Personality Theories

Personality theories attempt to identify personal characteristics people share and to determine the factors that produce their unique expression by any given person. Sigmund Freud developed the first theory of personality, psychoanalysis, from his profound insight that emerged in the early 1890s as he treated patients with neurotic disorders: forces that exist in the unconscious determine human behavior. Over the next 40 years he formulated the most influential personality theory in the 20th century. Freud argued that people's behavior reflects the outcome of a lifelong struggle in which repressed unacceptable sexual and aggressive instincts in the id are redirected toward acceptable expression by the forces of reason in the ego and of conscience in the superego. These instincts sustain the self throughout life, at the cost, however, of directing aggression toward others.

Freud's ideas attracted numerous young European intellectuals in the early 20th century, the most prominent being Carl Jung and Alfred Adler. Both departed from his orthodoxy to develop their own theories, analytical psychology and individual psychology, respectively. Jung partitioned the psyche, as he called the mind, into the conscious ego, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious. He posited that inherent in each person is a lifelong process of indi-viduation during which differentiation from others and a balancing of the opposing forces of the psyche (e.g., rationality/irrationality, masculinity/femininity) are sought. If attained, an integrated self emerges.

Adler reasoned that each individual struggles throughout life to overcome feelings of inferiority that arise during the first few years of life as the child, helpless and completely dependent, compares itself to its more capable caretakers. The child responds to these feelings unconsciously by striving for superiority (personal competence), formulating rudimentary life goals that give this striving a focus, and structuring a style of life to attain these goals.

The ego, according to Freud, has no independent functions. It acts only as a mediator to satisfy the instinctual demands of the id. Freud's daughter, Anna, and Margaret Mahler expanded the concept of the ego in the mid-20th century to include functions that guide the person's competence in mastering life's demands, particularly those related to social interactions. Their work focused on the study and treatment of children and gave rise to psychoanalytic ego psychology.

Erik Erikson elaborated this concept further in the second half of the 20th century. He postulated that ego development is bound closely to changing social institutions and values. Central to his theory is the development of ego identity, a process that begins in adolescence and continues throughout life. Erikson reasoned that ego development occurs via a series of genetically predetermined stages (critical periods). During each stage specific developmental crises of increasing social complexity are faced. Society ensures that the process unfolds in the proper order and at the proper pace.

Object relations theorists elaborated the concept of the ego and transformed core psychoanalytic concepts. Prominent among these theorists were Melanie Klein, David W. Winnicott, and Heinz Kohut. They emphasized the enduring influence of interpersonal relations on a person's unconscious processes and the impact of these relations on the development of a person's inner world, especially on the infant's interpersonal strivings for safety, love, empathy, admiration, and trust. Harry Stack Sullivan, an interpersonal theorist, viewed the mother's relationship with the infant as crucial to the child's developing self system. Karen Horney, a social psychoanalytic theorist, emphasized the critical influence of the parents on the developing child's self-images and tendencies to move away from, toward, or against others.

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