Personality Theories

Personality Theories

In Chapter two we discussed five different personality theories: psychodynamic theory, learning theory, humanistic theory, trait theory, and sociocultural.   For the purpose of this argument I am going to discuss the psychodynamic theory, humanistic theory, and trait theory.
When discussing the Psychodynamic theory for most the first person that comes to mind is Sigmund Freud and his theory on personality. Freud proposed the idea that the human personality is made up of three separate psychic structures: The id, ego and superego. According to Freud the id is present from birth, while the ego starts to develop over our first year. The superego develops later on throughout our childhood. Freud also focused on stages of psychosexual development. These states included: the oral stage, anal stage, phallic stage, latency stage and lastly the genital stage. Other psychodynamic theorists who had varying ideas from Freud were Carl Jung,   Alfred Adler, Karen Horney, and Erik Erikson.
The Humanistic theory has its foundation in the Existentialism which is the idea that we as humans are free and able to make our own choices as to what we do with our lives. This differs from the ideas of Sigmund Freud who believed that our defense mechanisms prevented us from being free and that most of our feelings stemmed from our sex drives. One humanistic theorist, Abraham Maslow believed in something called the hierarchy of needs. He believed that once our basic needs had been met that we would move on to other needs.
The final theory I would like to discuss is the Trait theory. Trait theorist Hans Esyenck created a five-factor model to help describe the trait theory. The five factor model describes five major personality traits. These traits include extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness to experience. This five factor model is supposed to help explain differences among people. Unlike the Humanistic theory, the trait theory proposes that genetics...