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Psychoanalytic Personality Assessment

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Psychoanalytic Personality Assessment
Arnette M. Brown
Psychology of Personality PSY/250
August 2, 2010
Mark Shen

Introduction

The psychoanalytic view holds that there are inner forces outside of your awareness that are directing your behavior. Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Alfred Adler influenced psychology and psychiatry with their psychoanalytic theories leaving a big impact on modern psychology. As the writer I will compare and contrast the theories of these three gentlemen and decide which of these theories in which I agree and which of these theories I do not agree with. I will also describe the stages of Freud’s theory and explain characteristics of personality using these components. I will explore the uses of Freudian defense mechanisms using real-life examples. Many pioneering concepts were proposed by these men and attempts are still being made to prove their theories. These men changed the world with their theories of the human mind.

Freud, Jung, and Adler believed that parenting and childhood development played a large role in the shaping of a personality and all three men believed that dreams and daydreams played an important role as well. Another similarity in each of their beliefs was the impact that the unconscious mind played in psychoanalytic analysis. Freud’s work is now the most recognized and most heavily cited in all of psychology and referenced in humanities as well. Freud put a lot of emphasis on sexuality and dreams. Dreams according to Freud’s psychoanalytic theory are said to have two levels of content, manifest content and latent content. The manifest content is what a person remembers and consciously considers. The latent content is the underlying hidden meaning. This is the trademark idealism of the psychoanalytic approach to personality, in other words what we see on the surface is only a

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