Psychoanalytic Approaches to Personality

All 11 Terms & Definitions

Structural model (id, ego, superego)

Freud's (1923) three-agency model: Id (pleasure principle — primitive drives, entirely unconscious), Ego (reality principle — mediates between id, superego, and external reality), Superego (morality principle — internalised parental and societal standards, produces guilt when violated).

Topographic model

Freud's earlier model dividing the mind into Unconscious (repressed, inaccessible), Preconscious (accessible with effort), and Consciousness. Superseded by the structural model, which showed that defences themselves operate unconsciously.

Psychosexual stages

Freud's theory of development: Oral (0–18 months), Anal (18 months–3 years), Phallic (3–6 years, site of Oedipus/Electra complex), Latency (6 years–puberty), Genital (puberty onwards). Fixation at a stage due to under- or over-gratification shapes adult character.

Oedipus complex

In the phallic stage, the child develops (unconscious) sexual desire for the opposite-sex parent and rivalrous hostility toward the same-sex parent. Resolution through identification with the same-sex parent and internalisation of the superego. In girls, Freud controversially described an "Electra complex."

Defence mechanisms

Unconscious psychological strategies used by the ego to manage anxiety arising from conflicts between id impulses, superego demands, and reality. Anna Freud systematised 10 defences in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936). Vaillant (1977) proposed a developmental hierarchy from immature to mature.

Repression

The foundational defence: unconscious, automatic exclusion of threatening material from consciousness. The person has no awareness of the defended content or of the defensive process. Distinguished from suppression (conscious, deliberate postponement of unwanted thoughts).

Projection

Attributing one's own unacceptable impulses, feelings, or thoughts to another person. Example: a person with unconscious hostility perceives others as hostile toward them.

Collective unconscious (Jung)

Jung's concept of a layer of unconscious deeper than personal experience, shared by all humans and inherited from ancestral evolution. Contains archetypes — universal structural patterns expressed in myths, symbols, and dreams across cultures.

Archetypes (Jung)

Universal, inherited predispositions to organise experience in particular ways, expressed in cross-cultural mythological themes. Key archetypes: the Persona (public mask), Shadow (denied dark side), Anima/Animus (contrasexual aspect), and the Self (archetype of wholeness).

Inferiority complex (Adler)

Adler's proposal that the fundamental human motivation is to overcome the universal experience of childhood inferiority and helplessness. Healthy development involves channelling this striving into "social interest" (Gemeinschaftsgefühl) — contributing to community welfare.

Object relations theory

A psychoanalytic tradition (Klein, Winnicott, Bowlby) proposing that personality is structured around internalised representations of early relationships with caregivers ("objects"). Early relational templates ("internal working models") shape adult relationship patterns and psychological functioning.