Psychoanalysis: After the Founding

Chapter 14

Psychoanalysis: After the Founding

Abraham Maslow’s relationship with his mother deviated greatly from the Oedipal relationship Freud would have predicted. As a child, Maslow brought home two kittens and his mother immediately clobbered them to death. His father was of no help, as he was always away drinking and womanizing. In short, his childhood was a miserable experience. His mother so adversely affected him that he said that “The whole thrust of my life-philosophy…and all my research and theorizing, has its roots in a hatred for and revulsion against everything she stood for.” Maslow’s was one of the systems that rose in reaction to Freud’s psychoanalysis. Such systems began only 20 years after the founding of psychoanalysis, and were not well tolerated by Freud. These systems each differed in how they revised Freud’s original thinking.

One prominent neo-Freudian was Freud’s youngest child, Anna Freud, who became the only of his children to follow in his footsteps. She reported having an unhappy childhood, although she was her father’s favorite child. “She became interested in [her father’s] work,” and 8 years later went into analysis with him for four years (for which he was heavily criticized). Her work focused on “the development and extension of psychoanalytic theory and its application to the treatment of emotionally disturbed children.” Sigmund “took pride in Anna’s work.” One revision to Freud’s work was her redefining the “ego functioning independently of the id.”

Another branch of neo-Freudian thought was Object Relations theory, which emphasized “the social and environmental influences on personality, particularly within the mother-child interaction.” Melanie Klein, an Object Relations theorist, focused on the social and cognitive (not sexual) aspects of the mother-child relationship particularly during the first 6 months of the child’s life. She posits that the breast is the child’s first part-object and is regarded as either hostile or satisfying depending on how satisfied the id is. The mother, the child’s first whole object, is similarly regarded as good or bad. In this way, the first six months of life sets the child up for how it will interact with other objects (people) in its life.

One of the most influential of the neo-Freudians was Carl Jung, who at one time Freud called “my successor and crown prince.” Jung later developed what he called analytic psychology. Jung had an unhappy childhood with a father given to rages and an emotionally disturbed mother. He obtained an M.D. in 1900 and established his own clinical practice before becoming interested in Freud’s system. After reading The Interpretation of Dreams, Jung contacted Freud and they corresponded for a year before they finally met. A close mentorship and friendship ensued. “In 1911, at Freud’s insistence, and despite opposition from the Viennese members, Jung became the first president of the International Psychoanalytic Association.” He wrote The Psychology of the Unconscious (1912), which established differences between his and Freud’s systems. That same year they terminated their personal correspondence, and in 1914 Jung resigned from the association.

One of the major differences between Jung’s analytic theory and Freud’s psychoanalysis is that Jung dismissed the importance Freud placed on sex. Some theorists believe that this is because Jung had a normal sex life while Freud had many insecurities concerning sex. In addition, Jung broadened the definition of libido to refer to life energy, not just in terms of sexual energy. Furthermore, for Jung, “personality was not fully determined by experiences during the first five years of childhood but could be changed throughout one’s lifetime.” Lastly, Jung added “a new dimension” to the unconscious, which he called the collective unconscious.

According to Jung, we have a personal unconscious and a collective unconscious. The personal unconscious contains “memories, impulses, wishes, faint perceptions, and other experiences in a person’s life that have been suppressed or forgotten.” The collective unconscious “contains inherited experiences of human and prehuman species.”

Within the collective unconscious are “inherited tendencies called archetypes…that dispose a person to behave not unlike ancestors who confronted similar situations.” Jung developed these by investigating and finding similar myths and symbols across cultures. The four most frequently occurring archetypes are the persona (the mask we present to others), anima/animus (characteristics of the opposite sex), shadow (a dark, animalistic part), and—most importantly—the self (the balance we strike within our unconscious).

Jung’s theory of personality involves the concepts of introversion (contemplative and introspective) and extraversion (sociable and confident in social situations). Other personality types he developed were thinking (“provides meaning and understanding”), feeling (“weighing and valuing”), sensing (“perception of physical objects”), and intuiting (“perceiving in an unconscious way”).

Although Jung’s system “influenced such diverse fields as religion, history, art, and literature,” it has been largely ignored by experimental psychology. Strong evidence has resulted from testing Jung’s theories empirically and created of the word-association test , the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and the Maudsley Personality Inventory. Thus, the “concepts of introversion and extraversion are widely accepted in psychology today.”

Around the turn of the century, social sciences like sociology and anthropology were emerging, emphasizing the thorough influence of social environments on human personality and behavior. This American Zeitgeist applied pressure on Freud’s tradition system and inspired younger psychoanalysts, like Alfred Adler and Karen Horney, to make revisions.

Alfred Adler had a “childhood…marked by illness, jealousy of an older brother, and rejection by his mother.” At both home and school, his childhood was marked by feelings of inferiority. He received his M.D. in 1895 and practiced medicine. In 1902 he joined Freud’s “weekly discussion groups” and later began to form his own personality theory. A rift began between them and they broke off with acrimony in 1911. He named his system individual psychology, which soon became popular in America.

Adler’s system differed from Freud’s in several ways. “Adler believed that human behavior is determined largely by social forces, not biological instincts.” Adler also thought that Freud put too much emphasis on the importance of sex, and instead focused more on conscious (rather than unconscious) processes. Furthermore, Adler saw personality as being unified and motivated by “an overriding goal…[of reaching] perfection.” Finally, “Adler argued that there was no biological reason, such as Freud’s concept of penis envy, for any alleged sense of inferiority women might feel,” and such feelings were driven instead by inequitable social forces.

Adler believed that a feeling of inferiority was the universal motivating force for humans, which leads us to compensate by overcoming obstacles. If we cannot overcome obstacles, we form “an inferiority complex, which renders the person incapable of coping with life’s problems.” Although our goal of perfection is universal, how we strive for the goal is not. Adler calls these differences the style of life, which become fixed by age 4 or 5. Adler believed that we have “creative power of the self” in which we shape our own destiny.

One social variable Adler became interested in is the effect of birth order on personality development. He believed that oldest, middle, and youngest children have different social environments, which in turn produce different personality traits. Oldest children become dethroned when the second and subsequent children are born and they become “insecure and hostile.” Middle children, he believed, would be “ambitious, rebellious, and jealous.” Youngest children “were likely to be spoiled and predisposed toward behavior problems.”

Because Adler’s system is more optimistic than Freud’s it was “warmly received by scholars.” However, critics contested that Adler’s system was too simple. In addition, criticisms about how Freud collected data from his patients also applies to Alder. Some of Adler’s system has received empirical support, particularly research on birth order.

Karen Horney also made changes to Freud’s system. She, like many other psychoanalysts before her, had an unhappy childhood. Horney spent her adolescence in a “frantic search for the love and acceptance she lacked at home.” She obtained her M.D. in 1913, “married, gave birth to three daughters…and became increasingly depressed.” She had several affairs and eventually divorced her husband. She underwent Freudian analysis, but it did not help her so she engaged in a self-analysis. Eventually she became formally trained in psychoanalysis, came to the United States in 1932, became disillusioned with Freudian psychoanalysis, and founded her own institute.

“Horney disputed Freud’s view that personality depends on unchanging biological forces. She denied the preeminence of sexual factors, challenged the validity of the Oedipal theory, and discarded the concepts of libido and the three-part structure of personality. However, she did accept unconscious motivation and the existence of emotional, non-rational motives. Counter to Freud’s belief that women are motivated by penis envy, Horney argued that men are motivated by womb envy: jealousy of women for their ability to give birth.” These ideas were the foundations for the women’s rights movement and for feminist psychology.

Horney founded the concept of basic anxiety, which is the result of social and environmental forces in a person’s childhood. Basic anxiety is a result of unfulfilling relationships with parents or caregivers. It may lead to three personality types that attempt to deal with the anxiety: the compliant personality (seeks approval, affection), the detached personality (seeks independence, perfection), and the aggressive personality (seeks power, exploitation). Horney believed that neurotic individuals had “a false picture of the personality or self” which she called the idealized self-image. However, Horney’s system is optimistic in proposing that these personality types are not universal or inevitable. They can be prevented by parental warmth, loving, and caring in childhood.

Horney’s system, like Adler’s, was praised for its optimism (in contrast to Freud’s determinism). Similar to Adler and Freud, Horney built her system based on her clinical observations, which were subject to the same criticisms of validity and reliability. Her work received renewed attention with the women’s movement, and indeed Horney was the first to write about a “feminine psychology” in 1922.

In the 1960’s a new school of thought in psychology, called humanism rose in opposition to the two prevailing schools: psychoanalysis and behaviorism, both of which were deemed mechanistic and dehumanizing. “Humanistic psychology emphasized human strengths and positive aspirations, conscious experience, free will (rather than determinism), the fulfillment of human potential, and a belief in the wholeness of human nature.” Some of the foundation of humanism was provided by Brentano and Külpe, and to some extent James and the Gestalt psychologists. Humanism grew out of the Zeitgeist of the 1960’s, which included a focus on pleasure and hedonism and a protest against mechanism and materialism. Two humanist psychologists that this chapter focused on are Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers.

Maslow had an unhappy childhood, but received his Ph.D. in psychology in 1934. He began his professional career as a Watsonian behaviorist, but became disenchanted with what he saw as behaviorism’s limitations. After World War II began, he was motivated to study “models of the best of human nature,” and believed that “people are capable of more noble behaviors than hatred, prejudice, and war.” Using these ideas, Maslow examined a small sample of individuals whom he believed achieved the highest level of self-actualization, in order to determine what differentiated them from the normal population. His new idea had difficulty being taken seriously by colleagues and getting published (behaviorism was still at its peak), but he was eventually recognized and “was elected president of the APA” in 1967.

Maslow believed that we all were capable of self-actualization, the highest state in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. However, before one is capable of self-actualization, the needs in the lower part of the hierarchy must be satisfied (including physiological, safety, belongingness, and esteem from others).

To achieve self-actualization, one needs to have a supportive and loving childhood, and the two basic needs must be satisfied within the first two years of life. According to Maslow, people who reach self-actualization “are almost always middle-aged or older and account for less than 1% of the population.” The authors include an excerpt from Maslow’s Motivation and Personality (1970) in which he elaborates on 3 of the 11 hallmarks of self-actualized individuals: a continued freshness of appreciation for the things around them, peak experiences, and social interest.

Maslow’s ideas have been criticized because of the small sample size he used. In his defense, Maslow said that this was because there are so few self-actualized people. His system has received some empirical support, and enthusiastic support from his followers both inside and outside psychology. It also served as the basis for positive psychology.

Another humanist, Carl Rogers, is best known for his person-centered therapy techniques. Rogers grew up in a house with very restrictive rules. The lonely boy was jealous of his older brother and turned to reading “incessantly.” At the age of 22, while attending a Christian student conference in China, “he finally freed himself from his parents’ fundamentalist code and adopted a more liberal philosophy of life.” He “received his Ph.D. in clinical and educational psychology in 1931” and later worked as a clinician for college students.

For Rogers, all people strive toward self-actualization, but this can be hindered if a person did not receive unconditional positive regard from his or her mother in childhood. Conditional positive regard can pose problems, because children internalize the conditions of worth and grow to fear rejection. The best case scenario for psychological health is unconditional positive regard. The idea of the fully-functioning person is similar to Maslow’s self-actualized person (which Rogers acknowledged). Rogers’ person-centered therapy was developed just as veterans were returning from World War II and needed clinical therapy. He was elected president of APA in 1946 and won numerous awards.

“The humanistic psychology movement became formalized with its own journal, association, and division of the APA. The Journal of Humanistic Psychology began in 1961, the American Association for Humanistic Psychology in 1962, and the Division of Humanistic Psychology of the APA in 1971. The Humanistic Psychologist became the division’s official journal in 1989, and in 1986 the humanistic psychology archive was established at the University of California at Santa Barbara.” However, even humanists believe that humanism never fully formed as a school of psychology because it was never accepted into mainstream psychology. This might be because humanists largely worked in clinical settings rather than academic institutions. This might also be because by the time humanism rose against psychoanalysis and behaviorism, those two schools had begun to lose power; humanism had no school against which to revolt. Despite this, it has had an impact on contemporary psychology with the current positive psychology movement.