PSY 3520 Module 2 Freud, Adler and Jung Paper: Testing Classic Psychoanalytic Ideas Against Modern Evidence Example

Unconscious Minds, Firstborns and Introverts: What Survives From the First Psychoanalysts

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Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, Thomas Edison State University

PSY-3520: Psychology of Personality

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Month Day, Year

Unconscious Minds, Firstborns and Introverts: What Survives From the First Psychoanalysts

Introduction

At work, I hear people explain each other with ideas that trace back to the first psychoanalysts. A manager says she is "a typical firstborn." A team building workshop sorted us into Myers-Briggs types, and a coworker said she must have an unconscious reason for avoiding a colleague. These ideas come from Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler and Carl Jung. This paper explains each theory and tests one popular idea from each against modern research.

Freud's Theory

Freud proposed that personality has three structures: the id, a reservoir of instinctual drives seeking immediate gratification; the ego, which deals with reality and mediates between drives and demands; and the superego, the internalized moral standards of parents and society. Much mental activity, he argued, is unconscious, and conflicts between these structures produce anxiety, which the ego manages through defense mechanisms such as repression, projection and displacement. Freud also proposed that personality develops through psychosexual stages in childhood, with early relationships shaping adult personality.

Adler's Theory

Adler broke with Freud over the central role of sexuality. He emphasized striving for superiority or significance as the main motive, often driven by childhood feelings of inferiority, and social interest, the sense of connection to others, as the mark of psychological health. Adler believed that people create a style of life, a set of goals and beliefs formed early, and he gave special attention to family position, proposing that birth order shapes personality: firstborns, for example, may become responsible and conservative after being displaced by a younger sibling.

Jung's Theory

Jung also broke with Freud, proposing that beyond the personal unconscious lies a collective unconscious shared by all humans and containing archetypes, universal patterns such as the hero or the shadow. He described psychological types based on two attitudes, introversion and extraversion, and four functions: thinking, feeling, sensing and intuiting. His typology later inspired the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.

Testing Freud: The Unconscious

Westen (1998) argued that psychologists had dismissed Freud too quickly. Reviewing research in cognitive, social and developmental psychology, he concluded that several of Freud's core propositions are supported: a large share of thinking, feeling and motivation occurs outside awareness; the mind runs several processes at once, which can pull against one another and settle into compromises; stable patterns of personality begin to form in childhood, and childhood experiences shape adult relationships; and people's mental representations of themselves and others guide how they interact. Westen acknowledged that many specific Freudian claims, such as the details of psychosexual stages, lack support, but he argued that the broad psychodynamic view of an unconscious, conflicted mind is consistent with modern science.

Testing Adler: Birth Order

Rohrer et al. (2015) analyzed three large national datasets from the United States, Great Britain and Germany, together including more than 20,000 people, and compared siblings within families as well as people across families. They found no meaningful effects of birth order on extraversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness or imagination. They did find a small decline in measured intelligence and self-reported intellect from earlier-born to later-born siblings. The authors concluded that the popular belief that birth order shapes personality is not supported, though it may slightly affect intellectual measures.

Testing Jung: Personality Types

Pittenger (2005) reviewed evidence on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which sorts people into 16 types. Many test takers, he found, receive a different type when they retake the test within weeks; scores on each dimension bunch near the middle instead of dividing people into two clear groups; and support for using the test to select employees or forecast performance is thin. He cautioned against using the instrument for important decisions, though it may serve as a starting point for conversation.

Defense Mechanisms in Modern Research

Social psychologists have tested some of Freud's defense mechanisms in laboratory studies. Evidence supports versions of several, such as reaction formation and projection, though often in forms that look more like ordinary biases in self-protection than the dramatic mechanisms Freud described. This pattern, broad idea supported and specific mechanism revised, is typical of how Freud's work fares under testing.

Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

Jung's collective unconscious is the hardest of his ideas to test. Similar myths and symbols across cultures may reflect shared human experiences and cognitive tendencies rather than inherited memories, an explanation that requires fewer assumptions.

What Lasts

Freud's lasting contribution is the insight that a great deal of thinking and feeling happens without awareness and that early relationships shape later ones, ideas now studied with experimental methods. Adler's emphasis on social connection and on how people's goals and beliefs guide behavior anticipated humanistic and cognitive theories. Jung's distinction between introversion and extraversion survives as a dimension in the five-factor model, even if his types do not.

Back to the Workplace

The research suggests that my coworkers' birth-order explanations are probably wrong and that sorting teams by Myers-Briggs type should not guide decisions such as hiring or promotion. The coworker who wondered about unconscious reasons for avoiding a colleague may be closer to the evidence, since people often do not know why they react as they do.

Limits

Westen's review interprets evidence broadly, and critics argue that modern findings on unconscious processes differ from Freud's specific claims. Birth-order research cannot rule out effects in particular families. Type instruments vary.

Conclusion

Westen showed that Freud's broad view of an unconscious, conflicted mind has support, Rohrer, Egloff and Schmukle found no birth-order effects on major traits and Pittenger showed that the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, based on Jung's types, has weak reliability. The first psychoanalysts asked lasting questions; testing their answers shows which belong in psychology and which belong in the break room.

References

Pittenger, D. J. (2005). Cautionary comments regarding the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 57(3), 210-221. https://doi.org/10.1037/1065-9293.57.3.210

Rohrer, J. M., Egloff, B., & Schmukle, S. C. (2015). Examining the effects of birth order on personality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(46), 14224-14229. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1506451112

Westen, D. (1998). The scientific legacy of Sigmund Freud: Toward a psychodynamically informed psychological science. Psychological Bulletin, 124(3), 333-371. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.124.3.333