Personality Theories
Join now to read essay Personality Theories
Personality Theories
Psychodynamic theorists
Humanistic theories
Table of Contents
Freud
Jung
Adler
Rogers
Maslow
Humanistic strengths and weakness
Psychodynamic strengths and weakness
Some similarities of both
Web Resources
Freud Biography
Biography
Sigmund Freud was born May 6, 1856, in a small town — Freiberg — in Moravia. His father was a wool merchant with a keen mind and a good sense of humor. His mother was a lively woman, her husbands second wife and 20 years younger. She was 21 years old when she gave birth to her first son, her darling, Sigmund. Sigmund had two older half-brothers and six younger siblings. When he was four or five — he wasnt sure — the family moved to Vienna, where he lived most of his life.
A brilliant child, always at the head of his class, he went to medical school, one of the few viable options for a bright Jewish boy in Vienna those days. There, he became involved in research under the direction of a physiology professor named Ernst Brьcke. Brьcke believed in what was then a popular, if radical, notion, which we now call reductionism: “No other forces than the common physical-chemical ones are active within the organism.” Freud would spend many years trying to “reduce” personality to neurology, a cause he later gave up on.
Freud was very good at his research, concentrating on neurophysiology, even inventing a special cell-staining technique. But only a limited number of positions were available, and there were others ahead of him. Brьcke helped him to get a grant to study, first with the great psychiatrist Charcot in Paris, then with his rival Bernheim in Nancy. Both these gentlemen were investigating the use of hypnosis with hysterics.
After spending a short time as a resident in neurology and director of a childrens ward in Berlin, he came back to Vienna, married his fiancйe of many years Martha Bernays, and set up a practice in neuropsychiatry, with the help of Joseph Breuer.
Freuds books and lectures brought him both fame and ostracism from the mainstream of the medical community. He drew around him a number of very bright sympathizers who became the core of the psychoanalytic movement. Unfortunately, Freud had a penchant for rejecting people who did not totally agree with him. Some separated from him on friendly terms; others did not, and went on to found competing schools of thought.
Freud emigrated to England just before World War II when Vienna became an increasing dangerous place for Jews, especially ones as famous as Freud. Not long afterward, he died of the cancer of the mouth and jaw that he had suffered from for the last 20 years of his life
Jung
Biography
Carl Gustav Jung was born July 26, 1875, in the small Swiss village of Kessewil. His father was Paul Jung, a country parson, and his mother was Emilie Preiswerk Jung. He was surrounded by a fairly well educated extended family, including quite a few clergymen and some eccentrics as well.
The elder Jung started Carl on Latin when he was six years old, beginning a long interest in language and literature — especially ancient literature. Besides most modern western European languages, Jung could read several ancient ones, including Sanskrit, the language of the original Hindu holy books.
Carl was a rather solitary adolescent, who didnt care much for school, and especially couldnt take competition. He went to boarding school in Basel, Switzerland, where he found himself the object of a lot of jealous harassment. He began to use sickness as an excuse, developing an embarrassing tendency to faint under pressure.
Although his first career choice was archeology, he went on to study medicine at the University of Basel. While working under the famous neurologist Krafft-Ebing, he settled on psychiatry as his career.
After graduating, he took a position at the Burghoeltzli Mental Hospital in Zurich under Eugene Bleuler, an expert on (and the namer of) schizophrenia. In 1903, he married Emma Rauschenbach. He