A Comparison of Sigmund Freuds Psychoanalytic and Humanistic Personality Theory

Personality is an individual’s characteristic pattern of thought, emotion, and behavior, together with the psychological mechanisms behind those patterns (Funder). The psychological mechanisms behind said patterns are described in varying ways across a plethora of personality theories. Two theories; Freudian Psychoanalysis and Humanistic Personality Theory provide an interesting contrast in their interpretations of personality and its application to an individuals characteristic patterns of though, emotion and behavior. It is through this very application to an individual that we find a deeper understanding and appreciation for the many facets of these theories.

The individual in question to whom we will apply these theories is Jessica Snow, my mother. My person is motivated by her drive to succeed in all areas of life – work, home, and social life. She wants to be the best mother possible for her two children, and wants to afford them all of the comforts that they desire in life. She has endured many hardships throughout her life, including having her first child at a young age and falling pregnant again during her time in college.

She shows me nothing but love in every facet of her relationship with me, and it is through learning about her struggles and consequent successes that I find the strength to fight through any difficulties that life may throw my way.

Despite Sigmund Freud’s theory of Psychoanalysis not being a key tenet of scientific psychology, it has had an enormous impact on culture, language, and the way we view human development.

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Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) practiced in Vienna as a M.D. He originally began working as a neurologist, before eventually becoming a psychiatrist while employing some hypnotism in his work. While much of Freud’s work is highly theoretical, he believed that eventually biological correlates of his ideas would be discovered.

His theory remains theoretical to this day however, because of the nature of his research. He based much of his work off of observations of patients and self-observations – to which the details of are still much hidden because of the legality of releasing such information about people. It is observations of patients and self-observations however where we find that psychoanalysis has one its greatest uses. Psychoanalysis provides us a great way in which we can explain and describe another’s patterns of behavior.

Freud’s Theory of Psychoanalysis can be applied to Jessica’s case in dealing with her father’s death. The whole event caused a lot of anxiety, not just for Jessica, but also for her family unit as a whole. Freud would have explained Jessica’s dealing with this anxiety by the need for the Ego (the part of the mind’s internal structure which dealt with basic desires, but within the constructs of reality) to distort reality to deal with this anxiety. Anna Freud – Sigmund’s daughter – was the first to define and name the different types of defense mechanisms the Ego uses to deal with anxiety (Freud, A).

According to recounts from her current husband, Jessica went through a number of ‘phases’ in dealing with this substantial anxiety. Initially she simply refused to believe that her father had died. “No! No way, he always said he was going to pull through!” According to Freud Jessica was in denial. This simple refusing to acknowledge the anxiety provoking stimuli was at best a short-term solution though. She turned to displacement for a while, in which she would take out her anger of her fathers passing on her siblings, seemingly becoming enraged at them for the smallest of disturbances they caused.

Jessica was displacing her anxiety onto her siblings. Freud explained her last stage of dealing with this anxiety as sublimation. To this day, Jessica is especially caring and loving towards close family members because he knows that they could be taken away from him at a moment.

Psychoanalysis can also be applied to Jessica’s ability to be very controlled in her high-pressure job. Working at a corrections facility, there is much temptation to disobey your duty and to give in to monetary offers or threats in order to give the inmates what they want. The fact that Jessica is able to ignore the chances to take bribes from inmates in return for drugs or other paraphernalia indicate that she has a very strong ego.

As per Freud’s theory, the personality develops from interactions between three fundamental structures of the mind; the superego, the id, and the ego. The id is the earliest developing of these structures, and is primarily concerned with instant gratification and basic physical needs and urges. Its operation is entirely unconscious. The id has no concept of social rules or morality; it simply desires what is best for itself in the short term. The id acts as a very young child would in terms of taking what it wants, and getting upset when it doesn’t get what it is after.

The superego on the other hand is primarily concerned with societal rules and moral obligation; it is similar to the concept of morality or “moral compass”. Its development comes later as a child learns what is wrong and what is right in a given situation. Your superego is what makes you feel guilty for giving in to what the id desires in the moment, you feel morally obligated in doing the wrong thing. Your superego alone is not able to overcome the immediate desires that the id has in the moment, and this is where the ego comes in.

The ego is the rational, pragmatic, part of the personality. It is partially conscious and partially unconscious, and is what was considered by Freud to be the “self”. Its job is to balance the wants and demands of the superego and id in the context of reality. The ego solves problems that arise due to conflicts between the id and the superego. Freud believed that these three are in constant conflict, and that it is childhood experiences and these internal struggles that shape the personality. A strong ego is supposed to be indicative of a “healthy” personality, free of neurosis, anxiety, and depression.

Jessica would have to have a strong superego and ego in order to resist the childish urges of accepting what was offered to you – immediate gratification. The superego would make sure that she did not accept anything currently because it would make her feel guilty about contemplating the thought; it would have what is commonly called “morality” holding her back from acting in a way which is not in accordance with the rest of society.

The ego would allow her to satiate the desires of the id in other ways, such as working a few extra hours and using the extra money she earned on something nice for herself. She would redirect the desire that was initially experienced unconsciously in the id, into a controlled manner that is thought out through the conscious and unconscious workings of the ego and superego. Freud felt that a lot of our minds workings happened in the unconscious, in ways which we did not necessarily experience in our conscious, but which influenced the way in which our conscious thoughts and decisions were processed and delivered.

Freud also suggested that the conflicts between these three entities and the inherent “human libido” through the growth stages of a young child up until adulthood made its way through five distinct stages. Each of these stages has a different focus; oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. This was Freud’s psychosexual theory of development.

Across the five stages, Freud proposed that a growing human was presented with different conflicts between their biological drives (id) and their social moral conscience (superego), because their biological development focused on different erogenous zones of the body. Failure to resolve a stage, or psychological trauma within a stage can cause one to become stuck in a phase of development into adulthood, which is displayed within particular personality traits in a fully developed adulthood.

Jessica’s almost compulsive desire to have a life and workspace which is neat and orderly may suggest that she may have gotten “stuck” in the anal phase of development. The stage usually spans between 18 months and 3 years old, and is experienced after the first stage, the oral stage. Toilet training and related activities are a key experience during this period, and parenting styles during this stage are critical in influencing the young child’s development through this phase of their life. If parents make intemperate demands of the child by overstressing toilet training, it may lead to a compulsive personality.

There are some traits that lead me to believe that she may have experienced a slight trauma during this period in her life (thought she would have been too young to recount this trauma now); she is very demanding about cleanliness, being punctual, and generally presenting herself (and ourselves – her family) as orderly and neat. Her job itself is a figure of this organization, where everything runs like clockwork. She is on a set schedule just as everyone else is, and all activities run the same way every time in order to avoid confusion and a possible break out or prisoner misbehavior.

In opposition to psychoanalysis, some humanistic theories of personality were developed. At the time it was disliked how psychoanalysis ignored the qualities that made us human, such as our quest for self-determination and self-realization (Benjafield, John G.). Humanistic psychologists have an optimistic outlook towards human nature, and believe that humans behave consciously and rationally. In the humanistic approach – contrary to psychoanalysis – there is no emphasis on the unconscious. Humans are in control of their behavior, and have the freedom to change their behavior and attitudes if it so suits them. One of the major humanistic theories of personality is Carl Roger’s Person-Centered theory.

In Rogers’s view, the self-concept is the most important feature of personality, and it includes all the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs people have about themselves. Rogers believed that people are aware of their self-concepts (Kramer). Despite this, their self-concepts do not always match reality. This is where people may experience incongruence, which is a term coined by Roger’s to describe a discrepancy between reality and a persons own self-concept.

Roger’s Person Centered theory of personality can be applied to Jessica through her inability to easily trust new people she meets. If you asked her personally whether she felt like she was a trusting person, she would almost definitely saying yes, stating that she is very open to new experiences and new people, and is trusting until said trust is broken. This is in contradiction to the Big 5 analysis that I conducted on her, which scored her very low on the trust scale. From an outside perspective such as mine, she seems very wary of any new people, and only comes to trust people when she has known them for some time. She usually attributes this slow build up of trust to the other person, stating that they “don’t look trustworthy”, or are “a little bit shady”.

Looking again through a different lens, it does not seem that this is the case for these people, and that because of her incongruence between her self-concept and reality, Jessica is attributing her low levels of trust to an outside source – commonly referred to as the fundamental attribution error. She fully believes that she is a trusting person, but is held back by environmental consequences.

According to Rogers, parents promote incongruence if they give their child conditional love. This is to say that if a parent accepts a child only when they behave in a particular manner, they are likely to block out experiences that are deemed unacceptable and attribute their behavior to sources that are not internal. Jessica’s parents had a very authoritarian outlook towards parenting, and gave her and her siblings very conditional tough love. She notes about her childhood that she very rarely received compliments about her behavior, but she would certainly be punished if she were to step out of line. It is through this childhood experience that her incongruence in trust may have been developed (Rogers).

Jessica would have had to have experienced an unconditional positive regard to avoid the development of this incongruence. It is also important to note that Rogers would attribute the anxiety uncovered by her Big 5 Personality test to this incongruence in her self-concept and reality. People with a high degree of incongruence are likely to experience anxiety according to Rogers (Welch & Rodwick). According to Rogers this incongruence and subsequent anxiety holds Jessica back from achieving “the good life”, in which she constantly aims to fulfill her potential, allowing her personality to emanate through her experiences.

Moreover, we see that personality theories can be applied in a variety of situations to provide differing explanations to almost the same situation. This is a product of the difficulty in which we have studying them, we usually rely on unreliable and highly ambiguous data to find an answer (evident in both the case of Psychoanalysis and Humanistic Theories). In applying psychological theories to ourselves and those around us we must make sure that we use caution; they are far from complete and undeniable, and can provide us with disturbing results when applied incorrectly. In the case of Jessica, they do allow us to provide some interesting insight and thought into her actions and maybe their sources – thought-provoking yet far from final.

Jessica grew up in southern Pennsylvania, the second youngest child of a family with 4 children. She has a brother who was the oldest, a sister who was older than her, and also a younger sister. Her family was lower middle class, and her parents instilled in her a hard work ethic from a young age, as both of her parents worked very strenuous full time jobs while struggling to raise a large family. Her father died when she was just 15 – a rather harrowing experience for such a close-knit family. Her brother subsequently went to work in order to support his siblings and his mother, further entrenching her values of hard work and family first.

Jessica fell pregnant to her high school boyfriend at the age of 18, and had to struggle through dealing with the birth of her first son at a very young and tender age. She subsequently fell pregnant again during her time at college, another bump in her road to graduation. Raising my older brother and I while going through college, she graduated and went on to work at a Corrections Facility. She is now married, and works hard every day to provide for her family in the way that her family was able to provide for her. The values her parents instilled in her are self evident in how she treats her kids, she is fair but tough, and is the first to let them know how much they mean to her.

Liliana is the most important person in my life, and has allowed me the room and love to achieve all that I have to date. Without such a strong and loving figure in my life, I do not know how I would have been able to achieve what I have thus far in my life, and going forward. She gives me strength every day.