PSY 111: Introduction to Psychology                                        Learning Unit 9: Mini-Lecture 
                  
                 Personality 
                 Speaker: Judy Austin 
                  
                 Do you know the names of the seven dwarfs? Let’s see… They are Crazy, Selfish, Ugly, Narcissistic, 
                 Crude, Lazy, and Uncooperative. Whoops… Those are not the names of the seven dwarfs; those are the 
                 seven characteristics of my ex-husband’s personality… Just kidding, my ex-husband was totally perfect in 
                 every way… Seriously, putting all kidding and jokes aside, we probably can recall the names of the seven 
                 dwarfs – Bashful, Happy, Dopey, Sneezy, Grumpy, Doc, and Sleepy. What helps us to be able to 
                 remember them is that each dwarf has a distinct personality. Personality is an individual’s characteristic 
                 pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. We each have a distinct personality. In this lecture we will look 
                 at the following personality models: Psychoanalytic, Neo-Freudian, Humanistic, Trait, and Social-
                 Cognitive. The Psychoanalytic Approach focuses on Sigmund Freud, the Neo-Freudian on Alfred Adler 
                 and Carl Jung, the Humanistic on Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, and the Social-Cognitive on Albert 
                 Bandura. 
                 Psychoanalytic Perspective 
                 So let’s look first at the Psychoanalytic Perspective on personality. Sigmund Freud’s clinical experience 
                 led him to develop the first comprehensive theory of personality, which included the unconscious mind, 
                 psychosexual states, and defense mechanisms. 
                 The unconscious mind, according to Freud, is made up of mainly unacceptable thoughts, wishes, 
                 feelings, and memories. He believed the mind is like an iceberg. It is mostly hidden, and below the 
                 surface lays the unconscious mind. The preconscious stores temporary memories. Freud believed our 
                 personality develops as a result of our efforts to resolve conflicts between our biological impulses (the 
                 ID) and social restraints (the Superego). The ID consciously strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive 
                 drives, operating on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification. The Superego provides 
                 standards for judgment, which is our conscious. The Ego mediates the demands of the ID and Superego. 
                 In order to find out what was in a patient’s mind, Freud asked patients to say whatever came into their 
                 thoughts. This process was called “free association.” Free association often leads to painful, 
                 embarrassing unconscious memories, but once retrieved and released causes the patient to feel better. 
                 Another method Freud used to analyze the unconscious mind was through interpreting a patient’s 
                 dreams. Freud believed there were manifest and latent contents of dreams. Manifest content is the 
                 dream as it is dreamed. The dream's latent content is the real meaning behind the dream which the 
                 dreamer seeks to hide from the conscious mind. 
                 Freud believed personality formed during the first few years of life divided into psychosexual states. 
                 During these stages the ID’s pleasure-seeking energies focus on pleasure sensitive body areas called 
                 erogenous zones. The five psychosexual stages of personality according to Freud are Oral, Anal, Phallic, 
                 Latency, and Genital. The Oral stage takes place up to 18 months of age and pleasure focuses on the 
                 mouth through sucking, biting, and chewing. The Anal stage is from 18 to 36 months, and its pleasure 
                 focuses on bowel and bladder elimination and coping with demands for control. The Phallic stage which 
                 takes place from 3 to 6 years focuses its pleasure in the genitals and is coping with incestuous sexual 
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                 PSY 111: Introduction to Psychology                                        Learning Unit 9: Mini-Lecture 
                  
                 feelings. In the Latency stage, which is from age 6 to puberty, sexual feelings become dormant. The 
                 Genital stage is from puberty onward and focuses on the maturing of sexual interests. Freud believed 
                 during the Phallic stage boys develop a sexual desire for their mothers and feelings of jealousy and 
                 hatred for the rival fathers. He called this the Oedipus Complex. When girls develop a sexual desire for 
                 their fathers, it is called the Electra Complex. 
                 Freud also believed the Ego tries to protect anxiety by distorting reality through defense mechanisms. 
                 Six types of defense mechanisms are: repression, regression, reaction formation, projection, 
                 rationalization, and displacement. Repression banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and 
                 memories from consciousness. Regression leads an individual faced with anxiety to retreat to a more 
                 infantile psychosexual stage. Reaction Formation causes the ego to unconsciously switch unacceptable 
                 impulses into their opposites. People may express feelings of purity when they may be suffering anxiety 
                 from unconscious feelings about sex. Projection leads people to disguise their own threatening impulses 
                 by attributing them to others. Rationalization offers self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more 
                 threatening, unconscious reasons for one’s actions. Displacement shifts sexual or aggressive impulses 
                 toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person, redirecting anger toward a safer outlet. 
                 When evaluating Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, we are resting everything on the repression of painful 
                 experiences into the unconscious mind. If this is the case, then why are the majority of children, death 
                 camp survivors, and battle-scarred veterans able to remember their painful experiences? Also, Freud’s 
                 concepts arise out of clinical practices which are merely an after-the-fact explanation. 
                 Neo-Freudians 
                 Alfred Adler and Carl Jung studied with Sigmund Freud, but later decided they did not agree with his 
                 ideas about all tensions in life being sexual. Therefore, their ideas about personality are considered Neo-
                 Freudian. Alfred Adler believed tensions were social. He coined the term “inferiority complex” and 
                 believed children struggled with this inferiority complex while striving for superiority and power. Carl 
                 Jung believed in collective unconscious, which contains a common reservoir of images derived from our 
                 species’ past. He believed this is why many cultures share certain myths and images such as the mother 
                 being a symbol of nurturance.  
                 Humanistic Perspective 
                 By the 1960s more and more psychologists became discontented with how negative Freud’s theories 
                 were and chose to look at a more “humanistic” perspective. Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers were the 
                 main leaders of the Humanistic Perspective Theory of Personality. Maslow believed we are motivated by 
                 a hierarchy of needs. We are all striving to be a self-actualized person. In order to reach this level we 
                 have to be totally satisfied on several other levels. The bottom level is the physiological level, then the 
                 safety level, the belonging level, the esteem level, and the self-actualized level. We cannot move to the 
                 next level until our needs are completely satisfied, and we cannot work on more than one level at a 
                 time. The self-actualized level is where we would fulfill our potential. Carl Rogers also believed in an 
                 individual’s self-actualization tendencies. His beliefs centered on the concept of “Unconditional Positive 
                 Regard.” This is an attitude of acceptance of others despite failings. In an effort to assess personality, 
                 Rogers asked people to describe themselves as they would like to be and as they actually are. If the two 
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                 PSY 111: Introduction to Psychology                                        Learning Unit 9: Mini-Lecture 
                  
                 descriptions were close, then the individual had a positive self-concept. The Humanistic Perspective has 
                 had a pervasive impact on counseling, education, child-rearing, and management with its emphasis on a 
                 positive self-concept, empathy, and the thought that people are basically good and can improve. Critics 
                 of the Humanistic Perspective state that the concepts are vague and lack scientific basis. It also fails to 
                 appreciate the reality of our human capacity for evil. 
                 Trait Perspective 
                 The Trait Perspective is based on an individual’s personality being made up of consistent ways of 
                 behaving called traits. Examples of traits would be: honest, dependable, moody, and impulsive.  
                 Almost 18,000 words have been identified that represent traits. There is a test called the MMPI, which 
                 stands for Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. It is the most widely researched and clinically 
                 used of all personality tests and was originally developed to identify emotional disorders. Some trait 
                 researchers believe that the test called “The Big Five” does a better job of assessment. This assessment 
                 looks at conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, openness, and extraversion.  
                 Social-Cognitive Perspective 
                 The last personality perspective we’re going to look at in this unit is the Social-Cognitive Perspective. 
                 Albert Bandura is the person most closely identified with this approach. He believed the personality is 
                 the result of an interaction that takes place between a person and his or her social context. In looking at 
                 personality from this perspective, we would derive that people choose different environments, our 
                 personalities shape how we react to events, and our personalities shape situations. Social-cognitive 
                 psychologists emphasize the study of whether we feel we control our environment or our environment 
                 controls us. An external locus of control refers to the perception that chance or outside forces beyond 
                 our personal control determine our fate while an internal locus of control refers to the perception that 
                 we can control our own fate. If we are unable to avoid repeated adverse events we then can acquire 
                 what is called “learned helplessness.”  
                 I hope you enjoyed this lecture on personality, and I leave you with a story about three psychiatrists that 
                 decided to analyze each other’s personalities. The first one said, “There’s something in my personality 
                 that makes me a compulsive shopper. I’m deeply debt, and I have to overcharge my patients.” The 
                 second one said, “There’s something in my personality that makes me addicted to drugs. I’m so out of 
                 control that I pressure my patients into buying illegal drugs for me.” The first two then turn to the third 
                 psychiatrist and say, “So what’s wrong with your personality?” The third psychiatrist said, “What’s 
                 wrong with my personality is that no matter how hard I try, I just can’t keep a secret.” 
                  
                 © Judy Austin and Indian Hills Community College 
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