OBJECTIVES

After the discussion, the students

should be able to:
1. Describe the different trait theories of
personality.
2. Discuss the Maslows hierarchy of
needs.
3. Explain the concepts of Sigmund
Freuds theory on psychosexual
development, transference and
trauma.
4. Differentiate the different models of

CARL JUNGS TRAIT

THEORIES OF
PERSONALITY
Communication
and
Interpersonal Skills Exercise

Trait
is what we call a characteristic way in
which an individual perceives, feels,
believes, or acts.
Psychologists, especially personologists,
are very interested in traits. They are
especially interested in finding which traits
are broad and possibly genetically
based, as opposed to ones that are rather
peculiar and can change easily.

Carl Jung
a colleague of Sigmund Freud, was
never completely sold on Freud's
ideas, and soon left his circle to
develop his own theory.
one aspect of the theory concerned
traits that Jung felt were inborn.
These inborn, genetically determined
traits are usually called
temperaments.

Later, two students of Jung's theory named

Myers and Briggs - mother and daughter developed a personality test based on
Jung's temperaments called the MyersBriggs Type Inventory, or MBTI.
It has become the most famous personality
test of all time.

The traits are seen as

OPPOSITES, and the first
set is introversion and
extraversion.

INTROVERSION
refers to a tendency
to prefer the world
inside oneself. The
more obvious
aspects of
introversion are
shyness, a distaste
for social functions,
and a love of privacy.

EXTRAVERSION
the tendency to look to the
outside world, especially
people, for one's pleasures.
Extraverts are usually
outgoing and they enjoy
social activities, but they
don't like to be alone.

The majority of people in the world are

extraverts, so introverts often feel a
bit out of it. A society like ours is
very pro-extravert, even to the point
of seeing introversion as abnormal
and shy people in need of therapy!
There are some cultures, however,
that see extraverts as the oddballs.
It was Jung who first used the terms
introversion and extraversion!

Jung believed that introversionextraversion was either-or. You are

born one or the other and remain
that way for the rest of your life.
Now you could, as an introvert, learn
to behave more like an extravert, or,
as an extravert, learn to behave
more like an introvert. But you can't
really switch.

2nd set is the contrast

between sensing people
and intuiting people

SENSING TYPES
get all their information about life from
their senses. They tend to be
realistic, down-to-earth people, but
they tend to see everything in rather
simplistic, concrete, black-or-white
terms.

INTUITING TYPES
tend to get their information from intuition.
This means that they tend to be a little
out of touch with the more solid aspects
of reality - a little "flakey", you might say
- but may see "the big picture" behind the
details better. Intuiting people are often
artistic and can be rather philosophical.

Again, the majority of people are sensing, and that can make intuiters
feel rather lonely and under-appreciated. Our society tends to be
distrustful of dreamers, artists, and intellectuals - but other societies
may be more appreciative.

3rd set is the contrast

between thinkers and
feelers

THINKERS
make their decisions on
the basis of thinking reasoning, logic, stepby-step problem solving.
This works very well for
physical problems, but
can leave something to
be desired when dealing
with something as
complex as people.

FEELERS
make their decisions based on their
feelings. While this doesn't work so
well when trying to fix you car or
your computer, feelings are a kind of
intuition that works very well when
dealing with people.

Half of all people are thinking and

half are feeling, but the
proportions differ when we start
looking at gender: The majority of
men are thinkers and the majority
of women are feelers. This goes
along well with old stereotypes as
well as recent research: Men tend
to do better with step-by-step
problem solving, especially
involving mechanical things;
Women tend to do better in social
situations.

Last set is the contrast

between judging and

JUDGING TYPE
tend to be more like Freud's anal
retentive types - neat, orderly,
hardworking, always on time,
scheduling things very carefully.

PERCEIVING TYPES
are more spontaneous. They prefer to
do things as the spirit moves them.
They are probably more fun than the
judging types but, as you can
imagine, they tend not to get things
done.

HIERARCHY OF NEEDS

Psychologist
Abraham Maslow first
introduced his
concept of a
hierarchy of needs in
his 1943 paper "A
Theory of Human
Motivation" and his
subsequent book
Motivation and
This hierarchy suggests that
people
Personality.

are motivated to fulfill basic needs

before moving on to other, more
advanced needs.

This hierarchy is most often displayed as a

pyramid. The lowest levels of the pyramid are
made up of the most basic needs, while the more
complex needs are located at the top of the
pyramid. Needs at the bottom of the pyramid are
basic physical requirements including the need for
food, water, sleep, and warmth. Once these lowerlevel needs have been met, people can move on to
the next level of needs, which are for safety and
security.
As people progress up the pyramid, needs become
increasingly psychological and social. Soon, the
need for love, friendship, and intimacy become
important. Further up the pyramid, the need for
personal esteem and feelings of accomplishment
take priority. Maslow emphasized the importance of
self-actualization, which is a process of growing and
developing as a person in order to achieve individual

Gird yourself for a mortifying tale of techno treachery, friends.

Girded?
Ok. In my weekly perusal of Facebook friends friends to see
who I might be missing being friends with (its an orgy of
friendship up in here), I came across an ex-coworker who I just
adore. Weve been Facebook friends forever, since that first
blissful wave of friendings back in the 1980s. I thought I shall
be sociable and leave him a wall howdy!, and scrolled through
my friend list to find him. How nice of me, spreading wall
sunshine. Scroll scroll. Wait. What the heck. He. Wasnt. There.
Like dropping your laptop in the bathtub (both personally
dismaying and electrically imprudent), a cold shock of disbelief
rippled through my being. It appeared, I cringed, that I had
been UNFRIENDED.
Ouch.
Now, I could have assimilated the sting of rejection and got on
with my life had this been your run of the mill Facebook-friendyou-dont-really-know-but-they-know-your-other-friend-and-youmet-them-once-outside-Starbucks kind of thing, but this was an
actual capital-F Friend. Someone I like! Someone whose

Last 2009, the New Oxford American

Dictionary announced unfriend
as the 2009 Word of the Year.

SIGMUND FREUD
Although Freud's main concern
was with "sexual desire," he
understood desire in terms of
formative drives, instincts, and
appetites
that
"naturally"
determined one's behaviors
and beliefs, even as we
continually
repress
those
behaviors
andthe
beliefs.
Freud established a rigid
model for
"normal" sexual
The libido is a component of the id. Freud
development of the human subject, what he terms the
believed
that theHere,
id was
partstory,
of as
"libido
development."
then,the
is your
told
by Freud, made
with theup
ages
provided
as very rough
personality
of all
the energy
that
approximations since Freud often changed his mind
works to satisfy basic survival and sexual
about the actual dates of the various stages and also
acknowledged that needs.
development varied between

0-2 years of age

Early in your development, all of your desires were
oriented towards your lips and your mouth, which
accepted food, milk, and anything else you could
get your hands on (the oral phase). The first
object of this stage was, of course, the mother's
breast, which could be transferred to auto-erotic
objects (thumb-sucking). The mother thus logically
became your first "love-object," already a
displacement from the earlier object of desire (the
breast). When you first recognized the fact of your
father, you dealt with him by identifying yourself
with him; however, as the sexual wishes directed
to your mother grew in intensity, you became
possessive of your mother and secretly wished

The term Oedipus complex denotes

the emotions and ideas that the mind
keeps in the unconscious, via dynamic
repression, that concentrate upon a
child's desire to sexually possess
his/her mother, and kill his/her father.
Freud believed that the Oedipus
complex is a desire for the mother in
both sexes (he believed that girls have
a homosexual attraction towards their
mother).
In order to resolve the Oedipus
complex, the child must learn to

2-4 years of age

Following the oral phase, you entered the
sadistic-anal phase, which is split between
active and passive impulses: the impulse to
mastery on the one hand, which can easily
become cruelty; the impulse to scopophilia
(love of gazing), on the other hand.
According to Freud, the child's pleasure in
defecation is connected to his or her
pleasure in creating something of his or her
own, a pleasure that for women is later
transferred to child-bearing.

4-7 years of age

The phallic phase, when the penis (or the
clitoris, which, according to Freud, stands
for the penis in the young girl) become
your primary object-cathexis. In this stage,
the child becomes fascinated with
urination, which is experienced as
pleasurable, both in its expulsion and
retention.
Over this time, the child began to deal with
separation anxieties by finding symbolic
ways of representing it and thus controlling

7-12 years of age

Next followed a long "latency period"
during which the sexual development was
more or less suspended and concentrated
on repressing and sublimating the earlier
desires and thus learned to follow the
reality-principle. During this phase, it
gradually freed the child from the parents
(moving away from the mother and
reconciling with the father) or by asserting
independence (if the child responded to the
incestuous desires by becoming overly
subservient to his father). The child also

13 years of age onward

(or
from
puberty
on).
The
development over the latency
period allowed you to enter the
final genital phase. At this point,
the child learned to desire members
of the opposite sex and to fulfill the
instinct to procreate and thus
ensure the survival of the human
species.

One thing "you" have surely

noticed
is
the
decidedly
masculine bent of Freud's story
of sexual development. Indeed,
Freud
often
had
difficulty
incorporating female desire into
his theories, leading to his
famous, unanswered question:
"what does a woman want?"

Freud: On transference and

trauma
The fact of transference points to an
important fact about the nature of trauma:
the compulsion of the human psyche to
repeat traumatic events over and over again
(hence the term "repetition-compulsion").
When it came to traumatic events,
repetition-compulsion was, therefore, not so
much the libido's efforts to expend its
cathexis of sexual energy as it was an effort
to come to grips with and to accept the fact
of death, Thanatos or the death-instinct.

Freud's
stages
of
psychosexual development is
on
of
the
best
known
personality theories, but also
one of the most controversial.
Now, lets put your knowledge
of this theory to the test in this
10-question
quiz.

1. According to Freud, personality is mostly established by what age?

A. 5
B. 10
C. 15
D. 20

2. What energy did Freud believe was the driving force behind behavior?
A. Motivation
B. Stress
C. Libido
D. Drive

3. What is the period following the phallic stage called?

A. The anal stage
B. The latent stage
C. The genital stage
D. The oral stage

4. As an adult, Cassandra is uptight and extremely rigid, often unwilling to make even small adjustments in her schedule. At which stage is she
fixated?
A. Oral
B. Anal
C. Phallic
D. Genital

5. Steve struggled for years to quit smoking, but he finally succeeded. Now, he chews several packs of gum a day. At which
stage is he fixated?
A. Oral
B. Anal
C. Phallic
D. Genital

6. Which psychologist famously criticized Freud's concept of penis envy, instead suggesting that men experience womb envy?
A. Mary Whiton Calkins
B. Anna Freud
C. Melanie Klein
D. Karen Horney

7. A common criticism of Freud's theory of psychosexual development is that:

A. It is focused almost exclusively on male development
B. His theory is difficult to test scientifically
C. Freud's research methods were unscientific an non-empirical
D. All of the above

8. Freud believed that the pleasure-seeking energies of the _______ becoming focused on different areas during development.
A. Preconscious
B. Id
C. Ego
D. Superego

9. This term refers to Freud's idea that children have an unconscious desire to possess their opposite-sex parent.
A. Sublimation
B. Libido
C. Oedipus complex
D. Manifest content

10. What did Freud call the process through which children come to identify with their same-sex parent?
A. Regression
B. Suppression
C. Sublimation
D. Identification