A scary face?

A couple of squirrels fighting?

Or this one?

A squashed frog?

Or tumbling poodles?

A bleeding bat?

Hermann Rorschach wants to know.

Eh, he wanted to know–he's dead now

He believed that your answers, what you saw in the ink, said something about your personality.

Rorschach was a Swiss psychoanalyst who, in his youth, was fascinated

by the childhood game of making pictures out of inkblots called klecksography

As an adult, Rorschach was intrigued with Carl Jung's use of word association

in attempts to access patients' unconscious minds.

Jung would ask patients to say the first thing that came to mind

when they saw words like

"dead"

or "window"

or "abuse"

and Rorschach thought,

"Why not do the same thing with amorphous blobs?"

So he'd show a patient a series of ink blots and record what they saw

to determine how people "projected" their personal associations onto random shapes.

Assuming there are important differences between those who saw

dancing bunnies versus those who saw severed, screaming heads,

he drew conclusions about a patient's personality.

And yeah, this was controversial.

Some clinicians still do think that Rorschach test can be a helpful diagnostic tool

when used correctly and cautiously.

But others remain critical of the test, calling them unscientific and unreliable.

It's even been called "the Dracula of psychological tests"

because no one has been able to drive a stake through its heart yet.

So I guess this is that part when I apologize for the set design.

Sorry.

But love it or hate it, the Rorschach test is one of the many methods

psychologists have used in an ongoing quest to understand personality.

And of all of the concepts we cover in this course, personality is one of the most complex,

and one of the most contested.

This is where we bring in the household names.

Not just Rorschach, but Freud, and Jung,

as well as other influential thinkers like Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers.

It's where some of the most familiar concepts in early psychology come into play,

ones that people with even passing knowledge of the field have heard of:

the ego, the Oedipus complex, penis envy, inferiority complexes, even the idea of self-help itself.

Whether you've heard of these as hard facts or simply as historical curiosities,

these notions represent the starting points for some of the biggest and most compelling questions in the field.

But they all come back to the same question:

What makes us who we are?

♪ [Crash Course intro] ♪

We always gotta start out with defining things. Personality. You think you know what that means,

but we're gonna define it as your distinctive and enduring characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving.

And psychologists typically study personality in two broad ways:

1. By trying to understand differences in specific characteristics,

like introvertedness versus extrovertedness.

And 2. By looking at how all the various parts of each person mesh together as a whole.

Basically, what are our characteristics and how do they combine to make me me and you you?

And guess what?

As you might expect, there are a number of competing perspectives on personality theory.

4 to be exact.

The first, and one of the most influential has been the psychoanalytic perspective,

first championed by our coke-loving, cigar-chewing friend, Sigmund Freud.

It was through his clinical observation of patients that

Freud came to theorize the existence of the unconscious.

For Freud, the unconscious represented a vast reservoir

of often unacceptable and frequently hard-to-tolerate thoughts, feelings, desires, and memories.

Usually involving a lots of weird sex stuff.

You gotta point out, by the way,

that the Freudian unconscious is a different thing

from the contemporary idea of non-conscious information processing

when we're, like, processing information that we don't know we're processing.

Freud's thing is, you know, a lot more titillating,

but, the non-conscious is like empirically validated a real thing that we study now.

Anyway, Freud believed that our personalities are largely shaped by the enduring conflict

between our impulses to do whatever we feel like, and our restraint to control those urges

between our pleasure-seeking aggressive urges and our inner social control over them.

He theorized our minds as being divided into three interacting parts—

the id, the ego, and the superego—

that provide the battleground for this internal conflict that shaped our personalities.

You can think of the classic Freudian mind like this iceberg.

It's mostly hidden, and that big underwater chunk is your id:

your unconscious, primitive, and instinctive self.

Freud thought the id was all about sex and agression,

the so-called pleasure principle of immediate gratification.

To him, infants were all id.

That's in part why babies freak out when they don't get a snack like "Right now!",

instead of just taking a deep breath for a second.

For that matter, a lot of the off-the-wall celebrities and dictators are big ids.

The id's like a honey badger—they don't care.

Eventually kids develop the ego part of their personality,

that largely conscious component that's charged with dealing with reality.

The ego works on getting the id what it wants in a reasonable, timely, and realistic way

without, you know, getting arrested or beaten up.

The final aspect to form in Freud's personality trifecta is the superego,

the Jiminy Cricket of voice of our conscience that represents not just the real, but also the ideal.

As you can imagine, the superego and the id don't much like each other,

and it's up the the Referee Ego to sort everything out.

And it's hard to be the ego.

Freud believed that anxiety comes in part from the ego getting all stressed out about losing control

over the id and superego.

So he proposed that our egos use a series of indirect and unconscious defense mechanisms

to protect themselves from this fear.

And each person's particular configuration of defense mechanisms, in turn,

makes up part of what we're referring to here as personality.

You might already have heard of repression,

the defense that's thought to work by banishing any thoughts, feelings, or memories

that cause anxiety to the unconscious.

And repression, Freud thought, allows our many other defense mechanisms to do their work.

Regression, for example, involves a retreat to a more infantile psychosexual stage,

like, when a second-grader sucks their thumb when they're nervous.

Reaction formation is kinda like passive-aggression.

It involves flipping unacceptable impulses like desire to punch someone in the face

with their opposites, like offering them cookies with a fake smile.

Projection is when you disguise your own impulses by calling them out in other people,

and rationalization is just what it sounds like, when we offer explanations and excuses for our behaviors

instead of getting to the real unconscious reasons.

Like, "Yeah, well, I ate six hot pockets at the party just 'cause I was being social!"

Displacement is the typical you got yelled at by your boss, and then came home and yelled at your roommate.

It's when you shift your impulses toward a less threatening victim.

And then there's denial,

which is when you refuse to believe or sometimes even perceive some kind of painful reality.

Like, "No, my boyfriend isn't cheating on me."

and "I'm not gonna fail that class,"

and "These pants TOTALLY STILL FIT!"

Our defense mechanisms, as theorized by Freud, are pretty tied in with our personalities.

Someone who engages in a lot of denial and not as much projection would probably look and act

a lot differently from someone who chronically does the reverse.

Still, Freud was convince our personalities form in our first few years as we pass

through a series of five psychosexual stages,

essentially during which the id seeks to get its rocks off in different pleasure-sensitive areas.

Infants start out in the oral stage because they get pleasure from eating.

From there, a child enters the anal stage, focused on peeing and pooping;

then on to the phallic stage, as they discover their boy and girl bits.

It was during this stage that Freud believed the infamous Oedipus complex reared up,

characterized by a boy experiencing a form of sexual desire toward his mother

and a parallel jealousy or hatred of his father.

Freud called from about age 6 to puberty the latency stage, marked by dormant sexual feelings

which eventually evolved into the fifth and final, adult, genital stage of mature sexual interests.

Now, he believed if certain conflicts weren't resolved in any of these given stages,

a person could develop a fixation, or a lingering focus on a younger stage.

Like if a baby was overfed or neglected and underfed, they might be fixate in the oral stage;

an orally fixated adult might seek oral gratification through excessive eating or chain smoking

and may develop issues with dependency or aggression.

Now of course, not everyone was on board with Freud's model of personality development.

Many of his ideas were controversial and remain so to this day;

even most modern psychoanalysts now dispute the whole Oedipal thing.

In fact, while many pioneering psychoanalysts built on Freud's theories -- these are so-called neo-Freudians --

many disagree with lots of his ideas, and instead either emphasize the role of the conscious mind

or focus on non-sexual motivations.

Take Karen Horney, for instance,

a German-born psychoanalyst credited with founding feminist psychology.

She wasn't down with the idea that our personalities are primarily shaped by sex and aggression.

She especially rejected the notion of penis envy,

which she thought was more than a little insulting to women.

She actually proposed that womb envy may occur as much in men who were envious they can't give birth.

She encouraged patients to take charge of their own mental health and engage in self-help and analysis,

believing people were often able to sorta be their own therapists.

We mentioned Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychoanalyst.

Jung was a friend and disciple of Freud, but eventually, theoretical differences took them in different directions.

He agreed that the unconscious was a powerful force,

but he believed it was more than just a holding cell for repressed sexual thoughts and feelings and memories.

Jung believed sexual drive was only part of the equation,

and that we're also driven by a need to achieve a full knowledge of self.

He also suggested that we have a collective unconscious,

a group of shared images or archetypes that are universal to all humans,

and this was why different cultures share similar myths and imagery.

Vienna-born Alfred Adler was another former collaborator of Freud who struck out on his own.

Adler agreed with Freud that childhood was important,

but he emphasized ongoing social tensions, not sexual ones, as most crucial to the formation of personality.

He coined the term "inferiority complex"

and believed that much of our adult behavior is linked to childhood struggles with feeling inferior.

In the end, not all of their their theories have endured,

but Freud and his contemporaries were key to the evolution of psychoanalytic theory

because they explored ways in which our mental life and personality

may be submerged beneath the veil of consciousness.

But the psychoanalytical approach

is only one perspective on what makes us who we are.

Rather than focuseing on how messed up we can be,

humanistic theorists focus on the basic goodness of people and how they strive to achieve their full potential.

In other words, they believe in the potential for personal growth.

Abraham Maslow is one of these guys;

he believed we're motivated by that pyramid-shaped hierarchy of needs

and that once basic needs are met, like food and shelter and whatnot, we're able to achieve higher goals.

Maslow believed the top two rungs of that pyramid are where the real growth in personality takes place.

First, with self-actualization, or the need to live up to our full, unique potential,

and then with self-transcendence, or finding meaning and purpose and identity beyond ourselves.

Rather than study only troubled patients,

Maslow look at healthy, creative types

with whom he discovered this common thread of self-actualization.

Bolstered by a secure sense of self,

these people were more sure of themselves, more compassionate, caring, driven,

and uneasy around cruelty and pettiness.

American psychologist, Carl Rogers, was another pioneer of humanistic theory,

who proposed a person-centered perspective on personality.

Like Maslow, Rogers believed we're all basically good eggs

so long as we're nurtured in a growth-promoting environment that he thought required three conditions.

The first is genuineness.

Just the idea that parents and teachers should be transparent and open with their feelings.

Then, there's acceptance; when folks are accepting,

people around them won't be afraid to be themselves or make mistakes.

And the third requirement, according to Rogers,

is empathy, or the ability to share others' feelings and reflect their meanings.

Rogers thought of these traits as the nutrients required to make a personality grow into a healthy self-concept,

that mix of thoughts and feelings that answer the fundamental question, who am I?

So, psychoanalytic and humanistic theories of personality were and are incredibly influential,