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The Freudian Theory of Personality

Sigmund Freud is considered to be the father of psychiatry. Among his many accomplishments is, arguably, the most far-reaching personality schema in psychology: the Freudian theory of personality. It has been the focus of many additions, modifications, and various interpretations given to its core points. Despite many reincarnations, Freud’s theory is criticized by many (e.g. for its perceived sexism) and it remains the focus of hot discussions on its relevance today.

Freud was a one of a kind thinker. There can be little question that he was influenced by earlier thinking regarding the human mind, especially the idea of there being activity within the mind at a conscious and unconscious level yet his approach to these topics was largely conceptual. His theoretical thoughts were as original as they were unique. It is a testament to Freud’s mind to know that whether you agree, disagree, or are ambivalent about his theory, it remains as a theoretical cornerstone in his field of expertise.

Human Personality: The adult personality emerges as a composite of early childhood experiences, based on how these experiences are consciously and unconsciously processed within human developmental stages, and how these experiences shape the personality.

Not every person completes the necessary tasks of every developmental stage. When they don’t, the results can be a mental condition requiring psychoanalysis to achieve proper functioning.

Stages of Development

Believing that most human suffering is determined during childhood development , Freud placed emphasis on the five stages of psychosexual development. As a child passes through these stages unresolved conflicts between physical drives and social expectation may arise.

These stages are:

• Oral (0 – 1.5 years of age): Fixation on all things oral. If not satisfactorily met there is the likelihood of developing negative oral habits or behaviors.
• Anal (1.5 to 3 years of age): As indicated this stage is primarily related to developing healthy toilet training habits.
• Phallic (3 – 5 year of age): The development of healthy substitutes for the sexual attraction boys and girls have toward a parent of the opposite gender.
• Latency (5 – 12 years of age): The development of healthy dormant sexual feelings for the opposite sex.
• Genital (12 – adulthood): All tasks from the previous four stages are integrated into the mind allowing for the onset of healthy sexual feelings and behaviors.

It is during these stages of development that the experiences are filtered through the three levels of the human mind. It is from these structures and the inherent conflicts that arise in the mind that personality is shaped. According to Freud while there is an interdependence among these three levels, each level also serves a purpose in personality development. Within this theory the ability of a person to resolve internal conflicts at specific stages of their development determines future coping and functioning ability as a fully-mature adult.

Each stage is processed through Freud’s concept of the human mind as a three tier system consisting of the superego, the ego, and the id. The super ego functions at a conscious level. It serves as a type of screening center for what is going on. It is at this level that society and parental guidance is weighed against personal pleasure and gain as directed by ones id. Obviously, this puts in motion situations ripe for conflict.

Much like a judge in a trial, once experiences are processed through the superego and the id they fall into the ego to mediate a satisfactory outcome. Originally, Freud used the word ego to mean a sense of self, but later revised it to mean a set of psychic functions such as judgment, tolerance, reality testing, control, planning, defense, synthesis of information, intellectual functioning, and memory.

The egocentric center of the human universe, Freud believed that within this one level, the id is constantly fighting to have our way in everything we undertake.

So where does this leave us? In the words of Jim Morrison in a song he wrote for the Doors “I want the world and I want it NOW!” seems to be on the tip of many persons lips. It could have been entitled Ode to the Id .

There are many mental illnesses that place the id in the forefront decision making. In particular, there are those whose lives are lived on a totally narcissistic level. Then there are those with anti-social personalities, psychotic like illnesses, and more. In the world of Freud, it is the neurotic person that is most affected by the principles of his theory.

As a result Freud laid out his plan for treatment: psychoanalysis . The treatment has been in use for many years with many adaptations given to it. On the plus side, psychoanalysis do present a client with the structure and time to resolve neurotic issues. On the negative side there is always expressed concern over the cost. Being that it does take time for psychoanalysis to be effective there is an associated cost that can be prohibitive.

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11.2 The Origins of Personality

Learning objectives.

• Describe the strengths and limitations of the psychodynamic approach to explaining personality.
• Summarize the accomplishments of the neo-Freudians.
• Identify the major contributions of the humanistic approach to understanding personality.

Although measures such as the Big Five and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) are able to effectively assess personality, they do not say much about where personality comes from. In this section we will consider two major theories of the origin of personality: psychodynamic and humanistic approaches.

Psychodynamic Theories of Personality: The Role of the Unconscious

One of the most important psychological approaches to understanding personality is based on the theorizing of the Austrian physician and psychologist Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who founded what today is known as the psychodynamic approach to understanding personality. Many people know about Freud because his work has had a huge impact on our everyday thinking about psychology, and the psychodynamic approach is one of the most important approaches to psychological therapy (Roudinesco, 2003; Taylor, 2009). Freud is probably the best known of all psychologists, in part because of his impressive observation and analyses of personality (there are 24 volumes of his writings). As is true of all theories, many of Freud’s ingenious ideas have turned out to be at least partially incorrect, and yet other aspects of his theories are still influencing psychology.

Freud was influenced by the work of the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893), who had been interviewing patients (almost all women) who were experiencing what was at the time known as hysteria . Although it is no longer used to describe a psychological disorder, hysteria at the time referred to a set of personality and physical symptoms that included chronic pain, fainting, seizures, and paralysis.

Charcot could find no biological reason for the symptoms. For instance, some women experienced a loss of feeling in their hands and yet not in their arms, and this seemed impossible given that the nerves in the arms are the same that are in the hands. Charcot was experimenting with the use of hypnosis, and he and Freud found that under hypnosis many of the hysterical patients reported having experienced a traumatic sexual experience, such as sexual abuse, as children (Dolnick, 1998).

Freud and Charcot also found that during hypnosis the remembering of the trauma was often accompanied by an outpouring of emotion, known as catharsis , and that following the catharsis the patient’s symptoms were frequently reduced in severity. These observations led Freud and Charcot to conclude that these disorders were caused by psychological rather than physiological factors.

Freud used the observations that he and Charcot had made to develop his theory regarding the sources of personality and behavior, and his insights are central to the fundamental themes of psychology. In terms of free will, Freud did not believe that we were able to control our own behaviors. Rather, he believed that all behaviors are predetermined by motivations that lie outside our awareness, in the unconscious. These forces show themselves in our dreams, in neurotic symptoms such as obsessions, while we are under hypnosis, and in Freudian “slips of the tongue” in which people reveal their unconscious desires in language. Freud argued that we rarely understand why we do what we do, although we can make up explanations for our behaviors after the fact. For Freud the mind was like an iceberg, with the many motivations of the unconscious being much larger, but also out of sight, in comparison to the consciousness of which we are aware ( Figure 11.8 “Mind as Iceberg” ).

Figure 11.8 Mind as Iceberg

In Sigmund Freud’s conceptualization of personality, the most important motivations are unconscious, just as the major part of an iceberg is under water.

Id, Ego, and Superego

Freud proposed that the mind is divided into three components: id , ego , and superego , and that the interactions and conflicts among the components create personality (Freud, 1923/1943). According to Freudian theory, the id is the component of personality that forms the basis of our most primitive impulses . The id is entirely unconscious, and it drives our most important motivations, including the sexual drive ( libido ) and the aggressive or destructive drive ( Thanatos ). According to Freud, the id is driven by the pleasure principle —the desire for immediate gratification of our sexual and aggressive urges. The id is why we smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, view pornography, tell mean jokes about people, and engage in other fun or harmful behaviors, often at the cost of doing more productive activities.

In stark contrast to the id, the superego represents our sense of morality and oughts . The superego tell us all the things that we shouldn’t do, or the duties and obligations of society. The superego strives for perfection, and when we fail to live up to its demands we feel guilty.

In contrast to the id, which is about the pleasure principle, the function of the ego is based on the reality principle —the idea that we must delay gratification of our basic motivations until the appropriate time with the appropriate outlet. The ego is the largely conscious controller or decision-maker of personality . The ego serves as the intermediary between the desires of the id and the constraints of society contained in the superego ( Figure 11.9 “Ego, Id, and Superego in Interaction” ). We may wish to scream, yell, or hit, and yet our ego normally tells us to wait, reflect, and choose a more appropriate response.

Figure 11.9 Ego, Id, and Superego in Interaction

Freud believed that psychological disorders, and particularly the experience of anxiety, occur when there is conflict or imbalance among the motivations of the id, ego, and superego. When the ego finds that the id is pressing too hard for immediate pleasure, it attempts to correct for this problem, often through the use of defense mechanisms — unconscious psychological strategies used to cope with anxiety and to maintain a positive self-image . Freud believed that the defense mechanisms were essential for effective coping with everyday life, but that any of them could be overused ( Table 11.4 “The Major Freudian Defense Mechanisms” ).

Table 11.4 The Major Freudian Defense Mechanisms

The most controversial, and least scientifically valid, part of Freudian theory is its explanations of personality development. Freud argued that personality is developed through a series of psychosexual stages , each focusing on pleasure from a different part of the body ( Table 11.5 “Freud’s Stages of Psychosexual Development” ). Freud believed that sexuality begins in infancy, and that the appropriate resolution of each stage has implications for later personality development.

Table 11.5 Freud’s Stages of Psychosexual Development

In the first of Freud’s proposed stages of psychosexual development, which begins at birth and lasts until about 18 months of age, the focus is on the mouth. During this oral stage , the infant obtains sexual pleasure by sucking and drinking. Infants who receive either too little or too much gratification become fixated or “locked” in the oral stage, and are likely to regress to these points of fixation under stress, even as adults. According to Freud, a child who receives too little oral gratification (e.g., who was underfed or neglected) will become orally dependent as an adult and be likely to manipulate others to fulfill his or her needs rather than becoming independent. On the other hand, the child who was overfed or overly gratified will resist growing up and try to return to the prior state of dependency by acting helpless, demanding satisfaction from others, and acting in a needy way.

The anal stage , lasting from about 18 months to 3 years of age is when children first experience psychological conflict. During this stage children desire to experience pleasure through bowel movements, but they are also being toilet trained to delay this gratification. Freud believed that if this toilet training was either too harsh or too lenient, children would become fixated in the anal stage and become likely to regress to this stage under stress as adults. If the child received too little anal gratification (i.e., if the parents had been very harsh about toilet training), the adult personality will be anal retentive —stingy, with a compulsive seeking of order and tidiness. On the other hand, if the parents had been too lenient, the anal expulsive personality results, characterized by a lack of self-control and a tendency toward messiness and carelessness.

The phallic stage , which lasts from age 3 to age 6 is when the penis (for boys) and clitoris (for girls) become the primary erogenous zone for sexual pleasure. During this stage, Freud believed that children develop a powerful but unconscious attraction for the opposite-sex parent, as well as a desire to eliminate the same-sex parent as a rival. Freud based his theory of sexual development in boys (the “Oedipus complex”) on the Greek mythological character Oedipus, who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother, and then put his own eyes out when he learned what he had done. Freud argued that boys will normally eventually abandon their love of the mother, and instead identify with the father, also taking on the father’s personality characteristics, but that boys who do not successfully resolve the Oedipus complex will experience psychological problems later in life. Although it was not as important in Freud’s theorizing, in girls the phallic stage is often termed the “Electra complex,” after the Greek character who avenged her father’s murder by killing her mother. Freud believed that girls frequently experienced penis envy , the sense of deprivation supposedly experienced by girls because they do not have a penis.

The latency stage is a period of relative calm that lasts from about 6 years to 12 years. During this time, Freud believed that sexual impulses were repressed, leading boys and girls to have little or no interest in members of the opposite sex.

The fifth and last stage, the genital stage , begins about 12 years of age and lasts into adulthood. According to Freud, sexual impulses return during this time frame, and if development has proceeded normally to this point, the child is able to move into the development of mature romantic relationships. But if earlier problems have not been appropriately resolved, difficulties with establishing intimate love attachments are likely.

Freud’s Followers: The Neo-Freudians

Freudian theory was so popular that it led to a number of followers, including many of Freud’s own students, who developed, modified, and expanded his theories. Taken together, these approaches are known as neo-Freudian theories . The neo-Freudian theories are theories based on Freudian principles that emphasize the role of the unconscious and early experience in shaping personality but place less evidence on sexuality as the primary motivating force in personality and are more optimistic concerning the prospects for personality growth and change in personality in adults .

Alfred Adler (1870–1937) was a follower of Freud who developed his own interpretation of Freudian theory. Adler proposed that the primary motivation in human personality was not sex or aggression, but rather the striving for superiority. According to Adler, we desire to be better than others and we accomplish this goal by creating a unique and valuable life. We may attempt to satisfy our need for superiority through our school or professional accomplishments, or by our enjoyment of music, athletics, or other activities that seem important to us.

Adler believed that psychological disorders begin in early childhood. He argued that children who are either overly nurtured or overly neglected by their parents are later likely to develop an inferiority complex —a psychological state in which people feel that they are not living up to expectations, leading them to have low self-esteem, with a tendency to try to overcompensate for the negative feelings. People with an inferiority complex often attempt to demonstrate their superiority to others at all costs, even if it means humiliating, dominating, or alienating them. According to Adler, most psychological disorders result from misguided attempts to compensate for the inferiority complex in order meet the goal of superiority.

Carl Jung (1875–1961) was another student of Freud who developed his own theories about personality. Jung agreed with Freud about the power of the unconscious but felt that Freud overemphasized the importance of sexuality. Jung argued that in addition to the personal unconscious, there was also a collective unconscious , or a collection of shared ancestral memories . Jung believed that the collective unconscious contains a variety of archetypes , or cross-culturally universal symbols, which explain the similarities among people in their emotional reactions to many stimuli. Important archetypes include the mother, the goddess, the hero, and the mandala or circle, which Jung believed symbolized a desire for wholeness or unity. For Jung, the underlying motivation that guides successful personality is self-realization , or learning about and developing the self to the fullest possible extent.

Karen Horney (the last syllable of her last name rhymes with “eye”; 1855–1952), was a German physician who applied Freudian theories to create a personality theory that she thought was more balanced between men and women. Horney believed that parts of Freudian theory, and particularly the ideas of the Oedipus complex and penis envy, were biased against women. Horney argued that women’s sense of inferiority was not due to their lack of a penis but rather to their dependency on men, an approach that the culture made it difficult for them to break from. For Horney, the underlying motivation that guides personality development is the desire for security , the ability to develop appropriate and supportive relationships with others.

Another important neo-Freudian was Erich Fromm (1900–1980). Fromm’s focus was on the negative impact of technology, arguing that the increases in its use have led people to feel increasingly isolated from others. Fromm believed that the independence that technology brings us also creates the need “escape from freedom,” that is, to become closer to others.

Research Focus: How the Fear of Death Causes Aggressive Behavior

Fromm believed that the primary human motivation was to escape the fear of death, and contemporary research has shown how our concerns about dying can influence our behavior. In this research, people have been made to confront their death by writing about it or otherwise being reminded of it, and effects on their behavior are then observed. In one relevant study, McGregor et al. (1998) demonstrated that people who are provoked may be particularly aggressive after they have been reminded of the possibility of their own death. The participants in the study had been selected, on the basis of prior reporting, to have either politically liberal or politically conservative views. When they arrived at the lab they were asked to write a short paragraph describing their opinion of politics in the United States. In addition, half of the participants (the mortality salient condition ) were asked to “briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you” and to “jot down as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die, and once you are physically dead.” Participants in the exam control condition also thought about a negative event, but not one associated with a fear of death. They were instructed to “please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your next important exam arouses in you” and to “jot down as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically take your next exam, and once you are physically taking your next exam.”

Then the participants read the essay that had supposedly just been written by another person. (The other person did not exist, but the participants didn’t know this until the end of the experiment.) The essay that they read had been prepared by the experimenters to be very negative toward politically liberal views or to be very negative toward politically conservative views. Thus one-half of the participants were provoked by the other person by reading a statement that strongly conflicted with their own political beliefs, whereas the other half read an essay in which the other person’s views supported their own (liberal or conservative) beliefs.

At this point the participants moved on to what they thought was a completely separate study in which they were to be tasting and giving their impression of some foods. Furthermore, they were told that it was necessary for the participants in the research to administer the food samples to each other. At this point, the participants found out that the food they were going to be sampling was spicy hot sauce and that they were going to be administering the sauce to the very person whose essay they had just read. In addition, the participants read some information about the other person that indicated that he very much disliked eating spicy food. Participants were given a taste of the hot sauce (it was really hot!) and then instructed to place a quantity of it into a cup for the other person to sample. Furthermore, they were told that the other person would have to eat all the sauce.

As you can see in Figure 11.10 “Aggression as a Function of Mortality Salience and Provocation” , McGregor et al. found that the participants who had not been reminded of their own death, even if they had been insulted by the partner, did not retaliate by giving him a lot of hot sauce to eat. On the other hand, the participants who were both provoked by the other person and who had also been reminded of their own death administered significantly more hot sauce than did the participants in the other three conditions. McGregor et al. (1998) argued that thinking about one’s own death creates a strong concern with maintaining one’s one cherished worldviews (in this case our political beliefs). When we are concerned about dying we become more motivated to defend these important beliefs from the challenges made by others, in this case by aggressing through the hot sauce.

Figure 11.10 Aggression as a Function of Mortality Salience and Provocation

Participants who had been provoked by a stranger who disagreed with them on important opinions, and who had also been reminded of their own death, administered significantly more unpleasant hot sauce to the partner than did the participants in the other three conditions.

Adapted from McGregor, H. A., Lieberman, J. D., Greenberg, J., Solomon, S., Arndt, J., Simon, L.,…Pyszczynski, T. (1998). Terror management and aggression: Evidence that mortality salience motivates aggression against worldview-threatening others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74 (3), 590–605.

Strengths and Limitations of Freudian and Neo-Freudian Approaches

Freud has probably exerted a greater impact on the public’s understanding of personality than any other thinker, and he has also in large part defined the field of psychology. Although Freudian psychologists no longer talk about oral, anal, or genital “fixations,” they do continue to believe that our childhood experiences and unconscious motivations shape our personalities and our attachments with others, and they still make use of psychodynamic concepts when they conduct psychological therapy.

Nevertheless, Freud’s theories, as well as those of the neo-Freudians, have in many cases failed to pass the test of empiricism, and as a result they are less influential now than they have been in the past (Crews, 1998). The problems are first, that it has proved to be difficult to rigorously test Freudian theory because the predictions that it makes (particularly those regarding defense mechanisms) are often vague and unfalsifiable, and second, that the aspects of the theory that can be tested often have not received much empirical support.

As examples, although Freud claimed that children exposed to overly harsh toilet training would become fixated in the anal stage and thus be prone to excessive neatness, stinginess, and stubbornness in adulthood, research has found few reliable associations between toilet training practices and adult personality (Fisher & Greenberg, 1996). And since the time of Freud, the need to repress sexual desires would seem to have become much less necessary as societies have tolerated a wider variety of sexual practices. And yet the psychological disorders that Freud thought we caused by this repression have not decreased.

There is also little scientific support for most of the Freudian defense mechanisms. For example, studies have failed to yield evidence for the existence of repression. People who are exposed to traumatic experiences in war have been found to remember their traumas only too well (Kihlstrom, 1997). Although we may attempt to push information that is anxiety-arousing into our unconscious, this often has the ironic effect of making us think about the information even more strongly than if we hadn’t tried to repress it (Newman, Duff, & Baumeister, 1997). It is true that children remember little of their childhood experiences, but this seems to be true of both negative as well as positive experiences, is true for animals as well, and probably is better explained in terms of the brain’s inability to form long-term memories than in terms of repression. On the other hand, Freud’s important idea that expressing or talking through one’s difficulties can be psychologically helpful has been supported in current research (Baddeley & Pennebaker, 2009) and has become a mainstay of psychological therapy.

A particular problem for testing Freudian theories is that almost anything that conflicts with a prediction based in Freudian theory can be explained away in terms of the use of a defense mechanism. A man who expresses a lot of anger toward his father may be seen via Freudian theory to be experiencing the Oedipus complex, which includes conflict with the father. But a man who expresses no anger at all toward the father also may be seen as experiencing the Oedipus complex by repressing the anger. Because Freud hypothesized that either was possible, but did not specify when repression would or would not occur, the theory is difficult to falsify.

In terms of the important role of the unconscious, Freud seems to have been at least in part correct. More and more research demonstrates that a large part of everyday behavior is driven by processes that are outside our conscious awareness (Kihlstrom, 1987). And yet, although our unconscious motivations influence every aspect of our learning and behavior Freud probably overestimated the extent to which these unconscious motivations are primarily sexual and aggressive.

Taken together, it is fair to say that Freudian theory, like most psychological theories, was not entirely correct and that it has had to be modified over time as the results of new studies have become available. But the fundamental ideas about personality that Freud proposed, as well as the use of talk therapy as an essential component of therapy, are nevertheless still a major part of psychology and are used by clinical psychologists every day.

Focusing on the Self: Humanism and Self-Actualization

Psychoanalytic models of personality were complemented during the 1950s and 1960s by the theories of humanistic psychologists . In contrast to the proponents of psychoanalysis, humanists embraced the notion of free will. Arguing that people are free to choose their own lives and make their own decisions, humanistic psychologists focused on the underlying motivations that they believed drove personality, focusing on the nature of the self-concept , the set of beliefs about who we are , and self-esteem , our positive feelings about the self .

One of the most important humanists, Abraham Maslow (1908–1970), conceptualized personality in terms of a pyramid-shaped hierarchy of motives ( Figure 11.11 “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs” ). At the base of the pyramid are the lowest-level motivations, including hunger and thirst, and safety and belongingness. Maslow argued that only when people are able to meet the lower-level needs are they able to move on to achieve the higher-level needs of self-esteem, and eventually self-actualization , which is the motivation to develop our innate potential to the fullest possible extent .

Maslow studied how successful people, including Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Helen Keller, and Mahatma Gandhi had been able to lead such successful and productive lives. Maslow (1970) believed that self-actualized people are creative, spontaneous, and loving of themselves and others. They tend to have a few deep friendships rather than many superficial ones, and are generally private. He felt that these individuals do not need to conform to the opinions of others because they are very confident and thus free to express unpopular opinions. Self-actualized people are also likely to have peak experiences , or transcendent moments of tranquility accompanied by a strong sense of connection with others.

Figure 11.11 Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Abraham Maslow conceptualized personality in terms of a hierarchy of needs. The highest of these motivations is self-actualization.

Perhaps the best-known humanistic theorist is Carl Rogers (1902–1987). Rogers was positive about human nature, viewing people as primarily moral and helpful to others, and believed that we can achieve our full potential for emotional fulfillment if the self-concept is characterized by unconditional positive regard — a set of behaviors including being genuine, open to experience, transparent, able to listen to others, and self-disclosing and empathic . When we treat ourselves or others with unconditional positive regard, we express understanding and support, even while we may acknowledge failings. Unconditional positive regard allows us to admit our fears and failures, to drop our pretenses, and yet at the same time to feel completely accepted for what we are. The principle of unconditional positive regard has become a foundation of psychological therapy; therapists who use it in their practice are more effective than those who do not (Prochaska & Norcross, 2007; Yalom, 1995).

Although there are critiques of the humanistic psychologists (e.g., that Maslow focused on historically productive rather than destructive personalities in his research and thus drew overly optimistic conclusions about the capacity of people to do good), the ideas of humanism are so powerful and optimistic that they have continued to influence both everyday experiences as well as psychology. Today the positive psychology movement argues for many of these ideas, and research has documented the extent to which thinking positively and openly has important positive consequences for our relationships, our life satisfaction, and our psychological and physical health (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000).

Research Focus: Self-Discrepancies, Anxiety, and Depression

Tory Higgins and his colleagues (Higgins, Bond, Klein, & Strauman, 1986; Strauman & Higgins, 1988) have studied how different aspects of the self-concept relate to personality characteristics. These researchers focused on the types of emotional distress that we might experience as a result of how we are currently evaluating our self-concept. Higgins proposes that the emotions we experience are determined both by our perceptions of how well our own behaviors meet up to the standards and goals we have provided ourselves (our internal standards ) and by our perceptions of how others think about us (our external standards ). Furthermore, Higgins argues that different types of self-discrepancies lead to different types of negative emotions.

In one of Higgins’s experiments (Higgins, Bond, Klein, & Strauman., 1986), participants were first asked to describe themselves using a self-report measure. The participants listed 10 thoughts that they thought described the kind of person they actually are; this is the actual self-concept . Then, participants also listed 10 thoughts that they thought described the type of person they would “ideally like to be” (the ideal self-concept ) as well as 10 thoughts describing the way that someone else—for instance, a parent—thinks they “ought to be” (the ought self-concept ).

Higgins then divided his participants into two groups. Those with low self-concept discrepancies were those who listed similar traits on all three lists. Their ideal, ought, and actual self-concepts were all pretty similar and so they were not considered to be vulnerable to threats to their self-concept. The other half of the participants, those with high self-concept discrepancies , were those for whom the traits listed on the ideal and ought lists were very different from those listed on the actual self list. These participants were expected to be vulnerable to threats to the self-concept.

Then, at a later research session, Higgins first asked people to express their current emotions, including those related to sadness and anxiety. After obtaining this baseline measure Higgins activated either ideal or ought discrepancies for the participants. Participants in the ideal self-discrepancy priming condition were asked to think about and discuss their own and their parents’ hopes and goals for them. Participants in the ought self-priming condition listed their own and their parents’ beliefs concerning their duty and obligations. Then all participants again indicated their current emotions.

As you can see in Figure 11.12 “Results From Higgins, Bond, Klein, and Strauman, 1986” , for low self-concept discrepancy participants, thinking about their ideal or ought selves did not much change their emotions. For high self-concept discrepancy participants, however, priming the ideal self-concept increased their sadness and dejection, whereas priming the ought self-concept increased their anxiety and agitation. These results are consistent with the idea that discrepancies between the ideal and the actual self lead us to experience sadness, dissatisfaction, and other depression-related emotions, whereas discrepancies between the actual and ought self are more likely to lead to fear, worry, tension, and other anxiety-related emotions.

Figure 11.12 Results From Higgins, Bond, Klein, and Strauman, 1986

Higgins and his colleagues documented the impact of self-concept discrepancies on emotion. For participants with low self-concept discrepancies (right bars), seeing words that related to the self had little influence on emotions. For those with high self-concept discrepancies (left bars), priming the ideal self increased dejection whereas priming the ought self increased agitation.

Adapted from Higgins, E. T., Bond, R. N., Klein, R., & Strauman, T. (1986). Self-discrepancies and emotional vulnerability: How magnitude, accessibility, and type of discrepancy influence affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51 (1), 5–15.

One of the critical aspects of Higgins’s approach is that, as is our personality, our feelings are also influenced both by our own behavior and by our expectations of how other people view us. This makes it clear that even though you might not care that much about achieving in school, your failure to do well may still produce negative emotions because you realize that your parents do think it is important.

Key Takeaways

• One of the most important psychological approaches to understanding personality is based on the psychodynamic approach to personality developed by Sigmund Freud.
• For Freud the mind was like an iceberg, with the many motivations of the unconscious being much larger, but also out of sight, in comparison to the consciousness of which we are aware.
• Freud proposed that the mind is divided into three components: id, ego, and superego, and that the interactions and conflicts among the components create personality.
• Freud proposed that we use defense mechanisms to cope with anxiety and to maintain a positive self-image.
• Freud argued that personality is developed through a series of psychosexual stages, each focusing on pleasure from a different part of the body.
• The neo-Freudian theorists, including Adler, Jung, Horney, and Fromm, emphasized the role of the unconscious and early experience in shaping personality, but placed less evidence on sexuality as the primary motivating force in personality.
• Psychoanalytic and behavioral models of personality were complemented during the 1950s and 1960s by the theories of humanistic psychologists, including Maslow and Rogers.

Exercises and Critical Thinking

• Based on your understanding of psychodynamic theories, how would you analyze your own personality? Are there aspects of the theory that might help you explain your own strengths and weaknesses?
• Based on your understanding of humanistic theories, how would you try to change your behavior to better meet the underlying motivations of security, acceptance, and self-realization?
• Consider your own self-concept discrepancies. Do you have an actual-ideal or actual-ought discrepancy? Which one is more important for you, and why?

Baddeley, J. L., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2009). Expressive writing. In W. T. O’Donohue & J. E. Fisher (Eds.), General principles and empirically supported techniques of cognitive behavior therapy (pp. 295–299). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Crews, F. C. (1998). Unauthorized Freud: Doubters confront a legend . New York, NY: Viking Press.

Dolnick, E. (1998). Madness on the couch: Blaming the victim in the heyday of psychoanalysis. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.

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Freud, S. (1923/1949). The ego and the id . London, England: Hogarth Press. (Original work published 1923)

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Strauman, T. J., & Higgins, E. T. (1988). Self-discrepancies as predictors of vulnerability to distinct syndromes of chronic emotional distress. Journal of Personality, 56 (4), 685–707.

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Sigmund Freud

Sigismund Schlomo Freud was born on 6th May 1856 to Jewish parents, Amalia and Jakob Freud, in a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire now in the Czech Republic. When Sigmund was three, the Freuds moved to Vienna. He excelled academically, developing a passion for literature, languages and the arts that would profoundly influence his thinking about the human mind. Freud became very interested in medical and scientific research, and went on to study medicine at the University of Vienna. While studying, Freud developed a particular fascination with neurology, and later trained in neuropathology at the Vienna General Hospital. In 1885, Freud travelled to Paris to study at the Salpêtrière Hospital with Jean-Martin Charcot, a famous neurologist studying hypnosis and hysteria. Freud was deeply affected by Charcot’s work, and upon returning to Vienna he started using hypnosis in his own clinical work with patients.

Out of these experiments in hypnosis, and in collaboration with his colleague Josef Breuer, Freud developed a new kind of psychological treatment based on the patient talking about whatever came to mind – memories, dreams, thoughts, emotions – and then analysing that information in order to relieve the patient’s symptoms. He would later call this process ‘free association’. Early forays into this new ‘talking cure’ by Breuer and Freud yielded promising results (notably in the famous case of ‘Anna O.’) A year before marrying his fiancée Martha Bernays, Freud published Studies on Hysteria (1895) with Breuer, the first ever ‘psychoanalytic’ work. In this book, Freud and Breuer described their theory that the symptoms of hysteria were symbolic representations of traumatic, and often sexual, memories. By 1896, Freud had abandoned hypnosis and started using the term ‘psychoanalysis’ to refer to this new clinical method and its underlying theories. The following year, Freud embarked upon a self-analysis, which he deemed necessary both as a means of expanding and testing his theory of the mind, and as an exercise in honesty and self-knowledge. This self-investigation led him to build upon his and Breuer’s original theory that neurosis was caused by early trauma, and to develop substantially his ideas about infantile sexuality and repression. In the coming years and decades, Freud’s clinical work with his patients – among them the famous ‘Dora’, ‘Rat Man’, and ‘Little Hans’ – would remain the basis and core of his work, and would provide the vital material for his continual advancement and refinement of his theory of the mind.

In 1899 Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams. In this, one of his most important works, he described dreams as a form of wish-fulfilment, and asserted that: “[T]he interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.” In his formulation, dreams were the result of the unconscious trying to resolve conflicts or express desires that, in our conscious minds, are not allowed to be acknowledged. He saw the preconscious mind as a kind of censor or bodyguard, only allowing unthreatening thoughts into the conscious mind. According to Freud, in dreams this censorship becomes weaker, and forbidden wishes can become visible to our sleeping minds, albeit in some kind of symbolic disguise or code. Freud believed these dream symbols were far from simple to interpret, often embodying several meanings at once. It was also in The Interpretation of Dreams that Freud introduced perhaps his most famous concept of the Oedipus Complex, and it was here that he first mapped out his topographical model of the mind. Between 1901 and 1905 Freud continued to elaborate and expand his model of human psychology, and he wrote two more very important works. In 'The Psychopathology of Everyday Life', he introduced the idea of ‘Freudian’ slips and ‘verbal bridges’, and in 'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,' he delineated his early thinking about psychosexual development and infantile sexuality.

By the beginning of the twentieth century Freud’s ideas were drawing interest from several colleagues in Vienna. In 1902 a group of physicians and psychiatrists formed the Wednesday Psychological Society, which met every week in Freud’s apartment at Berggasse, 19. The original group was made up of Freud, Wilhelm Stekel, Alfred Adler, Max Kahane, and Rudolph Reitler, all Viennese physicians. By 1906 the group had grown to a membership of sixteen, including Carl Jung and Otto Rank, both of whom would go on to be highly influential psychoanalytic thinkers. At this point the group decided to re-name and establish itself as the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Freud and Carl Jung quickly became close colleagues and friends, both fascinated and enthused by the possibilities of psychoanalysis. In 1909 they travelled, along with Hungarian analyst Sándor Ferenczi, to the USA, where Freud gave a series of psychoanalytic lectures. It was after these American lectures that Freud’s renown and influence began to grow far beyond the confines of the Viennese medical community. American psychologists and neurologists were galvanised by Freud’s new ideas, and within a few years both the New York Psychoanalytic Society and the American Psychoanalytic Association were founded.

A year after the outbreak of the First World War, at the age of sixty, Freud gave his ‘Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis’ at the University of Vienna. In them he outlined the key tenets of psychoanalytic theory, as he had developed them over the past two decades, including his ideas of repression, free association and libido. The lectures were published two years later, and went on to become his most popular publication. The year after the end of the war, in 1919, Freud examined soldiers traumatized by their experience of fighting. He did not write much explicitly about the psychological damage done by warfare, but it nevertheless influenced his thinking significantly, for example in his concepts of repetition compulsion and the death instinct.

In 1920 Freud suffered a personal tragedy when his daughter Sophie died from the influenza eviscerating an already war-damaged Europe. She was aged only twenty-seven when she died, pregnant, and a mother of two. Three years later Freud would also lose Sophie’s son Heinerle, his grandson, at the age of four. He wrote in a letter: “I have hardly ever loved a human being, certainly never a child, so much as him.” He said he had never felt such grief. The year of Sophie’s death, Freud published 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle', a paper introducing his concepts of repetition compulsion and the death instinct, and building upon his earlier description of the function and operation of dreams. It is in this work that he revised his theory that human behaviour is almost entirely driven by sexual instincts, instead portraying the psyche in a state of conflict between opposites: creative, life-seeking, sexual Eros; and destructive, death-bent Thanatos. In Freud’s formulation, the death instinct was an expression of a fundamental biological longing to return to an inanimate state. This new theory was not well received by most of his analytic colleagues in Vienna, though it would, in time, have a big impact on the thinking of several preeminent psychoanalytic thinkers, notably Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein.

In 1923 Freud published his important paper, 'The Ego and the Id'. Here he further developed and elucidated his model of the human mind, introducing his ‘Superego-Ego-Id’ formulation to supersede the 'conscious-preconscious-unconscious' structure described in The Interpretation of Dreams. In this year Freud also discovered a pre-cancerous growth in his jaw, certainly caused by his regular and liberal consumption of cigars. He nonetheless found himself unable to give them up, and likened his addiction to them to his obsessional collecting of antiquities. The growth later turned into cancer and would ultimately cause his death sixteen years later.

At the invitation of the League of Nations and its International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation at Paris, in 1932 Albert Einstein initiated an exchange of letters (for subsequent publication) with Freud, concerning the subject of war and how it might be avoided. Einstein and Freud had met several years earlier in Berlin, and were very interested in one another’s work. Only a year after this epistolary exchange, 1933 Hitler was elected Chancellor of the German Reich. In 1930 Freud had been awarded the Goethe Prize for his contributions to psychology and German literary culture, but in January 1933, the newly empowered Nazis seized Freud’s books, among many other psychoanalytic and Jewish-authored works, and publicly burned them in Berlin. The Nazis described this destruction as acting, "[A]gainst the soul-destroying glorification of the instinctual life, for the nobility of the human soul!” Meanwhile Freud’s comment on these barbaric proceedings was rather more ironic: "What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now, they are content with burning my books."

As the Nazis gained power and territory, and their policies grew ever more flagrantly discriminatory, Freud continued to write and practise in Vienna. As the 1930s wore on, friends and colleagues encouraged him to consider leaving Vienna but, even after the Anschluss in March 1938 and the ensuing displays of anti-Semitic brutality, he showed no desire to move. Ernest Jones was very worried about this determination to stay in what was becoming an increasingly dangerous place for Jews, and he flew into Vienna soon after the annexation, determined to get Freud to move to Britain. Freud at last agreed and, after much financial and political negotiating with the Gestapo on the part of Jones and others, he and his daughter Anna left for London in June 1938. They moved into 20 Maresfield Gardens, in Hampstead (now the Freud Museum ), where Freud continued to write and treat patients, despite the painful advancement of his jaw cancer. In London Freud worked on his final books, Moses and Monotheism, and the incomplete Outline of Psychoanalysis. He was visited by Salvador Dalí – a passionate devotee –, his fellow Viennese writer Stefan Zweig, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, and H.G. Wells.

By the autumn of 1939, the progression of Freud's cancer was causing him severe pain and had by this point been declared inoperable. He asked his doctor and friend, Max Schur, to euthanize him with a high dose of morphine, and he died on 23rd September 1939, not long after the outbreak of World War Two. His body was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium. Ernest Jones and Stefan Zweig spoke at his funeral.

Eleanor Sawbridge Burton 2015

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Little Hans – Freudian Case Study

Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

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Case Study Summary

• Little Hans was a 5-year-old boy with a phobia of horses. Like all clinical case studies, the primary aim was to treat the phobia.
• However, Freud’s therapeutic input in this case was minimal, and a secondary aim was to explore what factors might have led to the phobia in the first place, and what factors led to its remission.
• From around three years of age, little Hans showed an interest in ‘widdlers’, both his own penis and those of other males, including animals. His mother threatens to cut off his widdler unless he stops playing with it.
• Hans’s fear of horses worsened, and he was reluctant to go out in case he met a horse. Freud linked this fear to the horse’s large penis. The phobia improved, relating only to horses with black harnesses over their noses. Hans’s father suggested this symbolized his moustache.
• Freud’s interpretation linked Hans’s fear to the Oedipus complex , the horses (with black harnesses and big penises) unconsciously representing his fear of his father.
• Freud suggested Hans resolved this conflict as he fantasized about himself with a big penis and married his mother. This allowed Hans to overcome his castration anxiety and identify with his father.

Freud was interested in the role of infant sexuality in child development. He recognised that this approach may have appeared strange to people unfamiliar with his ideas but observed that it was inevitable for a psychoanalyst to see this as important. The case therefore focused on little Hans’s psychosexual development and it played a key role in the formulation of Freud’s ideas within the Oedipus Conflict , such as the castration complex.

‘Little Hans’ was nearly five when has was seen by Freud (on 30th March 1908) but letters from his father to Freud provide the bulk of the evidence for the case study. These refer retrospectively to when Hans was less than three years old and were supplied to Freud through the period January to May 1908 (by which time little Hans was five years old).

The first reports of Hans were when he was 3 years old when he developed an active interest in his ‘widdler’ (penis), and also those of other people. For example, on one occasion, he asked, ‘Mummy, have you got a widdler too?

Throughout this time, the main theme of his fantasies and dreams was widdlers and widdling.  When he was about three and a half years old his mother told him not to touch his widdler or else she would call the doctor to come and cut it off.

When Hans was almost 5, Hans’ father wrote to Freud explaining his concerns about Hans. He described the main problem as follows:

He is afraid a horse will bite him in the street, and this fear seems somehow connected with his having been frightened by a large penis’.

The father went on to provide Freud with extensive details of conversations with Hans. Together, Freud and the father tried to understand what the boy was experiencing and undertook to resolve his phobia of horses.

Freud wrote a summary of his treatment of Little Hans, in 1909, in a paper entitled “ Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy. “

Case History: Little Hans’ Phobia

Since the family lived opposite a busy coaching inn, that meant that Hans was unhappy about leaving the house because he saw many horses as soon as he went out of the door.

When he was first asked about his fear Hans said that he was frightened that the horses would fall down and make a noise with their feet.  He was most frightened of horses which were drawing heavily laden carts, and, in fact, had seen a horse collapse and die in the street one time when he was out with his nurse.

It was pulling a horse-drawn bus carrying many passengers and when the horse collapsed Hans had been frightened by the sound of its hooves clattering against the cobbles of the road.  He also suffered attacks of more generalized anxiety . Hans’ anxieties and phobia continued and he was afraid to go out of the house because of his phobia of horses.

When Hans was taken to see Freud (on 30th March 1908), he was asked about the horses he had a phobia of. Hans noted that he didn’t like horses with black bits around the mouth.

Freud believed that the horse was a symbol of his father, and the black bits were a mustache.  After the interview, the father recorded an exchange with Hans where the boy said ‘Daddy don’t trot away from me!

Over the next few weeks Hans” phobia gradually began to improve.  Hans said that he was especially afraid of white horses with black around the mouth who were wearing blinkers.  Hans” father interpreted this as a reference to his mustache and spectacles.

• In the first, Hans had several imaginary children. When asked who their mother was, Hans replied “Why, mummy, and you”re their Granddaddy”.
• In the second fantasy, which occurred the next day, Hans imagined that a plumber had come and first removed his bottom and widdler and then gave him another one of each, but larger.

Freud’s Interpretation of Hans’ Phobia

After many letters were exchanged, Freud concluded that the boy was afraid that his father would castrate him for desiring his mother. Freud interpreted that the horses in the phobia were symbolic of the father, and that Hans feared that the horse (father) would bite (castrate) him as punishment for the incestuous desires towards his mother.

Freud saw Hans” phobia as an expression of the Oedipus complex . Horses, particularly horses with black harnesses, symbolized his father. Horses were particularly suitable father symbols because of their large penises.

The fear began as an Oedipal conflict was developing regarding Hans being allowed in his parents” bed (his father objected to Hans getting into bed with them).

Hans told his father of a dream/fantasy which his father summarized as follows:

‘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 I sat down on top of the crumpled one’.

Freud and the father interpreted the dream/fantasy as being a reworking of the morning exchanges in the parental bed.  Hans enjoyed getting into his parent’s bed in the morning but his father often objected (the big giraffe calling out because he had taken the crumpled giraffe – mother – away).

Both Freud and the father believed that the long neck of the giraffe was a symbol for the large adult penis.  However Hans rejected this idea.

The Oedipus Complex

Freud was attempting to demonstrate that the boy’s (Little Hans) fear of horses was related to his Oedipus complex .  Freud thought that, during the phallic stage (approximately between 3 and 6 years old), a boy develops an intense sexual love for his mothers.

Because of this, he sees his father as a rival, and wants to get rid of him.  The father, however, is far bigger and more powerful than the young boy, and so the child develops a fear that, seeing him as a rival, his father will castrate him.

Because it is impossible to live with the continual castration-threat anxiety provided by this conflict, the young boy develops a mechanism for coping with it, using a defense mechanis m known as identification with the aggressor .

He stresses all the ways that he is similar to his father, adopting his father’s attitudes, mannerisms and actions, feeling that if his father sees him as similar, he will not feel hostile towards him.

Freud saw the Oedipus complex resolved as Hans fantasized himself with a big penis like his father’s and married to his mother with his father present in the role of grandfather.

Hans did recover from his phobia after his father (at Freud’s suggestion) assured him that he had no intention of cutting off his penis.

Critical Evaluation

Case studies have both strengths and weaknesses. They allow for detailed examinations of individuals and often are conducted in clinical settings so that the results are applied to helping that particular individual as is the case here.

However, Freud also tries to use this case to support his theories about child development generally and case studies should not be used to make generalizations about larger groups of people.

The problems with case studies are they lack population validity. Because they are often based on one person it is not possible to generalize the results to the wider population.

The case study of Little Hans does appear to provide support for Freud’s (1905) theory of the Oedipus complex.  However, there are difficulties with this type of evidence.

There are several other weaknesses with the way that the data was collected in this study. Freud only met Hans once and all of his information came from Hans father. We have already seen that Hans’ father was an admirer of Freud’s theories and tried to put them into practice with his son.

This means that he would have been biased in the way he interpreted and reported Hans’ behavior to Freud. There are also examples of leading questions in the way that Hans’ father questioned Hans about his feelings. It is therefore possible that he supplied Hans with clues that led to his fantasies of marriage to his mother and his new large widdler.

Of course, even if Hans did have a fully-fledged Oedipus complex, this shows that the Oedipus complex exists but not how common it is.  Remember that Freud believed it to be universal.

At age 19, the not-so Little Hans appeared at Freud’s consulting room having read his case history.  Hans confirmed that he had suffered no troubles during adolescence and that he was fit and well.

He could not remember the discussions with his father, and described how when he read his case history it ‘came to him as something unknown’

Finally, there are problems with the conclusions that Freud reaches. He claims that Hans recovered fully from his phobia when his father sat him down and reassured him that he was not going to castrate him and one can only wonder about the effects of this conversation on a small child!

More importantly, is Freud right in his conclusions that Hans’ phobia was the result of the Oedipus complex or might there be a more straightforward explanation?

Hans had seen a horse fall down in the street and thought it was dead. This happened very soon after Hans had attended a funeral and was beginning to question his parents about death. A behaviorist explanation would be simply that Hans was frightened by the horse falling over and developed a phobia as a result of this experience.

Gross cites an article by Slap (an American psychoanalyst) who argues that Hans’ phobia may have another explanation. Shortly after the beginning of the phobia (after Hans had seen the horse fall down) Hans had to have his tonsils out.

After this, the phobia worsened and it was then that he specifically identified white horses as the ones he was afraid of. Slap suggests that the masked and gowned surgeon (all in white) may have significantly contributed to Hans’ fears.

The Freud Archives

In 2004, the Freud Archives released a number of key documents which helped to complete the context of the case of little Hans (whose real name was Herbert Graf).

The released works included the transcript of an interview conducted by Kurt Eissler in 1952 with Max Graf (little Hans’s father) as well as notes from brief interviews with Herbert Graf and his wife  in 1959.

Such documents have provided some key details that may alter the way information from the original case is interpreted. For example, Hans’s mother had been a patient of Freud herself.

Another noteworthy detail was that Freud gave little Hans a rocking horse for his third birthday and was sufficiently well acquainted with the family to carry it up the stairs himself.

It is interesting to question why, in the light of Hans’s horse phobia, details of the presence of the gift were not mentioned in the case study (since it would have been possible to do so without breaking confidentiality for either the family or Freud himself).

Information from the archived documents reveal much conflict within the Graf family. Blum (2007, p. 749) concludes that:

“Trauma, child abuse [of Hans’s little sister], parental strife, and the preoedipal mother-child relationship emerge as important issues that intensified Hans’s pathogenic oedipal conflicts and trauma. With limited, yet remarkable help from his father and Freud, Little Hans nevertheless had the ego strength and resilience to resolve his phobia, resume progressive development, and forge a successful creative career.”

Support for Freud (Brown, 1965)

Brown (1965) examines the case in detail and provides the following support for Freud’s interpretation.

1 . In one instance, Hans said to his father –“ Daddy don”t trot away from me ” as he got up from the table. 2 . Hans particularly feared horses with black around the mouth.  Han’s father had a moustache. 3. Hans feared horses with blinkers on. Freud noted that the father wore spectacles which he took to resemble blinkers to the child. 4 . The father’s skin resembled white horses rather than dark ones.  In fact, Hans said, “Daddy, you are so lovely. You are so white”. 5 . The father and child had often played at “horses” together.  During the game the father would take the role of horse, the son that of the rider.

Ross (2007) reports that the interviews with Max and Herbert Graf provide evidence of the psychological problems experienced by Little Hans’s mother and her mistreatment of her husband and her daughter (who committed suicide as an adult).

Ross suggests that “Reread in this context, the text of “A Phobia in a Five-year-old Boy” provides ample evidence of Frau Graf’s sexual seduction and emotional manipulation of her son, which exacerbated his age-expectable castration and separation anxiety, and her beating of her infant daughter.

The boy’s phobic symptoms can therefore be deconstructed not only as the expression of oedipal fantasy, but as a communication of the traumatic abuse occurring in the home.

Blum, H. P. (2007). Little Hans: A centennial review and reconsideration . Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 55 (3), 749-765.

Brown, R. (1965). Social Psychology . Collier Macmillan.

Freud, S. (1905). Three essays on the theory of sexuality . Se, 7.

Freud, S. (1909). Analysis of a phobia of a five year old boy. In The Pelican Freud Library (1977), Vol 8, Case Histories 1, pages 169-306

Graf, H. (1959). Interview by Kurt Eissler. Box R1, Sigmund Freud Papers. Sigmund Freud Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Graf, M. (1952). Interview by Kurt Eissler. Box 112, Sigmund Freud Papers. Sigmund Freud Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Ross, J.M. (2007). Trauma and abuse in the case of Little Hans: A contemporary perspective . Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 55 (3), 779-797.

Further Information

• Sigmund Freud Papers: Interviews and Recollections, -1998; Set A, -1998; Interviews and; Graf, Max, 1952.
• Sigmund Freud Papers: Interviews and Recollections, -1998; Set A, -1998; Interviews and; Graf, Herbert, 1959.
• Wakefield, J. C. (2007). Attachment and sibling rivalry in Little Hans: The fantasy of the two giraffes revisited. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 55(3), 821-848.
• Bierman J.S. (2007) The psychoanalytic process in the treatment of Little Hans. Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 62: 92- 110
• Re-Reading “Little Hans”: Freud’s Case Study and the Question of Competing Paradigms in Psychoanalysis
• An” Invisible Man”?: Little Hans Updated

Sigmund Freud Theory: Understanding the Mind Through Psychoanalysis

Sigmund Freud is a name that has become synonymous with psychology. One critical concept in Freud’s theory is psychoanalysis. This therapeutic technique involves exploring the unconscious mind to uncover repressed thoughts and emotions that may contribute to a patient’s mental health issues.

Another is Sigmund Freud’s idea of the unconscious mind. According to Freud, the unconscious mind is a reservoir of thoughts, feelings, and memories outside our conscious awareness. These unconscious thoughts and feelings can influence our behavior in ways we may not even realize. Freud believed that by exploring these unconscious thoughts and feelings, we could better understand ourselves and our behavior.

His theories and contributions to the field have significantly impacted how we understand human behavior and the workings of the mind. Freud’s ideas on the unconscious mind, psychoanalysis, and the id, ego, and superego have become well-known concepts that are still studied and discussed today.

Sigmund Freud’s Life

Sigmund Freud was a renowned Austrian neurologist born in 1856. He is often called the “father of modern psychology” due to his revolutionary contributions to mental health. Freud’s life was filled with personal and professional challenges, but his perseverance and dedication to his work had a lasting impact on psychology and psychoanalysis.

Financial struggles and family issues marked Freud’s early life. Despite these obstacles, he was able to attend medical school and eventually became a practicing neurologist. In the late 1800s, Freud developed his theories on the human psyche and the unconscious mind.

Freud’s theories were met with both praise and criticism during his lifetime. He believed unconscious memories, thoughts, and urges primarily influenced human behavior. He also proposed that the psyche comprises the id, ego , and superego. The id was entirely unconscious, while the ego operated in the conscious mind.

Throughout his career, Freud faced opposition and controversy. His theories were often considered controversial and challenged by his peers. Despite this, Freud continued to develop and refine his ideas until he died in 1939.

Today, Freud’s contributions to psychology and psychoanalysis continue to influence the field. His theories on the unconscious mind and the role of early childhood experiences in shaping personality remain relevant to modern mental health practices.

Psychoanalysis Theory

Psychoanalysis theory is a psychological approach developed by Sigmund Freud , which aims to treat mental health disorders by exploring unconscious thoughts and feelings. This section will discuss the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis theory, including the unconscious mind, dream interpretation, and Freudian slip.

Unconscious Mind

According to Freud, the unconscious mind is the primary source of human behavior. He believed the unconscious mind is a reservoir of repressed memories, desires, and emotions that influence our thoughts and actions without awareness. Psychoanalysis therapy aims to bring these unconscious thoughts and feelings to the conscious mind, allowing individuals to gain insight into their behavior and emotions.

Dream Interpretation

Dream interpretation is a crucial aspect of psychoanalysis theory. Freud believed dreams manifest unconscious thoughts and desires, and analyzing them can provide insight into repressed emotions and conflicts. Through dream analysis, individuals can gain a deeper understanding of their unconscious mind, allowing them to work through mental health issues and attain personal growth.

Freudian Slip

A Freudian slip is a verbal or behavioral mistake that reveals an individual’s unconscious thoughts or desires. Freud believed these slips resulted from repressed emotions and desires, which can manifest themselves in seemingly unrelated situations. Psychoanalysis therapy aims to identify and analyze these slips, allowing individuals to gain insight into their unconscious mind and work through any underlying mental health issues.

Structural Model

Sigmund Freud’s Structural Model of the Human Psyche is a foundational theory in psychology that explains how the psyche is structured into three parts: the id, ego, and superego. Each piece of the psyche has a different function and operates at varying stages of our lives.

The id is the primitive and instinctual part of our psyche that is present from birth. It is responsible for our basic needs and desires, such as hunger, thirst, and sexual impulses. The id operates on the pleasure principle, seeking immediate gratification of our desires without regard for consequences.

The ego is the rational part of our psyche that develops as we age. It operates on the reality principle, considering the external world and the consequences of our actions. The ego mediates between the id and the superego, balancing our desires with social norms and values.

The superego is the moral and ethical part of our psyche that develops during childhood. It represents our internalized values and ideals, such as morality, justice, and altruism. The superego operates on the idealistic principle, striving for perfection and upholding moral standards.

Psychosexual Development Theory

Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychosexual development suggests that individuals go through five stages of development that shape their personality and sexuality. These stages are the oral stage, anal stage, phallic stage, latency stage, and genital stage. In this section, we will discuss each of these stages in detail.

The oral stage is the first stage of psychosexual development, from birth to 18 months. During this stage, the child’s primary source of pleasure is through the mouth. This includes activities such as sucking, biting, and chewing. The child’s relationship with their mother is critical during this stage, as it shapes their personality and attachment style.

The anal stage is the second stage of psychosexual development, which occurs from 18 months to 3 years. During this stage, the child’s primary source of pleasure is through the anus. This includes activities such as bowel movements and controlling them. During this stage, the child’s relationship with their parents shapes their personality and attitude towards authority figures.

Phallic Stage

The phallic stage is the third stage of psychosexual development, which occurs from 3 to 6 years. During this stage, the child’s primary source of pleasure is through the genitals. This includes exploring their own body and being curious about others’ bodies. The child’s relationship with their same-sex parent during this stage is critical, as it shapes their gender identity and sexual orientation.

Latency Stage

The latency stage is the fourth stage of psychosexual development, from 6 years to puberty. During this stage, the child’s sexual impulses are dormant, primarily focusing on social and intellectual development. The child’s relationship with their peers during this stage is critical, as it shapes their social skills and ability to form relationships.

Genital Stage

The genital stage is the final stage of psychosexual development, from puberty to adulthood. During this stage, the individual’s primary pleasure source is sexual activity with others. The individual’s ability to form intimate relationships and their sexual preferences are shaped during this stage.

Defense Mechanisms

As we delve into the theories of Sigmund Freud, we come across the concept of defense mechanisms. These are unconscious psychological strategies we use to protect ourselves from anxiety or guilt. Here are some of the most common defense mechanisms:

Denial is the refusal to accept reality. It is a common defense mechanism used when a situation is too difficult to handle. For example, a person diagnosed with a terminal illness may refuse to believe they are sick. This allows them to avoid the anxiety and fear of accepting their diagnosis.

Repression is the act of pushing painful memories or thoughts out of our conscious mind. This defense mechanism is often used when we experience trauma or other unpleasant experiences. For example, a person who was abused as a child may repress those memories in order to avoid the pain and discomfort associated with them.

Projection is when we attribute our own negative thoughts or feelings to others. For example, a person feeling jealous may accuse their partner of being unfaithful, even if no evidence supports this claim. This allows them to avoid confronting their feelings of jealousy.

Reaction Formation

Reaction formation is when we act the opposite way to how we feel. For example, a person attracted to someone may act aggressively towards them to mask their true feelings. This defense mechanism is often used when our true feelings are socially unacceptable or when expressing our true feelings would be detrimental.

Displacement

Displacement is when we redirect our negative feelings onto a less threatening target. For example, a person who is angry with their boss may go home and take out their frustration on their spouse or children. This allows them to avoid the consequences of expressing their anger towards their boss.

Sublimation

Sublimation is when we channel our negative feelings into a more socially acceptable outlet. For example, an angry or frustrated person may take up a physical activity like boxing or weightlifting to release their tension healthily. This defense mechanism allows us to express our negative feelings in a way that is not harmful to ourselves or others.

Criticism and Impact

Like any influential figure, Sigmund Freud has faced criticism for his theories. Some critics argue that his theories are too focused on sex and the unconscious mind and do not consider the role of social and cultural factors in shaping behavior. Others criticize Freud for relying too heavily on case studies and not conducting enough empirical research to support his claims.

Despite these criticisms, Freud’s theories have had a lasting impact on psychology. Many of his ideas, such as the importance of the unconscious mind and the role of childhood experiences in shaping adult behavior, continue to influence modern psychology.

Influence on Psychology

Freud’s theories have had a profound impact on the field of psychology. His work on the unconscious mind and the role of childhood experiences in shaping adult behavior has influenced many areas of psychology, including psychotherapy, personality psychology, and developmental psychology.

One of Freud’s most enduring contributions to psychology is the concept of the defense mechanism. According to Freud, defense mechanisms are unconscious strategies people use to protect themselves from anxiety and unpleasant emotions. Examples of defense mechanisms include denial, repression, and projection.

Freud’s theories have also had an impact on popular culture. Many of his ideas, such as the concept of the Oedipus complex, have become part of the cultural lexicon. However, it is essential to note that not all of Freud’s ideas have stood the test of time, and some have been criticized for being overly simplistic or not supported by empirical evidence.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the major theories of sigmund freud.

Sigmund Freud’s significant theories include the structure of the mind, psychosexual development, defense mechanisms, and psychoanalytic therapy. Freud believed the mind was divided into three parts: the conscious, the preconscious, and the unconscious. He also believed that personality developed through a series of psychosexual stages and that defense mechanisms were used to protect the ego from anxiety.

What is psychoanalysis, and how is it related to Freud’s theories?

Psychoanalysis is a therapeutic approach developed by Sigmund Freud to bring unconscious thoughts and feelings to conscious awareness. It is based on the idea that many psychological problems are caused by unconscious conflicts. Psychoanalytic therapy involves exploring a patient’s unconscious thoughts and feelings through free association, dream analysis, and interpretation.

How did Sigmund Freud’s theory of learning influence modern psychology?

Sigmund Freud’s theory of learning, which emphasized the role of unconscious processes, had a significant impact on modern psychology. His ideas about the importance of early childhood experiences and the influence of unconscious thoughts and feelings on behavior have been influential in the development of psychotherapy, personality theory, and social psychology.

What is the significance of Sigmund Freud’s theory of development?

Sigmund Freud’s theory of development, which posits that personality develops through a series of psychosexual stages, has had a lasting impact on psychology. His ideas about the importance of early childhood experiences and the influence of unconscious thoughts and feelings on behavior have been influential in the development of psychotherapy, personality theory, and social psychology.

How does Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory explain personality?

Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory explains personality as being composed of three parts: the id, the ego, and the superego. The id is the instinctual part of the mind, the ego is the rational part of the mind, and the superego is the moral part of the mind. Personality develops through a series of psychosexual stages, and defense mechanisms are used to protect the ego from anxiety.

What are some of Sigmund Freud’s most important works and how do they relate to his theories?

Some of Sigmund Freud’s most important works include “The Interpretation of Dreams,” “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” and “The Ego and the Id.” These works relate to his theories by exploring the structure of the mind, the development of personality, and the dynamics of psychoanalytic therapy.

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Freudian Personality Test

This free online 48-question Freudian Personality Style Test will allow you to obtain a glance of your scores on the 8 Freudian personality styles. Though Freud's theories have fallen out of favor with modern psychologists, the Freudian personality styles represent the historical forerunners of the modern Personality Styles . Both the Freudian as well as the modern personality styles represent a dynamic and more fluid aspect of the personality than the more structural properties measured by the Jung Type Test or the Big Five Test .

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I feel that I am an underachiever in the sense that I have never really 'gone for the gold' by applying my full potential.

The "Freudian Personality Style Test" is the property of IDR Labs International but pays homage to the works of Sigmund Freud, Karl Abraham, Wilhelm Reich, Nick Totton and Michael Jacobs.

While this test can help you gauge the extent of your scores on the various scales associated with the 8 Freudian personality styles, it is important to note that test scores do not necessarily translate into real-world assessments, as conducted by certified medical personnel with the respondent physically present and based on an extensive review of the respondent's personal and family history, among other things.

As such, please note that the information provided by this website provides educational information for educational purposes only. The information is provided "as-is" and should not be construed to constitute professional services or warranties of any kind. The publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, medical, financial, or any other type of professional services. If expert assistance is required, seek the services of a professional elsewhere.

The "Freudian Personality Style Test"© is the property of IDR Labs International. For more information, please consult our Terms of Service .

Why Use This Test?

1. Free. This free online test is designed to comprehensively measure your personality style on 8 different scales measuring Freudian personality styles and is delivered to you free of charge.

2. Comprehensive. This free online 48-question Freudian Personality Style test will help the respondent make sense of a wide theoretical framework of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and his associates. The century-old tradition of scholarship on the personality styles contains some contradictions, but this test straightens them out in order to deliver an overview of the field as a whole.

3. Made by professionals. The authors of this test are certified in the use of different personality tests and have worked professionally with typology and personality testing.

4. Clinically oriented. A common criticism of the personality descriptions yielded by Jung Type Tests like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and similar instruments is that their type descriptions are too positive. The feedback delivered by this instrument is designed to counteract that tendency, delivering a clear picture of the pathologies and problem areas that the respondent's personality is liable to be susceptible to.

Sigmund Freud

The Father of Psychoanalysis

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Childhood in Austria-Hungary

Attending university and finding love, freud the researcher, hysteria and hypnosis.

• Private Practice and "Anna O"

The Unconscious

• The Analyst's Couch

Self-Analysis and the Oedipus Complex

The interpretation of dreams, freud and jung, id, ego, and superego, later years.

• B.A., History, University of California at Davis

Sigmund Freud is best known as the creator of the therapeutic technique known as psychoanalysis. The Austrian-born psychiatrist greatly contributed to the understanding of human psychology in areas such as the unconscious mind, sexuality, and dream interpretation. Freud was also among the first to recognize the significance of emotional events that occur in childhood.

Although many of his theories have since fallen out of favor, Freud profoundly influenced psychiatric practice in the twentieth century.

Dates: May 6, 1856 -- September 23, 1939

Also Known As: Sigismund Schlomo Freud (born as); "Father of Psychoanalysis"

Famous Quote: "The ego is not master in its own house."

Sigismund Freud (later know as Sigmund) was born on May 6, 1856, in the town of Frieberg in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (present-day Czech Republic). He was the first child of Jacob and Amalia Freud and would be followed by two brothers and four sisters.

It was the second marriage for Jacob, who had two adult sons from a previous wife. Jacob set up business as a wool merchant but struggled to earn enough money to take care of his growing family. Jacob and Amalia raised their family as culturally Jewish, but were not especially religious in practice.

The family moved to Vienna in 1859, taking up residence in the only place they could afford -- the Leopoldstadt slum. Jacob and Amalia, however, had reason to hope for a better future for their children. Reforms enacted by Emperor Franz Joseph in 1849 had officially abolished discrimination against Jews, lifting restrictions previously placed upon them.

Although anti-Semitism still existed, Jews were, by law, free to enjoy the privileges of full citizenship, such as opening a business, entering a profession, and owning real estate. Unfortunately, Jacob was not a successful businessman and the Freuds were forced to live in a shabby, one-room apartment for several years.

Young Freud began school at the age of nine and quickly rose to the head of the class. He became a voracious reader and mastered several languages. Freud began to record his dreams in a notebook as an adolescent, displaying a fascination for what would later become a key element of his theories.

Following graduation from high school, Freud enrolled at the University of Vienna in 1873 to study zoology. Between his coursework and lab research, he would remain at the university for nine years.

As his mother's undisputed favorite, Freud enjoyed privileges that his siblings did not. He was given his own room at home (they now lived in a larger apartment), while the others shared bedrooms. The younger children had to maintain quiet in the house so that "Sigi" (as his mother called him) could concentrate on his studies. Freud changed his first name to Sigmund in 1878.

Early in his college years, Freud decided to pursue medicine, although he didn't envision himself caring for patients in a traditional sense. He was fascinated by bacteriology, the new branch of science whose focus was the study of organisms and the diseases they caused.

Freud became a lab assistant to one of his professors, performing research on the nervous systems of lower animals such as fish and eels.

After completing his medical degree in 1881, Freud began a three-year internship at a Vienna hospital, while continuing to work at the university on research projects. While Freud gained satisfaction from his painstaking work with the microscope, he realized that there was little money in research. He knew he must find a well-paying job and soon found himself more motivated than ever to do so.

In 1882, Freud met Martha Bernays, a friend of his sister. The two were immediately attracted to one another and became engaged within months of meeting. The engagement lasted four years, as Freud (still living in his parents' home) worked to make enough money to be able to marry and support Martha.

Intrigued by the theories on brain function that were emerging during the late 19th century, Freud opted to specialize in neurology. Many neurologists of that era sought to find an anatomical cause for mental illness within the brain. Freud also sought that proof in his research, which involved the dissection and study of brains. He became knowledgeable enough to give lectures on brain anatomy to other physicians.

Freud eventually found a position at a private children's hospital in Vienna. In addition to studying childhood diseases, he developed a special interest in patients with mental and emotional disorders.

Freud was disturbed by the current methods used to treat the mentally ill, such as long-term incarceration, hydrotherapy (spraying patients with a hose), and the dangerous (and poorly-understood) application of electric shock. He aspired to find a better, more humane method.

One of Freud's early experiments did little to help his professional reputation. In 1884, Freud published a paper detailing his experimentation with cocaine as a remedy for mental and physical ailments. He sang the praises of the drug, which he administered to himself as a cure for headaches and anxiety. Freud shelved the study after numerous cases of addiction were reported by those using the drug medicinally.

In 1885, Freud traveled to Paris, having received a grant to study with pioneering neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. The French physician had recently resurrected the use of hypnosis, made popular a century earlier by Dr. Franz Mesmer.

Charcot specialized in the treatment of patients with "hysteria," the catch-all name for an ailment with various symptoms, ranging from depression to seizures and paralysis, which mainly affected women.

Charcot believed that most cases of hysteria originated in the patient's mind and should be treated as such. He held public demonstrations, during which he would hypnotize patients (placing them into a trance) and induce their symptoms, one at a time, then remove them by suggestion.

Although some observers (especially those in the medical community) viewed it with suspicion, hypnosis did seem to work on some patients.

Freud was greatly influenced by Charcot's method, which illustrated the powerful role that words could play in the treatment of mental illness. He also came to adopt the belief that some physical ailments might originate in the mind, rather than in the body alone.

Private Practice and "Anna O"

Returning to Vienna in February 1886, Freud opened a private practice as a specialist in the treatment of "nervous diseases."

As his practice grew, he finally earned enough money to marry Martha Bernays in September 1886. The couple moved into an apartment in a middle-class neighborhood in the heart of Vienna. Their first child, Mathilde, was born in 1887, followed by three sons and two daughters over the next eight years.

Freud began to receive referrals from other physicians to treat their most challenging patients -- "hysterics" who did not improve with treatment. Freud used hypnosis with these patients and encouraged them to talk about past events in their lives. He dutifully wrote down all that he learned from them -- traumatic memories, as well as their dreams and fantasies.

One of Freud's most important mentors during this time was Viennese physician Josef Breuer. Through Breuer, Freud learned about a patient whose case had an enormous influence upon Freud and the development of his theories.

"Anna O" (real name Bertha Pappenheim) was the pseudonym of one of Breuer's hysteria patients who had proved especially difficult to treat. She suffered from numerous physical complaints, including arm paralysis, dizziness, and temporary deafness.

Breuer treated Anna by using what the patient herself called "the talking cure." She and Breuer were able to trace a particular symptom back to an actual event in her life that might have triggered it.

In talking about the experience, Anna found that she felt a sense of relief, leading to a diminishment -- or even the disappearance of -- a symptom. Thus, Anna O became the first patient to have undergone "psychoanalysis," a term coined by Freud himself.

Inspired by the case of Anna O, Freud incorporated the talking cure into his own practice. Before long, he did away with the hypnosis aspect, focusing instead upon listening to his patients and asking them questions.

Later, he asked fewer questions, allowing his patients to talk about whatever came to mind, a method known as free association. As always, Freud kept meticulous notes on everything his patients said, referring to such documentation as a case study. He considered this his scientific data.

As Freud gained experience as a psychoanalyst, he developed a concept of the human mind as an iceberg, noting that a major portion of the mind -- the part that lacked awareness -- existed under the surface of the water. He referred to this as the “unconscious.”

Other early psychologists of the day held a similar belief, but Freud was the first to attempt to systematically study the unconscious in a scientific way.

Freud's theory -- that humans are not aware of all of their own thoughts, and might often act upon unconscious motives -- was considered a radical one in its time. His ideas were not well-received by other physicians because he could not unequivocally prove them.

In an effort to explain his theories, Freud co-authored Studies in Hysteria with Breuer in 1895. The book did not sell well, but Freud was undeterred. He was certain that he had uncovered a great secret about the human mind.

(Many people now commonly use the term " Freudian slip " to refer to a verbal mistake that potentially reveals an unconscious thought or belief.)

The Analyst's Couch

Freud conducted his hour-long psychoanalytic sessions in a separate apartment located in his family's apartment building at Berggasse 19 (now a museum). It was his office for nearly half a century. The cluttered room was filled with books, paintings, and small sculptures.

At its center was a horsehair sofa, upon which Freud's patients reclined while they talked to the doctor, who sat in a chair, out of view. (Freud believed that his patients would speak more freely if they were not looking directly at him.) He maintained a neutrality, never passing judgment or offering suggestions.

The main goal of therapy , Freud believed, was to bring the patient's repressed thoughts and memories to a conscious level, where they could be acknowledged and addressed. For many of his patients, the treatment was a success; thus inspiring them to refer their friends to Freud.

As his reputation grew by word of mouth, Freud was able to charge more for his sessions. He worked up to 16 hours a day as his list of clientele expanded.

After the 1896 death of his 80-year-old father, Freud felt compelled to learn more about his own psyche. He decided to psychoanalyze himself, setting aside a portion of each day to examine his own memories and dreams , beginning with his early childhood.

During these sessions, Freud developed his theory of the Oedipal complex (named for the Greek tragedy ), in which he proposed that all young boys are attracted to their mothers and view their fathers as rivals.

As a normal child matured, he would grow away from his mother. Freud described a similar scenario for fathers and daughters, calling it the Electra complex (also from Greek mythology).

Freud also came up with the controversial concept of "penis envy," in which he touted the male gender as the ideal. He believed that every girl harbored a deep wish to be a male. Only when a girl renounced her wish to be a male (and her attraction to her father) could she identify with the female gender. Many subsequent psychoanalysts rejected that notion.

Freud's fascination with dreams was also stimulated during his self-analysis. Convinced that dreams shed light upon unconscious feelings and desires,

Freud began an analysis of his own dreams and those of his family and patients. He determined that dreams were an expression of repressed wishes and thus could be analyzed in terms of their symbolism.

Freud published the groundbreaking study The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900. Although he received some favorable reviews, Freud was disappointed by sluggish sales and the overall tepid response to the book. However, as Freud became better known, several more editions had to be printed to keep up with popular demand.

Freud soon gained a small following of students of psychology, which included Carl Jung, among others who later became prominent. The group of men met weekly for discussions at Freud's apartment.

As they grew in number and influence, the men came to call themselves the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. The Society held the first international psychoanalytic conference in 1908.

Over the years, Freud, who had a tendency to be unyielding and combative, eventually broke off communication with nearly all of the men.

Freud maintained a close relationship with Carl Jung , a Swiss psychologist who embraced many of Freud's theories. When Freud was invited to speak at Clark University in Massachusetts in 1909, he asked Jung to accompany him.

Unfortunately, their relationship suffered from the stresses of the trip. Freud did not acclimate well to being in an unfamiliar environment and became moody and difficult.

Nonetheless, Freud's speech at Clark was quite successful. He impressed several prominent American physicians, convincing them of the merits of psychoanalysis. Freud's thorough, well-written case studies, with compelling titles such as "The Rat Boy," also received praise.

Freud's fame grew exponentially following his trip to the United States. At 53, he felt that his work was finally receiving the attention it deserved. Freud's methods, once considered highly unconventional, were now deemed accepted practice.

Carl Jung, however, increasingly questioned Freud's ideas. Jung didn't agree that all mental illness originated in childhood trauma, nor did he believe that a mother was an object of her son's desire. Yet Freud resisted any suggestion that he might be wrong.

By 1913, Jung and Freud had severed all ties with one another. Jung developed his own theories and became a highly influential psychologist in his own right.

Following the assassination of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, thus drawing several other nations into the conflict which became World War I.

Although the war had effectively put an end to the further development of psychoanalytic theory, Freud managed to stay busy and productive. He revised his previous concept of the structure of the human mind.

Freud now proposed that the mind comprised three parts : the Id (the unconscious, impulsive portion that deals with urges and instinct), the Ego (the practical and rational decision-maker), and the Superego (an internal voice that determined right from wrong, a conscience of sorts). 

During the war, Freud actually used this three-part theory to examine entire countries.

At the end of World War I, Freud's psychoanalytic theory unexpectedly gained a wider following. Many veterans returned from battle with emotional problems. Initially termed "shell shock," the condition resulted from psychological trauma experienced on the battlefield.

Desperate to help these men, doctors employed Freud's talk therapy, encouraging the soldiers to describe their experiences. The therapy seemed to help in many instances, creating a renewed respect for Sigmund Freud.

By the 1920s, Freud had become internationally known as an influential scholar and practitioner. He was proud of his youngest daughter, Anna, his greatest disciple , who distinguished herself as the founder of child psychoanalysis.

In 1923, Freud was diagnosed with oral cancer, the consequence of decades of smoking cigars. He endured more than 30 surgeries, including the removal of part of his jaw. Although he suffered a great deal of pain, Freud refused to take painkillers, fearing that they might cloud his thinking.

He continued to write, focusing more on his own philosophies and musings rather than the topic of psychology.

As Adolf Hitler gained control throughout Europe in the mid-1930s, those Jews who were able to get out began to leave. Freud's friends tried to convince him to leave Vienna, but he resisted even when the Nazis occupied Austria.

When the Gestapo briefly took Anna into custody, Freud finally realized it was no longer safe to stay. He was able to obtain exit visas for himself and his immediate family, and they fled to London in 1938. Sadly, four of Freud's sisters died in Nazi concentration camps .

Freud lived only a year and a half after moving to London. As cancer advanced into his face, Freud could no longer tolerate the pain. With the help of a physician friend, Freud was given an intentional overdose of morphine and died on September 23, 1939 at the age of 83.

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Freudian Psychology

The new adventures of old freud, an updated translation of freud's complete works may change our views of him..

Updated August 30, 2024 | Reviewed by Davia Sills

• What Is Freudian Psychology?
• Find counselling near me
• Dr. Mark Solms recently published an updated and revised English translation of Freud's complete works.
• This new version, called the Revised Standard Edition (RSE), includes many new works of Freud.
• Some of the new works show Freud to be more enlightened about women and homosexuality than once thought.

This summer, The Revised Standard Edition (RSE) of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud was published on behalf of Rowman & Littlefield and commissioned by the Institute of Psychoanalysis . Edited by translator and neuropsychologist Dr. Mark Solms, the 24-volume set was completed over a 30-year period, updating and revising the translation of James Strachey from more than 50 years ago. Included in the RSE are 56 new notes, essays, letters, and lectures, some of which had not previously been translated into English.

Dr. Mark Solms is a South African psychoanalyst and the director of neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town and Groote Schuur Hospital. Dr. Solms is also known for his discovery of the brain mechanisms of dreaming , his use of psychoanalytic methods in contemporary neuroscience , and as the founding editor of the journal Neuropsychoanalysis.

History is replete with examples of those who were initially revered for their seminal achievements but then devalued in subsequent generations when their words and actions, revisited, were deemed out-of-step with contemporary sensibilities. So it is with Thomas Jefferson, a founding father of America, as well as Sigmund Freud, the founding father of psychoanalysis.

But what if new evidence emerged, adding greater nuance to these singular figures, perhaps even partially vindicating them? Those who care about truth would likely want to be made aware of such evidence. As such, I am delighted to present highlights of my interview with Dr. Mark Solms, whose Revised Standard Edition (RSE) of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud was published earlier this summer.

Dr. Solms’ opus is worthy of our attention , not only because he corrects some mistakes in James Strachey’s previous translation (e.g., changing Strachey’s translation of the German word “ trieb ” to mean “drive” instead of “instinct”) but also because he adds dozens of new writings to the corpus of Freud’s collected works, including letters, lectures, case studies, manuscripts, and neuroscience publications, that were previously unknown to most Freud scholars.

In our interview, Dr. Solms offered numerous revelations about Freud—e.g., how his early research in neuroscience influenced his later psychoanalytic theories; how his ambivalence about his Jewish identity shaped his views on religion; and his belief that Americans were rather ignorant. However, it’s his translation of Freud’s newly-discovered writings about women and homosexuality that have the most potential to change people’s views of him.

Freud’s views on women—especially regarding his theory of penis envy , his tendencies toward phallocentrism, and his Victorian view of women’s sexuality —were criticized even by members of his inner circle, like Karen Horney and Alfred Adler. However, when second-wave feminists of the mid-20th century, like Simone de Beauvoir and Nancy Chodorow, began challenging Freud and his theories of sexuality more stridently, it led to both his theories and his methods being marginalized in mental health and academic circles.

Freud’s legacy around women has always been complicated. On the one hand, at a time when women were discouraged from joining the workforce, much less becoming professionals, Freud was supportive of women becoming psychoanalysts , including Karen Horney and his own daughter, Anna.

However, a thorough reading of Freud’s work, including his case studies on hysteria, underscores the fact that Freud did not view women as empowered individuals with much agency. Together, these two sides of Freud formed the dialectical lens through which he has been viewed for the past century.

As such, Solms’s reports on Freud’s defense of women (as well as “homosexuals”) in the RSE are notable and add greater dimension to a man who had previously been reduced to a two-dimensional caricature. In one such correspondence, previously untranslated into English, Solms notes that when the Austrian government was considering a law in favor of marriage reform, Freud made “a strident defense of women’s rights” when he was asked for his recommendations on the law. Regarding this and other newly translated writings, Dr. Solms told me that he’s come to view Freud as more enlightened on social issues than he previously thought.

In a similar vein, though Freud didn’t necessarily have a reputation as being homophobic, his penchant for discussing homosexuality in clinical terms—frequently calling it an “ inversion ,” as well as “ an unfortunate trait ,” an “ abnormal tendency ,” and the result of an incomplete resolution of the Oedipal Complex (de Kuyper, 1993)—is perhaps why he is viewed unfavorably by some in the LGBTQ+ community. But Freud also offered well-known defenses of “homosexuals,” including his frequent citing of Plato, Michelangelo, and Leonardo Da Vinci—all of whom he believed to be gay—as among the greatest men in history.

In the RSE, Dr. Solms’ provides even more evidence to support the notion that, on both a personal and professional level, Freud had much more positive views of gay individuals than previously thought. Dr. Solms offered newly translated evidence—internal correspondence between Freud and the Committee on International Psychoanalysis—demonstrating his full support for “homosexuals” being trained as psychoanalysts, even though the committee itself didn’t allow this until the late 1980s!

In another newly translated writing, Freud refused to provide psychoanalysis as a form of conversion therapy to the son of an American woman who wrote to him asking him to do so. In his response, Freud declines because of his belief that it is not an illness to be “homosexual.” Solms also provided evidence that Freud defended a professor who was found guilty of moral insanity, primarily due to his engaging in gay sex. In his defense, Freud noted that there is nothing pathological or criminal about gay sex.

In light of the new evidence about Freud’s views—on women and homosexuality—how should we view him today? Like many who have reverence for Freud’s achievements but wince at some of his archaic words and perspectives, Dr. Solms reminds us that while “from a modern standpoint [it is easy to view Freud as] homophobic, sexist, misogynist, classist, racist even… we have to recognize that Freud was a man of his time.” He would even go so far as to say that Freud was “enlightened, relative to his compatriots and his peers at the time.”

Is it possible that, when evaluated against the peers of his era, we might consider Freud an “enlightened” progressive, even though by today’s standards, his words might be considered “homophobic,” “sexist,” “misogynist,” “classist,” and “racist”? And if we were willing to acknowledge that these opposing views of Freud are equally valid, what about Thomas Jefferson or anyone else in history whose reputation has swung back and forth on the pendulum of cultural critique?

Followers of this blog and those who have read my article on facts vs. truth know that I routinely argue that opposing perspectives of the same thing—be it an object, a person, or an event—can each be true. To understand this, however, we need to avoid what Freud and others would call “ splitting ,” which involves the reduction of things into black-and-white binaries, and instead commit to inspecting things in three-dimensional space, from multiple points of view.

Part 2 of this article series will cover other topics discussed in my interview with Dr. Mark Solms, including Freud’s neuroscience writings and his ambivalence about his Jewish heritage, as well as Dr. Solms’ research in a field he helped found: neuropsychoanalysis.

de Kuyper E. The Freudian construction of sexuality: the gay foundations of heterosexuality and straight homophobia. J Homosex. 1993;24(3-4):137-44. doi: 10.1300/J082v24n03_10. PMID: 8505533.

John G. Cottone, Ph.D., is a psychologist in private practice, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Brook University, and the author of Who Are You?

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Sigmund Freud summary

Learn about the life of sigmund freud and his contribution to psychoanalysis.

Sigmund Freud , (born May 6, 1856, Freiberg, Moravia, Austrian Empire—died Sept. 23, 1939, London, Eng.), Austrian neuropsychologist, founder of psychoanalysis , and one of the major intellectual figures of the 20th century. Trained in Vienna as a neurologist, Freud went to Paris in 1885 to study with Jean-Martin Charcot, whose work on hysteria led Freud to conclude that mental disorders might be caused purely by psychological rather than organic factors. Returning to Vienna (1886), Freud collaborated with the physician Josef Breuer (1842–1925) in further studies on hysteria, resulting in the development of some key psychoanalytic concepts and techniques, including free association, the unconscious, resistance (later defense mechanisms), and neurosis. In 1899 he published The Interpretation of Dreams , in which he analyzed the complex symbolic processes underlying dream formation: he proposed that dreams are the disguised expression of unconscious wishes. In his controversial Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), he delineated the complicated stages of psychosexual development (oral, anal, and phallic) and the formation of the Oedipus complex. During World War I, he wrote papers that clarified his understanding of the relations between the unconscious and conscious portions of the mind and the workings of the id, ego, and superego. Freud eventually applied his psychoanalytic insights to such diverse phenomena as jokes and slips of the tongue, ethnographic data, religion and mythology, and modern civilization. Works of note include Totem and Taboo (1913), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), The Future of an Illusion (1927), and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Freud fled to England when the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938; he died shortly thereafter. Despite the relentless and often compelling challenges mounted against virtually all of his ideas, both in his lifetime and after, Freud has remained one of the most influential figures in contemporary thought.

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Chapter 12. Personality

12.2 The Origins of Personality

Learning objectives.

• Describe the strengths and limitations of the psychodynamic approach to explaining personality.
• Summarize the accomplishments of the neo-Freudians.
• Identify the major contributions of the humanistic approach to understanding personality.

Although measures such as the Big Five and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) are able to effectively assess personality, they do not say much about where personality comes from. In this section we will consider two major theories of the origin of personality: psychodynamic and humanistic approaches.

Psychodynamic Theories of Personality: The Role of the Unconscious

One of the most important psychological approaches to understanding personality is based on the theorizing of the Austrian physician and psychologist Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who founded what today is known as the psychodynamic approach,   an approach to understanding human behaviour that focuses on the role of unconscious thoughts, feelings, and memories . Many people know about Freud because his work has had a huge impact on our everyday thinking about psychology, and the psychodynamic approach is one of the most important approaches to psychological therapy (Roudinesco, 2003; Taylor, 2009). Freud is probably the best known of all psychologists, in part because of his impressive observation and analyses of personality (there are 24 volumes of his writings). As is true of all theories, many of Freud’s ingenious ideas have turned out to be at least partially incorrect, and yet other aspects of his theories are still influencing psychology.

Freud was influenced by the work of the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893), who had been interviewing patients (almost all women) who were experiencing what was at the time known as hysteria . Although it is no longer used to describe a psychological disorder, hysteria at the time referred to a set of personality and physical symptoms that included chronic pain, fainting, seizures, and paralysis .

Charcot could find no biological reason for the symptoms. For instance, some women experienced a loss of feeling in their hands and yet not in their arms, and this seemed impossible given that the nerves in the arms are the same as those in the hands. Charcot was experimenting with the use of hypnosis, and he and Freud found that under hypnosis many of the hysterical patients reported having experienced a traumatic sexual experience, such as sexual abuse, as children (Dolnick, 1998).

Freud and Charcot also found that during hypnosis the remembering of the trauma was often accompanied by an outpouring of emotion , known as catharsis , and that following the catharsis the patient’s symptoms were frequently reduced in severity. These observations led Freud and Charcot to conclude that these disorders were caused by psychological rather than physiological factors.

Freud used the observations that he and Charcot had made to develop his theory regarding the sources of personality and behaviour, and his insights are central to the fundamental themes of psychology. In terms of free will, Freud did not believe that we were able to control our own behaviours. Rather, he believed that all behaviours are predetermined by motivations that lie outside our awareness, in the unconscious. These forces show themselves in our dreams, in neurotic symptoms such as obsessions, while we are under hypnosis, and in Freudian “slips of the tongue” in which people reveal their unconscious desires in language. Freud argued that we rarely understand why we do what we do, although we can make up explanations for our behaviours after the fact. For Freud the mind was like an iceberg, with the many motivations of the unconscious being much larger, but also out of sight, in comparison to the consciousness of which we are aware (Figure 12.7, “Mind as Iceberg”).

Id, Ego, and Superego

Freud proposed that the mind is divided into three components: id , ego , and superego , and that the interactions and conflicts among the components create personality (Freud, 1923/1949). According to Freudian theory, the id is the component of personality that forms the basis of our most primitive impulses . The id is entirely unconscious, and it drives our most important motivations, including the sexual drive ( libido ) and the aggressive or destructive drive ( Thanatos ). According to Freud, the id is driven by the pleasure principle  —  the desire for immediate gratification of our sexual and aggressive urges. The id is why we smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, view pornography, tell mean jokes about people, and engage in other fun or harmful behaviours, often at the cost of doing more productive activities.

In stark contrast to the id, the superego represents our sense of morality and oughts . The superego tell us all the things that we shouldn’t do, or the duties and obligations of society. The superego strives for perfection, and when we fail to live up to its demands we feel guilty.

In contrast to the id, which is about the pleasure principle, the function of the ego is based on the reality principle  —  the idea that we must delay gratification of our basic motivations until the appropriate time with the appropriate outlet. The ego is the largely conscious controller or decision-maker of personality . The ego serves as the intermediary between the desires of the id and the constraints of society contained in the superego (Figure 12.8, “Ego, Id, and Superego in Interaction”). We may wish to scream, yell, or hit, and yet our ego normally tells us to wait, reflect, and choose a more appropriate response.

Freud believed that psychological disorders, and particularly the experience of anxiety, occur when there is conflict or imbalance among the motivations of the id, ego, and superego. When the ego finds that the id is pressing too hard for immediate pleasure, it attempts to correct for this problem, often through the use of defence mechanisms  —  unconscious psychological strategies used to cope with anxiety and maintain a positive self-image . Freud believed that the defence mechanisms were essential for effective coping with everyday life, but that any of them could be overused (Table 12.4, “The Major Freudian Defence Mechanisms”).

The most controversial, and least scientifically valid, part of Freudian theory is its explanations of personality development. Freud argued that personality is developed through a series of psychosexual stages , each focusing on pleasure from a different part of the body (Table 12.5, “Freud’s Stages of Psychosexual Development”). Freud believed that sexuality begins in infancy, and that the appropriate resolution of each stage has implications for later personality development.

In the first of Freud’s proposed stages of psychosexual development, which begins at birth and lasts until about 18 months of age, the focus is on the mouth. During this oral stage , the infant obtains sexual pleasure by sucking and drinking . Infants who receive either too little or too much gratification become fixated or locked in the oral stage, and are likely to regress to these points of fixation under stress, even as adults. According to Freud, a child who receives too little oral gratification (e.g., who was underfed or neglected) will become orally dependent as an adult and be likely to manipulate others to fulfill his or her needs rather than becoming independent. On the other hand, the child who was overfed or overly gratified will resist growing up and try to return to the prior state of dependency by acting helpless, demanding satisfaction from others, and acting in a needy way.

The anal stage , lasting from about 18 months to three years of age , is when children first experience psychological conflict. During this stage children desire to experience pleasure through bowel movements , but they are also being toilet trained to delay this gratification. Freud believed that if this toilet training was either too harsh or too lenient, children would become fixated in the anal stage and become likely to regress to this stage under stress as adults. If the child received too little anal gratification (i.e., if the parents had been very harsh about toilet training), the adult personality will be anal retentive  —  stingy, with a compulsive seeking of order and tidiness . On the other hand, if the parents had been too lenient, the anal expulsive personality results, characterized by a lack of self-control and a tendency toward messiness and carelessness .

The phallic stage , which lasts from age three to age six is when the penis (for boys) and clitoris (for girls) become the primary erogenous zone for sexual pleasure . During this stage, Freud believed that children develop a powerful but unconscious attraction for the opposite-sex parent, as well as a desire to eliminate the same-sex parent as a rival. Freud based his theory of sexual development in boys ( the Oedipus complex ) on the Greek mythological character Oedipus, who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother, and then put his own eyes out when he learned what he had done. Freud argued that boys will normally eventually abandon their love of the mother, and instead identify with the father, also taking on the father’s personality characteristics, but that boys who do not successfully resolve the Oedipus complex will experience psychological problems later in life. Although it was not as important in Freud’s theorizing, in girls the phallic stage is often termed the Electra complex , after the Greek character who avenged her father’s murder by killing her mother. Freud believed that girls frequently experienced penis envy , the sense of deprivation supposedly experienced by girls because they do not have a penis .

The latency stage is a period of relative calm that lasts from about six years to 12 years . During this time, Freud believed that sexual impulses were repressed , leading boys and girls to have little or no interest in members of the opposite sex.

The fifth and last stage, the genital stage , begins about 12 years of age and lasts into adulthood . According to Freud, sexual impulses return during this time frame , and if development has proceeded normally to this point, the child is able to move into the development of mature romantic relationships. But if earlier problems have not been appropriately resolved, difficulties with establishing intimate love attachments are likely.

Freud’s Followers: The Neo-Freudians

Freudian theory was so popular that it led to a number of followers, including many of Freud’s own students, who developed, modified, and expanded his theories. Taken together, these approaches are known as neo-Freudian theories. The neo-Freudian theories are theories based on Freudian principles that emphasize the role of the unconscious and early experience in shaping personality but place less evidence on sexuality as the primary motivating force in personality and are more optimistic concerning the prospects for personality growth and change in personality in adults .

Alfred Adler (1870-1937) was a follower of Freud’s who developed his own interpretation of Freudian theory. Adler proposed that the primary motivation in human personality was not sex or aggression, but rather the striving for superiority. According to Adler, we desire to be better than others and we accomplish this goal by creating a unique and valuable life. We may attempt to satisfy our need for superiority through our school or professional accomplishments, or by our enjoyment of music, athletics, or other activities that seem important to us.

Adler believed that psychological disorders begin in early childhood. He argued that children who are either overly nurtured or overly neglected by their parents are later likely to develop an inferiority complex  —  a psychological state in which people feel that they are not living up to expectations, leading them to have low self-esteem, with a tendency to try to overcompensate for the negative feelings . People with an inferiority complex often attempt to demonstrate their superiority to others at all costs, even if it means humiliating, dominating, or alienating them. According to Adler, most psychological disorders result from misguided attempts to compensate for the inferiority complex in order meet the goal of superiority.

Carl Jung (1875-1961) was another student of Freud’s who developed his own theories about personality. Jung agreed with Freud about the power of the unconscious but felt that Freud overemphasized the importance of sexuality. Jung argued that in addition to the personal unconscious, there was also a collective unconscious , or a collection of shared ancestral memories . Jung believed that the collective unconscious contains a variety of archetypes , or cross-culturally universal symbols , which explain the similarities among people in their emotional reactions to many stimuli. Important archetypes include the mother, the goddess, the hero, and the mandala or circle, which Jung believed symbolized a desire for wholeness or unity. For Jung, the underlying motivation that guides successful personality is self-realization , or learning about and developing the self to the fullest possible extent .

Karen Horney (the last syllable of her last name rhymes with “eye”; 1855-1952) was a German physician who applied Freudian theories to create a personality theory that she thought was more balanced between men and women. Horney believed that parts of Freudian theory, and particularly the ideas of the Oedipus complex and penis envy, were biased against women. Horney argued that women’s sense of inferiority was not due to their lack of a penis but rather to their dependency on men, an approach that the culture made it difficult for them to break from. For Horney, the underlying motivation that guides personality development is the desire for security , the ability to develop appropriate and supportive relationships with others.

Another important neo-Freudian was Erich Fromm (1900-1980). Fromm’s focus was on the negative impact of technology, arguing that the increases in its use have led people to feel increasingly isolated from others. Fromm believed that the independence that technology brings us also creates the need to “escape from freedom,” that is, to become closer to others.

Research Focus: How the Fear of Death Causes Aggressive Behaviour

Fromm believed that the primary human motivation was to escape the fear of death, and contemporary research has shown how our concerns about dying can influence our behaviour. In this research, people have been made to confront their death by writing about it or otherwise being reminded of it, and effects on their behaviour are then observed. In one relevant study, McGregor and colleagues (1998) demonstrated that people who are provoked may be particularly aggressive after they have been reminded of the possibility of their own death. The participants in the study had been selected, on the basis of prior reporting, to have either politically liberal or politically conservative views. When they arrived at the lab they were asked to write a short paragraph describing their opinion of politics in the United States. In addition, half of the participants (the mortality salient condition ) were asked to “briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you” and to “jot down as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically die, and once you are physically dead.” Participants in the exam control condition also thought about a negative event, but not one associated with a fear of death. They were instructed to “please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your next important exam arouses in you” and to “jot down as specifically as you can, what you think will happen to you as you physically take your next exam, and once you are physically taking your next exam.”

Then the participants read the essay that had supposedly just been written by another person. (The other person did not exist, but the participants didn’t know this until the end of the experiment.) The essay that they read had been prepared by the experimenters to be very negative toward politically liberal views or to be very negative toward politically conservative views. Thus one-half of the participants were provoked by the other person by reading a statement that strongly conflicted with their own political beliefs, whereas the other half read an essay in which the other person’s views supported their own (liberal or conservative) beliefs.

At this point the participants moved on to what they thought was a completely separate study in which they were to be tasting and giving their impression of some foods. Furthermore, they were told that it was necessary for the participants in the research to administer the food samples to each other. At this point, the participants found out that the food they were going to be sampling was spicy hot sauce and that they were going to be administering the sauce to the very person whose essay they had just read. In addition, the participants read some information about the other person that indicated that he very much disliked eating spicy food. Participants were given a taste of the hot sauce (it was really hot!) and then instructed to place a quantity of it into a cup for the other person to sample. Furthermore, they were told that the other person would have to eat all the sauce.

As you can see in Figure 12.9, “Aggression as a Function of Mortality Salience and Provocation,” McGregor and colleagues found that the participants who had not been reminded of their own death, even if they had been insulted by the partner, did not retaliate by giving him a lot of hot sauce to eat. On the other hand, the participants who were both provoked by the other person and who had also been reminded of their own death administered significantly more hot sauce than did the participants in the other three conditions. McGregor and colleagues (1998) argued that thinking about one’s own death creates a strong concern with maintaining one’s one cherished worldviews (in this case our political beliefs). When we are concerned about dying we become more motivated to defend these important beliefs from the challenges made by others, in this case by aggressing through the hot sauce.

Strengths and Limitations of Freudian and Neo-Freudian Approaches

Freud has probably exerted a greater impact on the public’s understanding of personality than any other thinker, and he has also in large part defined the field of psychology. Although Freudian psychologists no longer talk about oral, anal, or genital fixations, they do continue to believe that our childhood experiences and unconscious motivations shape our personalities and our attachments with others, and they still make use of psychodynamic concepts when they conduct psychological therapy.

Nevertheless, Freud’s theories, as well as those of the neo-Freudians, have in many cases failed to pass the test of empiricism, and as a result they are less influential now than they have been in the past (Crews, 1998). The problems are, first, that it has proved to be difficult to rigorously test Freudian theory because the predictions that it makes (particularly those regarding defence mechanisms) are often vague and unfalsifiable and, second, that the aspects of the theory that can be tested often have not received much empirical support.

As examples, although Freud claimed that children exposed to overly harsh toilet training would become fixated in the anal stage and thus be prone to excessive neatness, stinginess, and stubbornness in adulthood, research has found few reliable associations between toilet training practices and adult personality (Fisher & Greenberg, 1996). And since the time of Freud, the need to repress sexual desires would seem to have become much less necessary as societies have tolerated a wider variety of sexual practices. And yet the psychological disorders that Freud thought we caused by this repression have not decreased.

There is also little scientific support for most of the Freudian defence mechanisms. For example, studies have failed to yield evidence for the existence of repression. People who are exposed to traumatic experiences in war have been found to remember their traumas only too well (Kihlstrom, 1997). Although we may attempt to push information that is anxiety-arousing into our unconscious, this often has the ironic effect of making us think about the information even more strongly than if we hadn’t tried to repress it (Newman, Duff, & Baumeister, 1997). It is true that children remember little of their childhood experiences, but this seems to be true of both negative as well as positive experiences, is true for animals as well, and probably is better explained in terms of the brain’s inability to form long-term memories than in terms of repression. On the other hand, Freud’s important idea that expressing or talking through one’s difficulties can be psychologically helpful has been supported in current research (Baddeley & Pennebaker, 2009) and has become a mainstay of psychological therapy.

A particular problem for testing Freudian theories is that almost anything that conflicts with a prediction based in Freudian theory can be explained away in terms of the use of a defence mechanism. A man who expresses a lot of anger toward his father may be seen via Freudian theory to be experiencing the Oedipus complex, which includes conflict with the father. But a man who expresses no anger at all toward the father also may be seen as experiencing the Oedipus complex by repressing the anger. Because Freud hypothesized that either was possible, but did not specify when repression would or would not occur, the theory is difficult to falsify.

In terms of the important role of the unconscious, Freud seems to have been at least in part correct. More and more research demonstrates that a large part of everyday behaviour is driven by processes that are outside our conscious awareness (Kihlstrom, 1987). And yet, although our unconscious motivations influence every aspect of our learning and behaviour, Freud probably overestimated the extent to which these unconscious motivations are primarily sexual and aggressive.

Taken together, it is fair to say that Freudian theory, like most psychological theories, was not entirely correct and that it has had to be modified over time as the results of new studies have become available. But the fundamental ideas about personality that Freud proposed, as well as the use of talk therapy as an essential component of therapy, are nevertheless still a major part of psychology and are used by clinical psychologists every day.

Focusing on the Self: Humanism and Self-Actualization

Psychoanalytic models of personality were complemented during the 1950s and 1960s by the theories of humanistic psychologists, an approach to psychology that embraces the notions of self-esteem, self-actualization, and free will . In contrast to the proponents of psychoanalysis, humanists embraced the notion of free will. Arguing that people are free to choose their own lives and make their own decisions, humanistic psychologists focused on the underlying motivations that they believed drove personality, focusing on the nature of the self-concept , the set of beliefs about who we are , and self-esteem, our positive feelings about the self .

One of the most important humanists, Abraham Maslow (1908-1970), conceptualized personality in terms of a pyramid-shaped hierarchy of motives ,  also called the hierarchy of needs ,  (Figure 12.10 “Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs”). At the base of the pyramid are the lowest-level motivations, including hunger and thirst, and safety and belongingness. Maslow argued that only when people are able to meet the lower-level needs are they able to move on to achieve the higher-level needs of self-esteem, and eventually self-actualization , which is the motivation to develop our innate potential to the fullest possible extent .

Maslow studied how successful people, including Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Helen Keller, and Mahatma Gandhi, had been able to lead such successful and productive lives. Maslow (1970) believed that self-actualized people are creative, spontaneous, and loving of themselves and others. They tend to have a few deep friendships rather than many superficial ones, and are generally private. He felt that these individuals do not need to conform to the opinions of others because they are very confident and thus free to express unpopular opinions. Self-actualized people are also likely to have peak experiences , or transcendent moments of tranquility accompanied by a strong sense of connection with others .

Perhaps the best-known humanistic theorist is Carl Rogers (1902-1987). Rogers was positive about human nature, viewing people as primarily moral and helpful to others, and believed that we can achieve our full potential for emotional fulfilment if the self-concept is characterized by unconditional positive regard  —  a set of behaviours including being genuine, open to experience, transparent, able to listen to others, and self-disclosing and empathic . When we treat ourselves or others with unconditional positive regard, we express understanding and support, even while we may acknowledge failings. Unconditional positive regard allows us to admit our fears and failures, to drop our pretenses, and yet at the same time to feel completely accepted for what we are. The principle of unconditional positive regard has become a foundation of psychological therapy; therapists who use it in their practice are more effective than those who do not (Prochaska & Norcross, 2007; Yalom, 1995).

Although there are critiques of the humanistic psychologists (e.g., that Maslow focused on historically productive rather than destructive personalities in his research and thus drew overly optimistic conclusions about the capacity of people to do good), the ideas of humanism are so powerful and optimistic that they have continued to influence both everyday experiences and psychology. Today the positive psychology movement argues for many of these ideas, and research has documented the extent to which thinking positively and openly has important positive consequences for our relationships, our life satisfaction, and our psychological and physical health (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000).

Research Focus: Self-Discrepancies, Anxiety, and Depression

Tory Higgins and his colleagues (Higgins, Bond, Klein, & Strauman, 1986; Strauman & Higgins, 1988) have studied how different aspects of the self-concept relate to personality characteristics. These researchers focused on the types of emotional distress that we might experience as a result of how we are currently evaluating our self-concept. Higgins proposes that the emotions we experience are determined both by our perceptions of how well our own behaviours meet up to the standards and goals we have provided ourselves (our internal standards ) and by our perceptions of how others think about us (our external standards ). Furthermore, Higgins argues that different types of self-discrepancies lead to different types of negative emotions.

In one of Higgins’s experiments (Higgins, Bond, Klein, & Strauman, 1986), participants were first asked to describe themselves using a self-report measure. The participants listed 10 thoughts that they thought described the kind of person they actually are; this is the actual self-concept . Then, participants also listed 10 thoughts that they thought described the type of person they would ideally like to be (the ideal self-concept ) as well as 10 thoughts describing the way that someone else — for instance, a parent — thinks they ought to be (the ought self-concept ).

Higgins then divided his participants into two groups. Those with low self-concept discrepancies were those who listed similar traits on all three lists. Their ideal, ought, and actual self-concepts were all pretty similar and so they were not considered to be vulnerable to threats to their self-concept. The other half of the participants, those with high self-concept discrepancies , were those for whom the traits listed on the ideal and ought lists were very different from those listed on the actual self list. These participants were expected to be vulnerable to threats to the self-concept.

Then, at a later research session, Higgins first asked people to express their current emotions, including those related to sadness and anxiety. After obtaining this baseline measure, Higgins activated either ideal or ought discrepancies for the participants. Participants in the ideal self-discrepancy priming condition were asked to think about and discuss their own and their parents’ hopes and goals for them. Participants in the ought self-priming condition listed their own and their parents’ beliefs concerning their duty and obligations. Then all participants again indicated their current emotions.

As you can see in Figure 12.11, “Research Results,” for low self-concept discrepancy participants, thinking about their ideal or ought selves did not much change their emotions. For high self-concept discrepancy participants, however, priming the ideal self-concept increased their sadness and dejection, whereas priming the ought self-concept increased their anxiety and agitation. These results are consistent with the idea that discrepancies between the ideal and the actual self lead us to experience sadness, dissatisfaction, and other depression-related emotions, whereas discrepancies between the actual and ought self are more likely to lead to fear, worry, tension, and other anxiety-related emotions.

One of the critical aspects of Higgins’s approach is that, as is our personality, our feelings are influenced both by our own behaviour and by our expectations of how other people view us. This makes it clear that even though you might not care that much about achieving in school, your failure to do well may still produce negative emotions because you realize that your parents do think it is important.

Key Takeaways

• One of the most important psychological approaches to understanding personality is based on the psychodynamic approach to personality developed by Sigmund Freud.
• For Freud the mind was like an iceberg, with the many motivations of the unconscious being much larger, but also out of sight, in comparison to the consciousness of which we are aware.
• Freud proposed that the mind is divided into three components: id, ego, and superego, and that the interactions and conflicts among the components create personality.
• Freud proposed that we use defence mechanisms to cope with anxiety and maintain a positive self-image.
• Freud argued that personality is developed through a series of psychosexual stages, each focusing on pleasure from a different part of the body.
• The neo-Freudian theorists, including Adler, Jung, Horney, and Fromm, emphasized the role of the unconscious and early experience in shaping personality, but placed less evidence on sexuality as the primary motivating force in personality.
• Psychoanalytic and behavioural models of personality were complemented during the 1950s and 1960s by the theories of humanistic psychologists, including Maslow and Rogers.

Exercises and Critical Thinking

• Based on your understanding of psychodynamic theories, how would you analyze your own personality? Are there aspects of the theory that might help you explain your own strengths and weaknesses?
• Based on your understanding of humanistic theories, how would you try to change your behaviour to better meet the underlying motivations of security, acceptance, and self-realization?
• Consider your own self-concept discrepancies. Do you have an actual-ideal or actual-ought discrepancy? Which one is more important for you, and why?

Baddeley, J. L., & Pennebaker, J. W. (2009). Expressive writing. In W. T. O’Donohue & J. E. Fisher (Eds.),  General principles and empirically supported techniques of cognitive behavior therapy  (pp. 295–299). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Crews, F. C. (1998).  Unauthorized Freud: Doubters confront a legend . New York, NY: Viking Press.

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Image Attributions

Figure 12.9: Adapted from McGregor, et al., 1998.

Figure 12.11: Adapted from Higgins, Bond, Klein, & Strauman, 1986.

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Freud's Perspective on Women

Treatment of hysteria, the women in freud’s life, women in psychoanalysis.

• Criticism of Freud's Views on Women

Modern Perspectives

Sigmund Freud’s views on women stirred controversy during his own lifetime and continue to evoke considerable debate today. "Women oppose change, receive passively, and add nothing of their own," he wrote in a 1925 paper entitled "The Psychical Consequences of the Anatomic Distinction Between the Sexes."

Donna Stewart, M.D., a professor and chair of women’s health at the University Health Network, explained, "Freud was a man of his times. He was opposed to the women’s emancipation movement and believed that women’s lives were dominated by their sexual reproductive functions."

"The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'" Freud once mused in "Sigmund Freud: Life and Work" by Ernest Jones.

Penis envy is the female counterpart to Freud’s concept of castration anxiety. In his theory of psychosexual development , Freud suggested that during the phallic stage (around ages 3 to 6 years) young girls distance themselves from their mothers and instead devote their affections to their fathers.

According to Freud, this occurs when a girl realizes that she has no penis. "Girls hold their mother responsible for their lack of a penis and do not forgive her for their being thus put at a disadvantage," Freud suggested (1933).

While Freud believed that his discovery of the Oedipal complex and related theories such as castration anxiety and penis envy were his greatest accomplishments, these theories are perhaps his most criticized.

Female psychoanalysts such as Karen Horney and other feminist thinkers have described his ideas as distorted and condescending. The counterpoint theory to the Oedipal complex is the Electra complex .

Freud’s revolutionary talk therapy evolved in part from his work with Bertha Pappenheim, who is known as Anna O . Experiencing what was then referred to as hysteria , she possessed a variety of symptoms that included hallucinations, amnesia, and partial paralysis.

During sessions with one of Freud’s colleagues, Joseph Breuer, Pappenheim described her feelings and experiences. This process seemed to alleviate her symptoms, which led her to dub the method the "talking cure." Pappenheim went on to become a social worker and made significant contributions to the women’s movement in Germany.  

Initially, Freud suggested that the causes of hysteria were rooted in childhood sexual abuse. He later abandoned this theory and instead emphasized the role of sexual fantasies in the development of a variety of neuroses and illnesses.

"His understanding of women was notoriously inadequate, but he did make great steps beyond what was understood about women when he came on the scene. It was very unusual in Freud's time even to acknowledge that women had sexual desire, much less to say that the repression of their sexual desire could make them hysterical," explained historian Peter Gay.

While Freud often claimed that he had little understanding of women, several women played important roles in his personal life. Freud was his mother’s eldest child (his father had two older sons from a previous marriage) and has often been described as her special favorite.

"I have found that people who know that they are preferred or favored by their mothers give evidence in their lives of a peculiar self-reliance and an unshakable optimism which often bring actual success to their possessors," Freud once commented.

Freud’s relationship with his wife, Martha, was very traditional. "She was a very good hausfrau (housewife)," explained his granddaughter, Sophie Freud. "She was very thrifty. And my father would say that his mother would rather poison the whole household than throw food away."

Freud was raised with several sisters and later became the father of three sons and three daughters, including Anna Freud , who played a major role in carrying on her father’s work.

While Freud described women as inferior to men, many women were instrumental in the development and advancement of psychoanalysis.

The first woman to run her own psychoanalysis clinic was Helene Deutsch in 1924. She published the first psychoanalytic book on women’s sexuality and wrote extensively on topics such as the psychology of women, female adolescence, and motherhood.

The seminal psychoanalyst (and supposedly Carl Jung's one-time lover) Sabina Spielrein also had an important influence on the development of psychoanalysis. She was originally one of Jung's patients.

During the early years of the Freud and Jung friendship, the two men spent a considerable amount of time discussing Spielrein's case which helped shape many of their views. Spielrein herself is also credited with developing the concept of the death instincts and for introducing psychoanalysis in Russia.

Psychoanalyst Karen Horney became one of the first critics of Freud’s views on feminine psychology. ​ Melanie Klein  became a prominent member of the psychoanalytic community and developed the technique known as "play therapy", which is still widely used today.

Additionally, his own daughter, Anna Freud, played a vital role in advancing many of her father’s theories and contributed greatly to child psychoanalysis.

Criticism of Freud's Views on Women

Not surprisingly, some important figures in psychology had their own responses to Freud's limited and often offensive take on female psychology. Karen Horney was one such critic, taking on Freud's concept of penis envy and providing her own take on male psychology. Even Freud's own granddaughter would later offer up criticism of her famous relative.

• Karen Horney:  Freud’s concept of penis envy was criticized in his own time, most notably by psychoanalyst Karen Horney. She suggested that it is men who are adversely affected by their inability to bear children, which she referred to as "womb envy."
• Freud's Response:  Freud responded, although indirectly, writing, "We shall not be very greatly surprised if a woman analyst who has not been sufficiently convinced of the intensity of her own wish for a penis also fails to attach proper importance to that factor in her patients" (Freud, 1949). According to Freud, Horney’s concept of womb envy emerged as a result of her own supposed penis envy.
• Sophie Freud:  While Freud’s notions of female sexuality often ran contrary to the patriarchal tendencies of the Victorian era, he was still very much a man of his time. His work is often dismissed as misogynistic and his own granddaughter, Sophie Freud, described his theories as outdated . "His ideas grew out of society. He mirrored in his theories the belief that women were secondary and were not the norm and didn't quite measure up to the norm," she explained.
• Final Thoughts:  Even Freud himself admitted that his understanding of women was limited. "That is all I have to say to you about femininity," he wrote in 1933. "It is certainly incomplete and fragmentary and does not always sound friendly... If you want to know more about femininity, enquire about your own experiences of life, or turn to poets, or wait until science can give you deeper and more coherent information."

Today, many analysts suggest that rather than reject Freud’s theories outright, we should instead focus on developing new views on his original ideas. As one writer said, "Freud revised his theories many times as he accumulated new data and reached fresh insights. Contemporary analysts should do no less."

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Foazen P. Helen Deutsch: 1884 - 1982 . The Encyclopedia of Jewish Women.

Hall K. Sabina Spielrein: 1885-1942 . The Encyclopedia of Jewish Women.

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Jones E. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud.  New York: Basic Books, Inc; 1953.

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By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."