PERSONALITY/ PSYCHODYNAMIC THEORIES

Personality/ psychodynamic theories

Personality/ psychodynamic theories

Introduction

Intensive examination of the individual clinical situation in supervising and studying clinical reports in the literature has been the core value of psychodynamic and psychoanalytic education. In psychoanalysis and psychodynamic psychotherapy, the clinical vignette rather than a, systematic unrelated, evaluation of clinical material has been the central data base both for the teaching of technique and for theory development. Studying selected clinical vignettes has been utilized to demonstrate aspects of technique that the student needs to learn, as well as to demonstrate the value of one theoretical approach versus another. This procedure allows for the intensive in-depth examination of a single life. In this topic, a comparison will be carried out between two theorists known as Freud, and, Jung to analyze their contributions towards personality/psychodynamic theories. It needs to be seen that which theorists' contribution towards personality/psychodynamic theories was higher. Therefore, all the aspects in this regard will be discussed in detail.

Freud's contribution towards personality/psychodynamic theory

Sigmund Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis, was born in Moravia, Czechoslovakia, in 1856. His family moved to Vienna in 1860, where Freud remained, until forced, to flee to Britain in the aftermath of the 1938 Anschluss. Freud published his first work of psychoanalysis, studies in Hysteria with Josef Breuer in 1895, after a career in neurological research and medical practice. In his 1917 “A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis,” Freud described psychoanalysis as the third prize blow to human narcissism. The first was Nicolaus Copernicus's refutation of the centrality of the earth; the second was Charles Darwin's refutation of the centrality of mankind to creation. The third was Freud's discovery that people were not even central to their own mental processes: The mind cannot be equated with consciousness because most cognitive functioning occurs unconsciously. Against philosophical and intellectual orthodoxy, Freud insisted that consciousness occurs only in part of the mind, what Freud termed das Ich, which only ever attains incomplete and untrustworthy perceptions of unconscious mental processes. Thus, the conscious, rational ego is not master in its own house, a fact for Freud that both summarized the enormity of his discovery and explained why so many people were unwilling to accept it. Despite such resistance, psychoanalysis became one of the most influential psychological schools of the twentieth century (Bridges, 2000).

From its conception, psychoanalysis is a theory of inner conflict. Studies in hysteria were groundbreaking in attributing hysterical symptoms (a range of conditions like fainting fits, paralysis, and fugue states), not to inherited biological defects, but to psychological conflict between a person's unconscious sexual drives and his or her cultural and ethical ideals. Freud introduced repression as the attempt to repel from consciousness the thoughts and memories connected to such intolerable drives. The hysterical symptom emerges as a defence against the return of repressed desire; it is a compromise formation that allows both the desire's expression and its repudiation at once. Freud proposed that these symptoms are relieved if the unconscious conflict at the source of a symptom is ...