A Bit More About Cognitive Approaches

 Cognitive approaches to personality were pioneered by Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis. Each approached the matter differently. Beck is a physician and well known for his work on depression. He developed the Beck Depression Inventory, a widely used scale for evaluating an individual’s mood.

Beck combined Rogers, Kelly and Freud. He emphasized the importance of personal point of view (phenomenology) and core beliefs (personal constructs). Beck incorporated the medical model and cognitive psychology. Although biological processes impact people greatly, they also are influenced by how they think about their lives and problems.

Our thoughts, called schema or values, are stored in a cognitive structure. We use these core beliefs to interpret our perceptions and to guide our behaviors. Our belief system develops early in life but is enhanced by our personal experiences. To the extent that our beliefs are based on reality, they are helpful to us. They allow us to have quick reactions to situations. But when our values are distortions of reality, our automatic thoughts led us astray.

In contrast, Albert Ellis was trained as a psychologist. His approach emphasized rationalism: the use of logic and deduction. Ellis held that thinking and happiness go together. How we think impacts how we feel. Thinking causes emotional consequences. His ABC theory includes: Activating event, Belief, and Consequence. A stimulus activates your beliefs which results in emotional consequences. Ellis maintains people should apply the scientific method to everyday life. The cure for irrational thinking is confrontation. Once you know you’re irrational, you’ll want to change the way you think.

Like Karen Horney, Ellis points out our tendency to do things simply because we think we should. Although shoulds can guide behavior, they can also drive us to irrational behavior. If left unexamined, the shoulds and musts of your life can restrict your freedom. You can spend all of your energy on adhering to rules, and not doing what you want to do. Ellis tries to break us of our slavery to the opinions of others and external rules.

Beck is much more cognitive in his approach. He is closely aligned to cognitive science, schemas, and information processing. Ellis proposes a rational system that is more in keeping with Aristotle than cognitive science. His rational philosophy points to our constructivist tendencies in creating our inner world, and to our destructivist tendencies to think ourselves out of being happy. Together, Beck and Ellis provide a strong argument for an active mind. They are in stark contrast to Freud’s unconscious processes or the mechanistic philosophy of behaviorism.

A Bit More About Existentialism

Like humanistic psychology, existential psychology was more of a movement or philosophy than a systematic school of thought. Basically a reaction to behaviorism, existential philosophers differentiated between existence (being) and essence (how things are). Existence is primary, and essence is fleeting.

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

Born in Copenhagen, Kierkegaard was raised in a restrictive religious environment. His father was a Lutheran who interpreted his religion through guilt and gloom. Reacting to his father’s narrow-mindedness, Kierkegaard rebelled during his college years but returned to studying theology after his father died.

Two years after his father died, Kierkegaard made a major shift in his life. He decided not to become a minister, and abruptly called off his year-long engagement to a local girl. Living off his father’s inheritance, he devoted himself to the ministry of writing. He wrote 20 books in the next 14 years.

In contrast to Hegel’s systematic and rational view of life, Kierkegaard focused on the ambiguity and sheer excitement of an unpredictable existence. He saw that philosophy can be used as an excuse for not taking personal responsibility.

According to Kierkegaard, life is full of riddles. Although people desire the infinite truths of life, they are occupied with its trivialities. We are fragile finite beings but we want to live forever. It is only when we submit to the will of God that we find ultimate freedom. For Kierkegaard, we find our meaning because of these mysteries, not in spite of them.

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)

Born in Messkirch, Germany, Heidegger stressed existential phenomenology. He maintained that people must accept that death in inevitable and that it is followed by nothingness. For Heidegger the contemplation of death was worse than the real thing.

Heidegger was an active supporter of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party. In light of the horrors of the Holocaust, Heidegger’s questioning of what it is to be and his warnings of the dangers of nihilism (being deprived of meaning) seem extremely odd.

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

Born in Paris, Sartre’s philosophy is an unsystematic collection of plays and novels. Focusing attention of the meaning of existence, he concludes that there is no reason people should exist. But since they do exist, they should freely make their own decisions.

Although Sartre stressed that decisions should be personal, unaided by religion, morality or society, he was active in the French Resistance during WWII. He believed that people should rebel against authority, and yet in his later years, Sartre moved from existentialism to social communism.

Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966)

Although he studied psychiatry under Bleuler and Jung, Binswanger is best known for his existential beliefs. One of the first psychoanalysts in Switzerland (and a personal friend of Freud), Binswanger combined Heidegger’s phenomenology with Freud’s psychoanalysis.

Binswanger stressed the interconnectedness of people with their environment. We have no existence aside from it. We are responsible for creating our own world design (“Weltanschaung”). This design can be open or closed, or expansive or constrictive. Stressing the importance of living an authentic life, he proposed three modes of existence: unwelt (around world), mitwelt (with world), and eigenwelt (own world.

He emphasized the here and now, rejected determinism, and championed freedom of choice. People should act in their own best interest, Binswanger maintained. We are not a product of heredity or the passive victims of environment. We have the ability to live an authentic life but are responsible for our actions.

Since we are thrown into the world, our “thrownness” determines the limits of our freedom. The circumstances within which we can exercise freedom is called our “ground of existence.” People should seek to grow beyond their limits; it is a process of becoming. Refusing to “become” causes neurotic or psychotic problems.

Viktor Frankl (1905-1997)

Frankl is often quoted as saying there are only two types of races: decent and indecent. As a survivor of Auschwitz, he certainly has met both. Surprisingly, Frankl’s view of the world is quite optimistic. The secret, he says, is to give meaning to your life.

Frankl maintains that we are all searching for meaning. Without it, we are empty and unfulfilled. But it is our responsibility to discover this meaning, to impose it. We cannot wait for life to tell us why we should do with our lives. Indeed, we are responsible to tell life the reason we are living. Frankl says we must actively choose our lives. We must participate in the game. What we do and who we are is up to us.

Frankl points out that freedom and responsibility are linked. One requires the other. You are free to be whatever you want but you also must take responsibility for your actions. You must fill your existential vacuum. You cannot blame your failure on your past or your current circumstances. You have the freedom, so you are responsible.

Rollo May (1909-1994)

Born in Ada, Ohio, Rollo May introduced Heidegger’s existentialism to America. While he recovered from tuberculosis (just prior to receiving his Ph.D.), May read Kierkegaard and Freud, and ultimately wrote his dissertation of their views on anxiety.

Differentiating between normal and neurotic anxiety, May maintained that normal anxiety can help you grow. Emphasizing man’s capacity to “will” (actively choosing the best of possibilities), May maintained that we must choose to love. Love is composed of sex, eros (the need to unite with others), phila (brotherly love), and agape (love for all mankind).

Rollo May also emphasized the ability for people to choose. We have the capacity to “will,” to help mold our own lives. Existence starts us off in life but we can become more than just survivors. We can be creative beings who transcend our existence. We can emerge from our shallow and petty anxieties into authentic, integrated, growing organisms.

This process, of course, requires effort. We begin with self-examination. No one else can do it for us. We must look at ourselves truthfully. We also must discover what it is to feel. We have insulated ourselves from our honest emotions. We must return to experiencing and expressing genuine emotions. And we must face our anxieties bravely. Neurosis is when we run away from what we fear. Health is meeting our fears and beating them.

For May, our ultimate discovery is love. In an age of promiscuity, we lose the underlying drive we seek: becoming one with another. So we fool ourselves into thinking that the shallowness of sex is the deepness of love. Love is more than pleasure; it is caring. To love is to actively care from the core of our being.

A Bit More About Humanism

Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)

Born in Brooklyn, NY, Maslow was educated at City College of New York and the University of Wisconsin. Best known for his optimistic view of human nature and his hierarchy of needs.

According to Maslow, self-actualization is a process, not an all-or-none phenomena. This process develops through five levels: physiological, safety, love & belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. Arranged in a hierarchy, development cannot proceed to the next level until those needs are met. Self esteem, for example, can’t be increased until one’s physiological and safety needs have been met.

Maslow believed that people are inherently good and that the process to self actualization is inevitable (if society nurtures it). People have a built in capacity for love which is shaped by society.

Although each person is a unique individual, it is possible to distinguish between D and B motives. D motives are the result of deficiencies which must be met. In contrast, B motives are the result of growth needs, and seek to fulfill one’s inner potential.

Carl Rogers (1902-1988)

Born in Oak Park, Illinois, Rogers’ family gave him a lot of direction as he grew up. They were close knit, hard working and fundamental Christians. In contrast, Rogers attended a liberal seminary (Union Theological), and established a therapy where the therapist is relatively weak.

Rogers founded “nondirective” therapy. Later, he modified the approach and called it “client centered” because it stressed the client-therapist relationship and the importance of “unconditional regard” (total acceptance).

Originally called “nondirective” therapy, the client was given no direction at all. The choice of topic was purely that of the client. Later, Rogers modified his approach, and called it “client centered.” Stressing the client-therapist relationship and the importance of “unconditional regard” (total acceptance), Rogers provided a warm, friendly (home-like?) environment.

A Bit More About Social Learning

Behaviorism explained behavior in terms of environmental control. Pavlov’s classical conditioning maintained that behavior is the result of environmental stimuli. Something occurs in the environment (a bell rings) and we respond (salivate). Skinner’s operant conditioning emphasized the importance of the environmental reaction to behavior. We act and the environment reacts with rewards and punishments. Together, Pavlov and Skinner provide a chicken-and-egg solution to behavior. It doesn’t matter which came first-environment-behavior or behavior-environment-either deterministic explanation is fine. 

Social learning theory was an extension of behaviorism. It helped bridge the gap between environment control and cognitive processing. Dollard-Miller, Bandura, and Rotter all maintained that learning is more person-driven than behaviorism would suggest. From their point of view, the environment does function as the behaviorists believed but it also provides opportunities to learn that don’t require associationism (Pavlov) or reinforcement (Skinner). Social learning theory rejected the simplistic explanations of complex behavior (like aggression, goal setting and internal conflicts) but kept the emphasis on experimental methods.

For Dollard & Miller, learning combines four processes: drive, cue, response and reinforcement. Drive is the engine. The cue tells you when, where and how to respond. Your response is any behavior or sequence of behaviors you perform. And reinforcement is the consequence of drive being reduced (similar to Skinner’s negative reinforcement). If your behavior isn’t reinforced, that behavior will be extinguished (disappear). But the process doesn’t stop there. You keep trying different responses until one of them satisfies the drive.

Although trained in behaviorism, Bandura maintained that it would take too long for people to learn everything by associating stimuli or being rewarded. We are much more capable than that. According to Bandura, people primarily learn by watching others.

Rotter’s point is that we don’t behave randomly. Even in novel situations, we apply our knowledge of the past to the current conditions. Behavior is always changing in response to the environment but the rules we use to determine what we’ll do are relatively stable. We have two basic rules: (a) the bigger the reward the better, and (b) safer is better. Our behavior is a combination of these rules. We try to maximize our rewards on the basis of value and expectation. We calculate that it’s better to have a low paying job we know we can get than to try for a high-paying job we think we’re unlikely to get.

A Bit More About Behaviorism

BF Skinner (1904-1990)

Best known for the “Skinner box”, his schedules of reinforcement, token economies, programmed learning and teaching pigeons to play table tennis, B.F. Skinner founded operation conditioning. Instead of emphasizing the stimuli which elicit responses (as in classical conditioning), he focused on behavior that is emitted and on what occurs immediately after a behavior occurs.

For Skinner, the consequence of a behavior impacts an operant (an entire class of behaviors). You no doubt have an operant for the way you enter a room. Depending on how you feel, you might enter bouncily, angrily, slowly or shyly. The entire class of room entering behavior is an operant. Consequently, in operant conditioning, rewards impact an entire class of behavior. Punishment would not only reduce bouncy entrances, it would reduce all entering. Reinforcement would increase the likelihood of the entire class of room entering behavior.

Skinner relied on operational definitions for his experiments. Instead of inferring internal states (such as hunger), he defined hunger in terms of the number of hours since having last eaten. Skinner insisted on clear definitions that are not open to interpretation. He did hypothesize drive, insight or any internal process. Although he didn’t deny their existence, he thought them to be unknowable. For Skinner, like Watson, if it didn’t impact behavior, whatever went on in the black box of the mind was unimportant.

Basing his findings on animal research (mostly rats and pigeons), Skinner identified five schedules of reinforcement: continuous reinforcement, fixed interval (FI), fixed ratio (FR), variable interval (VI) and variable ratio (VR). Continuous reinforcement is used to shape (refine) a behavior. Every time the subject performs the desired behavior, it is rewarded. Continuous reinforcement leads to quick learning and (after the reinforcement is stopped) quick descent.

A Bit More About NeoFreudians

Anna Freud (1895-1982)

Unlike her famous father, Anna Freud worked mostly with children. She is best known for showing that children look to their parents for cues on how to react to situations. Anna also created a diagnostic system for children, tracking their “developmental lines.”

Erik Erikson (1902-1994)

Although Erik had no college degree, he became a leading influence in psychoanalysis. Born and raised in Vienna, Erik originally was an educator. He started a progressive, non-graded, Montessori style school. Later, he was invited by Anna Freud to be analyzed by her and become a child analyst. Erikson is best known for coining the term “identity crisis,” and for his stages of development.

Karen Horney (1885-1952)

Karen Horney (1885-1952) is best known for her concept of basic anxiety and her emphasis on needs. She divided needs into 3 personality types: toward people, against people, and away from people

Erich Fromm (1900-1980)

Fromm’s loosely constructed theory of personality emphasized social influences and trends. He combined Freud, Marx, and existential philosophy. Fromm said people are lonely, and seeking social contact. Like Horney, Fromm has 3 personality types (mechanisms for escaping existential angst): authoritarianism, destructiveness, and automaton conformity.

Melanie Klein (1882-1960)

A major competitor of Anna Freud, Melanie Klien is the mother of object relations. She modified Freud’s id-based drive theory to a more social interaction theory of ego. Klien was the first to use toys (play therapy) when psychoanalyzing children. Melanie maintained that children construct an internal representation of people and use those symbolic stereotypes (objects) when relating to others.

A Bit More About Adler & Jung

Adler and Jung were followers of Freud, yet each established their own unique version of psychoanalysis. Although neither Adler or Jung were pupils of Sigmund, their ideas were all related. I think of them as Freud’s sons. At one point, they were very closely tied to Sigmund but, as children do, they grew up and went off on their own.

Alfred Adler (1870-1937)

Adler believed that being born second, being sick as a child or being pampered (or neglected) can lead to feelings of inferiority. He spoke from personal experience. The second child of six children of a wealth grain merchant, Adler had rickets as a child and was pampered by his parents. He was frail and unathletic and resented the way his mother doted on his strong older brother.

Born in Penzing, Austria (near Vienna), Adler attended the University of Vienna, receiving his MD in 1895. In 1902, Adler became Sigmund Freud’s most prominent follower. Freud was 14 years older, already famous and like an older, wiser brother. But in 1911, Adler’s had developed his own ideas (some would say had grown up) and they had a falling out. Adler formed his own circle of followers, founded his own journal and, beginning in 1921, established a chain of 30 child-guidance clinics. In 1926 Adler moved to the US. He died on a lecture tour to Scotland.

Adler was the founder of “individual psychology” and coined the term “feelings of inferiority.” In individual psychology, people’s primary motivation is striving for superiority. In light of Adler’s emphasis on inferiority, it would be easy to misconstrue superiority as meaning trying to be more valuable than another. But Alder used superiority as moving higher in rank toward completeness, as getting closer to perfection. Obviously, feelings of inadequacy and inferiority can interfere with reaching our full potential. Although compensation for feeling inferior is good, overcompensating can result in a lifestyle that take unfair advantage of other people. Adler also believed that people have an innate drive for “social interest” (the urge to work with others and be cooperative). Consequently, the goal of Adler’s therapy was for people to become socially useful and emotionally mature.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)

Jung was born and raised in Switzerland, along the shore of Lake Constance, where his father pastored a small Swiss Reformed Church. Jung received his MD from the University of Basel in 1900, and spent the next nine years working in a psychiatric clinic associated with the University of Zurich.

Freud wanted Jung to succeed him, and so in 1911, over the protests of many others, Freud managed to get Jung elected as the first president of the International Psychoanalytic Association. By 1912, however, their relationship had cooled, and was finally severed in 1914.

Jung accepted Freud’s insistence on a dynamic psychology of psychic energy and internal motivation. Like Freud, he was deterministic but unlike Freud, Jung incorporated aims, goals, and decisions into his model. Although he distinguished between the conscious and the unconscious, Jung’s unconscious included instincts, cultural knowledge and a basic life urge.

Like Freud, Jung believed in the importance of the unconscious mind, but he subdivided it into the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. According to Jung, emotionally charged collections of private attitudes are called complexes. In contrast, archetypes are universal thought forms (e.g., hero, mother, wise old man, etc.) are called archetypes. The most important of these archetypes are formed into systems (i.e., self). For Jung, the self involved striving for unity and wholeness, and was symbolized by a mandala, pearl, diamond, circle, or any object with central point.

Jung proposed 8 personality types, a combination of two personality orientations (extroversion and introversion) and four psychological functions (thinking, feeling, sensing and intuiting). Since the self is multifaceted, it shows different sides at different times. Sometimes the self presents its public personality (persona). At other times it reveals its ability to understand the opposite sex (anima and anius), or its darker (shadow) self.

A Bit More About Freud

Borrowing heavily from the terminology of physics and other sciences, Sigmund Freud proposed a self-contained system of psychical energy. Behavior is a result of conscious and unconscious processes which oppose and counteract each other. Freud emphasized the importance of early childhood, the usefulness of dreams, and that we are not always aware of our own motives.

In 1891, shortly before obtaining his medical degree, Freud was befriended by Joseph Breuer, a respected, successful, and sophisticated physician in Vienna. They discussed at great length Breuer’s finding that his patient, Bertha Pappenheim (referred to as Anna O in his writings), seemed to improve just from talking about her problems while under hypnosis. Although the symptom set changed, the treatments (which the girl called “chimney sweeping” or “the talking cure”) appeared to be effective in helping her deal with emotionally-charged events from her past. Freud tried the “talking cure” and found that it also worked when patients were not hypnotized. Based on their collaboration, Freud and Breuer co-wrote a book entitled Studies in Hysteria which was published in 1895, and marked both the end of their friendship and the founding of psychoanalysis.

Freud theory has become part of our everyday language. He introduced us to life instincts, death instincts, castration anxiety, Electra complex, Oedipus complex, and penis envy. Freud and his followers gave us defense mechanisms (such as displacement, projection, and rationalization) and multiple levels of consciousness (conscious, unconscious, and pre-conscious). We learned that we are expulsive, fixated or retentive, and that we suffer from reaction formation, reality anxiety or the influence of our mind’s secondary processes. Freud described psychosexual stages of development (i.e., oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital), depicted instincts as having aim, and introduced us to concepts such as conflict, identification, and regression.

A Bit More About Trait Theory

Trait theory is among the oldest approaches to explaining personality. According to this approach, your personality is the result of some external force. For the ancient Chinese, who you are is determined by the year in which you are born. If you are born in the year of the rat, your personality and fortune will be different from someone born in the year of the ox. Similarly, the ancient Greeks explained personality by four elements of life, each of which was related to a specific body fluid. You might be born sanguine (happy) or melancholic (sad). But your temperament was predetermined by these elements.

In the 1930’s, Gordon Allport used a lexiconic approach. Personality could be described by words found in our language, specifically in our dictionaries. Starting with 17,953 adjectives, Allport reduced the list of possible traits (getting rid of redundant meanings) to about 4000 traits. Although people had traits that could not easily be defined in a single word, Allport maintained that the best way to compare people was to use these common traits.

Raymond Cattell later reduced Allport’s list down to 16 personality factors. He believed that a limited number of traits were underlying the thousands of words used to describe people. Cattell was among the first to use a statistical technique (factor analysis) to determine which words went together and which described a different trait.

Factor analysis was also used by many others. Hans Eysenck used the method to identify two major personality dimensions: neuroticism and introversion-extroversion. He then tied each dimension to a physiological process of the brain. More recently, a series of researchers used factor analysis to describe the Big Five: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

But factor analysis is not the only approach to describing personality traits. In the 1940′s, William Sheldon hypothesized that personality and body type were tied together. He believed short-fat people were jolly, muscular-square people were strong willed, and thin-tall people were shy. Sheldon’s theory was not based on statistics, just observations made on a biased sample of college students.

Henry Murray moved personality theory from the outside to the inside. He proposed that personality is really a reflection of inner psychic needs. Like Sheldon, Murray’s theory was not based on empirical data. His theory reflected his believe in psychoanalysis. Murray is also known for creating a popular projective personality test:  the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT).