Approaches to Personality — Psychodynamic, Behavioural, Cultural and Humanistic — and Its Assessment
The Post-Freudians
Freud's followers kept his interest in the unconscious and in childhood but gave less weight to sexual and aggressive drives and more to social relationships, creativity and the conscious ego.
| Theorist | Key idea |
|---|---|
| Carl Jung — analytical psychology | Besides a personal unconscious there is a collective unconscious of primordial images, or archetypes, shared by all humans — such as God or the mother earth |
| Karen Horney | Psychological problems arise from basic anxiety produced by disturbed parent–child relationships; she rejected Freud's view of women as inferior |
| Alfred Adler — individual psychology | Behaviour is purposeful and goal-directed; the drive to overcome feelings of inferiority from childhood shapes personality |
| Erich Fromm | Humans are social beings; personality reflects social orientation, and qualities such as the desire for freedom and the striving for justice and truth |
| Erik Erikson | Stressed the rational, conscious ego; development continues throughout life, and the identity crisis of adolescence is central |
The psychodynamic approach has been criticised because its theories rest largely on case studies of a small number of atypical individuals and lack a scientific basis; its concepts are hard to define and test; and it is based on a male model of personality that undervalues women's experience.
The Behavioural, Cultural and Humanistic Approaches
The behavioural approach is not interested in inner states; it rests on data from observable behaviour and sees personality as a person's pattern of responses to the environment, learned through classical conditioning, instrumental conditioning and observational learning. The structural unit of personality is the stimulus–response link. The cultural approach explains personality in terms of the group's ecology and culture: the way a people earns its living — hunting and gathering in forests, or settled agriculture — shapes how its children are raised, and so the personality traits valued and developed among them.
The humanistic approach grew partly as a reaction to Freud. Carl Rogers proposed the idea of a fully functioning person: people have a natural tendency to grow and realise their potential. Central to his theory is the self-concept. When the real self — who we think we are — is close to the ideal self — who we would like to be — we are generally happy; a wide gap between the two produces unhappiness and dissatisfaction. Self-concept develops healthily in an atmosphere of unconditional positive regard, acceptance that does not depend on meeting conditions, and this idea underlies his client-centred therapy. Abraham Maslow gave a detailed account of self-actualisation, the state in which people have developed their full potential, and studied psychologically healthy people to describe it. He arranged human needs in a hierarchy: physiological needs at the base, then safety, then belongingness and love, then esteem, and self-actualisation at the top; higher needs become pressing as lower ones are met.
Assessing Personality
Self-report measures are structured questionnaires in which people answer statements about themselves. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), developed by Hathaway and McKinley, was built as an aid to psychiatric diagnosis; its revised form, MMPI-2, has 567 statements, and in India the Jodhpur Multiphasic Personality Inventory was developed along its lines. The Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (EPQ) measures Eysenck's dimensions, and Cattell's 16PF gives a profile across sixteen factors and is used in vocational guidance as well as research. Self-reports suffer from two response biases: social desirability, the tendency to answer in a socially desirable way, and acquiescence, the tendency to agree with items irrespective of their content.
Projective techniques grew out of psychoanalytic theory. They present ambiguous stimuli — inkblots, pictures, incomplete sentences — on the assumption that a person will project unconscious motives, desires and feelings onto material that has no fixed meaning. There are no right or wrong answers, and interpreting the responses needs specialised training.
| Technique | What it uses |
|---|---|
| Rorschach Inkblot Test (Hermann Rorschach) | Ten inkblots — five black and white, two with some red ink, three in pastel colours; given in two phases, performance proper and inquiry |
| Thematic Apperception Test (Morgan and Murray) | Thirty black-and-white picture cards and one blank card; the person tells a story about each; Uma Chaudhury made an Indian adaptation |
| Rosenzweig's Picture-Frustration Study | Cartoon-like pictures of one person frustrating another; the respondent says what the frustrated person would reply — it assesses how aggression is expressed; Pareek adapted it for India |
| Sentence Completion Test | Incomplete sentences ("My father…") that the person completes, revealing attitudes and feelings |
| Draw-a-Person Test | The person draws a human figure, and then one of the opposite sex; features of the drawing are interpreted |
Behavioural analysis assesses personality from what people do and say. It uses interviews (structured or unstructured), observation of behaviour in natural settings, ratings by people who know the person well, nomination by peers, and situational tests, such as a situational stress test in which the person performs a task under stress. Ratings carry their own errors: the halo effect, letting one positive quality colour judgements of all others; middle category bias, rating everyone near the middle; and extreme response bias, rating at the ends of the scale.
Key takeaways
- Freud: conscious, preconscious and unconscious; id (pleasure principle), ego (reality principle) and superego (moral standards).
- Defences reduce anxiety by distorting reality: repression, projection, denial, reaction formation, rationalisation. Stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital.
- Jung: collective unconscious and archetypes; Horney: basic anxiety; Adler: inferiority and goals; Fromm: social orientation; Erikson: identity crisis.
- Rogers: real versus ideal self, unconditional positive regard; Maslow: hierarchy from physiological needs to self-actualisation.
- Self-report: MMPI (Hathaway and McKinley), EPQ, 16PF — prone to social desirability and acquiescence.
- Projective: Rorschach (ten inkblots), TAT (Morgan and Murray, thirty cards and a blank one), Rosenzweig P-F Study, sentence completion, draw-a-person.
Practice questions (8)
Attempt each one before opening the answer. Every explanation names the tempting wrong option as well as the right one, because that is where marks are lost.
In Freud's theory, the part of the personality that grows out of the id and seeks realistic, socially acceptable ways of satisfying its demands — operating on the reality principle — is the:
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Answer: D — Ego
The ego operates on the reality principle, mediating between the id's demands and the world. The id runs on the pleasure principle and seeks immediate gratification; the superego is the moral branch; and libido is the instinctual energy the id uses, not a structure of personality.A projective test consists of ten inkblots — five in black and white, two with some red ink and three in pastel colours — and is given in two phases. It is the:
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Answer: B — Rorschach Inkblot Test
The Rorschach Inkblot Test uses ten inkblots and is given in two phases, performance proper and inquiry. The TAT also projects, but through thirty picture cards and a blank one; the MMPI is not projective at all — it is a self-report inventory.Rohit fails his driving test after barely practising, and tells his friends that the examiner was simply strict with young drivers that day. In Freud's terms, the defence mechanism he is using is:
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Answer: C — Rationalisation
Rationalisation makes an unreasonable outcome or behaviour seem reasonable and acceptable: Rohit replaces "I did not practise" with a plausible-sounding excuse. Projection would mean attributing his own unacceptable traits to the examiner, and repression would push the failure out of awareness altogether.Match the theorist with the idea. A. Carl Jung B. Karen Horney C. Alfred Adler D. Erik Erikson — 1. Goal-directed behaviour and feelings of inferiority 2. Collective unconscious and archetypes 3. Identity crisis of adolescence 4. Basic anxiety from disturbed parent–child relationships
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Answer: A — A-2, B-4, C-1, D-3
Jung proposed the collective unconscious with its archetypes; Horney traced problems to basic anxiety arising in parent–child relationships; Adler's individual psychology centres on goals and the struggle with inferiority; and Erikson placed the identity crisis at the heart of adolescence. Pairing Horney with inferiority is the usual slip, since both she and Adler stressed childhood relationships.According to Carl Rogers, a person is likely to feel unhappy and dissatisfied when:
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Answer: B — there is a wide gap between the real self and the ideal self
For Rogers, happiness depends on how close the real self — who we think we are — is to the ideal self we would like to be; a wide gap produces unhappiness. The id and superego options import Freud's structure, and the order of needs belongs to Maslow's hierarchy, not to Rogers.Assertion (A): Projective techniques present ambiguous stimuli such as inkblots or unclear pictures. Reason (R): They assume that a person projects unconscious motives and feelings onto material that has no fixed meaning.
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Answer: A — Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A
The stimuli are deliberately ambiguous precisely because of the assumption in R: material with no fixed meaning leaves room for the person's unconscious motives and feelings to shape the response. R is the reason the techniques are built the way A describes, so it explains A rather than merely accompanying it.In Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which need lies immediately above the need for belongingness and love?
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Answer: D — Esteem
Maslow's order from the base is physiological, safety, belongingness and love, esteem, and self-actualisation, so esteem sits directly above belongingness. Self-actualisation is the trap: it is above belongingness too, but only after esteem, at the very top of the hierarchy.Consider the statements. I. The TAT consists of thirty black-and-white picture cards and one blank card. II. The MMPI was developed by Hathaway and McKinley. III. Rosenzweig's P-F Study uses cartoon-like pictures of one person frustrating another. IV. All ten Rorschach inkblots are in black and white. Which are correct?
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Answer: C — I, II and III only
I, II and III are accurate: thirty cards and a blank one in the TAT, Hathaway and McKinley for the MMPI, and frustration cartoons in Rosenzweig's study. IV is false — only five of the Rorschach inkblots are black and white, two carry some red ink and three are in pastel colours.