If you could travel back to 1880s Vienna, you could meet a young man destined to become psychology’s most famous figure: Sigmund Freud. In some ways, he would “look the part”: intelligent, well-educated, insightful, ambitious. But if you were to ask him what he did for a living, his answer would surprise you. The young-adult Freud (he was born in 1856) was not a psychologist. He was a physician planning a career in biomedical research.

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Circumstances changed his plans. Freud fell in love, needed to make money to get married, and thus sought a career more lucrative than that of research. He became a practicing physician (Jones, 1953)—a career move that had huge consequences. Freud’s work with patients launched his theory of personality, psychoanalytic theory (Freud, 1900, 1923)—also called a psychodynamic theory because it addresses the changing flow, or dynamics, of mental energy.

Freud’s patients presented him with a puzzle. They reported bodily symptoms that had no obvious physical cause; a patient might report paralysis of a hand, yet have no injury or illness that could cause paralysis. Freud concluded that the cause was not physical, but psychological. Memories of traumatic events buried deep in patients’ minds, he said, created physical symptoms.

Freud based this conclusion on his therapy experiences. With Freud’s encouragement, patients in therapy would talk about their problems. Gradually, after great effort, many would recall highly traumatic events they had not remembered for years (e.g., experiences of childhood sexual abuse). Recalling the long-forgotten event was itself traumatic; patients relived painful events. But the pain brought gain as well. After uncovering the traumatic memories, the patients’ symptoms improved: Physical problems lessened and psychological well-being increased. (Contemporary scientific evidence confirms that therapies inspired by Freud’s approach significantly improve patients’ well-being; Shedler, 2010.) From this progress, Freud concluded that the bottled-up memories had been causing the physical distress.

Freud later modified his conclusion, however. He judged that many of his patients’ long-buried thoughts were not accurate memories but rather “fantasies built on the basis of memories” (Freud, 1913, p. 393). The bottled-up ideas were a mix of reality and fantasy.

Freud’s ideas raise extraordinarily difficult questions. How could memories and fantasies cause physical symptoms? Why are traumatic memories so hard to recall? When people don’t recall such memories, where within the mind are they stored? Freud’s personality theory contained his answers.

Freud proposed that personality is not a single, unitary part of the mind. Rather, personality consists of different parts—three personality structures called the id, ego, and superego.

ID. The id is the personality system we are born with. It motivates people to satisfy basic bodily needs. The body needs food, and the id says, “Get it, now!” The body needs sex, and the id says, “Get it, now!” The id doesn’t do anything except say, “Get it, now!” The id operates according to the pleasure principle: It seeks immediate pleasure and the avoidance of pain.

The id thus is impulsive. It doesn’t care about what is “appropriate,” “acceptable,” and “moral.” It doesn’t even care what makes sense in the world of reality; a hungry infant will chew on both food and toys, even though the latter won’t reduce its hunger.

EGO. The second personality structure, the ego, is a mental system that balances the demands of the id with opportunities and constraints in the world of reality. The ego operates according to the reality principle: It tries to delay the id’s demands until there are circumstances in reality that enable the person to obtain pleasure while avoiding pain, including painful punishment that comes from breaking social rules.

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To do this, the ego devises strategies. If a child wants a cookie, the ego’s strategy might be to sneak into the cookie jar when no one is looking. If a guy wants a date, his ego’s strategy is to tell the woman, “I’ll be getting a great, high-paying job soon.” If your romantic partner breaks up with you, your ego says, “I never really liked him that much.” These strategies protect the person from harm: punishment from parents; rejection from a potential date; recognition of how much you really wanted a relationship to continue.

The ego, according to Freud, is weaker than the id. Its strategies are feeble compared with the id’s impulsive desires. The ego is “like a man on horseback, who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse” (Freud, 1923, p. 15).

SUPEREGO. Do you ever have sudden pangs of guilt? Almost everyone does. Freud believed they’re generated by a third personality structure, the superego. The superego represents society’s moral and ethical rules—rules indicating what types of behavior are bad and good. If the ego devises a strategy for dealing with the id’s demands that violates these rules, the superego detects it and the person feels guilt. The superego thus helps to align behavior with social rules. In addition to rules dictating behavior one should avoid, the superego contains an ego ideal: an image of an idealized self that the ego should try to achieve.

In psychoanalytic theory, the superego develops as children interact with their parents. Parental commands (“Don’t hit”) gradually become internalized as superego rules (“Hitting is bad”).

LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS. Personality structures operate, according to psychodynamic theory, at different levels of consciousness. Consciousnes s refers to people’s awareness of mental contents and processes (Chapter 9). Levels of consciousness are variations in the degree to which people are aware of the contents of their mind.

Freud distinguished among three levels of consciousness. The conscious regions of mind contain the mental contents of which we are aware at a given moment. For instance, if you’re paying attention to the words on this page, then ideas about Freud’s theory of personality are in your conscious mind now. The preconscious contains ideas that you easily could bring to consciousness awareness if you wanted to. If, for example, someone asked for your phone number, you could think of it; before you were asked, the information was in your preconscious. Finally, the unconscious regions of mind contain ideas that you are not aware of and could not become aware of even if you wanted. Freud believed that a vast collection of painful memories is stored unconsciously—especially the memories of traumatic events that he believed were the cause of his patients’ unexplained physical symptoms. This material is so emotionally disturbing that the mind protects the person from even thinking about it by keeping it buried in the unconscious.

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Metaphorically, Freud suggested that the mind is like an iceberg: A small tip (consciousness) floats above the surface; a thin layer (the preconscious) is visible just below the surface; and the vast bulk of material (the unconscious) lurks below, out of sight (Figure 13.1).

The id is entirely unconscious. People cannot consciously “look into” their mind and directly see its desires. Both the ego and the superego are partly unconscious. Sometimes we aren’t aware of our ego strategies; you may really think that your ex is a terrible person, not recognizing that this conclusion is a strategy devised by the ego. Similarly, sometimes you may feel guilty without realizing how the superego has created this guilt. But sometimes, people are aware of the ego’s and superego’s contents. In general, Freud’s key insight—one that shaped Western civilization’s understanding of human nature—is that much of the mental activity that causes our experiences and actions is unconscious: outside of our awareness and control.

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The id, ego, and superego are stable personality structures. Their basic nature is consistent from one day of your life to the next. Let’s now look at the personality processes of psychoanalytic theory, which explain changes in psychological experience.

PSYCHODYNAMICS. Psychoanalytic theory views the mind as an energy system. Just as the physical energy of burning fuel powers an automobile engine, mental energy powers the mind. In the physical sciences, the changing physical energies of objects in motion are called dynamics. In psychoanalysis, mental energies are called psychodynamics. Psychodynamic processes are changes in mental energy that occur as energy flows from one personality structure to another or is directed to desired objects.

Freud proposed two types of mental energies: life energies (or a life instinct) and death energies (a death instinct):

The life and death energies can power a wide variety of behavior. The ego directs them to diverse activities that are related symbolically to survival and sex or to death (see Chapter 11; also see Chapter 9 for Freud’s analysis of dreams and mental energy). Sexual energies power the efforts of an artist painting nudes or a musician composing sensual music. Death energies—once deflected away from the self—are destructive forces that power behaviors ranging from sarcasm and ridicule to violent acts of aggression.

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Few contemporary psychologists endorse Freud’s precise ideas about the death instinct. Yet research does confirm his general intuition about the power of death-related feelings. Terror management theory (Greenberg & Arndt, 2012; Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2004) proposes that death is so terrifying that when people think about it, the mind plays a mental trick: It increases feelings of identification with institutions that will survive one’s death. Some institutions—such as nations, religions, and cultures—are, in a sense, immortal. The theory predicts that thoughts of death heighten identification with these institutions, causing people temporarily to become more religious or patriotic, or to attend more closely to cultural norms.

In one test of the theory, researchers led participants to take a walk that either (1) passed through a cemetery or (2) did not pass through, or in sight of, a cemetery. All participants then overheard a conversation (in which the speaker was an experimental confederate; see Chapter 12) that exposed participants to a reminder of a cultural value, namely, helpfulness. Finally, participants encountered a stranger who needed help. People who had walked through the cemetery were more helpful (Gailliot et al., 2008); the reminder of death caused them to attend to the cultural norm of helpfulness. A meta-analysis of more than 200 experiments confirms that thinking about death increases adherence to cultural norms, as well as pride in one’s nation, race, and cultural group (Burke, Martens, & Faucher, 2010).

PSYCHODYNAMIC DEVELOPMENT. In addition to identifying mental energies, Freud provided a theory of their development. He proposed that the id’s sexual energies develop in a series of steps, or stages. A psychosexual stage is a period in child development during which the child focuses on obtaining sensual gratification through a particular part of the body. The specific part of the body changes from one stage to another.

Freud identified five psychosexual stages (Table 13.1). In the oral stage (age 0 to 18 months), children seek gratification through the mouth by eating, sucking, and chewing. In the anal stage (18 months to 3½ years), they experience gratification from the release of tension that comes from the control and elimination of feces. In the phallic stage (3½ to 6 years), the source of gratification shifts to the genitals. At the end of the phallic stage, children enter a latency stage during which sexual desires are repressed into the unconscious until puberty. The genital stage, which starts at puberty, signals the reawakening of sexual desire.

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Freud claimed that the emotional themes of the childhood psychosexual stages are repeated throughout life. The adult who frequently smokes and chews gum is repeating themes from the oral stage. Adult love and sexual attraction to a romantic partner repeat the child’s first love and attraction, experienced toward the opposite-sex parent during the phallic stage. Themes repeat most strongly when the child experiences a developmental fixation, which is a disruption in development that occurs when an individual experiences either too little or too much gratification at a psychosexual stage. This occurs if parents overly indulge the child or provide inadequate physical and emotional support. Table 13.1 lists some adult psychological characteristics associated with fixations at each psychosexual stage of development.

At each psychosexual stage, the child encounters prohibitions. At the oral stage, parents tell children to stop chewing on nonfood items. At the anal stage, they tell children to control the elimination of feces and use the bathroom. Each developmental stage, then, features a conflict: Biological urges conflict with social rules. Conflict is particularly intense at the phallic stage. At this stage, children experience sexual attraction toward the opposite-sex parent, view the same-sex parent as a rival, and thus want to eliminate the same-sex parent in order to have the opposite-sex parent for themselves. Freud called this constellation of feelings the Oedipus complex, after the Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex, whose main character unknowingly kills his father and marries his mother.

Recall that children progress through the key psychosexual stages—oral, anal, phallic—early in life. Because Freud believed that developmental stages shape personality, he concluded that personality was largely “fixed”—stable and unchanging—by the time the child exited the phallic stage (usually by age 6).

DEFENSE MECHANISMS. As you’ve just seen, the desires of the id conflict with the rules of society. The conflict, Freud explained, creates anxiety; people become anxious when they recognize that their desires conflict with moral rules. When this happens, defense mechanisms come to the rescue. A defense mechanism is a mental strategy devised by the ego to protect oneself against anxiety. Defense mechanisms reduce anxiety in two ways:

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Freud believed that all people use defense mechanisms (Cameron & Rychlak, 1985). Table 13.2 lists a number of defense mechanisms that people frequently employ.

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Freud’s psychoanalytic theory complicates the task of personality assessment. A simple assessment strategy—self-report (i.e., directly asking people about their personality characteristics; see Chapter 2)—cannot be used. To a psychoanalyst, self-report methods are inadequate for two reasons: (1) Much mental content is unconscious, so people can’t recognize and discuss it; and (2) even when people do have insights into themselves, they may not want to talk about those insights because they reveal ideas that are socially unacceptable and anxiety provoking. Psychoanalytic psychologists thus need alternatives to self-report methods. They have developed two: the free association method and projective tests.

FREE ASSOCIATION METHOD. In the free association method, devised by Freud, psychologists encourage people to let their thoughts flow freely. They instruct people to say whatever comes to mind, even if it seems irrelevant or ridiculous. This procedure might sound odd, but Freud thought it was the best way to assess personality. He reasoned that the mind is like a machine. If a machine makes a sound (e.g., a banging in a car engine), something inside the machine must have caused it. The sound thus is a clue to the machine’s inner workings. Similarly, if an idea pops into someone’s mind, something inside the mind must have caused it. The flow of free associations thus provides clues to how the mind works.

Freud accepted a limitation of the free association method: It is slow. Patients may be in therapy for months before they associate to deeply significant material. (Freud’s therapy method is detailed in Chapter 15.) Others sought quicker methods and thus devised projective tests.

PROJECTIVE TESTS. A projective test is a personality assessment tool in which test items are ambiguous and psychologists are interested in how test takers interpret the ambiguity. For example, test takers might tell a story about people depicted in a drawing whose feelings and actions are unclear. The idea behind the tests is that when people interpret ambiguous items, they inevitably will draw on information in their own personalities. Elements of personality are thus “projected” onto the test.

A famous projective test is the Rorschach inkblot test (or, simply, the “Rorschach”), developed in 1921 by Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach. The test items are symmetrical blobs of ink (Figure 13.2). Test takers say what the images look like to them, and explain their interpretations. Based on these responses, the psychologist usually tries to identify the test taker’s style of thinking: Did the test taker focus on the image as a whole or just a small part of it? Did his or her interpretation rely only on the inkblot image itself, or did it include imaginative flights of fantasy that went beyond the image?

The Rorschach is personality psychology’s most famous test. Unfortunately, it is more famous than accurate. Research shows that Rorschach test responses are poor predictors of important life outcomes, such as who might become depressed or who might perform well under high stress (Lilienfeld, Wood, & Garb, 2000). Even when Rorschach responses do predict outcomes accurately, similar predictions often can be made through much simpler procedures (e.g., directly asking people if they tend to become depressed or perform well under stress; Mischel, 1968).

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These negative results with the Rorschach reveal a limitation of the psychoanalytic approach. Freud and many of his followers neglected the principles of measurement and research design that make psychology scientific. One result of this neglect is their failure to develop efficient and accurate measures of personality.

Freud’s followers may have faltered when developing psychological tests. But they excelled at creating novel, insightful psychological theory. After Freud proposed his theory of personality, neo-Freudian personality theories developed—that is, new (“neo”) theories inspired by Freud that attempted to overcome limitations in his work. Let’s look at three neo-Freudian theories: those of Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, and Erik Erikson.

Adler (1927) felt that Freud underestimated the importance of social motives. People compare themselves to others in the social world—friends, classmates, coworkers—and are motivated to compensate for personal qualities that they feel are inferior to those of others. In particular, people are motivated to compensate for organ inferiorities: body organs that, due to disease or genetic defect, work less well than normal. Someone with impaired hearing, for example, may compensate by developing his or her musical skills. (Both Beethoven, the great classic composer, and Brian Wilson, songwriter for the Beach Boys, the American rock band with the all-time most Top 40 hits, had impaired hearing.) Adler judged that, to fully understand personality development, the motivation to compensate for inferiority—which Adler called an inferiority complex—must be added to the motives proposed by Freud.

Carl Jung (1939) judged that Freud underestimated the role of evolution. Specifically, Jung proposed that there are two different unconscious minds: (1) the one identified by Freud, which stores memories of events from one’s own life, and (2) another, overlooked by Freud, which stores ideas inherited from humans’ ancestral evolutionary past. Jung called this second unconscious mind the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious is a storehouse of mental images, symbols, and ideas that all humans inherit, in exactly the same form, thanks to their common evolutionary past. Throughout the history of our species, all humans experienced, for example, darkness (which is frightening), mothers (who are comforting), and wise older adults (who acquired wisdom during their long lives). Jung suggested that, as a result, concepts of darkness, mothers, and wise elders are stored in our collective unconscious. Without our even knowing it—because the ideas are unconscious!—these inherited mental symbols influence our thoughts and emotions.

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Erik Erikson (1950) worked to overcome two limitations in Freud’s theory of personality development:

At each stage of development, people experience an emotional conflict, or “crisis,” that involves interactions between oneself and the social world. Infants, for example, face a crisis involving trust in others, on whom they are entirely dependent for survival. Table 13.3 summarizes Erikson’s theory.

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Freud’s theory of personality had immense impact. His insights revolutionized people’s view of human nature; the idea that most memories and feelings are unknown to the individual, buried in the unconscious, was startling. Beyond psychology, scholars in other fields—history, art history, film and literary criticism—applied Freud’s concepts. An artist’s work, for example, could be interpreted as the symbolic expression of his or her unconscious desires.

How valuable, though, are Freud’s ideas as a scientific theory of personality? Freud, as you’ve seen, depicts personality as an energy system with three structures (id, ego, and superego) that regulate the flow of two types of energy (life/sex, death/aggression). In this model, much of mental life occurs outside of conscious awareness, and much of it is a struggle between biological urges and social rules. What are the advantages and disadvantages of this model?

An advantage is that it captures the complexity of personality. Mental life truly is a mix of conscious experiences and unconscious processes. People often do experience conflict within themselves and between personal desires and social rules. Freud’s theory is complex enough to address these aspects of human experience. Some other theories of personality are not.

Yet the complexity brings costs. The major cost is that elements of Freud’s theory are difficult—and sometimes impossible—to test. To test a theory, you generally need good measurement tools (see Chapter 2). Freud developed no tools for measuring personality precisely and thus provided no means for putting his theory to the test.

A final limitation is that, in some respect, psychoanalytic theory is not complex enough. Does the mind contain only three main personality structures (id, ego, and superego)? Most contemporary psychologists don’t think so. As discussed elsewhere (especially Chapters 6 and 11), research suggests that the mind contains numerous mental systems that contribute to memory, thought, and motivation—more than Freud had imagined.

Such limitations motivated psychologists to develop alternative theories of psychoanalytic personality, as we’ll see next.

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