Neo-Freudians Public Fascination with the Concept of Personality and The

1 Neo-Freudians Public fascination with the concept of personality and the elements which contribute to its development in people has persisted throughout history. In the digital era, this interest in analyzing personality has grown exponentially with the advent of modernized personality testing which in turn has spurred a multibillion-dollar industry. Arguably the most lucrative and famous of these personality tests is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI, which has been used in businesses and organizations alike for the purposes of optimizing management and employee efficiency. Most people in the workforce or academic world are likely to have encountered or even taken the MBTI or other personality tests at some point in their lives. I once spent a significant period of time exploring these tests and trying to pin down my personality “type” in an effort to try to know myself better. I took a multitude of different MBTI and other tests, sometimes multiple times over, to try to be as accurate as possible. At the time, I felt the answers I got from these tests were valuable and could help me navigate life in the future in some way. Since then, I’ve come to understand a few serious flaws with these kinds of personality analyses which seriously undermine their validity and usefulness. However, before detailing such specific problems it is first important to have an understanding of where these tests come from and knowledge of the people who influenced their fruition. Much of the foundation for modern personality tests trace back to the work of a group of people collectively known as neo-Freudians, or those who once studied and followed the work of Sigmund Freud and built upon or outright rejected his theories by introducing theories of their own. In order to better examine the contemporary understanding of personality, it is useful to be familiar with the concepts attributed to three of the major neo-Freudians: Adler, Jung, and Horney. 2 The first person within Freud’s circle to leave and become the first official neo-Freudian was Alfred Adler. Unconvinced by Freud’s assertions that behavior is motivated by unconscious influences, Adler believed it was mostly driven by purposeful or goal-oriented phenomena. The first major concept introduced by Adler was what he described as “individual psychology”, or the notion that people are motivated by the goals they set in their life; in particular goals which help them achieve security or overcome a feeling of inferiority. This provides a flow into Adler’s second major theory break from Freud, which states that most, if not all, people experience or suffer from an inferiority complex; that is, a deep feeling of inadequacy or incompetence stemming from experiences of helplessness as infants. Adler described this perilous situation in early development as culminating in a “will to power” that has one of two possible outcomes. The more negative possibility has children developing a superiority complex to counter their feelings of inferiority by exercising dominance over others through aggression or envy. Hopefully, children emerging from the uncertainty of infancy will take the alternative path, which sees them realizing their full potential through creativity and the ability to become the master of their own life. Adler truly believed that the inferiority complex’s will to power could lead to great social good by empowering people to identify with others and cooperate with them through a positive social interest. He also formulated a few rudimentary personality types that were not meant to be absolute descriptors but merely learning tools or guides to understand different individuals. The first he described as the ruling type, which encompasses people who are domineering, aggressive, or otherwise function at an intense level that commands attention. His leaning type contains sensitive people who often rely on others to support them and see them through tough life challenges. They are characterized by lower 3 energy and are prone to anxiety disorders or compulsions. The avoiding type is a more extreme variant of the leaning type wherein people are so incapable of functioning normally they retreat into themselves, generally avoiding people or life in general. Lastly, the socially useful type houses all healthy individuals who have adequate social interest and energy. They are characterized by a healthy balanced regulation of self-identity, neither feeling inferior or superior in relation to others (“Alfred Adler's Personality Theory and Personality Types.”). Perhaps one of the most notorious figures in psychology, second to Freud, is Carl Jung, who founded analytical psychology as a response to points of contention he had with Freud’s theories. Jung took the premise Freud set with unconscious processes and elaborated on it by introducing spiritual and positive forces that play a role at the unconscious level, rather than just aggressive and sexual drives. Jung was convinced the unconscious mind was divided into two forms which interact and influence each other. The personal unconscious, he believed, was comprised of individual life experiences, whereas the collective unconscious is something all humans share identically and is inherited by every generation of humanity. He posited that the collective unconscious is a repository of primal imagery and patterns of thought, sensation, and behavior referred to as archetypes. Due to the presence of these archetypes, or archetypal patterns, in the collective unconscious, all humans are able to perceive the world around them and react to it in predictable manners. According to Jung, this was the reason why so many similarities existed across all human cultures in relation to forms of expression like art, symbolism, and religion. He carried this assertion further into the sphere of gender roles, where he claimed archetypes existed for femininity, called anima, and masculinity, called animus. These sets of patterns are available to both males and females in order to permit the 4 expression of masculine or feminine personality traits which help us understand the opposite sex. In 1921, Jung published a book called “Psychological Types” which outlined and established three binaries through which he categorized personality types. His ideas in this work were later adapted over time to form the modern MBTI personality test which identifies four binaries involved in categorizing personality instead of the original three he described (Menand). With the prior neo-Freudian contributions by Adler and Jung, Karen Horney was a psychoanalyst who was able to use them as springboard to not only reject major components of Freud’s theories but also formulate her own unique composite of personality development. By vetting, filtering, and combining aspects of the three aforementioned psychologists’ work with her own concepts she was able to create an influential and critical perspective on gender and personality. Horney dismissed the idea that fixations at various stages of psychosexual development, as Freud had proposed, had any influence on the emergence of adult personality. Instead, she argued that personality in adulthood is shaped during childhood in accordance with parental relationship to the child. Feelings of extreme helplessness or insecurity are experienced by children whose needs are not met or nurtured by their parents. Horney referred to these feelings surrounding a lonely, isolated, and hostile early environment as basic anxiety, which works to determine emotional health. She outlined three possible ways in which people try to establish security in their lives: they can move toward people through seeking affection or acceptance, move away from people by working toward independence and self- sufficiency, or move against people by gaining power and control over others. According to her criteria, emotional health hinges on the balance of all three methods. One of Horney’s most notable contributions was her scathing critique of Freud’s theories on sex and gender. She was 5 able to effectively inject feminism into neo-Freudian thought by tackling Freud’s assumptions about female personality as being grossly biased and reflecting a deep lack of understanding. She took this further by specifically refuting Freud’s concept of penis envy as actually being a mirror of women’s inferiority in the culture rather than their inherent biological inferiority, therefore representing a kind of power envy not penis envy. Horney retaliated against this notion of penis envy by introducing her own concept of womb envy, which suggests that men envy the ability of women to get pregnant, nurse, and be mothers. Because of women’s singular role in the creation and sustaining of life, she argued, men are compelled to declare their superiority in other areas of society to effectively dominate the culture (“Karen Horney”). Of this group of neo-Freudians, all three can be credited with polishing Freud’s somewhat crude foundational theories regarding personality. In my estimation, there are useful nuggets of truth to be found in all their work, but Jung seems to be the one who strayed the least from Freud’s more questionable concepts. In the same way, he takes similar liberties that Freud did which border on the ridiculous such as his thoughts on archetypes and collective unconscious. These concepts don’t seem to have a basis in reality and were conjured from anecdotal inferences rather than anything substantive; many of them sound more like interesting fiction than science. I think in general, Adler is more accurate with his thoughts on inferiority complexes and individualistic goal-oriented motivation. His arguments seem not only more applicable to people’s lives but generally more relatable despite being somewhat primitive by modern standards. His views also seem more neutral in approach by describing simple positive or negative possibilities rather than definitively asserting an underlying or unconscious aggressive and sexual drive for nearly everything. However, in my opinion the neo- 6 Freudian who described personality most accurately among the three is Horney.

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