COURSE NOTES: Personality

denotes a term that you should know how to define, and to recognize and give examples. denotes an important person. You should remember this person's name and what (s)he has done. denotes an important research finding. denotes an issue that you should be able to discuss or explain.

THE PSYCHOANALYTIC-SOCIAL PERSPECTIVE

• The ego, the adaptational force in personality, is more important than in Freud's theory.
• The development of a sense of self is described.
• Interpersonal relationships, beyond the relationships with one's parents, are important aspects of personality.
• Social and cultural factors influence personality in important ways.

Chapter 4: 

Adler: Individual Psychology

Striving from Inferiority Toward Superiority

Inferiority

Adler's Evolving Ideas about Striving to Improve (moving away from a biological, and toward an interpersonal and social-cultural, emphasis):
• Organ Inferiority: Compensation for weakness leads to strength.
• Aggressive Drive: This may be experienced as fighting or competition.
• Masculine Protest: Men and women seek the privilege associated with the male gender role.
• Superiority Striving: People strive to achieve their personal best.
• Perfection Striving: People inherently are motivated toward personal growth.

Inferiority Complex: stagnation of growth in which difficulties seem too immense to be overcome

• feeling one never will be strong enough
• feeling one never will be intelligent enough

Superiority Complex: neurotic belief that one is better than others

• feeling no one else is as athletically fit
• feeling one’s own ideas are better than anyone else’s

compensation: We are motivated to compensate for felt inferiorities. This is the basis for our striving.

Fictional Finalism

• a person’s image of the goal of his or her striving

creative self

• Each person is “the artist of his own personality.”

The Unity of Personality

style of life: “a person’s consistent way of striving”

First Memories

• evidence of style of life
• not necessarily accurate
• Adler himself had an erroneous memory of running across a cemetery, to overcome his fear of death. Sounds like exposure therapy. (Adler's was, indeed, an intuitive operant conditioning theory.)

Sources of memory errors:

• what the child has been told about the past
• immature brain (hippocampus)
• inadequate early language
• distortion from thinking about events based on their subjective importance

Cross-cultural study of early memories

• Chinese and Korean children are less likely than U.S. children to mention
  • themselves
  • their feelings
• Why?
  • U.S. emphasis on individuality
  • Asian emphasis on collective culture

Mistaken and Healthy Styles of Life

• Mistaken Styles of Life
  • Ruling Type (deprecation complex)
  • Getting Type
  • Avoiding Type
• The Healthy Style of Life
  • Socially Useful Type

The Development of Personality

Parental Behavior

Neglected Child

Parental Training Programs

Advice for Raising Healthy Children, Derived from Adler’s Approach (see Cloninger text, Table 4.2 on page 117)

FAMILY CONSTELLATION

• In contrast to Freud's model of the family, which included the child and his/her parents, but no siblings, Adler offered an expanded model.
• Sibling issues are important.

Firstborn Child

• Adler's prediction: a problem child
• experiences “dethronement” when the next child is born
• may try too hard and become exhausted

Second-Born Child

• Adler's prediction: most favorable

Youngest Child

• risks being pampered

Only Child

• Risks developing a “mother complex.”
• Research shows a similar personality to firstborns.

Research on Birth Order

• Shows weak and inconsistent effects, which vary depending on other factors (such as culture).
• Does not consistently confirm Adler’s predictions, though there are many supportive findings.

Sulloway’s Analysis of Scientific Revolutions

• conservatism of first-born scientists
• rebellion of later-born scientists
  • Copernicus
  • Darwin
• Frank J. Sulloway (1996). Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives.

Psychological Health

Social Interest

• sense of community and shared tasks
• essential for mental health
• measurement
• positive effects on social behaviors, health, job satisfaction, etc.

Examples of Questions Suggested by Adler to Measure Psychological Health in Children (see the Cloninger text, Table 4.3 on page 119)

The Three Tasks of Life

• Work
  • (Freud recognized work as an important task of life.)
• Love
  • (Freud also recognized love as an important task of life.)
• Social Interaction
  • Includes social relationships, such as friendship.
  • This one was not described by Freud
  • (This one was not described by Freud.)
• Art: The 4th Task?
• and the 5th task: spirituality?

Interventions Based on Adler's Theory

• individual education
• Adler's Child Guidance Clinics

Therapy

• "What would you do if you had not got this trouble?" (i.e., What are you avoiding?)
• style of life
  • first memories
  • dreams
• brief; discouraged transference
• humor
• supported religion
• effect on physical symptoms
• behavioral approach

Stages of Adlerian Psychotherapy (see Cloninger text, Table 4.4 on page 122)

Web links:

http://www.alfredadler.org/

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/at/adler.htm

http://www.sulloway.org/

http://www.apsa-co.org/ctf/pubinfo/about/bios/adler.html

Alfred Adler Institute of San Francisco
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/hstein/



Stein pages on Adler, on Behavior OnLine
http://www.behavior.net/cgi-bin/ls2.cgi?config=adlerian&uid=nC1M8.user&new=0

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