Theorists

Theorists | Major Personality Theory | Notes from Class |
Carl Jung |     * Freud’s disciple-turned dissenter   * Placed less emphasis on social factors and agreed with Freud that the unconscious exerts a powerful influence.     * But believed that the unconscious contains more than our repressed thoughts and feelings.   * Believed that we also have a collective unconscious, a common reservoir of images derived from our species’ universal experiences.     * 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, such as mother as a symbol of nurturance. | |
Alfred Adler |     * Struggled to overcome childhood illnesses and accidents   * Said that much of our behavior is driven by efforts to conquer childhood feelings of inferiority, feelings that trigger our strivings for superiority and power.     * Proposed the still-popular idea of the “inferiority complex” | |
Karen Horney |     * Said childhood anxiety, caused by dependent child’s sense of helplessness, triggers our desire for love and security.   * Countered Freud’s assumptions that women have weak superegos and suffer “penis envy”   * Attempted to balance the bias she detected in this masculine view of psychology. | |
Gordon Allport |     * Described personality in terms of fundamental traits-people’s characteristic behaviors and conscious motives (such as the professional curiosity that actually motivated Allport to see Freud).     * Defined personality in terms of identifiable behavior patterns.   * Concerned less with explaining individual traits than with describing them. | |
Hans and Sybil Eysenck |     * Believe that we can reduce many of our normal individual variations to two or three genetically influenced dimensions, including extraversion-introversion and emotional stability-instability.     * Their Eysenck Personality Questionnaire uses these two primary personality...