective test items commonly has nothing to do with the content of the test‐taker's day‐to‐day life. It might be that an individual exhibits a distinctive style of thinking when contemplating, for example, relations with members of the opposite sex to which he or she is attracted. A psychological test that contained stimuli representing members of the opposite sex might pick up on this thinking style. But there is no guarantee that the person's thinking style will manifest itself when he or she is confronted with abstract blotches of ink. The few projective tests that are successful tend to use “stimuli that are especially relevant to the construct being assessed” (Lilienfeld et al., 2000, p. 55). For example, researchers interested in people's thoughts about interpersonal relations might use TAT cards that feature interpersonal themes (Westen, 1991). But this commonly is not done; instead, context commonly has been disregarded, and a generic set of stimulus materials (e.g., the set of Rorschach cards) is used to predict an individual's thoughts and feelings in a wide variety of contexts. And here the predictions commonly fail. As you will see in subsequent chapters, other personality theories employ psychological testing procedures that are much more sensitive to these issues of social context than are the projective tests of psychodynamic theory. What do the limitations of projective testing say about Freud's psychoanalytic theory of personality? Some might argue that they say very little. In evaluating Freud, it is important to recall that he himself did not develop or use projective tests. He relied entirely on the free‐association method in clinical interviews. So Freud's theory might be fine, even if the testing procedures developed by followers of Freud are flawed. However, one goal for a personality theorist is to provide guidelines that might inspire the construction of psychological testing procedures with high levels of reliability and validity. Whatever its other strengths, psychoanalysis generally has failed to achieve this goal. Although future developments may improve the validity of testing methods and thus respond to the criticisms that have been raised (Lilienfeld et al., 2000), psychological testing and prediction unquestionably do not constitute a strength of the psychodynamic tradition. Psychopathology Freud spent most of his professional time treating patients with neurotic disorders. He concluded that the psychological processes of his neurotic patients were basically similar to the psychological processes of people who were not suffering from neuroses and seeking therapy. Neuroses could be found, to one degree or another and in one form or another, in all people. Thus, Freud's analyses of pathology—its development, primary psychological dynamics, and treatment—are integral to his general theory of personality. Personality Types One aspect of Freud's analysis of pathology was developmental. Here, he addressed the questions of why an individual would develop pathology and why it would be a pathology of a particular type. This analysis is closely related to an idea you already have learned about, namely, Freud's theory of psychosexual stages of developmental (see Chapter 3). At any given developmental stage, the individual may experience a failure in the development of the instincts. Such failures are called fixations. If individuals receive so little gratification during a stage of development that they are afraid to go to the next stage, or if they receive so much gratification that there is no motivation to move on, a fixation will occur. If it does, later in life the individual will try to obtain the same type of satisfaction that was appropriate at the earlier stage (i.e., the one at which the fixation occurred). For example, an individual fixated at the oral stage may, as an adult, seek oral gratification in eating, smoking, or drinking. A developmental phenomenon related to that of fixation is regression. In regression, the individual seeks to return to an earlier mode of satisfaction, an earlier point of fixation. Regression often occurs under conditions of stress, so that many people overeat, smoke, or drink too much alcohol only during periods of frustration and anxiety. Since there are three distinct stages of early childhood development—oral, anal, and phallic—three personality styles may result from fixations (Table 4.1). TABLE 4.1 Personality Characteristics Associated with Psychoanalytic Personality Types Personality Type Personality Characteristics Oral Demanding, impatient, envious, covetous, jealous, rageful, depressed (feels empty), mistrustful, pessimistic Anal Rigid, striving for power and control, concerned with shoulds and oughts, pleasure and possessions, anxiety over waste and loss of control, concern with whether to submit or rebel Phallic Male: exhibitionistic, competitive, striving for success, emphasis on being masculine—macho—potent Female: naive, seductive, exhibitionistic, flirtatious The characteristics of the oral personality type, which results from fixation at the oral stage of development, involve themes of taking things into, toward, and for oneself. Oral personalities are narcissistic, that is, interested only in themselves. They do not have a clear recognition of others as separate and valuable entities. Other people are seen only in terms of what they can give (feed). Oral personalities are always asking for something, either in terms of a modest, pleading request or an aggressive demand. Why the cigar? Freud's theory suggests that a fixation at the oral stage of development can create a life‐long pattern of taking things into, toward, and for oneself. The anal personality, which stems from fixation at the anal stage of development, reflects a transformation of gratifications of anal impulses in the childhood years. In general, the traits of the anal character relate to anal‐stage processes that have not been completely relinquished. The important processes at that stage are bodily processes (accumulation and release of fecal material) and interpersonal relations (the struggle of wills over toilet training). Tying the two together, the anal person sees excretion as symbolic of enormous power. That such a view persists is shown in many everyday expressions, such as the reference to the toilet as “the throne.” The change from the oral to the anal character is one from “give me” to “do what I tell you,” or from “I have to give you” to “I must obey you”. The anal character is known by a triad of traits, called the anal triad: orderliness and cleanliness, parsimony and stinginess, and obstinacy. The emphasis on cleanliness is expressed in the saying “Cleanliness is next to godliness”. The anal‐compulsive personality has a need to keep everything clean and in order, representing a reaction formation against an interest in things that are disorderly and unclean. The second trait of the triad, parsimony/stinginess, relates to the anal‐compulsive's interest in holding onto things, an interest dating back to a wish to retain the powerful and important feces. The third trait in the triad, obstinacy, relates to the anal character's infantile defiance against parting with stools, particularly on command by others. Dating back to toilet training and the struggle of wills, anal personalities often seek to be in control of things and have power or dominance over others. Just as the oral and anal character types reflect partial fixations at the first two stages of development, the phallic personality character results from fixation at the phallic stage, during the Oedipus complex. Fixation here has different implications for men and women, and particular attention has been given to the results of partial fixation for males. Whereas success for the oral person means “I get,” and success for the anal person means “I control,” success for the phallic male means “I am a man”. The phallic male must deny all possible suggestions that he has been castrated. For him, success means that he is “big” in the eyes of others. He must at all times assert his masculinity and potency, an attitude exemplified by Theodore Roosevelt's saying, “Speak softly but carry a big stick.” The excessive, exhibitionist quality to the behavior of these people is expressive of the underlying anxiety concerning castration. The female counterpart of the male phallic character is known as the hysterical personality. As a defense against Oedipal wishes, the little girl identifies to an excessive extent with her mother and femininity. She uses seductive and flirtatious behavior to maintain the interest of her father but denies its sexual intent. The pattern of behavior then is carried over into adulthood, where she may attract men with flirtatious behavior but deny sexual intent and generally appear to be somewhat naive. Hysterical women idealize life, their partners, and romantic love, often finding themselves surprised by life's uglier moments.

Conflict and Defense Psychoanalytic theory proposes that psychopathology results from individuals' efforts to gratify instincts that were fixated at an earlier stage of development. The individual still seeks sexual and aggressive gratification in infantile forms. The problem for the person is that this potential gratification is associated with past trauma, such as the trauma of not having been able to express Oedipal desires. Expression of a wish thus may signal danger to the ego. This creates anxiety. There is, then, a conflict: A given desire and potential behavior are associated with both pleasure and pain. You may wish to indulge in sexual behavior but find that your desires are blocked by feelings of guilt or fear of punishment. You may wish to retaliate against powerful others (who symbolically represent the parents) but find your desire for revenge to be inhibited by anxieties about retaliation from powerful others (who again represent the parents). In all such cases, there is intrapsychic conflict between a wish and anxiety. The result often is that the individual can't say “no,” can't be assertive, or otherwise feels blocked and unhappy (Table 4.2). TABLE 4.2 Psychoanalytic Theory of Psychopathology Illustrative Conflicts Behavior Consequences of Defense Mechanisms WISH ANXIETY DEFENSE I would like to have sex with that person. Such feelings are bad and will be punished. Denial of all sexual behavior, obsessive preoccupation with the sexual behavior of others. I would like to strike out at all those people who make me feel inferior. If I am hostile, they will retaliate and really hurt me. Denial of wish or fear: “I never feel angry,” “I'm never afraid of anyone or anything.” I would like to get close to people and have them feed me or take care of me. If I do, they will smother me or leave me. Excessive independence and avoidance of getting close to people or fluctuations between approaching people and moving away from them; excessive need to take care of others. To reduce the painful experience of anxiety, defense mechanisms (see Chapter 3) are deployed. A person may, for example, deny sexual and aggressive feelings or project them onto others. If the defense is successful, the person no longer recognizes the feelings as his or her own and thus experiences less anxiety. If less successful, the energy associated with the unconscious sexual or aggressive drives may express itself in pathological symptoms. A symptom—such as a tic, psychological paralysis, or a compulsion—is a disguised expression of a repressed impulse. The meaning of the symptom, the nature of the dangerous instinct, and the nature of the defense all remain unconscious. A mother's obsession with the thought that something bad will happen to her child may, unknown to the mother, be caused by her own underlying rage at her child and anxiety about harm that she herself may do to it. A hand‐washing compulsion may express both the wish to be dirty or do “dirty” things, and the defense against the wish is expressed in excessive cleanliness. Again, the person may be unaware of the wish or the defense and be troubled only by the symptom. To summarize the psychoanalytic theory of psychopathology, in psychopathology there is a conflict between a drive or wish (instinct) and the ego's sense (anxiety) that danger will ensue if the wish is expressed (discharged). The wishes date back to childhood: Wishes and fears that were part of a specific time period in childhood are carried over into adolescence and adulthood. The person attempts to handle the painful anxiety that results from intrapsychic conflict via defense mechanisms. If the conflict is too great, the use of defense mechanisms can lead to neurotic symptoms or psychotic withdrawal from reality. Symptoms express the unconscious conflict between the wish or drive and anxiety. Each case of abnormal behavior, then, arises from an underlying conflict between a wish and a fear that dates back to an earlier period in childhood. Problems of adulthood, then, are a repetition of aspects of childhood. There continue to be childlike parts of us that, under stress and some other conditions, may become more active and troublesome. Psychological Change How does psychological change come about? Once a person has established a way of thinking about and responding to situations, through what process does a change in personality take place? The psychoanalytic theory of growth suggests that there is a normal course of human personality development, one that occurs because of an optimum degree of frustration. Where there has been too little or too much frustration at a particular stage of growth, personality does not develop normally and a fixation takes place. When this occurs, the individual repeats patterns of behavior regardless of other changes in situations. Given the development of such a neurotic pattern, how is it possible to break the cycle and move forward? Insights into the Unconscious: Free Association and Dream Interpretation In therapy, the first challenge is to gain insight into the problematic psychodynamics of the patient. As you learned in Chapter 3, Freud's method for accomplishing this was the free‐association technique. The patient is asked to report to the analyst every thought that comes to mind, to delay reporting nothing, to withhold nothing, to bar nothing from coming to consciousness. Freud was interested in free associations to material that occurred not only in normal daily experiences but also in dreams. Dreams, as we discussed in the previous chapter, provide insight into unconscious desires. Through the free‐association method, the analyst and patient are able to go beyond the manifest content of the dream to the latent content, the hidden unconscious wish that the storyline of the dream expresses. In the free‐association method, patients may experience transference: a development of attitudes toward the analyst that are based on attitudes held earlier toward parental figures. At first, Freud thought that making the unconscious conscious was sufficient to effect change and cure. This was in keeping with his original belief that repressed memories were a basis for pathology. However, Freud gradually realized that more than a simple recovery of memories was required. Patients needed to acquire emotional insight into their wishes and conflicts. The process of therapeutic change in psychoanalysis, then, involves coming to grips with emotions and wishes that were previously unconscious and struggling with these painful experiences in a relatively safe environment. If psychopathology involves fixation at an early stage of development, then in psychoanalysis individuals become free to resume their normal psychological development. If psychopathology involves damming up the instincts and using energy for defensive purposes, then psychoanalysis involves a redistribution of energy so that more energy is available for mature, guiltless, less rigid, and more gratifying activities. If psychopathology involves conflict and defense mechanisms, then psychoanalysis involves reducing conflict and freeing the patient from the limitations of the defensive processes. If psychopathology involves an individual dominated by the unconscious and the tyranny of the id, then psychoanalysis involves making conscious what was unconscious and putting under control of the ego what was formerly under the domination of the id or superego. The Therapeutic Process: Transference We have seen that psychoanalysis views therapy as a learning process in which the individual resumes and completes psychological growth that was interrupted earlier in life, when their neurosis began. The key process is that the patient is reexposed to earlier emotional situations that they could not handle in the past, but can now handle with the aid of the therapist. This reexposure is affected by a psychological dynamic known as transference. Transference is the development of attitudes toward an individual that are based on attitudes held earlier in life toward significant others (especially parents). Transference can occur in everyday life; for example, research shows that people's mental images of past significant others shape their interpretations of new interpersonal relationships (Andersen & Chen, 2002). However, it is particularly significant to psychoanalytic therapy. In therapeutic transference, patients express attitudes toward the analyst that duplicate attitudes they expressed earlier in life toward significant figures. For example, a patients who thought that an analyst's note taking may lead them to be exploited by the analyst could be duplicating concerns about exploitation that they first experienced with family figures earlier in life. Or oral characters, for example, may express concerns about “feeding” the analyst and getting enough from the analyst in return that repeat earlier parental encounters. Transference can occur within any type of therapy. Psychoanalysis, however, distinctively exploits it as a force for behavior change. Many formal qualities of the analytic situation are structured to enhance the development of transference. The patient lying on the couch supports the development of a dependent relationship. The scheduling of frequent meetings (up to five or six times a week) strengthens the emotional importance of the analytic relationship to the patient's daily existence. Finally, the fact that patients become so tied to their analysts, while knowing so little about them as people, means that their responses are almost completely determined by their neurotic conflicts. The analyst remains a mirror or blank screen on which the individual projects wishes and anxieties. These analytic features promote the development of a transference neurosis. It is here that patients play out, full blown, their old conflicts. They display wishes and anxieties as if they are trying to gain from the analyst what had been lacking in childhood. Rather than seeking a way out of competitive relationships, the patients may only seek to castrate the analyst; rather than seeking to become less dependent on others, they may seek to have the analyst gratify all their dependency needs. Once these experiences occur, patient and analyst can examine the instinctual and defensive components of the original infantile conflict. Change occurs when insight has been gained, with patients comprehending—intellectually and emotionally—the nature of their conflicts. They thereby gain freedom to perceive the world anew and to gratify their instincts in a mature, conflict‐free way. Why do these psychological gains occur specifically in the analytic setting when they did not occur previously in the patient's life? There are three key therapeutic factors. First, in analysis the conflict is less intense than it was in the original situation. Second, the analyst assumes an attitude that is different from that of the parents. Finally, patients in analysis are older and more mature; they thus are more able to use parts of their ego that were under‐developed earlier in life. These three factors provide the basis for what Alexander and French (1946) call the “corrective emotional experience”. Psychoanalytic theory suggests that through insight into old conflicts, through an understanding of the needs for infantile gratifications and recognition of the potential for mature gratification, and through an understanding of old anxieties and a recognition of their lack of relevance to current realities, patients may progress toward maximum instinctual gratification within the limits set by reality and their own moral convictions. A Case Example Little Hans A deep appreciation of Freud's analysis of personality can be gained through his case studies. Freud reported in detail on a small number of cases. Although these case reports often were written early in his career and thus do not fully reflect his final structural model of personality, they nonetheless reveal his general approach to the complex conflicts and anxieties of the mind. We summarize one such case here, the case of Little Hans (published in 1909). Little Hans was a five‐year‐old boy who suffered from an extreme fear, or a phobia. He feared that a horse would bite him and, therefore, refused to leave the house. Freud's report of the case is unusual in that it did not involve a treatment by Freud himself; the boy was treated by his father. However, the father kept detailed notes on Hans's treatment and frequently discussed Hans's progress with Freud. Freud's interpretation of the case is highly illustrative of his psychoanalytic principles, particularly his theories of infantile sexuality, the Oedipus complex and castration anxiety, the dynamics of symptom formation, and the process of behavior change. Events Leading Up to Development of the Phobia Our account of events in the life of Little Hans begins at age three. At this point Hans had a lively interest in his penis, which he called his “widdler.” He derived much pleasure in touching his own penis and was preoccupied with “widdlers” in others. The interest in touching his penis, however, led to threats by his mother. “If you do that, I shall send you to Dr. A. to cut off your widdler. And then what will you widdle with?” Thus, there was a direct castration threat. Freud pinpointed this as the beginning of Hans's castration complex. Hans's interest in widdlers extended to noting the large size of the widdlers of horses on the street and lions at the zoo and analyzing the differences between animate and inanimate objects (animals have widdlers, unlike tables and chairs). Hans was curious about many things, but Freud related this child's general thirst for knowledge to sexual curiosity. Hans continued to be interested in whether his mother had a widdler and said to her, “I thought you were so big you'd have a widdler like a horse.” When he was three and a half, a sister was born, who also became a focus for his widdler concerns. “But her widdler's still quite small. When she grows up, it'll get bigger all right.” According to Freud, Hans could not admit what he really saw, namely, that there was no widdler there. To do so would mean that he would have to face his own castration anxieties. These anxieties occurred at a time when he was experiencing pleasure in the organ, as witnessed in his comments to his mother while she dried and powdered him after his bath. Hans: Why don't you put your finger there? Mother: Because that'd be piggish. Hans: What's that? Piggish? Why? (laughing) But it's great fun. Thus Hans, now more than four years old and preoccupied with his penis, began some seduction of his mother. It was at this point that his nervous disorders became apparent. The father, attributing the difficulties to sexual overexcitation due to his mother's tenderness, wrote Freud that Hans was “afraid that a horse will bite him in the street” and that this fear seemed somehow to be connected with his having been frightened by seeing a large penis. (Recall that Hans, at a very early age, noticed what large penises horses have and inferred that his large mother must “have a widdler like a horse.”) Hans was afraid of going into the street and was depressed in the evenings. He had bad dreams and was frequently taken into his mother's bed. While walking in the street with his nurse, he became extremely frightened and sought to return home to be with his mother. The fear that a horse would bite him became a fear that the horse would come into his room. He had developed a full‐blown phobia, an irrational dread or fear of an object. Interpretation of the Symptom The father attempted to deal with his son's fear of horses by offering him an interpretation. Hans was told that the fear of horses was nonsense, that the truth was that he (Hans) was fond of his mother and that the fear of horses had to do with an interest in their “widdlers.” On Freud's suggestion, the father explained to Hans that women do not have “widdlers.” Apparently this provided some relief, but Hans continued to be bothered by an obsessive wish to look at horses, though he was then frightened by them. At this point, his tonsils were taken out, and his phobia worsened. He was afraid that a white horse would bite him. He continued to be interested in “widdlers” in females. At the zoo, he was afraid of all the large animals and was entertained by the smaller ones. Among the birds, he was afraid of the pelican. In spite of his father's truthful explanation, Hans sought to reassure himself. “And everyone has a widdler. And my widdler will get bigger as I get bigger, because it does grow on me.” According to Freud, Hans had been making comparisons among the sizes of widdlers and was dissatisfied with his own. Big animals reminded him of this defect and were disagreeable to him. The father's explanation heightened his castration anxiety, as expressed in the words “it does grow on me,” as if it could be cut off. For this reason he resisted the information, and thus it had no therapeutic results. About this Freud mused, “Could it be that living beings really did exist which did not possess widdlers? If so, it would no longer be so incredible that they could take his own widdler away, and, as it were, make him into a woman.” At around this time, Hans reported the following dream. “In the night there was a big giraffe in the room and a crumpled one; and the big one called out because I took the crumpled one away from it. Then it stopped calling out; and then I sat down on top of the crumpled one.” The father's interpretation was that he, the father, was the big giraffe, with the big penis, and the mother was the crumpled giraffe, missing the genital organ. The dream was a reproduction of a morning scene in which the mother took Hans into bed with her. The father warned her against this practice (“The big one called out because I'd taken the crumpled one away from it”), but the mother continued to encourage it. The mother encouraged and reinforced the Oedipal wishes. Hans stayed with her and, in the wish fulfillment of the dream, he took possession of her (“Then the big giraffe stopped calling out; and then I sat down on top of the crumpled one”). Freud's strategy in understanding Hans's phobia was to suspend judgment and to give his impartial attention to everything there was to observe. He learned that prior to the development of the phobia, Hans had been alone with his mother at a summer place. There, two significant events occurred. First, he heard the father of one of his friends tell her that a white horse there bit people and that she was not to hold her finger up to its mouth. Second, while pretending to be horses, a friend who rivaled Hans for the affection of the little girls fell down, hit his foot, and bled. In an interview with Hans, Freud learned that Hans was bothered by the blinders on horses and the black band around their mouths. The phobia became extended to include a fear that horses dragging a heavy van would fall down and kick their feet. It was then discovered that the exciting cause of his phobia—the event that capitalized on a psychological readiness for the formation of a phobia—was that Hans had witnessed a horse falling down. While walking outside with his mother one day, Hans had seen a horse pulling a van fall down and begin to kick its feet. The central feature in this case was the phobia about the horse. What is fascinating in this regard is how often associations concerning a horse came up in relation to the father, the mother, and Hans himself. We have already noticed Hans's interest in his mother's “widdler” in relation to that of a horse. To his father, he said at one point: “Daddy, don't trot away from me.” Could the father, who wore a mustache and eyeglasses, be the horse that Hans was afraid of, the horse that would come into his room at night and bite him? Or could Hans himself be the horse? Hans was known to play horse in his room, to trot about, fall down, kick about with his feet, and neigh. He repeatedly ran up to his father and bit him, just as he feared the horse would do to him. Hans was overfed. Could this relate to his concerns about large, fat horses? Finally, Hans was known to have called himself a young horse and to have a tendency to stamp his feet on the ground when angry, similar to what the horse did when it fell down. To return to the mother, could the heavily laden carts symbolize the pregnant mother and the horse falling down the birth or delivery of a child? Are such associations coincidental, or can they play a significant role in our understanding of the phobia? According to Freud, the major cause of Hans's phobia was his Oedipus conflict. Hans felt more affection for his mother than he could handle during the phallic stage of his development. Although he had deep affection for his father, he also considered him a rival for his mother's affections. When he and his mother stayed at the summer cottage and his father was away, he was able to get into bed with his mother and keep her for himself. This heightened his attraction for his mother and his hostility toward his father. For Freud, “Hans was really a little Oedipus who wanted to have his father ‘out of the way,' to get rid of him, so that he might be alone with his handsome mother and sleep with her. This wish had originated during his summer holidays, when the alternating presence and absence of his father had drawn Hans's attention to the condition upon which depended the intimacy with his mother which he longed for.” The fall and injury to his friend and rival during one of those holidays were significant in symbolizing for Hans the defeat of his rival. The Solution to the Oedipal Conflict When he returned home from the summer holidays, Hans's resentment toward his father increased. He tried to suppress the resentment with exaggerated affection. He arrived at an ingenious solution to the Oedipal conflict. He and his mother would be parents to children, and the father could be the granddaddy. Thus, as Freud notes, “The little Oedipus had found a happier solution than that prescribed by destiny. Instead of putting his father out of the way, he had granted him the same happiness that he desired himself: He made him a grandfather and let him too marry his own mother.” But such a fantasy could not be a satisfactory solution, and Hans was left with considerable hostility toward his father. The exciting cause of the phobia was the horse falling down. At that moment, Hans perceived a wish that his father might similarly fall down and die. The hostility toward his father was projected onto the father and was symbolized in the horse, because he himself nourished jealous and hostile wishes against him. He feared the horse would bite him because of his wish that his father would fall down, and fears that the horse would come into his room occurred at night when he was most tempted by Oedipal fantasies. In his own play as a horse and in his biting of his father, he expressed an identification with his father. The phobia expressed the wish and the anxiety and, in a secondary way, accomplished the objective of leaving Hans home to be with his mother. In sum, both his fear that a horse would bite him and his fear that horses would fall down represented the father who was going to punish Hans for the evil wishes he was harboring against him. Hans was able to get over the phobia, and, according to a later report by Freud, he appeared to be functioning well. What factors allowed the change? First, there was the sexual enlightenment by the father. Although Hans was reluctant to accept this, and it at first heightened his castration anxiety, it did serve as a useful piece of reality to hold onto. Second, the analysis provided by his father and by Freud was useful in making conscious for Hans what had formerly been unconscious. Finally, the father's interest in and permissive attitude toward Hans's expression of his feelings allowed a resolution of the Oedipus conflict in favor of an identification with the father, diminishing both the wish to rival the father and the castration anxiety, and thereby decreasing the potential for symptom development. To the contemporary personality scientist, the case of Little Hans is very limited if viewed as a scientific investigation. The father's interviewing was not systematic, his close adherence to Freud's thinking may have biased his observations and interpretations, and Freud was primarily dependent on secondhand reports. Though aware of these limitations, Freud nonetheless was impressed with the data on Hans. Whereas before he had based his theory on the childhood memories of adult patients, now, in the case of Little Hans, he began to observe the sexual life of children. The case of Little Hans simultaneously gives us an appreciation of the wealth of information available to the analyst and the problems inherent in interpreting such data. This one case alone yields information relevant to multiple theoretical ideas: infantile sexuality, fantasies of children, functioning of the unconscious, the process of conflict development and conflict resolution, the process of symptom formation, symbolization, and the dream process. We see Freud's courage and boldness in trying to discover secrets of human functioning in spite of limitations in his observations. Yet we also see Freud interpreting data that most contemporary psychologists would reject; most 21st‐century psychology scientists would see the data this case provides as so unsystematic, and so potentially biased, that it could not serve as a foundation for scientific theorizing. The Case of Jim Rorschach and Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) Data The Rorschach Inkblot Test and the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) were administered to Jim by a professional clinical psychologist. On the Rorschach, Jim gave relatively few responses—22 in all. This is surprising in view of other evidence of his intelligence and creative potential. It may be interesting to follow his responses to the first two cards and to consider the interpretations formulated by the psychologist, who also is a practicing psychoanalyst. CARD 1   Jim: The first thing that comes to mind is a butterfly. Interpretation: Initially cautious and acts conventionally in a novel situation. Jim: This reminds me of a frog. Not a whole frog, like a frog's eyes. Really just reminds me of a frog. Interpretation: He becomes more circumspect, almost picky, and yet tends to overgeneralize while feeling inadequate about it. Jim: Could be a bat. More spooky than the butterfly because there is no color. Dark and ominous. Interpretation: Phobic, worried, depressed, and pessimistic. CARD 2   Jim: Could be two headless people with their arms touching. Looks like they are wearing heavy dresses. Could be one touching her hand against a mirror. If they're women, their figures are not good. Look heavy. Interpretation: Alert to people. Concern or confusion about sexual role. Anal‐compulsive features. Disparaging of women and hostile to them—headless and figures not good. Narcissism expressed in mirror image. Jim: This looks like two faces facing each other. Masks, profiles—more masks than faces—not full, more of a façade, like one with a smile and one with a frown. He presents a façade, can smile or frown, but doesn't feel genuine. Despite façade of poise, feels tense with people. Repeated several times that he was not imaginative. Is he worried about his productivity and importance? A number of interesting responses occurred on other cards. On the third card Jim perceived women trying to lift weights. Here again was a suggestion of conflict about his sexual role and about a passive as opposed to an active orientation. On the following card he commented that “somehow they all have an Alfred Hitchcock look of spooky animals,” again suggesting a possible phobic quality to his behavior and a tendency to project dangers into the environment. His occasional references to symmetry and details suggested the use of compulsive defenses and intellectualization while experiencing threat. Disturbed and conflicted references to women come up in a number of places. On Card 7, he perceived two women from mythology who would be good if they were mythological but bad if they were fat. On the next to last card he perceived “some sort of a Count, Count Dracula. Eyes, ears, cape. Ready to grab, suck blood. Ready to go out and strangle some woman.” The reference to sucking blood suggested tendencies toward oral sadism, something that also appeared in another percept of vampires that suck blood. Jim followed the percept of Count Dracula with one of pink cotton candy. The tester interpreted this response as suggesting a yearning for nurturance and contact behind the oral sadism; that is, the subject uses oral aggressive tendencies (e.g., sarcasm, verbal attacks) to defend against more passive oral wishes (e.g., to be fed, to be taken care of, and to be dependent). The examiner concluded that the Rorschach suggested a neurotic structure in which intellectualization, compulsivity, and hysterical operations (irrational fears, preoccupation with his body) are used to defend against anxiety. However, it was suggested that Jim continues to feel anxious and uncomfortable with others, particularly authority figures. The report from the Rorschach concluded: “He is conflicted about his sexual role. While he yearns for nurturance and contact from the motherly female, he feels very guilty about the cravings and his intense hostility toward women. He assumes a passive orientation, a continual role playing and, behind a facade of tact, he continues his rage, sorrow, and ambition.” What kinds of stories did Jim tell on the TAT? Most striking about these stories were the sadness and hostility involved in all interpersonal relationships. In one story a boy is dominated by his mother, in another an insensitive gangster is capable of gross inhumanity, and in a third a husband is upset to learn that his wife is not a virgin. In particular, the relationships between men and women constantly involve one putting down the other. Consider this story. Looks like two older people. The woman is sincere, sensitive, and dependent on the man. There is something about the man's expression that bespeaks of insensitivity—the way he looks at her, as if he conquered her. There is not the same compassion and security in her presence that she feels in his. In the end, the woman gets very hurt and is left to fend for herself. Normally I would think that they were married but in this case I don't because two older people who are married would be happy with one another. In this story we have a man being sadistic to a woman. We also see the use of the defensive mechanism of denial in Jim's suggestion that these two people cannot be married since older married people are always happy with one another. In the story that followed the aforementioned one, there is again the theme of hostile mistreatment of a woman. In this story there is a more open expression of the sexual theme, along with evidence of some sexual role confusion. This picture brings up a gross thought. I think of Candy. The same guy who took advantage of Candy. He's praying over her. Not the last rites, but he has convinced her that he is some powerful person and she's looking for him to bestow his good graces upon her. His knee is on the bed, he's unsuccessful, she's naive. He goes to bed with her for mystical purposes. [Blushes] She goes on being naive and continues to be susceptible to that kind of thing. She has a very, very sweet compassionate look. Could it possibly be that this is supposed to be a guy wearing a tie? I'll stick with the former. The psychologist interpreting these stories observed that Jim appeared to be immature, naive, and characterized by a gross denial of all that is unpleasant or dirty, the latter for him including both sexuality and marital strife. The report continued: “He is vacillating between expressing sadistic urges and experiencing a sense of victimization.

Probably he combines both, often in indirect expressions of hostility while feeling unjustly treated or accused. He is confused about what meaningful relationships two people can have. He is ambivalently idealistic and pessimistic about his own chances for a stable relationship. Since he sees sex as dirty and as a mode for using or being used by his partner, he fears involvement. At the same time he craves attention, needs to be recognized, and is often preoccupied with sexual urges.” Across the Rorschach and TAT, a number of themes emerge: Involves a lack of warmth in interpersonal relationships, including a disparaging and sometimes sadistic orientation toward women. The experience of tension and anxiety behind a facade of poise. Conflict and confusion about his sexual identity. Although there is evidence of intelligence and creative potential, there also is evidence of rigidity and inhibition in relation to the unstructured nature of the projective tests. Compulsive defenses, intellectualization, and denial are only partially successful in helping him deal with his anxieties. Comments on the Data These data about Jim highlight the most attractive feature of projective tests. Their disguise enables one to penetrate the façade of someone's personality (in psychoanalytic terms, his or her defenses) in order to view the person's underlying needs, motives, or drives. Information presented in Jim's autobiography (Chapter 2) did not indicate the psychological themes evident in his projective test responses. At the same time, the interpretations from the projective tests fit with and elaborate upon themes in his autobiography such as his hiding his tension behind a façade of poise and his conflicted relationship with women. As we not only examine psychoanalytic theory but also look forward to other theories to come, an interesting point arises. It is difficult to see how other theories of personality could make as much use of this data about Jim as psychoanalytic theory can. The assessment practices associated with other theories are unlikely to reveal this sort of information. It is only on the Rorschach that we obtain content such as “women trying to lift weights,” “Count Dracula ready to grab, suck blood. Ready to go out and strangle some woman,” and “pink cotton candy.” The TAT is unique in revealing references to themes of sadness and hostility in interpersonal relationships. These responses allow for the psychodynamic interpretations. An important part of Jim's personality functioning appears to involve a defense against sadistic urges. The references to sucking blood and to cotton candy, together with the rest of his responses, allow for the interpretation that he is partially fixated at the oral stage. In relation to this, it is interesting to observe that Jim has an ulcer, which involves the digestive tract, and that he had to drink milk (a treatment of choice at one time) to manage this condition. As Freud's fame grew, he attracted followers. As may be inevitable with any person of fame and the followers he or she attracts, some followed closely in his footsteps, whereas others rejected one or more aspects of his thinking and embarked in new directions—directions they may never have considered were it not for Freud, yet that he himself would not have taken. In the remainder of this chapter, we review this post‐Freudian psychodynamic tradition. Related Theoretical Conceptions Two Early Challenges to Freud: Adler and Jung Among the many early analysts who broke with Freud and developed their own schools of thought were Alfred Adler and Carl G. Jung. Both were early and important followers of Freud, Adler having been president of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and Jung president of the International Psychoanalytic Society. Both split with Freud over what they felt was an excessive emphasis on the sexual instincts. Alfred Adler (1870–1937) For approximately a decade, Alfred Adler was an active member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. However, in 1911, when he presented his views to the other members of this group, the response was so hostile that he left it to form his own school of Individual Psychology. What ideas could have been considered so unacceptable to psychoanalysts? Perhaps most significant in Adler's split from Freud was his greater emphasis on social urges and conscious thoughts than on instinctual sexual urges and unconscious processes. Early in his career Adler became interested in bodily inferiorities and how people compensate for them. A person with a weak bodily organ may attempt to compensate for this weakness by making special efforts to strengthen that organ or to develop other organs. Someone who stutters as a child may attempt to become a great speaker. A person with an auditory impairment may attempt to develop special listening or musical sensitivities. Adler gradually realized that there was a general principle here. People consciously experience feelings of inferiority and are motivated to compensate for these painful inferiorities. To Adler, “it is the feeling of inferiority, inadequacy, insecurity, which determines the goal of an individual's existence” (Adler, 1927, p. 72). Adlerian thinking reformulates traditional Freudian interpretations. To take an historical example, U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt emphasized toughness by saying that one should “carry a big stick.” To Freud, such statements are a defense against castration anxiety. An Adlerian might instead see this as expressing compensatory strivings against feelings of inferiority. As another example, Freudians might see an extremely aggressive woman as expressing penis envy, whereas Adlerians might see such persons as expressing a masculine protest or rejection of the stereotyped feminine role of weakness and inferiority. According to Adler, how a person attempts to cope with such feelings becomes a part of his or her style of life—a distinctive aspect of his or her personality functioning. The principle of striving to compensate for inferiority does not apply merely to select individuals who suffer from a physical limitation. It applies to everyone. This is because everyone, in childhood, experiences inferiority. “One must remember that every child occupies an inferior position in life” (Adler, 1927, pp. 69–70). All young children see that they are less able to cope with objects and events than are adults or older children whom they encounter. Everyone, then, experiences the motivating force of inferiority feelings. Adler's theory proposes that people are motivated to compensate for feelings of inferiority. These compensatory strivings can shape the development of a person's life. The motives explored by Adler sometimes are evident in the life stories of highly successful persons. This photo depicts Brian Wilson, founder of the Beach Boys, one of the most popular groups in the history of contemporary music. What was the origin of Wilson's success? His official Web site reports that “After years of abuse by his father, he was left nearly deaf in one ear, depressed and lacking self‐esteem. ‘I overcompensated,' he said. ‘I felt inferior because I only had one good ear. I compensated for that inferiority, and made some superior music.' ” These Adlerian concepts are more socially oriented than are Freud's. To Adler, compensatory strivings reflect will to power, that is, the individual's efforts to be a powerful, effective social being by coping with inferiorities and feelings of helplessness. In neurotic form, strivings for superiority may be expressed in efforts to exert power and control over others. In healthier form, a person experiences an “upward drive” toward unity and perfection. In the healthy person the striving for superiority is expressed in social feeling and cooperation as well as in assertiveness and competition. From the beginning people have a social interest, that is, an innate interest in relating to people and an innate potential for cooperation. Adler also emphasized people's feelings about the self, how they respond to goals that direct their behavior toward the future, and how the order of birth among siblings can influence their psychological development. Consistent with Adler's views, later research indicated that first‐borns are somewhat more conscientious and conservative, preserving their “first‐place” status in the (Paulhus, Trapnell, & Chen, 1999; Sulloway, 1996). Also consistent with Adler's ideas contemporary researchers have become explored power as a fundamental determinant of human behavior (Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003). However, Adler's school of individual psychology itself has not had a major direct impact on 21st century personality theory and research. Carl G. Jung (1875–1961) Carl Jung's role in the history of psychodynamic theory is utterly unique. Early in his career as a physician, the Swiss scholar read the writings of Freud, was deeply impressed, and established a correspondence with the Vienna psychoanalyst. When Freud and Jung eventually met, they deeply impressed one another. They developed a relationship that was both professional and personal; their written correspondence suggests that they related as much in the style of father and son as professional colleagues. Freud came to view Jung as his “crown prince”—the person who would carry on Freud's psychoanalytic tradition after Freud's death. But this isn't what happened. Their relationship began to deteriorate beginning in 1909, due to a mixture of professional and personal conflicts (Gay, 1998). In 1914, Jung resigned his position as president of the International Psychoanalytic Association. Why the split between Freud and Jung? From Jung's perspective, it was because he felt that Freud had overemphasized sexuality. Jung viewed the libido not as a sexual instinct but as a generalized life energy. Although sexuality is a part of this basic energy, the libido also includes strivings for pleasure and creativity. To Jung, this reinterpretation of the libido was the primary reason for his break with Freud. (Freud, in contrast, viewed their breakup in psychoanalytic terms, with Jung expressing Oedipal feelings toward his professional father, Freud.) Carl Jung. This reinterpretation of libidinal energy is just one feature that differentiates Jung's analytic psychology from Freud's psychoanalysis. Jung felt that Freud overemphasized the idea that our current behavior is a mere repetition of the past, with instinctual urges and psychological repressions of childhood being repeated in adult life. Instead, Jung believed that personality development also has a forward‐moving directional tendency. People try to acquire a meaningful personal identity and a sense of meaning in self. Indeed, people are so forward looking that they commonly devote efforts to religious practices that prepare them for a life after death. A particularly distinguishing feature of Jung's psychology is his emphasis on the evolutionary foundations of the human mind. Jung accepted Freud's emphasis on the unconscious as a storehouse of repressed experiences from one's life. But he added to this idea the concept of the collective unconscious. According to Jung, people have stored within their collective unconscious the cumulative experiences of past generations. The collective unconscious, as opposed to the personal unconscious, is universal. It is shared by all humans as a result of their common ancestry. It is part of our human as well as our animal heritage, and thus it is our link with the collective wisdom of millions of years of past experience: “This psychic life is the mind of our ancient ancestors, the way in which they thought and felt, the way in which they conceived of life and the world, of gods and human beings. The existence of these historical layers is presumably the source of belief in reincarnation and in memories of past lives” (Jung, 1939, p. 24). The collective unconscious contains universal images or symbols, known as archetypes. Archetypes, such as the Mother archetype, are seen in fairy tales, dreams, myths, and some psychotic thoughts. Jung was struck with similar images that keep appearing, in slightly different forms, in different cultures that are distant from one another. For example, the Mother archetype might be expressed in different cultures in a variety of positive or negative forms: as life giver, as all giving and nurturant, as the witch or threatening punisher (“Don't fool with Mother Nature”), and as the seductive female. Archetypes may be represented in our images of persons, demons, animals, natural forces, or objects. The evidence in all cases for their being a part of our collective unconscious is their universality among members of different cultures from past and current time periods. Another important aspect of Jung's theory is his emphasis on how people struggle with opposing forces within them. For example, there is the struggle between the face or mask we present to others, represented in the archetype of the persona, and the private or personal self. If people emphasize the persona too much, there may be a loss of sense of self and a doubting about who they are. On the other hand, the persona, as expressed in social roles and customs, is a necessary part of living in society. Similarly, there is the struggle between the masculine and feminine parts of ourselves. Every male has a feminine part (the archetype of the anima) and every female has a masculine part (the archetype of the animus) to their personality. If a man rejects his feminine part, he may emphasize mastery and strength to an excessive degree, appearing cold and insensitive to the feelings of others. If a woman rejects her masculine part, she may be excessively absorbed in motherhood. Psychologists currently interested in stereotyped sex roles would probably applaud Jung's emphasis on these dual aspects in everyone's personality, although they might question his characterizing some as specifically masculine and others as feminine. An interesting yet controversial feature of Jung's analysis is the contention that gender‐role stereotypes are not a product of an individual's social experience but of the experiences of one's ancestors over the course of evolution. A similar idea is found in contemporary evolutionary psychology (Chapter 9). Jung emphasizes that all individuals face a fundamental personal task: finding unity in the self. The task is to bring into harmony, or integrate, the various opposing forces of the psyche. The person is motivated and guided along the path to personal knowledge and integration by the most important of all Jungian archetypes: the self. In Jungian psychology “the self” does not refer to one's conscious beliefs about one's personal qualities. Instead, the self is an unconscious force, specifically, an aspect of the collective unconscious that functions as an “organizing center” (Jung and Collaborators, 1964, p. 161) of the person's entire psychological system. Jung believed that the self often is represented symbolically in circular figures—the circle representing a sense of wholeness that can be achieved through self‐knowledge. Mandalas, which are circular symbols that contain pathways toward a centerpoint, serve as vivid symbols of the struggle for knowledge of our true selves. Since the self is an archetype of the collective unconscious, and the collective unconscious is a universal aspect of human personality, according to Jungian theory one should expect to find similar symbolic representations of the self across diverse human cultures. And one does. Symbols found in human cultures separated widely in time and place often contain remarkably similar imagery that, according to Jung, represents the universal unconscious motive to grow in self‐knowledge. To Jung, the search for the self is a never‐ending quest. “Personality as a complete realization of the fullness of our being is an unattainable ideal. But unattainability is no counter argument against an ideal, for ideals are only signposts, never goals” (Jung, 1939, p. 287). The struggle described here can become a particularly important aspect of life once people have passed the age of 40 and defined themselves to the outside world in a variety of ways. Another contrast in Jung's theory is that between introversion and extraversion. Everyone relates to the world primarily in one of two directions, though the other direction always remains a part of the person. In the case of introversion, the person's basic orientation is inward, toward the self. The introverted type is hesitant, reflective, and cautious. In the case of extraversion the person's basic orientation is outward, toward the outside world. The extraverted type is socially engaging, active, and adventuresome. As with Adler, we have considered only some of the highlights of Jung's theory. Jung is considered by many to be one of the great creative thinkers of the 20th century. His theory has influenced intellectual trends in many fields outside of psychology. Jungian centers for clinical training continue to exist in many countries. Yet, Jung's work has had little impact within scientific psychology. To a large degree, this reflects the fact that Jung often did not state his ideas in a manner that could be tested according to standard scientific methods. His imaginative theorizing commonly was more speculative than that of other personality theorists—so speculative that elements of this theorizing are difficult, if not impossible, to support or to disprove through objective scientific methods. The Cultural and Interpersonal Emphasis: Horney and Sullivan Reinterpreting Motivational Forces In the middle of the 20th century, a group of psychoanalytic theorists began a deep rethinking of basic psychoanalytic principles. These writers felt that, to a greater degree than Freud had appreciated, personality develops through interpersonal interactions. These interpersonal actions inherently occur within social and cultural contexts. Their work thus constitutes a cultural and interpersonal emphasis within the psychoanalytic tradition. As Greenberg and Mitchell (1983) have explained, there are two different ways of emphasizing interpersonal factors from a psychodynamic perspective. One adheres to traditional Freudian principles. In this classic psychoanalytic view, the motivational forces in the development of the individual are biological drives (the id's drives toward pleasure). The central features of personality development are the individual's efforts to manage these biologically based desires, which often conflict with social norms. Once personality structures are developed in this manner, they in turn influence social life. The instinctual drives, then, are primary: They are the initial forces driving development and are responsible for the formation of personality structure. Social relationships—for example, with peers and friends—are of secondary importance. Social relationships do not determine personality structure in this traditional Freudian account. They are determined by personality structures whose development is an outgrowth of the biologically based desires of the id. The ideas of interpersonal psychodynamic theorists differed strikingly from this Freudian tradition. The interpersonal view sees social relations as primary, not secondary. Personality structures are thought to develop through (i.e., as a result of) interactions with others. Other people display emotional styles that influence one's own emotional life. They provide evaluations that influence one's own self‐concept. Acceptance by others becomes a basic motivational force. Although many writers contributed to this interpersonal tradition, two figures of particular historical importance are Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan. Karen Horney (1885–1952) Karen Horney was trained as a traditional analyst in Germany. She then came to the United States, in 1932. Shortly thereafter she split with traditional psychoanalytic thought and developed her own theoretical orientation and psychoanalytic training program. A major difference between Horney's work and traditional psychoanalytic thinking involved the question of universal biological influences as opposed to cultural influences: “When we realize the great import of cultural conditions on neuroses, the biological and physiological conditions, which are considered by Freud to be their root, recede into the background” (1937, p. viii). Three considerations led her to this conclusion. The first was the role of culture in the development of gender identity. The influence of cultural factors on “ideas of what constitutes masculinity or femininity was obvious, and it became just as obvious to me that Freud had arrived at certain conclusions because he failed to take them into account” (1945, p. 11). Second was her association with another psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm, who drew her attention to social and cultural influences. Third, when moving from European culture to the United States, Horney judged that she observed differences in personality structure between European and U.S. patients. Beyond this, these observations led her to conclude that interpersonal relationships are at the core of all healthy and disturbed personality functioning. Horney's emphasis in neurotic functioning is on how individuals attempt to cope with basic anxiety—the feeling a child has of being isolated and helpless in a potentially hostile world. According to her theory of neurosis, in the neurotic person there is conflict among three ways of responding to this basic anxiety. These three patterns, or neurotic trends, are known as moving toward, moving against, and moving away. All three are characterized by rigidity and the lack of fulfillment of individual potential, the essence of any neurosis. In moving toward, a person attempts to deal with anxiety by an excessive interest in being accepted, needed, and approved of. Such a person accepts a dependent role in relation to others and, except for the unlimited desire for affection, becomes unselfish, undemanding, and self‐sacrificing. In moving against, a person assumes that everyone is hostile and that life is a struggle against all. All functioning is directed toward denying a need for others and toward appearing tough. In moving away, the third component of the conflict, the person shrinks away from others into neurotic detachment. Such people often look at themselves and others with emotional detachment, as a way of not getting emotionally involved with others. Although each neurotic person shows one or another trend as a special aspect of their personality, the problem is really that there is conflict among the three trends in the effort to deal with basic anxiety. Before leaving Horney, we should consider her views concerning women. These views date back to her early work within traditional psychoanalytic thought and are reflected in a series of papers collected in Feminine Psychology (1973). As noted from the start, Horney had trouble accepting Freud's views of women. She felt that the concept of penis envy might be the result of a male bias in psychoanalysts who treat neurotic women in a particular social context: “Unfortunately, little or nothing is known of psychologically healthy women, or of women under different cultural conditions” (1973, p. 216). She suggested that women are not biologically disposed toward masochistic attitudes of being weak, dependent, submissive, and self‐sacrificing. Instead, these attitudes indicated the powerful influence of social forces. Karen Horney. In sum, both in her views of women and in her general theoretical orientation, Horney rejected Freud's biological emphasis in favor of a social, interpersonal approach. Partly as a result of this difference, she held a much more optimistic view concerning people's capacity for change and self‐fulfillment. Harry Stack Sullivan (1892–1949) Of the theorists considered in this section, Sullivan, an American, most emphasized the role of social, interpersonal forces in human development. His theory has been known as the Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry (Sullivan, 1953), and his followers created a Sullivan school of interpersonal relations. In Sullivan's view, emotional experiences are not based in biological drives, as Freud posited, but in relations with others. This is true even in the early stages of life. For example, anxiety may be communicated by the mother in her earliest interaction with the infant; thus, from the start, anxiety is interpersonal in character rather than purely biological. The self, a critical concept in Sullivan's thinking, similarly is social in origin. The self develops out of feelings experienced while in contact with others and from reflected appraisals or perceptions by a child as to how he or she is valued or appraised by others. Experiences of anxiety as opposed to security in interpersonal relations contribute to the development of different parts of the self. The “good me” is associated with pleasurable experiences; the “bad me” with pain and threats to security; and the “not me”—a part of the self that is rejected—is associated with intolerable anxiety. Sullivan's emphasis on social influences is seen in his views on the development of the person. Like Erikson (Chapter 3), Sullivan judged that the developmental period beyond the time of the Oedipus complex contributed significantly to the overall development of the person. He particularly emphasized the juvenile era and preadolescence. During the juvenile stage—roughly the grammar school years—a child's experiences with friends and teachers begin to rival the influence of his or her parents. Social acceptance becomes important, and the child's reputation with others becomes an important source of self‐esteem or anxiety. During preadolescence, a relationship with a close friend of the same sex becomes particularly important. This relationship of close friendship, of love, forms the basis for the development of a love relationship with a person of the opposite sex during adolescence. In later years, child psychologists highlighted the importance of early relationships with peers that were anticipated, years earlier, by Sullivan (Lewis, 2002). Object Relations, Self Psychology, and Attachment Theory Object Relations Theory The interpersonal approach of Sullivan represented a significant break with the psychoanalytic tradition established by Freud. As noted, Sullivan's interpersonal approach placed greater emphasis on developmental experiences that occur after the Oedipal period (e.g., during preadolescence). We now consider schools of thought that moved in a different direction. A group of psychodynamic thinkers known as object relations theorists were, like Sullivan, interested in interpersonal relations. However, they presented ideas that “are essentially developmental theories that examine developmental processes and relationships prior to the Oedipal period” (St. Clair, 1986, p. 15). You, the student, face an immediate potential obstacle in understanding object relations theory. It is the meaning of the word object. In psychodynamic theory, the word takes on a definition that differs from its typical use. We usually use the word object to refer to something that isn't human: a chair, a lamp, a box, and so forth. In object relations theory, however, the word object generally refers to a person. Psychoanalysts beginning with Freud posited that people have drives that are directed toward the thing that can satisfy the drive by reducing tension. This thing toward which the drive is directed is an object. Since the need to reduce tension generally is satisfied by a person (the hungry infant seeks the mother's breast, the adult is sexually attracted to another person), significant objects are persons. In studying objects then, object relations theorists are interested in the world of interpersonal relations (Greenberg & Mitchell, 1983; Westen & Gabbard, 1999). They are concerned with how experiences with important people in the past are represented as parts or aspects of the self and then, in turn, affect one's relationships with others in the present. In some respects, this theorizing is close to Freud's original psychoanalytic model. Yet there is a difference. Object relations theorists do not explain all aspects of personality development, and later personality functioning, in terms of conflicts between biological drives and social constraints, as Freud did. Instead, they focus on mental representations of relationships with objects (i.e., others). Relationships experienced in early childhood determine the nature of the mental models, or mental representations, of others that one forms. Once formed, these mental representations remain in the mind. Later in life, the mental representations formed in childhood influence one's experiences in new relationships: “residues of past experiences … shape [later] perceptions of individuals and relationships” (St. Clair, 1986). Self Psychology and Narcissism A theoretical development that is closely related to object relations theory is the set of ideas known, in psychodynamic theorizing, as self psychology. (Note that many psychologists who are not psychodynamic in their orientation also are interested in the self, and sometimes refer to their work as a “self psychology.” In this section we specifically are addressing the self psychology that developed within the overall psychodynamic tradition.) A particular focus of self psychology is a phenomenon known as narcissism. Although the exact meaning of narcissism varies slightly from one psychodynamic theorist to another, the term generally refers to an investment of mental energy in the self. In healthy, mature personality development, people can respond to their own needs while also being responsive to the needs of others. The narcissistic need to display features of the self may even display itself in socially positive ways, such as in creative products that display an artist's inner being (St. Clair, 1986). However, if developmental experiences result in less maturity, a person may display a narcissistic personality; that is, their narcissism may become a predominant feature of their personality, with negative implications for their relationships with others. In the narcissistic personality, the person has a grandiose sense of self‐importance and is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success and power. Narcissists (i.e., individuals who develop a predominantly narcissistic personality) have an exaggerated feeling of being entitled to things from others, of deserving the admiration and love of others, and of being special or unique. Because so much mental energy is self‐directed, narcissists lack empathy with the feelings and needs of others. Although narcissists display positive self views, they also are vulnerable to blows to self‐esteem. They need admiration from others. They at times idealize others around them, yet at other times devalue others; in therapy it is not unusual for the narcissistic individual to idealize the therapist as extremely insightful at one moment and to berate the same therapist as stupid and incompetent at the next moment.

The contemporary concept of narcissism can be dated back to ancient Greek mythology. Narcissus was so taken with his own beauty that he could do nothing other than stare at his image, which eventually led to his death.

Narcissism has been the focus of much systematic research for many years. One goal in the study of narcissism is the development of assessment instruments that can distinguish narcissists from others. Henry Murray, who developed the TAT, also developed an early narcissism questionnaire (Figure 4.1). More recently, a Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) (Raskin & Hall, 1979, 1981) has been developed (Figure 4.1). Individuals scoring high on the NPI have been found to use many more self‐references (e.g., I, me, mine) than those scoring low (Raskin & Shaw, 1987). In another study, a relationship was found between high scores on the NPI and being described by others as exhibitionistic, assertive, controlling, and critical‐evaluative (Raskin & Terry, 1987). Individuals scoring high on narcissism have been found to evaluate their performance more positively than it is evaluated by peers or staff, demonstrating a significant self‐enhancement bias relative to individuals scoring low on narcissism (John & Robins, 1994; Robins & John, 1997). Moreover, whereas most people feel uncomfortable and self‐conscious when they see themselves in a mirror or on videotape, this is not the case for narcissistic individuals. Just like the mythical Narcissus, who admired his own reflection in a pond, narcissistic individuals spend more time looking at themselves in mirrors, prefer to watch themselves rather than another person on videotape, and indeed receive an “ego boost” from watching themselves on videotape (Robins & John, 1997).

Murray's Narcissism Scale (1938, p. 181)

I often think about how I look and what impression I am making upon others.

My feelings are easily hurt by ridicule or by the slighting remarks of others.

I talk a good deal about myself, my experiences, my feelings, and my ideas.

 

Narcissism Personality Inventory (Raskin & Hall, 1979)

I really like to be the center of attention.

I think I am a special person.

I expect a great deal from other people.

I am envious of other people's good fortune.

I will never be satisfied until I get all that I deserve.

FIGURE 4.1 Illustrative items from questionnaire measures of narcissism.

Researchers also have focused on the thinking processes and interpersonal tendencies of narcissistic individuals (Morf & Rhodewalt, 2001; Rhodewalt & Sorrow, 2002). Narcissistic persons are found to have not only a self‐aggrandizing attributional style but also fairly simple self‐concepts and a cynical mistrust of others (Rhodewalt & Morf, 1995). These findings are consistent with the picture of the narcissist as a person preoccupied with the maintenance of his or her exaggerated self‐esteem. In relation to this, it is not surprising that narcissistic individuals seek romantic partners who will be admiring of them, in contrast with non‐narcissistic individuals who seek caring partners (Campbell, 1999).

Much of the research on narcissism has used correlational methods. Investigators commonly relate NPI scores to scores on other questionnaires or to observations of behavior (e.g., self‐references, looking at self in the mirror). However, investigators increasingly have employed experimental methods. For example, building on clinical observations that narcissists respond to criticism or threat to self‐esteem with feelings of rage, shame, or humiliation, Rhodewalt and Morf (1998) exposed individuals with high and with low narcissism scores (NPI) to experiences of success and failure on two tests described as measures of intelligence. Since the items on the measures were moderately difficult, subjects would be uncertain about the accuracy of their responses, and feedback concerning accuracy could be manipulated by the experimenters. To observe the effects of failure following success as opposed to preceding success, half the subjects received success feedback for the first test and failure feedback for the second test, and the other half the reverse order of feedback. Following each test, subjects were asked to respond to questions concerning their emotions and to indicate their attributions for their performance. As predicted, individuals high on narcissism (NPI) reacted to failure with greater anger than did individuals scoring low on narcissism, particularly when the failure followed success. This result was consistent with the view that narcissistic anger is a response to perceived threats to the narcissist's grandiose self‐image. In addition, individuals scoring high on narcissism were found to be particularly vulnerable to swings in self‐esteem as a consequence of receiving positive and negative feedback about the self. Feelings of happiness were similarly greatly affected by such feedback. Finally, narcissists were found to be more self‐aggrandizing in attributing success to their own ability, and more blaming of others in accounting for failure, than were less narcissistic subjects. In sum, the experimental findings supported the clinical observations concerning the vulnerability of narcissists to blows to their self‐esteem and their response to such blows with anger.

Attachment Theory

The last theoretical development we will discuss in this review of post‐Freudian psychodynamic theories is attachment theory. Attachment theory is of particular relevance to the contemporary science of personality. Some writers believe that current research on attachment processes has resurrected psychodynamic theory within the scientific field (Shaver & Mikulincer, 2005, 2012), as Freud's theories had been severely criticized over the years.

Attachment theory originated in theoretical work by a British psychoanalyst, John Bowlby, and was significantly advanced by the developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth (Ainsworth & Bowlby, 1991; Bretherton, 1992; Rothbard & Shaver, 1994). Bowlby was interested in the effects of early separation from parents on personality development—a major problem in England during World War II when many children were sent to the countryside, far from their parents, to be safe from enemy bombing of the cities. In a traditional Freudian approach to this issue, one would inquire into how separation from the parents affected the development of instinctual drives (involving sex and aggression) during the Oedipal period. But here is where Bowlby's work differed from that of Freud. Based on his knowledge of ethology (a branch of biology focusing on the study of animals in their natural environment), Bowlby suggested that there exists a psychological system that is specifically dedicated to parent–child relationships. He called this the  attachment behavioral system (ABS) .

According to Bowlby, the ABS is innate; that is, all persons have such a system as a result of their biological endowment. The ABS has motivational significance; it is a system that motivates the infant to be close to (i.e., to seek physical proximity to) caregivers, especially when there is a threat in the environment. A young child clinging to adults for comfort and security, then, would be an example of a behavior motivated by the ABS. During development, as the infant gains a greater sense of security in its relations with adults, the proximity of adult attachment figures provides a “secure base” for explorations of the environment.

Attachment theory predicts that the effects of developmental processes involving attachment are long lasting. The prediction is based on the following rationale. Child–parent relations create, in the child, symbolic mental representations involving the self and caregivers. These mental representations, called  internal working models , contain abstract beliefs and expectations about significant others. Once formed, internal working models endure; they are long‐lasting personality structures.

Bowlby's attachment theory recognizes individual differences in attachment. Different infants may experience different types of interactions with caregivers, since parents differ in how responsive they are to infants' needs. These parental differences create different internal working models in the child. These mental representations, in turn, can contribute to differences in children's behavior and emotion in interactions with significant others.

These theoretical ideas received a major boost from research involving a novel methodology: the “Strange Situation” procedure developed by Mary Ainsworth (Ainsworth, Bleher, Waters, & Wall, 1978). This procedure is designed to identify individual differences in attachment styles via direct observation of parent–child interactions. (Direct observation of parents is more convincing than, for example, merely asking parents to report their interactions with children, since parents' reports might be inaccurate.) In the Strange Situation procedure, psychologists observe infants' responses to the departure (separation) and return (reuniting) of the mother or other caregiver in a structured laboratory setting. Based on these observations, Ainsworth and her colleagues classified infants into different attachment types. About 70% of infants were classified as being of a secure attachment type; these infants were those who were sensitive to the departure of the mother but greeted her upon being reunited, were readily comforted, and were then able to return to exploration and play. About 20% of infants displayed an attachment style that was labeled anxious‐avoidant. This style was marked by little protest over separation from the mother and, upon her return, avoidance in terms of turning, looking, or moving away from the mother. Finally, about 10% of infants were classified as anxious‐ambivalent; these infants had difficulty separating from the mother and reuniting with her upon her return. Their behavior mixed pleas to be picked up with squirming and insistence on being let down.

The Strange Situation paradigm provides an objective procedure for studying psychodynamic processes that can be used to explore a variety of research questions. For example, if one wants to know whether attachment patterns are similar across cultures, one can employ the standardized Strange Situation paradigm in different cultural contexts. Results of such research (Van Ijzendoorn & Kroonenberg, 1988) document between‐culture difference in the prevalence of different attachment styles (as well as differences between groups within a given cultural setting). For example, a study in Korea found a very low rate of avoidance attachment among Korean infants, which may reflect parental styles distinctive to that culture (Jin, Jacobvitz, Hazen, & Jung, 2012).

Attachment Styles in Adulthood In more recent years, psychologists have used the attachment framework to understand not only parent–child relationships but also romantic relationships in adulthood. Individual differences in emotional bonds in infancy may be related to individual differences in the way emotional bonds are established later in life. To study this possibility, Hazan and Shaver (1987) had research participants complete a newspaper survey or “love quiz.” As a measure of attachment style, the newspaper readers described themselves as fitting one of three categories in terms of their relationships with others. These three categories were descriptive of the three attachment styles. As a measure of their current style of romantic love, subjects were asked to respond to questions listed under a banner headline in the newspaper: “Tell Us about the Love of Your Life.” Responses to the questions concerning the most important love relationship they ever had formed the basis for scores on 12 love experience scales. Additional questions were asked concerning each person's view of romantic love over time and recollections of childhood relationships with parents and between parents. Did the different types of respondents (secure, avoidant, anxious‐ambivalent) also differ in the way they experienced their most important love relationships? This appears to be the case. Secure attachment styles were associated with experiences of happiness, friendship, and trust; avoidant styles with fears of closeness, emotional highs and lows, and jealousy; and anxious‐ambivalent styles with obsessive preoccupation with the loved person, a desire for union, extreme sexual attraction, emotional extremes, and jealousy. In addition, the three groups differed in their views or mental models of romantic relationships: Secure lovers viewed romantic feelings as being somewhat stable but also waxing and waning, and they discounted the kind of head‐over‐heels romantic love often depicted in novels and movies; avoidant lovers were skeptical of the lasting quality of romantic love and felt that it was rare to find a person one can really fall in love with; anxious‐ambivalent lovers felt that it was easy to fall in love but rare to find true love. Finally, secure subjects, in comparison with subjects in the other two groups, reported warmer relationships with both parents, as well as between their two parents. Subsequent research has extended these findings. For example, attachment style is found to be related not only to interpersonal relationships, but to orientations toward work. Secure persons approach their work with confidence, are relatively unburdened by fears of failure, and do not allow work to interfere with personal relationships; anxious‐ambivalent subjects are very much influenced by praise and fear of rejection at work and allow love concerns to interfere with work performance; avoidant subjects use work to avoid social interaction and, although they do well financially, are less satisfied with their jobs than secure subjects (Hazan & Shaver, 1990). Other work relates attachment style to psychopathology. Attachment tends to predict psychopathology in interaction with other factors. For example, if people encounter highly stressful life events (e.g., experiences with crime, war, or terrorism), those individuals with an avoidant attachment style undergo greater psychological distress than others (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2012). Many studies of attachment style in adulthood have relied on self‐report data. However, a clever study by Fraley and Shaver (1998) examined the relation between attachment style and separation behavior in couples through naturalistic observation. The behavior of couples temporarily separating from each other was observed in an airport. Researchers approached couples waiting in an airport lobby and asked them to complete a questionnaire on “The Effects of Modern Travel on Close Relationships.” The individuals in the couples independently filled out the questionnaire, which included a measure of attachment style. Another member of the research team took a seat within viewing distance of the couple and took notes on their interactions while they awaited flight departure. These behaviors were coded into attachment behavior categories such as Contact Seeking (e.g., kissing, watching from window after partner has boarded), Contact Maintenance (e.g., hugging, unwillingness to let go), Avoidance (e.g., looking elsewhere, breaking off contact), and Resistance (e.g., wanting to be held but also resisting contact, signs of anger or annoyance). Among women (but not men), individuals differing in attachment style displayed different behavior. Compared to nonavoidant women, highly avoidant women were less likely to seek and maintain contact with their partners and to provide care and support to their partners, and they were more likely to show withdrawal behavior such as pulling away and not making eye contact. Interestingly, the behavior of avoidant women was quite different when they were accompanying their partner in travel as opposed to separating from them. Whereas the listed behaviors were true of avoidant women during separation, when they were to be flying with their partner (a setting that poses no threat of abandonment), they were more likely to seek care from and contact with their partners. In sum, at least for women, the attachment dynamics originally found in studies of children also applied in the context of adult romantic relationships. Personality and the Brain Attachment Twentieth‐century pioneers in the study of attachment, such as Bowlby and Ainsworth, did not have data on brain systems that underlie attachment. Twenty‐first century advances, however, have opened the door to research on attachment processes and the brain. Since the door has been opened only recently, the exact brain systems underlying attachment processes are not yet fully understood. A review of research (Coan, 2010), however, does already point to some general principles. One is that the brain does not contain a single “attachment mechanism” within one particular brain region. Instead, multiple brain systems contribute to the development and maintenance of attachment processes, and they generally are systems that take part in a number of psychological functions in addition to attachment. A second principle is that the brain systems that play the key roles in attachment are likely to be the same ones that are key to human emotions. Attachment processes are fundamentally emotional. Parents respond to emotional displays by their infants (e.g., a smile or cry), and infants desire the warm emotional response of the parent. Brain systems that enable the infant to experience and display emotional reactions, then, are certain to take part in attachment processes. With regard to the question of exactly which brain mechanisms are involved, you should remember that the brain contains two kinds of material. One is cellular. The brain contains a massive number of individual cells, called neurons, which are organized into the various substructures that make up the overall anatomy of the brain. The other kind is molecular. Neurons communicate with one another by sending neurotransmitters—molecules that travel from one neuron to another and affect the activity of the neuron to which they travel. Let's first look at attachment processes and neurotransmitters. One neurotransmitter implicated in attachment processes is oxytocin, which is active in numerous parts of the brain involved in emotional response. The effects of oxytocin can be evaluated experimentally. In different experimental conditions, researchers give participants a nasal spray containing either oxytocin or an inert placebo chemical, and then evaluate the effects of oxytocin on subsequent attachment‐related responses. In one study (Buchheim et al., 2009), participants with insecure attachment styles were given oxytocin or a placebo, and then were shown drawings with attachment‐related themes (e.g., a small girl, by herself, looking out the window of a home). For each picture, participants were asked to judge the degree to which different phrases (e.g., “This girl seems to be desperate, maybe deserted by someone,” or “She is ill and has to stay inside … her mother comes in and embraces here”) fit the picture. The researchers found that, after receiving the oxytocin spray, participants were more likely to judge that security‐related phrases (e.g., the one including the text “her mother … embraces her”) fit the pictures (Buchheim et al., 2009). The result suggests, then, that oxytocin directly affects attachment feelings and thoughts. What about attachment processes and brain anatomy? Research implicates two regions of the brain; one is not surprising, but the other is. The unsurprising region is a set of neural circuits known to be involved in emotional responses and simple forms of motivation (basic desires to approach and avoid rewards and punishments; see Coan, 2010). These neural circuits are found primarily in a lower region of the brain known as the limbic system. The surprising region is a structure in the lower rear of the brain known as the cerebellum. The cerebellum is primarily involved in the control of motor movement, which would seem to make it an unlikely candidate to participate in attachment processes. But recent research shows that the cerebellum also is involved in the experience of emotion and attempts to control emotional reactions (Schutter & van Honk, 2009), including attachment‐related emotions. In one study, conducted with a set of individuals with a history of psychological distress, researchers used brain scans to measure the volume of neural matter in the cerebellum. They did so among individuals who had experienced varying degrees of interpersonal loss (e.g., loss, through death, of a loved one) and varying attachment styles. People with different attachment styles differed in cerebellar anatomy. The differences were most apparent when examining the relation between experiences of loss and the cerebellum. Among people with an avoidant attachment style, the experience of a higher number of interpersonal losses was associated with lower cerebellar volume. Among people with a less avoidant, more secure, style, the experience of a higher number of interpersonal losses was associated with higher cerebellar volume. The psychological variable, attachment style, and the neural variable, volume of neural matter in the cerebellum, thus were strongly linked. More research is needed to determine the exact role of the cerebellum in attachment processes and, more generally, to identify the brain mechanisms involved in the development of different attachment styles early in life. But current findings already provide significant clues to this scientific puzzle. Attachment Types or Dimensions? As we noted, Ainsworth suggested that individual differences in attachment style could be understood in terms of three attachment types. In other words, she proposed what we called (back in Chapter 1) units of analysis involving type variables. The idea was that different attachment types are qualitatively distinct. Although the idea of distinct categorical types is attractive to many, categorical variables are rare. Most observable psychological qualities—variations in behavior, emotions, and so forth—are affected by a large number of factors. When many factors are at play, outcomes usually varies dimensionally, not categorically. As attachment an exception, with true categorical differences? Evidence suggests “no.” Fraley and Spieker (2003) examined data from a very large number of 15‐month‐old children who had participated in the Strange Situation paradigm. Rather than merely asking how many children fell into one versus another attachment category, they asked a logically prior question: Are there attachment categories in the first place? Or might the differences among children actually involve simple dimensions? This question can be addressed through somewhat complex, yet highly informative, statistical procedures that ask whether different psychological characteristics go together so consistently that they form distinct categories (Meehl, 1992). The results indicated that, for attachment styles, this was not the case. Instead, variations in attachment involved continuous dimensions. These findings raise the question of exactly what dimensions might best capture individual differences in attachment style. One possibility involves a theoretical model of individual differences in internal working models of the self and others (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991; Griffin & Bartholomew, 1994). Following Bowlby, according to this model attachment patterns can be defined in terms of two dimensions, reflecting the internal working model of the self and the internal working model of others (Figure 4.2). Each dimension involves a positive end and a negative end. Illustrative of the positive self end would be a sense of self‐worth and expectations that others will respond positively. Illustrative of the positive other end would be expectations that others will be available and supportive, lending themselves to closeness. As show in Figure 4.2, this model leads to the addition of a fourth attachment style, that of dismissing. Individuals with this attachment pattern are not comfortable with close relationships and prefer not to depend on others but still retain a positive self‐image. Positive Other Secure (Comfortable with intimacy and autonomy) Preoccupied (Preoccupied with relationships) Positive Self Negative Self Dismissing (Dismissing of intimacy; counter‐dependent) Fearful (Fearful of intimacy; socially avoidant) Negative Other FIGURE 4.2 Bartholomew's dimensions of self and other internal working models and associated attachment patterns. Bartholomew & Horowitz (1991); Griffin and Bartholomew (1994). Copyright © 1994 by the American Psychological Association. Reprinted by permission. The research presented here just scratches the surface of what has become an important area of investigation. Attachment styles have been associated with partner selection and stability of love relationships (Kirkpatrick & Davis, 1994), with the development of adult depression and difficulties in interpersonal relationships (Bartholomew & Horowitz, 1991; Carnelley, Pietromonaco, & Jaffe, 1994; Roberts, Gotlib, & Kassel, 1996), with movement toward becoming more religious (Kirkpatrick, 1998), and with how individuals cope with crises (Mikulciner, Florian, & Weller, 1993). In addition, one study suggests that attachment style develops out of family experiences shared by siblings, rather than being strongly determined by genetic factors (Waller & Shaver, 1994). Thus, an impressive research record is beginning to develop (Fraley & Shaver, 2008). Yet it is important to note a number of points. First, despite suggestive evidence of continuity of attachment style, there also is evidence that these styles are not fixed in stone. At this point the amount of continuity over time of attachment style, and the reasons for greater or lesser continuity, remain issues of considerable debate. Second, these studies tend to look at attachment patterns as if each person had just one attachment style. Yet, there is evidence that the same individual can have multiple attachment patterns, perhaps one in relationships with males and another with females, or one for some contexts and another for different contexts (Baldwin, 1999; Sperling & Berman, 1994). Finally, it is important to recognize that much of this research involves the use of self‐reports and the recall of experiences in childhood. In other words, we need more evidence about the actual behavior of individuals with different adult attachment patterns and research that follows individuals from infancy through adulthood. In sum, research to date supports Bowlby's view of the importance of early experience for the development of internal working models that have powerful effects on personal relationships. At the same time, further research is needed to define the experiences in childhood that determine these models, the relative stability of such models, and the limits of their influence in adulthood. Contemporary Developments in Personality Theory: Neuropsychoanalysis At heart, Freud was a neuroscientist—a “biologist of the mind,” as the author Frank Sulloway phrased it (Sulloway, 1979). Early in his career, Freud hoped to identify brain mechanisms that could explain basic psychological abilities such as memory and attention, as well as the more complex personality dynamics that later became the focus of psychoanalytic theory. He devoted much of his work to this challenge in the early 1890's. These efforts culminated in a book, known as the Project for a Scientific Psychology (Freud, 1895), in which Freud suggested ways in which the activities of neurons (the cells of the brain) might give rise to psychological abilities, primary and secondary thinking processes (see Chapter 3), and consciously felt experience. In historical retrospect, Freud's Project was remarkable. He anticipated results from research conducted many decades later, such as the finding that experiences create changes in neuronal systems that, in turn, are the basis of memory for those experiences (Centonze, Siracusano, Calabresi, & Bernardi, 2004; Pribram, 2005). Yet Freud became discouraged about the Project. After spending substantial time on it, he recognized a limitation in his own work: It was too speculative. This speculative quality is something he could not avoid. In Freud's day, knowledge about the workings of the brain was quite limited. This base of knowledge could barely support an analysis of simple processes of learning and memory. As Freud realized, it was entirely insufficient to support a detailed theory of how the brain contributes to the complex motivations, emotions, and defense mechanisms that were his true interest. After expending enormous effort on the Project, he concluded that his own work has a mistake; he wrote to a colleague that, “I no longer understand the state of mind in which I concocted the psychology” [i.e., the Project for a Scientific Psychology] (quoted in Nagy, 1991 p. 120). Freud thus changed directions (Northoff, 2012). Starting with his next major work, The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud devoted himself exclusively to psychological analyses of personality structure and dynamics. His overall orientation remained that of a biologist (Sulloway, 1979). But he analyzed the workings of the mind without also trying to identify the brain systems underlying mental events. That, he knew, was a challenge that could only be met in the future. Has the future arrived? Does contemporary neuroscience provide the brain‐level explanation of psychodynamic processes that Freud lacked? Investigators who take part in the enterprise known as neuropsychoanalysis think so. Neuropsychoanalysis Neuropsychoanalysis is a movement. It is not the work of any one theorist but, instead, is an enterprise in which a number of psychologists and neuroscientists take part. It also is not a unique theory of personality. Instead—exactly as the name suggests—neuropsychoanalysis is an effort to determine whether 21st‐century neuroscience can provide what Freud's 19th‐century neuroscience could not: a brain‐based understanding of psychoanalytic structures and processes. Because numerous people contribute to the neuropsychoanalytic enterprise, it is not possible briefly to summarize the full range of ideas and findings. However, a valuable summary of key contributions of neuropsychoanalysis is provided by two writers who have themselves been significant to the neuropsychoanalytic effort: the late Jaak Panksepp, a neuroscientist from Estonia who spent much of his academic career in the United States (Panksepp passed away in 2017), and Mark Solms, a psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist from South Africa who coined the term “neuropsychoanalysis” (Johnson & Mosri, 2016). Neuropsychoanalysis: Four Key Contributions Panksepp and Solms (2012) outline four key contributions of neuropsychoanalysis. In each case, the contribution rests on neuroscience methods and findings that were unavailable to Freud or his followers in the early decades of the 20th century. We will introduce each one by relating it to one of the aspects of Freud's theory that you learned about in Chapter 3. Animalistic Drive and Animal Models in Human Emotion In psychoanalytic theory, the id houses a small set of instinctual drives that are “animalistic” in nature. The unconscious forces impel people toward self‐preservation and sexual reproduction (the life instincts) and can power acts of aggression (the death instinct). In light of this theory, ask yourself: What would you expect to find when studying the brain through contemporary research methods? There is a two‐part answer to this question. One is that there should be specific subsystems of the brain that generate basic instinctual drives. The other is that you would expect to find these systems in the brains of both humans and nonhuman animals; the “animalistic” nature of Freudian drives suggests that the brains of a wide range of mammalian species should have basic‐drive systems that resemble those of humans. Contemporary neuroscientific findings are consistent with this expectation. Neuroscientists have, in fact, identified neural systems that are similar in structure and function in human and nonhuman animals, and they directly contribute to the experience of feeling states. In a key type of research that supports this conclusion, researchers stimulate specific brain regions electrically. Electrical stimulation of different brain areas of animals' brains produce different emotions, including fear, rage (anger), lust (sexual desire), and seeking (motivation to pursue a reward; Panksepp (2011). The key brain regions are subcortical, that is, they are in lower regions of the brain whose anatomy is similar in numerous animal species. Self‐Deception and the Neuroscience of “Confabulation” When Freud listened to his patients, he did not take their statements “at face value”. He knew that anything patients said about themselves could be self‐deceptions; the defensive strategies of the ego could repress some of the patient's memories, distort other memories, and result in statements by the patient that—unbeknownst to the patient—were disconnected from reality. Patients would think they were telling the truth about their past, but their mind would be deceiving them. Despite Freud's painstaking clinical efforts, there were two inherent limits to his analysis of self‐deception. One is purely psychological. Whenever patients make statements that are not accurate, it is difficult to distinguish between two possibilities: (1) the patients unconsciously are deceiving themselves; (2) the patients consciously are deceiving their therapist; for example, individuals may not feel comfortable enough with their therapist to reveal the truth about painful personal events, or may wish to make up stories about themselves to impress the therapist. The second involves the connection between the psychological and the biological. Once Freud abandoned the Project, he also abandoned hope of identifying brain regions that might underlie self‐deceptive thoughts. A second contribution of neuropsychoanalysis is the identification of these brain regions (Panksepp and Solms, 2012). Key research is conducted with people who engage in “confabulation”. Confabulation is a form of false memory, that is, of the apparent memory of experiences and information that is unquestionably not accurate (Schneider, 2003). Confabulation may be observed in cases of brain damage (e.g., that might result from a brain tumor), with patients making statements that that unquestionably seem to believe, yet that are plainly incorrect. For example, a patient hospitalized in Switzerland was certain that he was in Bordeaux, France; it is reported that when he looked out a window, he acknowledged that his environment looked nothing like France yet insisted that “I am not crazy, I know that I am in Bordeaux!” (Schneider, 2003, p. 663). Another patient, after an operation to treat a brain tumor, told his doctor (who were fully aware of the surgery) that he merely had hit his head while playing sports and that he then consulted a sports psychologist who told him that he was fine (Solms, https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/what‐is‐a‐mind/0/steps/9266). Contemporary research on confabulation overcomes both of the limitations encountered by Freud. First, in cases of confabulation, there is no question that patients' statement are genuine cases of self‐deception. Some confabulations are so obviously wrong—so disconnected from reality—that no one would ever believe them except the patient making the statement. This could not be a strategy for making a good impression on a therapist. Solms (https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/what‐is‐a‐mind/0/steps/9266) interprets such statements as a motivated self‐deception that is an “inadequate attempt” to deal with extreme stress in which patients engage in “an overly emotionally colored, distorted, overly wishful … use of [false] memory Solms (). Why are the patients' attempts to deal with stress so inadequate? In many cases, it is because brain damage has reduced their ability to make plans and decisions. Research findings indicate that many patients who confabulate have experienced damage to the frontal lobes of the brain, which are required for “executive functioning,” that is, the control of logical flows of thought and action that match up to requirements in the environment (Schneider, 2003; Turner, Cipolotti, Yousry, & Shallice, 2008). Such findings address the second limitation experienced by Freud; they identify a neural basis of self‐deceptive thinking of the sort that Freud hoped to identify when working on the Project. Dreaming and the Brain To appreciate the third contribution of neuropsychoanalysis, think back to two facts you likely learned in introductory psychology. One is that there are stages of sleep, one of which is rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. A distinctive feature of REM sleep is that if you wake someone during this sleep stage, that usually report that they had been dreaming. A second fact is that the brain region from which signals are sent that control activity during REM sleep is the pons, a structure in the brain stem (the lowest region of the brain, which sits just above the spinal cord). What does this have to do with psychoanalysis? Recall that, to Freud, dreaming was a highly complex mental process in which dream content reflected the life—the desires, memories, and defensive strategies—of the dreamer. The pons, a simple low‐level brain mechanism, could never generate such complex mental activity. Contemporary neuroscientific evidence shows that it does not have to. Solms (2000) reviews evidence showing that dreaming and REM sleep are distinct; specifically, different brain mechanisms control one versus the other activity. Unlike REM sleep, dreaming is influenced by relatively high‐level brain mechanisms. The high‐level brain mechanisms that produce the imagery of dreams are connected to a range of additional brain systems involved in thinking and memory. Importantly, this means that dream imagery can be “actively constructed through complex cognitive processes” (Solms, 2000, p. 846)—precisely as Freudian theory would expect. From Neural Mechanisms to Therapy Methods The fourth contribution of neuropsychoanalysis identified by Panksepp and Solms concerns the treatment of psychological disorders. Once Freud abandoned his Project for a neuroscience of psychological processes, he also abandoned any hope of identifying neuroscience‐based treatments for mental disorders. As you have learned, the focus of Freud's therapy method was entirely psychological—the free association method and the dynamics of the associated therapist—patient relationship—not biological. But neuropsychoanalysis opens the door to the use of both psychological and biological interventions. Specifically, neuropsychoanalysts suggest that animal models can inform therapy for humans. In other words, research conducted with nonhuman animals on neural systems and emotion and provides clues to effective treatment of human psychological disorders—including highly prevalent disorders such as anxiety or depression. “By understanding the neurobiological nature of relevant brain emotional systems, optimally studied in detail in animal models, novel ways to envision and treat human depression should emerge” (Panksepp et al., 2014, p. 473). An advantage of animal‐model research is that it provides knowledge of specific neural systems involved in the production of emotional states. With that knowledge, therapists can, in principle target those neural systems directly. Directly influencing a biological system that generates distressful emotion could reduce patients' distress. One such therapy strategy uses deep brain stimulation (DBS). Deep brain stimulation is a surgical procedure. In the surgery, an extremely small electrical device is implanted in a specific region of the brain. The device sends out electrical signals that influence levels of brain activity in that region. Research using animal models provides information about the specific brain region that should be targeted to treat a given disorder (Panksepp et al., 2014). One disorder for which DBS has been employed is depression. DBS has been shown not only to reduce the emotional and behavioral symptoms of depression (Mayberg et al., 2005), but also to reduce negative thinking patterns that contribute to the disorder. For example, one team of therapists treated seven depressed patients whose depression was not relieved by traditional forms of therapy (Hilimire et al., 2015). In the DBS treatment, over a four‐week period electrical stimulation was applied to an area of the limbic system of the brain that was known, from prior research, to be involved in depressed emotional states. DBS affected the way in which patients thought about themselves; specifically, it reduced “negative self‐bias,” which is the tendency to have negative thoughts and feelings about one's own personal qualities. Compared to their experiences before treatment, after DBS therapy the patients were less likely to describe their personal qualities in negative terms; their negative self‐bias was reduced. Implications for Psychoanalytic Theory The general implications of neuropsychoanalysis for Freud's psychoanalytic theory are clear. Contemporary neuroscience research has generated some findings that are entirely consistent with Freudian theory. Freud's psychological model depicted a mind that contained basic animalistic drives (in the id) and a mental system (the ego) that defended against anxiety through defensive strategies that could result in people deceiving themselves about their own past. The brain does, in fact, contain biological systems that correspond to these psychological functions. There is a second implication that was not mentioned above, but that you might be able to figure out if you compare our discussion of neuropsychoanalysis with what you learned earlier about psychoanalytic theory. Consider these facts one at a time: Neuropsychoanalysis uses animal models to identify brain systems that produce basic emotional states such as fear and rage. These emotional states appear to correspond to the instinctual drive states discussed in Freud's psychoanalytic theory. In psychoanalytic theory, instincts are part of the id. In psychoanalytic theory, the id is part of the unconscious; it functions outside of conscious awareness. But emotional states such as fear and rage are felt consciously. People feel afraid and angry, and these feeling states are a defining feature of consciousness. The implication is spelled out vividly by Solms (2013): “The conclusion is inescapable: consciousness is generated in the id” (p. 12). Rather than being a hidden unconscious force, id impulses are “the fount of all consciousness” (p. 16). As Solms notes, this conclusion “has massive implications for psychoanalysis” (p. 16). It forces a rethinking of fundamental psychoanalytic processes since, in Freud's view, those processes dealt with drive states that were unconscious. Limitations? Neuropsychoanalysis is a major theoretical advance. Neuropsychoanalysts' ability to identify brain mechanisms that contribute to psychoanalytic phenomena, to apply that knowledge to clinical treatment, and to revisit core issues of psychoanalytic theory accomplishes many of the goals that Freud himself could not achieve in the 1890's. Yet one does have to keep this advance in perspective. Neuropsychoanalysts tend to highlight ways contemporary evidence about the brain that is consistent with elements of psychoanalytic theory. Yet there also are elements of psychoanalytic theory that plainly are inconsistent with current knowledge of the brain. For example, Freud posited a death instinct. Contemporary neuroscientists have not found a neural mechanism corresponding to the death instinct, and it is safe to assume that they are not going to do so; if one applies the logic of Darwinian theory, it is difficult to see how a death instinct could ever have evolved (since it appears not to have advantages for adaptation). Freud proposed that early life experiences have a fixed effect on personality, with few if any substantial changes in personality structure occurring after the start of the latency period. Again, it is extremely difficult to reconcile this theoretical position with contemporary brain science. Current‐day evidence show that brain systems change—or are highly “plastic” (see Chapter 9)— even after the early years of childhood. This brain plasticity plainly is not consistent with the Freudian view that early life experiences entirely determine the later‐like structure of the mind. A second concern is that neuropsychoanalysts' focus on animal models—and therefore on the similarity between humans and nonhuman animals—may cause them to give insufficient attention to differences between humans and nonhuman animals. Consider recent findings about neurotransmitters, the biochemicals that are responsible for communication between brain cells. Although the same neurotransmitters are found in multiple species, this does not mean that the different species are psychologically similar. Researchers recently compared neurotransmitter function in humans and other primates. When focusing on the striatum (a system within the limbic system that is involved in responses to rewarding stimuli), they found that our species has a “unique profile” (Raghanti, 2018, p. 5 early ed) of neurotransmitter activity. The unique biochemical makes us differ from other species. Specifically, the uniquely human biochemical profile causes our species to be distinctively attentive to social cues, less aggressive, and more knowledgeable of environmental factors that may influence our behavior. A similar concern comes from research in which brain‐imaging methods are used to identify the brain systems involved in human emotional experience. When a large team of researchers reviewed evidence from more than 150 imaging studies (Kober et al., 2008), they found that emotion is generated by a complex network of brain structures. Some of these were limbic‐system structures that humans share with nonhuman animals. But others were higher‐level structures in the brain's cortex—a brain region that is developed to a unique degree in humans. A challenge for neuropsychoanalysts is not merely to identify contemporary findings about the brain that are consistent with the theorizing of Freud, but also to grapple to additional discoveries about the brain that challenge the psychoanalytic—and neuropsychoanalytic—perspective. Critical Evaluation Throughout our text, we not only will present theories of personality but also will evaluate them. We will do so by considering the five criteria we presented in Chapter 1, each of which is a goal to be achieved in a formal scientific theory of personality. As we discussed, the five criteria are the degree to which (1) the theory is based on good scientific observations, specifically, observations that are diverse in nature, are objective, and illuminate specific cognitive, affective, and biological systems of personality; whether the theory itself is (2) systematic, (3) testable, and (4) comprehensive; and whether the theory (5) yields valuable applications. After reviewing these five points, we will summarize the major contributions of the given theory. Scientific Observation: The Database One of the most distinctive features of psychoanalysis is its database. Freud developed a novel form of scientific observation: the free‐association method. He based his theory almost entirely on the information yielded by this method. Most contemporary personality scientists judge that Freud's exclusive reliance on the free‐association technique is a major drawback. Clinical observations of patients can provide a useful starting point for theorizing, but for Freud it was both a starting point and an ending point! He never pursued the sort of standardized, objective, replicable observations that are the hallmark of science. Instead, he relied on a free‐association database that is limited in at least two respects. It is not at all diverse. Freud's clients were a relatively small number of fairly well‐educated persons living in one particular city in central Europe. It is exceptionally risky to generalize from these observations to the psychological life of all persons. Second, there is no guarantee of objectivity in data collection. The person who is observing and interpreting the data—Freud—is the same person who developed the theory. One cannot know whether Freud's interpretation of his cases was biased by his own desire to find evidence that supported his theorizing. Freud's clinical observations, then, are inadequate as a foundation for developing and testing a scientific theory, as many have noted (Edelson, 1984; Grunbaum, 1984, 1993). Rather than constituting unbiased observations of experiences and recollections by patients, many critics suggest that Freud often biased his observations by using suggestive procedures and by inferring that memories existed at the unconscious level (Crews, 1993; Esterson, 1993; Powell & Boer, 1994). Eysenck, a frequent and passionate critic of psychoanalysis, whose views we will consider later in this textbook, suggests that “we can no more test Freudian hypotheses on the couch than we can adjudicate between the rival hypotheses of Newton and Einstein by going to sleep under the apple tree” (1953, p. 229). Theory: Systematic? A second criterion for evaluating a personality theory is whether the theory is systematic. The theory should not be a disconnected set of statements about persons. Instead, its ideas should relate to one another in a logical, coherent manner. On this score, Freud excels. The very different elements of the theory are interrelated in an exceptionally coherent manner. The process and structure aspects of the theory are related in a clear manner, with the id, ego, and superego (the psychological structures) playing different roles in the gratification of mental energy within the constraints of reality (the central personality processes, or dynamics). Freud's analyses of development in childhood, of psychological change in therapy, and of the role of society in civilizing the individual all follow logically from his analyses of personality structure and processes. Freud was an exceptional theorist, and his skill is clearly evident in the well‐specified interrelations among the disparate elements of his theory. At the same time, it is important to recognize that as time has passed differing views have evolved concerning various elements of psychoanalytic theory. Thus, there are less unity and dogma in psychoanalysis and greater flux (Westen, Gabbard, & Ortigo, 2008). Theory: Testable? Although Freud systematically related the different elements of his theory to one another, this does not imply that the overall theory is testable in an unambiguous manner. A theory could be systematic and yet still have features that make it difficult to test. Unfortunately, such is the case for psychoanalysis. It commonly is difficult to determine how, exactly, one could prove a theoretical prediction in psychoanalysis to be wrong. The problem is that psychoanalysts can account for almost any outcome. Even opposite outcomes can be fit within the psychoanalytic explanatory system. Suppose a Freudian thinks that an instinctual drive will give rise to a certain form of behavior. If the behavior appears, the theory is confirmed. If the behavior does not appear, the psychoanalyst may conclude that the instinctual drive was so strong that defense mechanisms became active and prevented the behavior. Again the theory is confirmed. If some unanticipated form of behavior appears, the psychoanalyst could interpret it as a compromise between the instinct and a defense mechanism—again with no negative consequences for the theory as a whole. Psychoanalysts are not unaware that their theoretical framework has this limitation. Some might even think that it is not a big problem; it is possible to construe psychoanalysis as a framework for interpreting events rather than as a scientific theory that makes specific testable predictions (Ricoeur, 1970). Most contemporary psychologists, however, feel that Freud's work should be assessed using the standard criteria for evaluating a scientific theory. These criteria include whether the theory is testable. A limitation of psychoanalysis, then, is that it is so flexible that—like a ruler made of pliable rubber that can be bent, twisted, pushed, and pulled to yield any of a variety of measurements of a given object—it fails to make hard‐and‐fast predictions that could be proven wrong. The “infinite pliability of defense mechanisms [is] the Freudian's insurance against ever encountering uninterpretable material” (Crews, 1998, p. xxv). In sum, even strong supporters of the psychoanalytic model are critical of its excessive reliance on case study material: “That psychoanalysts seriously shot themselves in the foot by never evolving from case study methods as their primary mode of hypothesis testing is beyond doubt” (Westen, Gabbard, & Ortigo, 2008, p. 95). Theory: Comprehensive? Another question to ask about a personality theory is whether it is comprehensive. Does the theorist cover all aspects of personality or merely concentrate on those aspects that are most easily addressed by his or her theoretical system? Both friend and foe of psychoanalysis must recognize that Freud's theory of personality is extraordinarily comprehensive. Freud addresses an exceptionally wide range of issues: the nature of mind, the relation between persons and society, dreams, sexuality, symbolism, the nature of human development, therapies for psychological change—the list goes on and on. Freud provides the most comprehensive of all the major personality theories. As you will see in subsequent chapters, many theories developed subsequent to Freud's say little or nothing about major aspects of the human experience that he addressed in depth. Applications In many respects, applications are a strength of psychoanalytic theory. This should not be surprising. Psychoanalysis at first was an application; that is, Freud began his psychological work by addressing applied questions involving the treatment of hysteria. He only subsequently developed his work into a general theory of personality. Freud thus gave great effort to the challenge of applying psychological theory to the improvement of individual lives. This effort was not in vain. In the decades since Freud first developed his therapy and theory, a great many studies have evaluated the question of whether psychoanalytic therapy is effective. Because this is a textbook of personality theory and research, not of clinical applications, we will not review this work in detail. We merely raise two points. On the one hand, psychoanalysis unquestionably “works” (Galatzer‐Levy, Bachrach, Skolnikoff, & Waldron, 2000). That is, if one asks whether people who enter into psychoanalytic therapy are better off than people who did not obtain therapy, and if one answers this question by reviewing the many therapy outcome studies that have been done over the years, one finds that psychoanalysis often benefits clients significantly. In addition, there is evidence of the efficacy of brief psychodynamically oriented psychotherapy (Shedler, 2010). A second point, however, is that other therapies benefit clients, too. Other theories of personality have fostered alternative forms of treatment that often are of great benefit to clients, as you will see in the subsequent chapters of this book. These alternative treatments quite commonly do not feature the core elements of psychoanalysis (such as a search for conflictual unconscious contents that are the underlying cause of current problems), yet they still do work. Many psychologists see this as a major strike against psychoanalytic theory. Freud provided a specific theory of the origins of psychological distress and the steps needed for relieving it. To the extent that nonpsychoanalytic therapies work, too, they raise questions about the fundamental premises of Freud's theory. Major Contributions and Summary Even the harshest critic must recognize that Freud made major contributions to psychology. In closing our discussion of psychodynamic theories, we note contributions of two types. Freud at a Glance Structure Process Growth and Development Pathology Change Illustrative Case Id, ego, superego; unconscious, preconscious, conscious Sexual and aggressive instincts; anxiety and the mechanisms of defense Erogenous zones; oral, anal, phallic stages of development; Oedipus complex Infantile sexuality; fixation and regression; conflict; symptoms Transference; conflict resolution; “Where id was, ego shall be” Little Hans By closely observing the working of the mind, Freud identified important phenomena that previously had been overlooked by psychologists. Even if one does not agree with Freud's explanations of all these phenomena, he must be credited with identifying, as important targets of psychological study, phenomena of enormous significance: unconscious motivational and emotional processes; defensive strategies for coping with psychological threat; the sexually charged nature of childhood. If personality psychology had lacked Freud's insights into these phenomena, its history would have been much less rich. A second contribution was his formulating a theory of sufficient complexity. By “sufficient” we mean that his ideas were complex enough to do justice to the complexities of human development and individuality. By obtaining richly detailed observations of persons and by willing to forge ahead with his theorizing, Freud provided a theory that accounts—rightly or wrongly—for almost all aspects of human behavior. No other theory of personality comes close to psychoanalysis in its comprehensiveness. Few others give comparable attention to the functioning of the individual as a whole. Even if one were to presume that multiple aspects of Freud's work were fundamentally wrong, in its structure his psychoanalytic theory provides a model of what a truly comprehensive theory would look like. Today, views concerning Freud's works and contributions range from the judgment that it is of little relevance to contemporary science to the view, emblazoned across the front of a major U.S. magazine on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Freud's birth, that “Freud is NOT Dead” (Newsweek Magazine, 2006). Whereas some are critical of psychoanalytic errors made in the treatment of certain disorders (e.g., schizophrenia; Dolnick, 1998) and of limited evidence supportive of psychoanalysis's major hypotheses, others are more supportive of its treatment methods and cite its enduring contributions to empirical research. Indeed, it has been suggested that many psychoanalytic views (e.g., motives, unconscious mental representations) now are part of traditional personality and social psychology (Westen, Gabbard, & Ortigo, 2008). We end by summarizing some of the strengths and limits of psychoanalytic theory (Table 4.3). Whatever the limits of his work, psychology has benefited from the contributions of Freud, whose genius in observing human behavior has rarely been equaled. TABLE 4.3 Summary of Strengths and Limitations of Psychoanalytic Theory Strengths Limitations Provides for the discovery and investigation of many interesting phenomena Develops techniques for research and therapy (free association, dream interpretation, transference analysis) Recognizes the complexity of human behavior Encompasses a broad range of phenomena Fails to define all its concepts clearly and distinctly Makes empirical testing difficult, at times impossible Endorses the questionable view of the person as an energy system Tolerates resistance by parts of the profession to empirical research and change in the theory MAJOR CONCEPTS Anal personality Attachment behavioral system (ABS) Collective unconscious Fixation Free association Internal working model Oral personality Phallic personality Projective test Regression Symptom Transference REVIEW Projective tests, such as the Rorschach Inkblot Test and Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), have been used by psychodynamically oriented investigators to assess personality. They are valuable in that they provide disguised methods for tapping an individual's unique interpretations of the world, including the person's complex organization of individual perceptions. However, they also present problems of reliability and validity of interpretation. The psychoanalytic theory of psychopathology emphasizes the importance of fixations, or failures in development, and regression, or the return to earlier modes of satisfaction. The oral, anal, and phallic character types express personality patterns resulting from partial fixations at earlier stages of development. Psychopathology is seen to involve conflict between instinctual wishes for gratification and the anxiety associated with these wishes. Defense mechanisms represent ways to reduce anxiety but can result in the development of symptoms. The case of Little Hans illustrates how a symptom, such as a phobia, can result from conflicts associated with the Oedipus complex. Psychoanalysis is a therapeutic process in which the individual gains insight into and resolves conflicts dating back to childhood. The methods of free association and dream interpretation are used to gain insight into unconscious conflicts. Therapeutic use is also made of the transference situation, in which patients develop attitudes and feelings toward their therapist that relate to experiences with earlier parental figures. A number of analysts broke with Freud and developed their own schools of thought. Alfred Adler emphasized social concepts more than biological concepts, and Carl Jung emphasized a generalized life energy and the collective unconscious. Analysts such as Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan emphasized the importance of cultural factors and interpersonal relations, and were part of the group known as neo‐Freudians. Recent clinical developments in psychoanalysis have focused on problems of self‐definition and self‐esteem. Psychoanalysts in this group, known as object relations theorists, emphasize the importance of relationship seeking as opposed to the expression of sexual and aggressive instincts. The concepts of narcissism and the narcissistic personality have gained particular attention. Bowlby's attachment model and related research illustrate the importance of early experiences for later personal relationships, as well as other aspects of personality functioning. An evaluation of psychoanalysis suggests its tremendous contribution in calling attention to many important phenomena and developing techniques for research and therapy. At the same time, the theory suffers from ambiguous, poorly defined concepts and problems in testing specific hypotheses.