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.

46-2 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). His early twentieth-century concepts penetrate our twenty-first-century language. Without realizing their source, we may speak of ego, repression, projection, complex (as in “inferiority complex”), 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. 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. Free association, he believed, would allow him to retrace that line, following a chain of thought leading into the patient’s unconscious. There, painful unconscious memories, often from childhood, could be retrieved and released.

Basic to Freud’s theory was his belief that the mind is mostly hidden (FIGURE 46.1). 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, sometimes gaining expression in disguised forms—the work we choose, the beliefs we hold, our daily habits, our troubling symptoms.

Personality Structure

46-3 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 46.1).

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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 (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.

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. It 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 Jane feels sexually attracted to John, she may satisfy both id and superego by joining a volunteer organization that John attends regularly.

Personality Development

46-4 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 46.1). Each stage offers its own challenges, which Freud saw as conflicting tendencies.

Freud believed that during the phallic stage, for example, boys seek genital stimulation. They also 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.

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Children eventually cope with the threatening feelings, said Freud, by repressing them and by identifying with (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 provided 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 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.

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

Defense Mechanisms

46-5 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.” (Similarly, sex-related slips of the tongue increased among men sitting next to an attractive young woman rather than a middle-aged man [saying bare shoulders instead of share boulders; Motley & Baars, 1979].) 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 46.2 describes a sampling of six other well-known defense mechanisms.

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46-6 Which of Freud’s ideas did his followers accept or reject?

In a historical period when people never talked about sex, and certainly not unconscious desires for sex with one’s parent, Freud’s writings prompted considerable 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 Freud’s 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 off 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 (who proposed 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.

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Carl Jung started out a strong follower of Freud, but then he 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 [Yoong], 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 psychodynamic psychologists and other psychological theorists discount the idea of inherited experiences, but do believe that our shared evolutionary history shaped some universal dispositions. They are also aware that experience can leave epigenetic marks.

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.

46-7 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. Such tools, useful to those who study personality or provide therapy, are tailored to test specific theories. So, what might be the assessment tool of choice for someone working in the Freudian tradition?

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Such a test would need to provide some sort of road into the unconscious, to unearth the residue of early childhood experiences, to 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 and 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).

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 46.2), 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 to judges Rorschach-based assessments of criminals’ violence potential. Others view the test as a source of suggestive leads, an icebreaker, and a revealing interview technique. The Society for Personality Assessment (2005) commends “its responsible use” (which would not include inferring past childhood sexual abuse). And—in response to past criticisms of test scoring and interpretation (Sechrest et al., 1998)—a research-based, computer-aided tool has been designed to improve agreement among raters and enhance the test’s validity (Erdberg, 1990; Exner, 2003).

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But the evidence is insufficient to its revilers, who insist the Rorschach is no emotional MRI. They argue that only a few of the many Rorschach-derived scores, such as ones for hostility and anxiety, have demonstrated validity (Wood, 2006). Moreover, they say, these tests are not reliable. Inkblot assessments diagnose many normal adults as pathological (Mihura et al., 2013; Wood et al., 2003, 2006, 2010). Alternative projective assessment techniques fare little better. “Even seasoned professionals can be fooled by their intuitions and their faith in tools that lack strong evidence of effectiveness,” warned Scott Lilienfeld, James Wood, and Howard Garb (2001). “When a substantial body of research demonstrates that old intuitions are wrong, it is time to adopt new ways of thinking.”

46-8 How do contemporary psychologists view Freud’s psychoanalysis?

Modern Research Contradicts Many of Freud's IdeasWe 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 his skepticism of stories of childhood sexual abuse told by his female patients—stories that some scholars believe he attributed to their 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.

New psychological research about why we dream 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.

Psychologists also criticize Freud’s theory for its scientific shortcomings. It’s important to remember 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.

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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 our self-righteousness, exposed our self-protective defenses, and reminded us of our potential for evil.

Modern Research Challenges the Idea of RepressionPsychoanalytic 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 (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.”

The Modern Unconscious Mind

46-9 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).

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Nevertheless, 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 mind wanders, activating the brain’s “default network” (Mason et al., 2007). Unconscious processing occurs constantly. Like an enormous ocean, the unconscious mind is huge. This 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).

There is also research support for two of Freud’s defense mechanisms. For example, one study demonstrated reaction formation (trading unacceptable impulses for their opposite). Men who reported strong anti-gay attitudes, compared with those who did not report such attitudes, experienced greater physiological arousal when watching videos of homosexual men having sex (as measured with an instrument that measures bloodflow to the penis) 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 don’t work exactly as Freud supposed. They seem motivated less by the sexual and aggressive undercurrents he imagined than by our need to protect our self-image.

Finally, research has supported Freud’s idea that we unconsciously defend ourselves against anxiety. Researchers have proposed that one source of anxiety is “the terror resulting from our awareness of vulnerability and death” (Greenberg et al., 1997). Nearly 300 experiments testing terror-management theory show that thinking about one’s mortality—for example, by writing a short essay on dying and its associated emotions—provokes various terror-management defenses (Burke et al., 2010). For example, death anxiety increases aggression toward rivals and esteem for oneself (Cohen & Solomon, 2011; Koole et al., 2006).

Faced with a threatening world, people act not only to enhance their self-esteem but also to adhere more strongly to worldviews that answer questions about life’s meaning. The prospect of death promotes religious sentiments, and deep religious convictions enable people to be less defensive—less likely to rise in defense of their worldview—when reminded of death (Jonas & Fischer, 2006; Norenzayan & Hansen, 2006). Moreover, when contemplating death, people prioritize their close relationships (Cox & Arndt, 2012; Mikulincer et al., 2003). The actual death of loved ones can provoke protective responses as well. For years, I [ND] have studied the way people respond to thoughts about death (Kashdan et al., 2014). It has been fascinating, but not enough to get me off the couch. The shock of my own mother’s unexpected death, however, motivated me to start running again, and to live a healthier lifestyle (Hayasaki, 2014). Facing death can inspire us to affirm life.

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