Personality Theories Assignment

Personality Theories

I chose my two theories from the Psychodynamic Theories. My first theory that I chose was by Alfred Adler. He believed that people’s personalities were formed by an inferior complex. This meant that people were acting on the impulse of being better in another area of their life than others because they themselves have a physical problem. He believed a little of this was actually in all of us because we were all small children at one time. He said that we were all self aware of our problems and felt the need to overcome them by developing potential in other areas. These views by him were called Individual Psychology. He was also known to have brought up several times that he thought birth order had a lot to do with our personalities. He believed this because a lot of first born children are very highly motivated, since parents have high expectations of them, and children after the first feel competitive because of this in order to try to be “better” than the older sibling(s).

My second theory of choice is Karen Horney. She is well known for standing against the Psychoanalytic Theory that women who went against men in a work setting have penis envy. This theory believed that a women’s place was in the home only. She believed that personal relationships were more important to our personalities as a child when we are growing up. She believed that there are three basic ways that we relate to other people. The ways are: going towards others, going away from others, and going against others. If you could find a way to balance all three in a healthy way then you were said to be holding a healthy personality. If you lean towards any one more than the others she believed it caused unhealthy personalities or negative problems to happen to the individual.

These two theories are similar in the fact that both Adler and Horney seem to think that personalities stem or start when we are very young. They both agree that our personalities are shaped...