AP Psychology 4.4: Psychodynamic and Humanistic Theories of Personality

Sigmund Freud built the psychodynamic theory of personality on one central claim: unconscious processes drive personality. Wishes, fears and conflicts a person is not aware of shape how they act, what they feel and which patterns keep repeating in their life. Later psychodynamic theorists disagreed with Freud about many details, but they kept that claim.

Freud pictured the mind in levels of awareness. Whatever you are thinking about right now is conscious. What you are not thinking about but can call up easily, like a friend's phone number, is preconscious. The unconscious holds material you cannot bring to mind even when you try, and in this view it still pushes on behavior. That is how a person can act on a feeling and give a sincere but wrong reason for it, the way Nico blamed the shoes.

Freud called one part of personality the ego. It deals with the real world and has to manage what pushes up from below. When something threatens it, a painful fact or an urge the person cannot accept, the result is anxiety, and the ego protects itself.

Ego defense mechanisms protect the ego from threats, and they do it unconsciously. A person using one is not lying or scheming. They honestly experience the distorted version. Eight are worth knowing well:

• Denial: refusing to accept that a threatening fact is true.
• Displacement: moving a feeling from its real target to a safer one.
• Projection: seeing your own unacceptable feeling or urge in other people instead of in yourself.
• Rationalization: offering a sensible-sounding reason in place of the real, threatening one.
• Reaction formation: turning an unacceptable feeling into its opposite, often overdone.
• Regression: falling back on more childlike behavior under stress.
• Repression: pushing a threatening memory, thought or feeling out of awareness.
• Sublimation: channeling an unacceptable urge into an activity society values.

To name one, ask two questions. What is the threat? Then, what does the person do with it: refuse it, move it, hand it to someone else, explain it away, flip it, retreat from it, bury it, or put it to good use?

Deliberately choosing not to think about something is not repression, and knowingly making up an excuse is not rationalization. If the person is doing it on purpose, it is not a defense mechanism.

If personality runs on things a person cannot report, asking them directly will not reach those things. So psychodynamic psychologists assess personality with projective tests: ambiguous stimuli with no right answer, designed to probe the preconscious and unconscious mind. The idea is that people project their hidden concerns onto whatever they are shown. In the Rorschach inkblot test, a person says what they see in a series of inkblots. In the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), a person tells a story about each of several ambiguous pictures of people. A trained psychologist then interprets the answers.

Research can test some things about this and not others. It can test whether a projective test is reliable, giving similar results when it is taken twice or scored by two people, and whether its scores predict anything outside the test. Critics have long questioned how consistently these tests can be scored and how well they predict.

What research cannot do is observe the unconscious directly. And some psychodynamic explanations fit opposite results: warmth toward a rival can be called reaction formation, and coldness can be called the real feeling showing through. An explanation that fits any result cannot be put to a test it might fail. That makes a claim hard to test, which is not the same as showing it is false.

Humanistic psychology, associated above all with Carl Rogers, starts from the other direction. It sees people as basically good and looks at conscious experience in the present: how you see yourself, and who you are becoming. Two forces drive personality in this view.

The self-actualizing tendency is a built-in push to grow and to become more fully the person you could be. Nobody has to reward it. Given the right conditions, it moves people forward on its own.

Those conditions come from unconditional regard, which Rogers called unconditional positive regard: being accepted and valued as a person whatever you do, fail at or feel. It does not mean approving of every choice. A parent can be unhappy about a lie and still make it plain that the child is loved. When regard comes with conditions (warmth only after good grades, belonging only for acting tough), people learn to hide parts of themselves to keep it, and growth stalls.

Because the person is the expert on their own experience, humanistic psychologists assess personality by asking. They use interviews and questionnaires on which people describe themselves, often comparing how a person sees themselves now with how they would like to be. A large gap between the two is read as a sign that growth has stalled.