Psychoanalytic Personality Assessment

1345 Words6 Pages
Psychoanalytic Personality Assessment Tina Smigelski PSY/250 December 10, 2012 Anney Snyder Psychoanalytic Personality Assessment Psychoanalytic theories have been around for many years. There are three men who have become well known to contributing to the different psychoanalytic theories. All three of these men have theories that have similarities and differences that set them apart from each other. This paper will compare and contrast the ideas represented by the three psychoanalysts: Freud, Jung, and Adler. Freud Before Freud there was no personality psychology or any explanations for individual personality differences or traits (Friedman & Schustack, 2012). He is best known for his theories of the unconscious mind involving the mechanism of repression, his redefinition of sexual desire and his therapeutic technique of dreams in understanding the therapeutic relationship and the presumed value of dreams as a source of insight into unconscious desires. He theorized that the human mind consisted of three basic components, the id, the ego, and the superego, and these individual parts often conflict, shaping personality and if not treated, causing neurosis. He explained it as a healthy superego works much like a parent, balancing the needs of a person’s drive to pursue events which give pleasure, the id, and a person’s self-reflection which is reality based and constantly working to keep the person responsible and societally acceptable, the ego (Thompson, 2008). He viewed the psychological world as a series of tensions between selfishness and society that strived for relief. He believed these underlying tensions were sexual in nature and developed different stages for them. The first stage is the oral stage which is developed before the age of 1, in which infants are driven to satisfy their drives of hunger and thirst. The second stage is the anal
Open Document