Traces of psychoanalysis in

contemporary personality research

• Freud’s view on narcissism – withdrawal of energy from
objects to the self
• The lack of object boundary – you are part of mine

• Object theorists further proposed narcissism as a

developmental process; a major theme was how object
relations helped channel primary narcissism to a mature
form (e.g., self-esteem).
 Recent development in narcissism research

• The theorizing of the vulnerable (covert) and

grandiose (overt) subtypes of narcissism (Wink, 1991)

• Both subtypes share a grandiose sense of self, but the

former is also hypersensitive to social evaluation and
approval-seeking

• Ego threat hypothesis (Rhodewalt & Morf, 1998)

• Narcissists reacted aggressively after receiving negative

bogus feedback
 Object relations and attachment
• Drives are directed to people (objects) for tension reduction [e.g.
feeding]
• Experiences with important others shape the mental
representations of relationships (e.g., Oedipal complex)

• John Bowlby’s attachment behavioral system (ABS)

• Caregiver as the secure base and safe haven
• Internal working models of the self and others
• Attachment is from the cradle to the grave

• Mary Ainsworth – realizing the theory into a standardized

experiment (the strange situation)
PREDICTIONS BASED ON THE ATTACHMENT THEORY

• Hazan & Shaver (1987, 1990)

• Self-reported attachment security predicted more

positive affects (e.g. trust) and stability in adulthood
relationships

• Attachment style predicted work orientation

• Secure subjects approach their work with confidence
• Anxious-ambivalent subjects influenced by praise and fear of
rejection at work
• Avoidant subjects use work to avoid social interaction
Personality Psychology

Carl Rogers’s phenomenological theory

Three ideas of psychoanalytic theory

• Humans are controlled by unconscious forces

• Personality is determined by childhood experience

• Neurosis is the repetition of past trauma

A genuine relationship is therapeutic

In my relationships with persons I have

found that it does not help, in the long
run, to act as though I were something
that I am not

I find I am more effective when I can listen

acceptantly to myself, and can be myself
… when I accept myself as I am, then I
change

It has been my experience that persons

have a basically positive direction

Rogers (1961 pp.16-17)

Emphasis on the phenomenal field

• No absolute reality - subjective

construction of the reality

• The subjective experience is so real

that we may take it as the reality

• No one is qualified to judge the

subjective reality of another person

• Compare this with Freud’s

therapeutic approach
 The self is a conscious experience

• Many life problems are conscious,

self-relevant experiences

• embarrassment, disappointment, guilt

• Actual self, ideal self

• Self-congruence/ incongruence
 Self-Actualization is an innate motivation

• All organisms are born to grow

• From dependence to independence

• From rigidity to freedom of expression

• Such an experience is positive and satisfying

• Why do some adults fail to realize this motivation then?

 What are self-actualizing people like?
• Self-acceptance (a congruent self-concept)
• Positive relations with others (trust)
• Sense of autonomy and development
• Environmental mastery
• Openness to new experiences
• Purpose in life

• Growth is hampered when these features are lacking in life.

 ideal actual
Self-congruence

• Incongruence is unpleasant

• Aligning the ideal self to the actual self (or the other way
around)

• Inconsistency and incongruence bring problems to the self-

concept

• Defense processes [distortion, denial]

• How is it different from Freud’s theory?

 Heimpel, Wood, Marshall and Brown, 2002

• Study 3 [experiment]
• Filled in the Rosenberg SE scale, divided into HSE (N = 58) and LSE
groups (N = 58)

• Mood induction through music (positive mood vs. negative mood)

• Participants to choose whether to watch a comedy tape or not

Finding

“the vast majority of sad HSE participants (24 out of 32, 75%)
chose the comedy video over the other videos, whereas less than
half of the sad LSE participants (16 out of 34, 47%) did so.”
Heimpel, Wood, Marshall and Brown, 2002

• Self-reinforcing mechanism that sustains the negative mood of

LSE people

• Rogerian psychology suggests that this is due to the need for

consistency and congruence in the self

¤ Even though they may recognize that a comedy

will probably lift the mood, they end up
choosing those that are congruent with their
self-concept
How to assess self concepts and
their (in)congruence?
 Sample items in the California Q-sort (CQ-set)
[100 cards in total]

The evaluator [subject/ patient/ therapist] must order the Q-items into a designated
number of categories and (most important) with an assigned number of items placed
in each category. For the present version of the CQ-set, nine categories are
employed, the number of items distributed into each category being respectively, 5,
8, 12, 16, 18, 16, 12, 8, and 5. At one end of the continuum are placed the items
most characteristic of the person being described or most "salient" in describing him.
At the other end of the continuum are placed the items most uncharacteristic or most
"salient" in a negative sense in formulating the personality description.
 Most Neutral/ Most
unchara Cannot characte
cteristic Decide ristic of
of me me

(# = 5) (# = 8) (# = 12) (# = 16) (# = 18) (# = 16) (# = 12) (# = 8) (# = 5)

 PERSONALITY STRUCTURE
• The q-sort can be administered to the subject’s real self and
ideal self

• A correlation index can be calculated to see how much real

self ratings are associated with ideal self ratings [self-
congruence]

• High self-congruence reflects better psychological

adjustment and is often used to track progress in Rogerian
therapy
The Need for Positive Regard

• Why do people deny their gut feelings, distort the reality to

align with their self, and fail to realize their self-actualizing
power?

• A compelling need and a rewarding experience that distracts a

person from facing their experiences

• Conditions of worth imposed by others

• Conditions of worth imposed by the self

• You cannot make everyone loves you

Why is a genuine relationship therapeutic?

• You can listen to your true self without fearing being judged

• Parent’s unconditional positive regard is particularly important

• Unconditional positive regard is the foundation of therapy

• “It’s not your fault [to be abused by your father]; it’s okay to be angry;
it’s okay to be sad; it’s okay to be weak”

• For the first time in life, someone truly hear your frustrations without
telling you what to do

• You will figure out what to do in the end

 Good Will Hunting

• Will Hunting is a math genius who works at MIT as

a janitor. He also has a lot of emotional and
behavioral problems
• He can be “big” working in math research, as he is
invited to work under a famous MIT professor.
• He fails to treat himself and relationships genuinely
[distortion and denial]

• Is this a congruent self-concept? Who is eligible

to judge?
• Does incongruence-induced anxiety lead to
these problems? What is he trying to distort
and deny?
RESEARCH ON PARENT-CHILD RELATIONSHIPS

• What kind of relationships best support the personal

growth of children?
• Acceptant, democratic parental attitudes

• Clear behavioral guidelines and emphasis on reward rather than

punishment (e.g., loss of love, conditional positive regard)

• Self-accepting parents [the same also applies to a successful therapist –

the client cannot build up a growth-facilitating relationship with a
“fake” person]
CLIENT-CENTERED THERAPY

“It is the client who knows what hurts, what directions to go, what
problems are crucial, what experiences have been deeply buried … I
would do better to rely upon the client for the direction of movement in
the process”

• Change is brought about by the relationship built between the client

and the therapist

• The presence
EXAMPLE

“I had been working with a highly intelligent mother whose boy was
something of a hellion. The problem was clearly her early rejection of the
boy, but over many interview I could not help her to this insight. I drew
her out, I gently pulled together the evidence she had given, trying to help
her see the pattern. But we got nowhere. Finally I gave up. I told her that
it seemed that we had both tried, but we had failed… so we concluded the
interview, shook hands, and she walked to the door of the office”
EXAMPLE

“Then she turned and asked, ‘do you ever take adults for counselling
here?’ When I replied in the affirmative, she said, ‘Well then, I would like
some help.’ She came to the chair she had left and began to pour out her
despair about her marriage, her troubled relationship with her husband,
her sense of failure and confusion, all very different from the sterile ‘case
history’ she had given before. Real therapy began then, and ultimately it
was very successful.”
CLIENT-CENTERED THERAPY

• It is difficult to open up to another person, especially if we are

seriously distressed! A lot of trust is required!

• “Became a companion to my client”

• Three qualities in a successful client-therapist relationship

• Congruence or genuineness
• Unconditional positive regard
• Empathic understanding
 A humanistic perspective

• The human potential movement

• Humans are not driven by biological needs, but also
psychological needs

¤ Social structures that restrict needs

fulfillment
Abraham H. Maslow
(1908 - 1970)

Can we learn anything from individuals

who live up to their full potentials?
 Case studies of self-actualizing people

• Full use and exploitation of talents,

capacities, potentialities, etc.

• Such people seem to be fulfilling

themselves and to be doing the best that
they can do

• Mentioned examples in the work –

Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein

• Tenet – if they can achieve this, so can we

• Features include the ability to:
• Accept themselves and others for what they Rogerian
are qualities for a
• Recognize the needs and desires of others mature,
• Respond to the uniqueness of people and congruent
situations personality

Rogers’s
• Form intimate relationships with at least a predictions of
few special people behaviors to be
• Be spontaneous and creative exhibited by
• Resist conformity and assert themselves individuals with
congruent self-
concept
 Later development

• The positive psychology movement

• Psychoanalysis was developed on observations of psychotic and

neurotic patients; it revealed the negative side of the
personality

¤ What was the most famous work in Seligman’s

early career?

Martin Seligman
 Positive Psychology

• Psychology has overlooked human strengths

¨ Can we study human strengths?

¨ What strengths are worth cultivating?

¨ The need for a classification system for universal human

strengths
Dahlsgaard, Peterson, & Seligman, 2005

Positive psychology needs an agreed-upon way of classifying

positive traits as a backbone for research, diagnosis, and
intervention. As a 1st step toward classification, the authors
examined philosophical and religious traditions in China
(Confucianism and Taoism), South Asia (Buddhism and
Hinduism), and the West (Athenian philosophy, Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam) for the answers each provided to
questions of moral behavior and the good life. The authors
found that 6 core virtues recurred in these writings: courage,
justice, humanity, temperance, wisdom, and transcendence. This
convergence suggests a nonarbitrary foundation for the
classification of human strengths and virtues.
Dahlsgaard, Peterson, & Seligman, 2005
Dahlsgaard, Peterson, & Seligman, 2005
Confucian five cardinal relationships (Wulun):
Father–son, husband–wife, friend–friend, elder–younger, ruler–subject.
Virtues of positive emotions

• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s FLOW

• Match between personal skills and

environmental challenge

• High level of focused attention

• Enjoyment

• Loss of self-consciousness

• Time seems to fly by

¨ Have you ever experienced flow? What is that experience
like?

¨ How does the flow experience align with Rogerian

Psychology?

¨ How to measure flow?

¨ Jackson & Marsh (1996) – The Flow State Scale
What is so unique about humans? What if lives
bear no meaning at all?

Harari believed that there was a long period of time when

humans saw themselves as animals [we kill each other and
get killed]. The meaning of life came to the human history
when we abandoned such a view, which occurred with the
creation of religious beliefs [we were purposefully created by
God]

Harari predicted that, with technology, humans would

become God in the future [e.g. immortality, creation of lives
at will, building an ark larger than Noah’s, interstellar
travelling]. Humans, not God, would be the center of our
history. He also warned about the possible take-over by
artificial intelligence.
Research inspired by existentialism

• Our meaningful and purposeful existence

seems to be fundamental in the personality

• What if the meaning and purpose of life is

threatened?

• Terror management theory (Greenberg, Solomon,

Arndt, 2008)

• What is the meaning of life if death is inevitable?

Terror management theory

• When mortality is made salient to people [as in walking by a

cemetery; reading news of a terrorist attack]…

• Greater identification with the ingroup and rejection of outgroups

[prejudice, stereotypes]

• Greater identification to religions and traditional beliefs [e.g. those that

promise afterlife]

• Motivation to distinguish humans from animals [flee from our body]

More on motivation

• Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory

• It makes a difference between intrinsic, self-determined motivation

and extrinsic, coerced motivation!

• Three basic psychological needs in human nature

• Autonomy [Autonomous, self-determined behaviors]

• Competence [Are you in control? Are you making impact?]
• Relatedness [Do you feel connected to others?]

• Do you want to turn a hobby into a career? Why or why not?

 A very American theory perhaps?

• The need for positive regard is not as universal as Rogers

theorized

• Heine, Lehman, Markus, & Kitayama (1999)

• In the US, most people report having relatively high self-esteem

• The bias is absent in Japan, where many people report low self-
esteem; self-criticism [on self-incongruence] is a valued quality in the
personality
References [also Ch. 5 & 6]

• Butler, J. M., & Haigh, G. V. (1954). Changes in the relation between self-concepts and ideal concepts
consequent upon client-centered counseling.
• Dahlsgaard, K., Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. (2005). Shared virtue: The convergence of valued human
strengths across culture and history. Review of general psychology, 9(3), 203-213.
• Das, E., Bushman, B. J., Bezemer, M. D., Kerkhof, P., & Vermeulen, I. E. (2009). How terrorism news reports
increase prejudice against outgroups: A terror management account. Journal of Experimental Social
Psychology, 45(3), 453-459.
• Heimpel, S. A., Wood, J. V., Marshall, M. A., & Brown, J. D. (2002). Do people with low self-esteem really
want to feel better? Self-esteem differences in motivation to repair negative moods. Journal of personality
and social psychology, 82(1), 128.
• Heine, S. J., Lehman, D. R., Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1999). Is there a universal need for positive self-
regard?. Psychological review, 106(4), 766.
• Jackson, S. A., & Marsh, H. W. (1996). Development and validation of a scale to measure optimal
experience: The Flow State Scale. Journal of sport and exercise psychology, 18(1), 17-35.
• Moneta, G. B. (2012). On the measurement and conceptualization of flow. In Advances in flow
research (pp. 23-50). Springer, New York, NY.
• Tugade, M. M., & Fredrickson, B. L. (2004). Resilient individuals use positive emotions to bounce back from
negative emotional experiences. Journal of personality and social psychology, 86(2), 320.