THEORIES OF PERSONALITY

PSYCHODYNAMIC THEORIES – SACMEEKHA

Proponent Theory Key Terms/Ideas

Sigmund Freud Psychoanalytic Theory Sex and Aggression;

Uncosncious; Id, Ego,
Superego; Oedipus Complex

Alfred Adler Individual Psychology Organ Inferiority; Striving

Forces; Creative Power;
Organ Dialect

Carl Jung Analytical Psychology Levels of Psyche;

Archetypes; Introversion and
Extraversion

Melanie Klein Object Relation Psychology Good and Bad Breast

Erik Erikson Post-Freudian Psychology Self-identity; Psychosocial

stage; Basic strength &
Psychological crisis

Erich Fromm Humanistic Psychoanalysis Existential dichotomies;

Transcendence; Frame of
orientation; Burden of
freedom

Karen Horneye Psychoanalytic Social Theory Neurotic Needs; Neurotic

Trends; Basic Anxiety; Basic
Hostility

Harry Sullivan Interpersonal Theory Humans have no personality;

Levels of cognition;
Dynamisms; Personifications

HUMANISTIC EXISTENTIAL THEORIES – CAR

Proponent Theory Key Terms/Ideas

Carl Rogers Person-Centered Theory Unconditional Positive

Regard; Conditions of worth;
Empathic Listening

Abraham Maslow Holistic Dynamic Theory Hierarchy of needs; B-values

Rollo May Existential Psychology Existence; Being-in-the

 world; Nonbeing; Care, Love,
Will; Freedom & Destiny

BIOLOGICAL-TRAIT-DISPOSITIONAL THEORIES – GRPRH

Proponent Theory Key Terms/Ideas

Gordon Allport Psychology of the Individual

Robert Mccrae & Paul Costa Five-factor Trait Theory

Raymond Catell 16 Personality Continuum

Hans Eysenck Biologically Based Factor

Theory

OTHER THEORIES – HD
Proponent Theory Key Terms/Ideas

Henry Murray Personology

David Buss Evolutionary Theory of

Personality

LEARNING/COGNITIVE THEORIES – BARMiKe

Proponent Theory Key Terms/Ideas

B.F. Skinner Behavioral Analysis

Albert Bandura Social Cognitive Theories

Julian Rotter & Walter Cognitive Social Learning

Mischel Theories

George Kelly Psychology of Personal

Conduct
 THEORIES OF PERSONALITY | HOLISTIC-DYNAMIC THEORY

● Proponent: Abraham Harold Maslow (Abe)

● Assumption:
○ Whole person is constantly being motivated by one need or another and that
people have the potential to grow toward psychological health – self-actualization
○ To attain self-actualization, people must satisfy lower level needs
● Concepts:
○ 5 views of motivation
■ Holistic approach of motivation (whole person is motivated)
■ Motivation is usually complex
■ People are continually motivated by one need or another
■ All people everywhere are motivated by the same basic needs
■ Needs can be arranged on a hierarchy
○ Hierarchy of needs
■ This concept assumes that lower level needs must be satisfied at at least
relatively satisfied before higher needs become motivators
■ 5 needs = conative needs
■ Physiological – only needs that can be completely or overly satisfied;
recurring
■ Safety – can not be overly satisfied
■ Love & Belongingness
■ Esteem – reputation & self-esteem
■ Self-actualization – realization of all one’s potential
○ Other categories of needs
■ Aesthetic needs – beauty & aesthetically pleasing experiences; not
universal
■ Cognitive needs – when this need is blocked, all needs are threatened
■ Neurotic needs – leads to stagnation & pathology; non-productive
○ Self-actualization
■ Criterias
● They were free from pathology
● Had progressed through the hierarchy of needs
● Embracing the B-values
● Fulfilled their needs to grow, to develop, and to increasingly
become what they were capable of becoming
○ B-values
■ Meta needs (ultimate level of needs)
■ Effortless
 ■ Humor
■ Autonomy
■ Truth
■ Goodness
■ Beauty
■ Wholeness
■ Aliveness
■ Uniqueness
■ Perfection
■ Completion
■ Justice
■ Simplicity
■ Totality
○ Characteristics of self-actualizing people
■ More efficient perception of reality
■ Acceptance of self, others, and nature
■ Spontaneity , Simplicity, & Naturalness
■ Problem-centering
■ Need for privacy
■ Autonomy
■ Continued freshness of appreciation
■ Peak experience
■ Gemeinschaftsgefühl
■ Profound interpersonal relations
■ Democratic character structure
■ Discrimination between means and ends
■ Philosophical sense of humor
■ Creativeness
■ Resistance to enculturation
○ Jonah complex
■ Fear of being one’s best; attempts to run away from one’s destiny
○ Psychotherapy
■ Aim of therapy would be for clients to embrace B-values

THEORIES OF PERSONALITY | PERSON-CENTERED THEORY

● Proponent: Carl Rogers

● Assumption:
○ Formative Tendency
 ■ Tendency for all matter, both inorganic & organic, to evolve from simpler
to more complex forms
○ Actualizing Tendency
■ Interrelated and more pertinent assumption
■ Tendency within all humans to move toward complexion or fulfillment of
potentials
■ Only motive people possess
○ Need for maintenance
■ Tendency to resist change and to seek status quo
○ Enhancement
■ Willing to learn and to change
○ Other animals and even plants have an inherent tendency to grow toward reaching
their genetic potential – provided certain conditions are presented
○ Having a partner who possesses congruence, empathy, and unconditional positive
regard does not cause people to move toward constructive personal change; it
does permit them to actualize their innate tendency toward self-fulfillment
● Concepts:
○ The self & self-actualization
■ Infants begin to develop a vague concept of self when a portion of their
experience becomes personalized & differentiated in awareness as “I” or
“me” experiences
■ Self actualization
● Subset of the actualization tendency & is therefore are not
synonymous with it
● Actualization tendency refers to the organismic experiences of the
individual
● Organism + Perceived self (in harmony) = 2 actualization
tendencies are nearly identical
● Organism + Perceived self (not in harmony) = discrepancy
● 2 self subsystems; self-concept & ideal self
○ Awareness
■ Self-concept and ideal self will not exist without this
■ Symbolic representation of some portion of our experiences
○ Denial of positive experiences
■ It is not only the negative or derogatory experiences that are distorted or
denied to awareness
■ Many people have difficulty accepting genuine compliments and positive
feedback, even when deserved
○ Becoming a person
 ■ An individual must make contact – positive or negative – with another
person
■ Positive regard – the person develops a need to be loved, liked, or
accepted by another person
■ Positive self-regard – experience of prizing or valuing one’s self
○ Barriers of Psychological Health
■ Conditions of worth –
● valued/accepted just when meeting people’s expectations and
approval
■ Incongruence
● failure to recognize organismic experiences as self-experiences; do
not accurately symbolize organismic experiences into awareness
because they appear to be inconsistent with emerging self-concept
● Vulnerability – greater incongruence = more vulnerable; behave in
ways that are incomprehensible not only to others but also to
themselves
● Anxiety & Threat
○ Anxiety – state of uneasiness or tension whose cause is
unknown
○ Threat – awareness that our self is no longer whole or
congruent
■ Defensiveness
● Protection of the self-concept against anxiety and threat by denial
or distortion of experiences inconsistent with it
● Distortion – misinterpret an experience in order to fit it into some
aspect of our self-concept
● Denial – refuse to perceive an experience in awareness
■ Disorganization
● Failed defenses and behavior that becomes disorganized and
psychotic
● People sometimes behave consistently with their organismic
experience & sometimes in accordance with their shattered
self-concept
○ Psychotherapy
■ Client-centered therapy
■ Rogerian therapy can be viewed in terms of conditions, process, and
outcomes
■ Counselor/therapist must be congruent, provides an atmosphere or
unconditional acceptance and accurate empathy
● Unconditional positive regard
 ○ Need to be liked, prized, or accepted by another person
exists without any condition or qualification
○ Warm, positive, and accepting attitude
● Empathic listening
○ Therapist accurately sense the feelings of their clients and
are able to communicate these perceptions so that clients
know that another person has entered their world
○ Empathy is not equal to sympathy
○ The person of tomorrow
■ Fully functioning person
■ More adaptable
■ Open to their experiences
■ Tendency to live fully in the moment
■ Would remain confident of their own ability to experience harmonious
relation with others
■ More integrated, more whole, with no artificial boundary between
conscious and unconscious processes
■ Basic trust of human nature
■ Would enjoy a greater richness in life that do other people

THEORIES OF PERSONALITY | EXISTENTIAL PSYCHOLOGY

● Proponent: Rollo Reese May

● Assumption:
○ Modern people frequently run away both from making choices and from
assuming responsibility
● Concepts:
○ Existentialism
■ Existence takes precedence over essence
■ Existence
● To emerge or to become
● Suggests process
● Growth and change
● People’s essence is their power to continually redefine themselves
through the choices they make
■ Essence
● Implies a static immutable substance
● Refers to a product
● Stagnation & finality
 ● Sought to understand the essential composition of things &
humans
■ Opposes the split between subject and object
■ People search for some meaning to their lives
■ Hold that ultimately each of s is responsible for who we are and what we
become
■ Basically anti-theoretical
○ Being-in-the-world
■ “Dasein” (to exist there)
■ No sense of dasein= no unity of self & world
■ Feeling of isolation & alienation of the self from the world is suffered not
only by pathologically disturbed individuals but also by most individuals
in modern society
■ Alienation is the illness of our time – separation from nature, lack of
meaningful interpersonal relations, alienation from one;s authentic self
■ Umwelt
● Environment around us
■ Mitwelt
● Relations with other people
■ Eigenwelt
● Relationship with oneself
○ Non-being
■ Dread of not being; nothingness
■ Death
○ Anxiety
■ Neurotic anxiety – behaving in a non-productive and self-defeating
manner
■ Much of human behavior is motivated by an underlying sense of dread and
anxiety
■ A threat to some important value
■ Normal anxiety – does not involve repression and can be confronted
constructively on the conscious level
○ Guilt
■ Arises when people deny their potentialities, fail to accurately perceive the
needs of fellow humans, or remain oblivious to their dependence on the
natural world
■ Nature of being and not to feelings arising from specific situations or
transgressions
■ Separation guilt
● Umwelt
 ● Separation from nature
■ Mitwelt
● Inability to perceive accurately the world of others
■ Eigenwelt
● Denial of our own potentialities or with our failure to fulfill them
■ Positive ontological guilt = develop a healthy sense of humility
■ Refuse to accept ontological guilt = neurotic/morbid
○ Intentionality
■ Structure that gives meaning to experience and allows people to make
decisions about the future
■ Action implies intentionality & vice versa
○ Care, Love, Will
■ Care – active process that suggest that things matter; source of love
■ Love – to care, to delight in the presence of another partner and to affirm
that person’s value as much as one’s own
■ Will – conscious commitment to action; care is the source of will
○ Union of love & will
■ May believed that our modern society has lost sight of the true nature of
love and will, equating love with sex and will with will power
■ Psychologically healthy people are able to combine love and will because
both imply care, choice, action, and responsibility
○ Forms of love
■ Sex – manipulating organs; desire to experience pleasure
■ Eros – making love; union with loved one; built on tenderness and care
■ Philia – intimate nonsexual friendship between two people
■ Agape – needed by Philia; esteem for the other
■ Healthy adult relationship blend all 4 forms of love
○ Freedom and destiny
■ Healthy individuals are able to both to assume their freedom and to face
their destiny
■ Freedom – capacity to know that we are the determined one
● Existential freedom – freedom of action/doing
● Essential freedom – freedom of being/inner freedom
■ Destiny – design of the universe speaking through the design of each one
of us
● Ultimate destiny = death
○ Power of myth
■ Myths are not falsehood; rather, they are conscious and unconscious belief
systems that provide explanation for personal and social problems
■ Myths are stories that unify a society
○ Psychopathology
■ Principal ingredients – alienation,, apathy, emptiness
■ Lack of connectedness and an ability to fulfill one;s destiny
○ Psychotherapy
■ The goal of may’s psychotherapy was not to cure patients of any specific
disorder, but to make them more fully human; to set people free, allow
them to make choices, and to assume responsibility for those choices