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What Is Personality?

13-1 What theories inform our understanding of personality?

Our personality is our characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. Two historically significant personality theories have become part of our cultural legacy. Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory proposed that childhood sexuality and unconscious motivations influence personality. (Freud’s ideas inspired today’s psychodynamic theorists.) The humanistic theories focused on our inner capacities for growth and self-fulfillment. Later theorists built upon these two broad perspectives. Trait theories, for example, examine characteristic patterns of behavior (traits). Social-cognitive theories explore the interaction between people’s traits (including their thinking) and their social context. Let’s begin with psychodynamic theories.

Psychodynamic theories of personality view human behavior as a dynamic interaction between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind, including associated motives and conflicts. These theories are descended from Freud’s psychoanalysis—his theory of personality and the associated treatment techniques. Freud was the first to focus clinical attention on our unconscious mind.

Freud’s Psychoanalytic Perspective: Exploring the Unconscious

13-2 How did Sigmund Freud’s treatment of psychological disorders lead to his view of the unconscious mind?

Ask 100 people on the street to name a notable deceased psychologist, suggested Keith Stanovich (1996, p. 1), and “Freud would be the winner hands down.” In the popular mind, he is to psychology what Elvis Presley is to rock music. Freud’s influence not only lingers in psychiatry and clinical psychology, but also in literary and film interpretation. Almost 9 in 10 American college courses that reference psychoanalysis have been outside of psychology departments (Cohen, 2007). Today’s psychological science is, as we will see, skeptical about many of Freud’s ideas and methods. Yet his early twentieth-century concepts penetrate our twenty-first-century language. Without realizing their source, we may speak of ego, repression, projection, sibling rivalry, Freudian slips, and fixation. So, who was Freud, and what did he teach?

Like all of us, Sigmund Freud was a product of his times. His Victorian era was a time of tremendous discovery and scientific advancement, but it is also known today as a time of sexual repression and male dominance. Men’s and women’s roles were clearly defined, with male superiority assumed and only male sexuality generally acknowledged (discreetly).

Long before entering the University of Vienna in 1873, young Freud showed signs of independence and brilliance. He so loved reading plays, poetry, and philosophy that he once ran up a bookstore debt beyond his means. As a teen he often took his evening meal in his tiny bedroom in order to lose no time from his studies. After medical school he set up a private practice specializing in nervous disorders. Before long, however, he faced patients whose disorders made no neurological sense. A patient might have lost all feeling in a hand—yet there is no sensory nerve that, if damaged, would numb the entire hand and nothing else. Freud’s search for a cause for such disorders set his mind running in a direction destined to change human self-understanding.

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Might some neurological disorders have psychological causes? Observing patients led Freud to his “discovery” of the unconscious. He speculated that lost feeling in one’s hand might be caused by a fear of touching one’s genitals; that unexplained blindness or deafness might be caused by not wanting to see or hear something that aroused intense anxiety. How might such disorders be treated? After some early unsuccessful trials with hypnosis, Freud turned to free association, in which he told the patient to relax and say whatever came to mind, no matter how embarrassing or trivial. He assumed that a line of mental dominoes had fallen from his patients’ distant past to their troubled present, and that the chain of thought revealed by free association would allow him to retrace that line into a patient’s unconscious. There, painful memories, often from childhood, could then be retrieved from the unconscious and brought into conscious awareness.

Basic to Freud’s theory was his belief that the mind is mostly hidden (FIGURE 13.1). Our conscious awareness is like the part of an iceberg that floats above the surface. Beneath our awareness is the larger unconscious mind, with its thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories. Some of these thoughts we store temporarily in a preconscious area, from which we can retrieve them into conscious awareness. Of greater interest to Freud was the mass of unacceptable passions and thoughts that he believed we repress, or forcibly block from our consciousness because they would be too unsettling to acknowledge. Freud believed that without our awareness, these troublesome feelings and ideas powerfully influence us. Such feelings, he said, sometimes surface in disguised forms—the work we choose, the beliefs we hold, our daily habits, our troubling symptoms.

PERSONALITY STRUCTURE

13-3 What was Freud’s view of personality?

In Freud’s view, human personality—including its emotions and strivings—arises from a conflict between impulse and restraint—between our aggressive, pleasure-seeking biological urges and our internalized social controls over these urges. Freud believed personality arises from our efforts to resolve this basic conflict—to express these impulses in ways that bring satisfaction without also bringing guilt or punishment. To understand the mind’s dynamics during this conflict, Freud proposed three interacting systems: the id, ego, and superego (FIGURE 13.1).

The id’s unconscious psychic energy constantly strives to satisfy basic drives to survive, reproduce, and aggress. The id operates on the pleasure principle: It seeks immediate gratification. To envision an id-dominated person, think of a newborn infant crying out for satisfaction, caring nothing for the outside world’s conditions and demands. Or think of people with a present rather than future time perspective—those who heavily use tobacco, alcohol, and other drugs, and would sooner party now than sacrifice today’s pleasure for future success and happiness (Fernie et al., 2013; Friedel et al., 2014; Keough et al., 1999).

As the ego develops, the young child responds to the real world. The ego, operating on the reality principle, seeks to gratify the id’s impulses in realistic ways that will bring long-term pleasure. (Imagine what would happen if, lacking an ego, we expressed all our unrestrained sexual or aggressive impulses.) The ego contains our partly conscious perceptions, thoughts, judgments, and memories.

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Around age 4 or 5, Freud theorized, a child’s ego recognizes the demands of the newly emerging superego, the voice of our moral compass (conscience) that forces the ego to consider not only the real but the ideal. The superego focuses on how we ought to behave. It strives for perfection, judging actions and producing positive feelings of pride or negative feelings of guilt. Someone with an exceptionally strong superego may be virtuous yet guilt ridden; another with a weak superego may be outrageously self-indulgent and remorseless.

Because the superego’s demands often oppose the id’s, the ego struggles to reconcile the two. The ego is the personality “executive,” mediating among the impulsive demands of the id, the restraining demands of the superego, and the real-life demands of the external world. If chaste Conner feels sexually attracted to Tatiana, he may satisfy both id and superego by joining a volunteer organization that Tatiana attends regularly.

PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT

13-4 What developmental stages did Freud propose?

Analysis of his patients’ histories convinced Freud that personality forms during life’s first few years. He concluded that children pass through a series of psychosexual stages, during which the id’s pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct pleasure-sensitive areas of the body called erogenous zones (TABLE 13.1). Each stage offers its own challenges, which Freud saw as conflicting tendencies.

Freud believed that during the phallic stage, for example, boys develop both unconscious sexual desires for their mother and jealousy and hatred for their father, whom they consider a rival. Given these feelings, he thought, boys also experience guilt and a lurking fear of punishment, perhaps by castration, from their father. Freud called this collection of feelings the Oedipus complex after the Greek legend of Oedipus, who unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. Some psychoanalysts in Freud’s era believed that girls experienced a parallel Electra complex.

Children eventually cope with the threatening feelings, said Freud, by repressing them and by trying to become like the rival parent. It’s as though something inside the child decides, “If you can’t beat ’em [the same-sex parent], join ’em.” Through this identification process, children’s superegos gain strength as they incorporate many of their parents’ values. Freud believed that identification with the same-sex parent provides what psychologists now call our gender identity—our sense of being male, female, or a combination of the two. Freud presumed that our early childhood relations—especially with our parents and other caregivers—influence our developing identity, personality, and frailties.

In Freud’s view, conflicts unresolved during earlier psychosexual stages could surface as maladaptive behavior in the adult years. At any point in the oral, anal, or phallic stages, strong conflict could lock, or fixate, the person’s pleasure-seeking energies in that stage. A person who had been either orally overindulged or deprived (perhaps by abrupt, early weaning) might fixate at the oral stage. This orally fixated adult could exhibit either passive dependence (like that of a nursing infant) or an exaggerated denial of this dependence (by acting tough or uttering biting sarcasm). Or the person might continue to seek oral gratification by smoking or excessive eating. In such ways, Freud suggested, the twig of personality is bent at an early age.

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Freud’s ideas of sexuality were controversial in his own time. “Freud was called a dirty-minded pansexualist and Viennese libertine,” noted Morton Hunt, historian of psychology (2007, p. 211). Today, Freud’s ideas of Oedipal conflict and castration anxiety are disputed even by psychodynamic theorists and therapists (Shedler, 2010). Yet they are still considered an important part of the history of Western ideas.

DEFENSE MECHANISMS

13-5 How did Freud think people defended themselves against anxiety?

Anxiety, said Freud, is the price we pay for civilization. As members of social groups, we must control our sexual and aggressive impulses, not act them out. But sometimes the ego fears losing control of this inner id-superego war. The presumed result is a dark cloud of unfocused anxiety that leaves us feeling unsettled but unsure why.

Freud proposed that the ego protects itself with defense mechanisms—tactics that reduce or redirect anxiety by distorting reality. For Freud, all defense mechanisms function indirectly and unconsciously. Just as the body unconsciously defends itself against disease, so also does the ego unconsciously defend itself against anxiety. For example, repression banishes anxiety-arousing wishes and feelings from consciousness. According to Freud, repression underlies all the other defense mechanisms. However, because repression is often incomplete, repressed urges may appear as symbols in dreams or as slips of the tongue in casual conversation.

Freud believed he could glimpse the unconscious seeping through when a financially stressed patient, not wanting any large pills, said, “Please do not give me any bills, because I cannot swallow them.” Freud also viewed jokes as expressions of repressed sexual and aggressive tendencies, and dreams as the “royal road to the unconscious.” The remembered content of dreams (their manifest content) he believed to be a censored expression of the dreamer’s unconscious wishes (the dream’s latent content). In his dream analyses, Freud searched for patients’ inner conflicts.

TABLE 13.2 describes a sampling of six other well-known defense mechanisms.

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The Neo-Freudian and Later Psychodynamic Theorists

13-6 Which of Freud’s ideas did his followers accept or reject?

In a historical period when people never talked about sex, and certainly not conscious desires for sex with one’s parent, Freud’s writings prompted debate. “In the Middle Ages, they would have burned me,” observed Freud to a friend. “Now they are content with burning my books” (Jones, 1957). Despite the controversy, Freud attracted followers. Several young, ambitious physicians formed an inner circle around their strong-minded leader. These pioneering psychoanalysts, whom we often call neo-Freudians, adopted Freud’s interviewing technique and accepted his basic ideas: the personality structures of id, ego, and superego; the importance of the unconscious; the childhood roots of personality; and the dynamics of anxiety and the defense mechanisms. But they broke away from Freud in two important ways. First, they placed more emphasis on the conscious mind’s role in interpreting experience and in coping with the environment. And second, they doubted that sex and aggression were all-consuming motivations. Instead, they tended to emphasize loftier motives and social interactions.

Alfred Adler and Karen Horney [HORN-eye], for example, agreed with Freud that childhood is important. But they believed that childhood social, not sexual, tensions are crucial for personality formation (Ferguson, 2003). Adler (responsible for the still popular idea of the inferiority complex) had struggled to overcome childhood illnesses and accidents. He believed that much of our behavior is driven by efforts to conquer childhood inferiority feelings that trigger our strivings for superiority and power. Horney said childhood anxiety triggers our desire for love and security. She also countered Freud’s assumptions, rooted in his conservative culture, that women have weak superegos and suffer “penis envy,” and she attempted to balance his masculine bias.

Carl Jung [Yoong] started out a strong follower of Freud, but then veered off on his own. Jung placed less emphasis on social factors and agreed with Freud that the unconscious exerts a powerful influence. But to Jung, the unconscious contains more than our repressed thoughts and feelings. He believed we also have a collective unconscious, a common reservoir of images, or archetypes, derived from our species’ universal experiences. Jung said that the collective unconscious explains why, for many people, spiritual concerns are deeply rooted and why people in different cultures share certain myths and images. Most of today’s psychologists discount the idea of inherited experiences. But they do believe that our shared evolutionary history shaped some universal dispositions and that experience can leave epigenetic marks (see Chapter 2).

Freud died in 1939. Since then, some of his ideas have been incorporated into the diversity of perspectives that make up psychodynamic theory. “Most contemporary [psychodynamic] theorists and therapists are not wedded to the idea that sex is the basis of personality,” noted Drew Westen (1996). They “do not talk about ids and egos, and do not go around classifying their patients as oral, anal, or phallic characters.” What they do assume, with Freud and with much support from today’s psychological science, is that much of our mental life is unconscious. With Freud, they also assume that we often struggle with inner conflicts among our wishes, fears, and values, and that childhood shapes our personality and ways of becoming attached to others.

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Assessing Unconscious Processes

13-7 What are projective tests, how are they used, and what are some criticisms of them?

Personality tests reflect the basic ideas of particular personality theories. So, what might be the assessment tool of choice for someone working in the Freudian tradition?

Such a test would need to provide some sort of road into the unconscious—to unearth the residue of early childhood experiences, move beneath surface pretensions, and reveal hidden conflicts and impulses. Objective assessment tools, such as agree-disagree or true-false questionnaires, would be inadequate because they would merely tap the conscious surface.

Projective tests aim to provide this “psychological X-ray” by asking test-takers to describe an ambiguous stimulus or tell a story about it. The clinician may presume that any hopes, desires, and fears that people see in the ambiguous image are projections of their own inner feelings or conflicts.

Henry Murray (1933) demonstrated a possible basis for such a test at a party hosted by his 11-year-old daughter. Murray engaged the children in a frightening game called “Murder.” When shown some photographs after the game, the children perceived the photos as more malicious than they had before the game. These children, it seemed to Murray, had projected their inner feelings into the pictures.

A few years later, Murray introduced the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT)—a test in which people view ambiguous pictures then make up stories about them. One use of such storytelling has been to assess achievement motivation (Schultheiss et al., 2014). Shown a daydreaming boy, those who imagine he is fantasizing about an achievement are presumed to be projecting their own goals. “As a rule,” said Murray, “the subject leaves the test happily unaware that he has presented the psychologist with what amounts to an X-ray of his inner self” (quoted by Talbot, 1999).

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The most widely used projective test left some blots on the name of Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach [ROAR-shock; 1884-1922]. He based his famous Rorschach inkblot test, in which people describe what they see in a series of inkblots (FIGURE 13.2), on a childhood game. He and his friends would drip ink on a paper, fold it, and then say what they saw in the resulting blot (Sdorow, 2005). Do you see predatory animals or weapons? Perhaps you have aggressive tendencies. But is this a reasonable assumption? The answer varies.

Some clinicians cherish the Rorschach, even offering Rorschach-based assessments of criminals’ violence potential. Others view the test as a source of suggestive leads, an icebreaker, or a revealing interview technique.

Critics of the Rorschach insist the test is no emotional MRI. They argue that only a few of the many Rorschach-derived scores, such as those for cognitive impairment and thought disorder, have demonstrated reliability and validity (Mihura et al., 2013, 2015; Wood et al., 2015). And inkblot assessments have inaccurately diagnosed many normal adults as pathological (Wood et al., 2003, 2006, 2010).

Evaluating Freud’s Psychoanalytic Perspective and Modern Views of the Unconscious

13-8 How do contemporary psychologists view Freud’s psychoanalysis?

MODERN RESEARCH CONTRADICTS MANY OF FREUD’S IDEAS We critique Freud from a twenty-first-century perspective, a perspective that itself will be subject to revision. Freud did not have access to neurotransmitter or DNA studies, or to all that we have since learned about human development, thinking, and emotion. To criticize his theory by comparing it with today’s thinking, some say, is like criticizing Henry Ford’s Model T by comparing it with today’s hybrid cars. How tempting it always is to judge people in the past from our perspective in the present.

But both Freud’s devotees and detractors agree that recent research contradicts many of his specific ideas. Today’s developmental psychologists see our development as lifelong, not fixed in childhood. They doubt that infants’ neural networks are mature enough to sustain as much emotional trauma as Freud assumed. Some think Freud overestimated parental influence and underestimated peer influence. They also doubt that conscience and gender identity form as the child resolves the Oedipus complex at age 5 or 6. We gain our gender identity earlier, and those who become strongly masculine or feminine do so even without a same-sex parent present. And they note that Freud’s ideas about childhood sexuality arose from stories of childhood sexual abuse told by his female patients—stories that some scholars believe Freud expressed skepticism about, and attributed to his patients’ own childhood sexual wishes and conflicts (Esterson, 2001; Powell & Boer, 1994). Today, we understand how Freud’s questioning might have created false memories of abuse, and we also know that childhood sexual abuse does happen.

Modern dream research disputes Freud’s belief that dreams disguise and fulfill wishes. And slips of the tongue can be explained as competition between similar verbal choices in our memory network. Someone who says “I don’t want to do that—it’s a lot of brothel” may simply be blending bother and trouble (Foss & Hakes, 1978). Researchers find little support for Freud’s idea that defense mechanisms disguise sexual and aggressive impulses (though our cognitive gymnastics do indeed work to protect our self-esteem). History also has failed to support another of Freud’s ideas—that suppressed sexuality causes psychological disorders. From Freud’s time to ours, sexual inhibition has diminished; psychological disorders have not.

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Psychologists also criticize Freud’s theory for its scientific shortcomings. Recall from Chapter 1 that good scientific theories explain observations and offer testable hypotheses. Freud’s theory rests on few objective observations, and parts of it offer few testable hypotheses. For Freud, his own recollections and interpretations of patients’ free associations, dreams, and slips were evidence enough.

What is the most serious problem with Freud’s theory? It offers after-the-fact explanations of any characteristic (of one person’s smoking, another’s fear of horses, another’s sexual orientation) yet fails to predict such behaviors and traits. If you feel angry at your mother’s death, you illustrate his theory because “your unresolved childhood dependency needs are threatened.” If you do not feel angry, you again illustrate his theory because “you are repressing your anger.” That “is like betting on a horse after the race has been run” (Hall & Lindzey, 1978, p. 68). A good theory makes testable predictions.

So, should psychology post an “Allow Natural Death” order on this old theory? Freud’s supporters object. To criticize Freudian theory for not making testable predictions is, they say, like criticizing baseball for not being an aerobic exercise, something it was never intended to be. Freud never claimed that psychoanalysis was predictive science. He merely claimed that, looking back, psychoanalysts could find meaning in our state of mind (Rieff, 1979).

Freud’s supporters also note that some of his ideas are enduring. It was Freud who drew our attention to the unconscious and the irrational, at a time when such ideas were not popular. Today many researchers study our irrationality (Ariely, 2010). Psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his studies of our faulty decision making. Freud also drew our attention to the importance of human sexuality, and to the tension between our biological impulses and our social well-being. It was Freud who challenged ourself-righteousness, exposed our self-protective defenses, and reminded us of our potential for evil.

MODERN RESEARCH CHALLENGES THE IDEA OF REPRESSION

Psychoanalytic theory presumes that we often repress offending wishes, banishing them into the unconscious until they resurface, like long-lost books in a dusty attic. Recover and resolve childhood’s conflicted wishes, and emotional healing should follow. Repression became a widely accepted concept, used to explain hypnotic phenomena and psychological disorders. Some psychodynamic followers extended repression to explain apparently lost and recovered memories of childhood traumas (Boag, 2006; Cheit, 1998; Erdelyi, 2006). In one survey, 88 percent of university students believed that painful experiences commonly get pushed out of awareness and into the unconscious (Garry et al., 1994).

Today’s researchers agree that we sometimes spare our egos by neglecting threatening information (Green et al., 2008). Yet many contend that repression, if it ever occurs, is a rare mental response to terrible trauma. Even those who witnessed a parent’s murder or survived Nazi death camps have retained their unrepressed memories of the horror (Helmreich, 1992, 1994; Malmquist, 1986; Pennebaker, 1990). “Dozens of formal studies have yielded not a single convincing case of repression in the entire literature on trauma,” concluded personality researcher John Kihlstrom (2006).

Some researchers do believe that extreme, prolonged stress, such as the stress some severely abused children experience, might disrupt memory by damaging the hippocampus, which is important for processing conscious memories (Schacter, 1996). But the far more common reality is that high stress and associated stress hormones enhance memory. Indeed, rape, torture, and other traumatic events haunt survivors, who experience unwanted flashbacks. They are seared onto the soul. “You see the babies,” said Holocaust survivor Sally H. (1979). “You see the screaming mothers. You see hanging people. You sit and you see that face there. It’s something you don’t forget.”

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THE MODERN UNCONSCIOUS MIND

13-9 How has modern research developed our understanding of the unconscious?

Freud was right about a big idea that underlies today’s psychodynamic thinking: We indeed have limited access to all that goes on in our minds (Erdelyi, 1985, 1988, 2006; Norman, 2010). Our two-track mind has a vast out-of-sight realm. Some researchers even argue that “most of a person’s everyday life is determined by unconscious thought processes” (Bargh & Chartrand, 1999).

Yet many research psychologists now think of the unconscious not as seething passions and repressive censoring but as cooler information processing that occurs without our awareness. To these researchers, the unconscious also involves

More than we realize, we fly on autopilot. Our lives are guided by off-screen, out-of-sight, unconscious information processing. The unconscious mind is huge. However, our current understanding of unconscious information processing is more like the pre-Freudian view of an underground, unattended stream of thought from which spontaneous behavior and creative ideas surface (Bargh & Morsella, 2008).

Research also supports two of Freud’s defense mechanisms. One study demonstrated reaction formation (trading unacceptable impulses for their opposite) in men who reported strong anti-gay attitudes. Compared with those who did not report such attitudes, these men experienced greater measured erections when watching videos of homosexual men having sex, even though they said the films did not make them sexually aroused (Adams et al., 1996). Likewise, preliminary evidence suggests that people who unconsciously identify as homosexual—but who consciously identify as straight—report more negative attitudes toward gays and less support for pro-gay policies (Weinstein et al., 2012).

Freud’s projection (attributing our own threatening impulses to others) has also been confirmed. People do tend to see their traits, attitudes, and goals in others (Baumeister et al., 1998; Maner et al., 2005). Today’s researchers call this the false consensus effect—the tendency to overestimate the extent to which others share our beliefs and behaviors. People who binge-drink or break speed limits tend to think many others do the same. However, defense mechanisms seem motivated less by the sexual and aggressive undercurrents that Freud imagined than by our need to protect our self-image.

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13-10 How did humanistic psychologists view personality, and what was their goal in studying personality?

By the 1960s, some personality psychologists had become discontented with the sometimes bleak focus on drives and conflicts in psychodynamic theory, and the mechanistic psychology of B. F. Skinner’s behaviorism (see Chapter 7). In contrast to Freud’s emphasis on disorders born out of dark conflicts, these humanistic theorists focused on the ways people strive for self-determination and self-realization. In contrast to behaviorism’s scientific objectivity, they studied people through their own self-reported experiences and feelings.

Two pioneering theorists—Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) and Carl Rogers (1902–1987)—offered a third-force perspective that emphasized human potential.

Abraham Maslow’s Self-Actualizing Person

Maslow proposed that we are motivated by a hierarchy of needs (Chapter 10). If our physiological needs are met, we become concerned with personal safety; if we achieve a sense of security, we then seek to love, to be loved, and to love ourselves; with our love needs satisfied, we seek self-esteem. Having achieved self-esteem, we ultimately seek self-actualization (the process of fulfilling our potential) and self-transcendence (meaning, purpose, and communion beyond the self).

Maslow (1970) developed his ideas by studying healthy, creative people rather than troubled clinical cases. He based his description of self-actualization on a study of those, such as Abraham Lincoln, who seemed notable for their rich and productive lives. Maslow reported that such people shared certain characteristics: They were self-aware and self-accepting, open and spontaneous, loving and caring, and not paralyzed by others’ opinions. Secure in their sense of who they were, their interests were problem-centered rather than self-centered. They focused their energies on a particular task, one they often regarded as their mission in life. Most enjoyed a few deep relationships rather than many superficial ones. Many had been moved by spiritual or personal peak experiences that surpassed ordinary consciousness.

These, said Maslow, are mature adult qualities found in those who have learned enough about life to be compassionate, to have outgrown their mixed feelings toward their parents, to have found their calling, to have “acquired enough courage to be unpopular, to be unashamed about being openly virtuous.” Maslow’s work with college students led him to speculate that those likely to become self-actualizing adults were likable, caring, “privately affectionate to those of their elders who deserve it,” and “secretly uneasy about the cruelty, meanness, and mob spirit so often found in young people.”

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Carl Rogers’ Person-Centered Perspective

Fellow humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers agreed with much of Maslow’s thinking. Rogers’ person-centered perspective held that people are basically good and are, as Maslow said, endowed with self-actualizing tendencies. Unless thwarted by a growth-inhibiting environment, each of us is like an acorn, primed for growth and fulfillment. Rogers (1980) believed that a growth-promoting climate required three conditions.

Genuineness, acceptance, and empathy are, Rogers believed, the water, sun, and nutrients that enable people to grow like vigorous oak trees. For “as persons are accepted and prized, they tend to develop a more caring attitude toward themselves” (Rogers, 1980, p. 116). As persons are empathically heard, “it becomes possible for them to listen more accurately to the flow of inner experiencings.”

Writer Calvin Trillin (2006) recalled an example of parental genuineness and acceptance at a camp for children with severe disorders, where his wife, Alice, worked. L., a “magical child,” had genetic diseases that meant she had to be tube-fed and could walk only with difficulty. Alice recalled,

One day, when we were playing duck-duck-goose, I was sitting behind her and she asked me to hold her mail for her while she took her turn to be chased around the circle. It took her a while to make the circuit, and I had time to see that on top of the pile [of mail] was a note from her mom. Then I did something truly awful. . . . I simply had to know what this child’s parents could have done to make her so spectacular, to make her the most optimistic, most enthusiastic, most hopeful human being I had ever encountered. I snuck a quick look at the note, and my eyes fell on this sentence: “If God had given us all of the children in the world to choose from, L., we would only have chosen you.” Before L. got back to her place in the circle, I showed the note to Bud, who was sitting next to me. “Quick. Read this,” I whispered. “It’s the secret of life.”

Maslow and Rogers would have smiled knowingly. For them, a central feature of personality is one’s self-concept—all the thoughts and feelings we have in response to the question, “Who am I?” If our self-concept is positive, we tend to act and perceive the world positively. If it is negative—if in our own eyes we fall far short of our ideal self—said Rogers, we feel dissatisfied and unhappy. A worthwhile goal for therapists, parents, teachers, and friends is therefore, he said, to help others know, accept, and be true to themselves.

Assessing the Self

13-11 How did humanistic psychologists assess a person’s sense of self?

Humanistic psychologists sometimes assessed personality by asking people to fill out questionnaires that would evaluate their self-concept. One questionnaire, inspired by Carl Rogers, asked people to describe themselves both as they would ideally like to be and as they actually are. When the ideal and the actual self are nearly alike, said Rogers, the self-concept is positive. Assessing his clients’ personal growth during therapy, he looked for successively closer ratings of actual and ideal selves.

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Some humanistic psychologists believed that any standardized assessment of personality, even a questionnaire, is depersonalizing. Rather than forcing the person to respond to narrow categories, these humanistic psychologists presumed that interviews and intimate conversation would provide a better understanding of each person’s unique experiences. Some modern personality researchers believe our identity may be helpfully revealed using the life story approach—collecting a rich narrative detailing each person’s unique life history (McAdams & Guo, 2015).

Evaluating Humanistic Theories

13-12 How have humanistic theories influenced psychology? What criticisms have they faced?

One thing said of Freud can also be said of the humanistic psychologists: Their impact has been pervasive. Maslow’s and Rogers’ ideas have influenced counseling, education, child raising, and management. And they laid the groundwork for today’s scientific positive psychology subfield (Chapter 11).

They have also influenced—sometimes in unintended ways—much of today’s popular psychology. Is a positive self-concept the key to happiness and success? Do acceptance and empathy nurture positive feelings about ourselves? Are people basically good and capable of self-improvement? Many people answer Yes, Yes, and Yes. In 2006, U.S. high school students reported notably higher self-esteem and greater expectations of future career success than did students living in 1975 (Twenge & Campbell, 2008). Given a choice, today’s North American college students mostly say they’d rather get a self-esteem boost, such as a compliment or good grade on a paper, than enjoy a favorite food or sexual activity (Bushman et al., 2011). Humanistic psychology’s message has been heard.

The prominence of the humanistic perspective set off a backlash of criticism. First, said the critics, its concepts are vague and subjective. Consider Maslow’s description of self-actualizing people as open, spontaneous, loving, self-accepting, and productive. Is this a scientific description? Or is it merely a description of the theorist’s own values and ideals? Maslow, noted M. Brewster Smith (1978), offered impressions of his own personal heroes. Imagine another theorist who began with a different set of heroes—perhaps Napoleon, John D. Rockefeller, Sr., and Donald Trump. This theorist would likely describe self-actualizing people as “undeterred by others’ needs and opinions,” “motivated to achieve,” and “comfortable with power.”

Critics also objected to the idea that, as Rogers put it, “The only question which matters is, ‘Am I living in a way which is deeply satisfying to me, and which truly expresses me?’” (quoted by Wallach & Wallach, 1985). This emphasis on individualism—trusting and acting on one’s feelings, being true to oneself, fulfilling oneself—could lead to self-indulgence, selfishness, and an erosion of moral restraint (Campbell & Specht, 1985; Wallach & Wallach, 1983). Imagine working on a group project with people who refuse to complete any task that is not deeply satisfying or does not truly express their identity.

Humanistic psychologists have replied that a secure, nondefensive self-acceptance is actually the first step toward loving others. Indeed, people who feel intrinsically liked and accepted—for who they are, not just for their achievements—exhibit less defensive attitudes (Schimel et al., 2001). Those feeling liked and accepted by a romantic partner report being happier in their relationships and acting more kindly toward their partner (Gordon & Chen, 2010).

A final critique has been that humanistic psychology is naive, that it fails to appreciate the reality of our human capacity for evil (May, 1982). Faced with climate change, overpopulation, terrorism, and the spread of nuclear weapons, we may become apathetic from either of two rationalizations. One is a starry-eyed optimism that denies the threat (“People are basically good; everything will work out”). The other is a dark despair (“It’s hopeless; why try?”). Action requires enough realism to fuel concern and enough optimism to provide hope.

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Learning Objectives

Test Yourself by taking a moment to answer each of these Learning Objective Questions (repeated here from within the chapter). Research suggests that trying to answer these questions on your own will improve your long-term memory of the concepts (McDaniel et al., 2009).

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Terms and Concepts to Remember

Test yourself on these terms.

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Experience the Testing Effect

Test yourself repeatedly throughout your studies. This will not only help you figure out what you know and don’t know; the testing itself will help you learn and remember the information more effectively thanks to the testing effect.

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Use to create your personalized study plan, which will direct you to the resources that will help you most in .