Neo freudians

“NEO-FREUDIANS”
“sexuality can’t explain everything”
CHAIRPERSON:
Dr. S.K Talukdar
Professor
Department of Psychiatry
PRESENTED BY:
Dr. Sachin Arora
3rd
year pg student
Department of Psychiatry
Discussant:
Dr. Rahul Mathur

“Emergence”
“HISTORICAL BACKGROUND”
As the psychoanalytic theories of personality formed by
Freud were nurtured by a positivistic climate, that
shaped the course of 19th
century.
At the same time intellectuals trends that were at variance
with purely biophysical conception of human
were beginning to take shape.
During the later part of 19th
century, sociology and
and anthropolgy began to emerge as independent
disciplines .

We are “NEO- freudians”
A number of followers of Freud who became
dissatisfied with his myopia regarding the social
conditioners of personality withdrew their
allegiance from classical psychoanalytical theories
along lines dictated by new orientation developed
by social science.
We don’t agree with freud completely…
(sexuality cant explain everything)

Freud Post Freudian Neo Freudian
Jung
?Adler
Adler
Horney
Fromm
Sullivan
Who are the Neo – Freudians??

Neo-Freudian
• Definition–
“Neo-Freudian referring to modifications, extensions, or revisions of
Freud’s original psychoanalytic theory, most commonly to those that
emphasize social, cultural, and interpersonal elements rather than
innate biological instincts such as sexuality and aggression.”
(Campbell's
Dictionary)
• Major theorists described as neo-Freudian are
Alfred Adler (1870-1937)
Erich Fromm(1900-1980)
Karen Horney (1885-1952)
Harry Stack-Sullivan (1892-1949)

Major disagreements with Freud : -
• Socio cultural factors determine conflicts, not instincts.
• Infantile sexuality is of little importance compared to socio-
cultural factors. Conflicts can be or are predominately non-
sexual.
• Societal factors cause anxiety, not a defense.
• Dreams have no latent content: could be metaphorical
expressions of the patient’s real concern or reflect
struggles to achieve self-awareness and responsibility.
• Oedipal complex has no sexual component, is due to
interpersonal/ social factors.
• Technique of treatment: normally emphasize ‘here and
now’, de-emphasis on past, gaining insight etc.

“We are united”
Although differing in details ,they are united in the following
conceptual beliefs:
1. The social and cultural, rather than biological factors are
basic to the understanding of human nature.
2. The oedipus complex, the formation of superego and alleged
inferiorities are cultural though there may be a biological
foundation for oral and anal stage , it can be modified by
cultural factors.
3. Emphasis is placed on “interpersonal relationships” in the
formation of character and the production of anxiety.
4. It is not the sexual behavior that determines character but

Alfred Adler
• Adler’s Personality Theory.
Few basic concepts sustain the whole
theoretical structure.
 Social interest.
 Creative self.
 Fictional finalism.
 Striving for superiority.
 Inferiority feelings and
compensations.
 Style of life.

Alfred Adler
Social interest: -
“humans are primarily social not sexual creature”
• Motivated by social urges
• Inherently social beings, place social welfare above selfish interest,
and acquire a style of life that is predominantly social in orientation.
• Social interest is in born, but the specific types of relationships with
people and social institutions that develop are determined by the
nature of the society into which a person is born.
• The person is embedded in a social context from the first day of life.
“Society interest is the true and inevitable compensation for all the
natural weakness of individual human beings”

Concept of creative self: -
 It asserts that humans make their own personality.
“Heredity only endows him with certain abilities.
Environment only gives him certain impression. These
abilities and impression and the manner in which he
experience them, that is to say, the interpretation he
makes of life experiences” Adler
• Adler’s self is a highly personalized, subjective system that
interprets and makes meaningful the experiences of the
organism.
• Searches for experiences that will aid in fulfilling the
person’s unique style of life; if these experiences are not
found in the world, the self tries to create them.

Consciousness: -
• Consciousness to be the center of personality.
• Conscious beings;
Ordinarily aware of the reasons for their behavior
Their inferiorities
Goal for which they strive.
• Humans are self-conscious individuals capable of planning
and guiding their actions with full awareness of heir
meaning for their own self-realization.

Fictional Finalism: -
• Motivated more by their expectations of the futures
than by experiences of the past.
• These fictional goals were the subjective causation of
psychological events.
• His final goal may be a fiction, that is, an ideal that is
impossible to realize but that nonetheless is a very real spur
to human striving and the ultimate explanations of
conduct.
• Normal person could free him- or herself from the
influence of these fictions and face reality when necessity
demanded.

Striving for superiority
It is a striving for perfect completion.
 Adler had three stages in his thinking regarding the
final goals of human-
 The striving for superiority carries him to the higher
stages of development.

Striving for Superiority
Aggression was important than sexuality.
“Will to power”- identified power with muscularity & weakness with
femininity.
“Masculine protest” - a form of overcompensation that both men and
women indulge in when they feel inadequate and inferior.
“Striving for superiority”- striving for perfect completion
• It is innate.
• Becomes socialized; the ideal of a perfect society takes the place of
personal ambition and selfish gain. Human compensate for their
individual weaknesses.
• Prepotent dynamic principal – from birth to death, carries the person
from one stage of development to the next higher stage.

Inferiority feelings and compensation: -
• Arise from a sense of incompleteness or imperfection in
any sphere of life, arise from subjectively felt psychological
or social disabilities as well as actual bodily weakness or
impairment.
• Not a sign of abnormality; they are the cause of all
improvement in the human lot.
• Under normal circumstances, is the great driving force of
mankind.
• Inferiority feelings were painful, relief of these feelings was
not necessarily pleasurable.
• Perfection, not pleasure, was for him the goal of life.

• Inferiority feelings and compensation.
Psychological /social disabilities/body
weakness.
Feeling of inferiority -unmanliness/feminity.
compensatory-masculine protest.
inferiority feelings-exaggerated:
pampering/rejection.
Abnormal manifestations-inferiority complex.
compensatory superiority complex.

Style of life: -
• The system principle by which the individual
personality functions; it is the whole that commands
the part.
• Explain the uniqueness
• Every person has the same goal, that of superiority, but
there are innumerable ways of strivings for this goal.
• Determines how a person confronts the three “life
problems” of adulthood: social relation, occupation, and
love and marriage.
• Formed very early in childhood & from then on experiences
are assimilated and utilized according to the this unique
style of life.
• Attitudes, feelings, and apperceptions become fixed and
mechanized at an early age.

Style of life: -
• May acquire new ways of expressing his or her unique style
of life, but these are merely concrete and particular
instances of the same basic style found at an early age.
• 4 different style of life
• Determines of style of life – specific inferiorities, either fancied or
real, that the person has. The style of life is a compensation for a
particular inferiority.
Styles Social interest Social activity
Ruling Low High
Getting Low Low
Avoiding Low Low
Socially useful High High

Order of birth: - personalities of the oldest, middle, and youngest child
in a family were likely to be quite different. these differences to the
distinctive experiences that each child has as a members of a social
group.
Early memory: - important key to understanding one’s basic style of life.
Childhood experiences: - predispose to a faulty style of life.
• Three important factors:
– Children with inferiorities (organic inferiority)
– Spoiled children (pampering)
– Neglected children (rejection)
• Conditions produce erroneous conceptions of the world and result in
a pathological style of life.

Neurosis: -
• Develops symptoms as protection from the sense of
inferiority that is trying so desperately to avoid.
• Rigidly overcompensates for the perceived inferiorities.
• Inability to deal with life’s problems leads to develop
“safeguards.” they serve to protect the neurotic from the
low self-esteem.
– Excuses – attempts to avoid blame for failures in life
– Aggression – blaming self or others for failures
– Distancing – procrastination, claims of helplessness, or
attempts to avoid problems

Contrast to Freud
Freud Adler
Human behavior is motivated by
inborn instincts (exclusive role
of sexual instinct in dynamics of
behavior)
Humans are primarily motivated
by social urges
A group of psychological
processes serving the ends of
inborn instincts
Concept of creative self -
subjective system that interprets
and makes meaningful the
experiences of the organism
Consciousness is a nonentity – a
mere froth floating on the great
sea of unconsciousness
Consciousness is the center of
personality

Freud Adler
Unconscious mind Conscious mind.
Pleasure principle Strive for superiority.
Psychoanalysis Individual psychology.
Determined by id, ego, superego Birth order, organ inferiority.
Directed towards past. Governed by what he wants in
future.
By:
Bernard Handbauer

• Personality theory
Two central facts dominate human behaviour.
-the inevitability of seperatedness.
-historical and social moment into which the person is born
Baby is born
Recognise itself as a separate being
Erich Fromm

Struggling-desperate anxiety of loneliness against the urge to fully
express and actualize oneself.
Facing aloneness and choosing individualization adds to freedom
and productive life.
True freedom terrifying
Construct series of illusions that generate a feeling of safety and
Security
Create a pseudoself, think pseudothought. and experience
Pseudofeeling

Erich Fromm
• Person feels lonely and isolated because he or she has
become separated from nature & form other people.
• Humans have gained more freedom throughout the ages
they have also felt more alone. Freedom then becomes a
negative condition from which they try to escape.
• The healthy strategy is for the person to unite with other
people in the spirit of love and shared work.
• The unhealthy option is for the person to attempt to
“escape from freedom”.

Escape from freedom
• One can attempt to escape through three means.
Authoritarianism – either via masochistic submission or
a sadistic attempt. (trying to live through someone, something
external)
Destructiveness – escape from powerlessness by
destroying the social agents and institutions that
produce a sense of helplessness and isolation
Automaton conformity – one renounces selfhood by
adopting a “pseudo self” based on the expectations of
others.
• Healthy case - humans use their freedom to develop a
better society. In the unhealthy cases, they acquire a new
bondage.

Fromm said four basic human needs to be met for existence
and to free from pseudoillusions.
Relatedness The need to feel connected to other human
Transcendence Rising above basic instincts.
Identity The need to feel accepted yet unique.
Frame of orientation Is a stable and conscious way of perceiving and comprehending
the world.

Needs
Six specific needs rise from the conditions of human existence:
1. The need for relatedness – humans, in becoming human,
have been torn from the animal’s primary union with nature.
In place of those instinctive ties with nature that animals
posses humans have to create their own relationships, the
most satisfying are based upon productive love.
2. The need for transcendence- a person’s need to rise above
his or her animal nature, to become a creative person
instead of remaining a creature
3. The need for rootedness- human desire natural roots; they
want to be an integral part of the world, to feel that they
belong.
A person finds the most satisfying and healthiest roots in a
feeling of kinship with other men and women.

4. The need for identity- have a sense of personal identity,
to be a unique individual.
May obtain a certain mark of distinction by identifying with
another person or group. In this case, identity arises from
belonging to someone and not from being some one.
5. The need for a frame of orientation- have a frame of
reference, a stable and consistent way of perceiving and
comprehending the world.
6. The need for excitation and stimulation –
– Simple stimuli produce an automatic, almost reflex,
response, and they are best thought of in terms of drives
– Activating stimuli – entail striving for goals.

• These needs are
Purely human and purely objective
Not derived from observing what humans say they want
Nor are these strivings created by society
Have become embedded in human nature through
evolution
• Specific manifestations of these needs, are determined by
“the social arrangements under which he lives”.
• One’s personality develops in accordance with the
opportunities that a particular society offers one.

Character types
• Five social character types
Receptive : cooperative and open.
Exploitive: filling up from outside
Hoarding: collect and close in on themselves.
Marketing: treat themselves as plastic commodity,
manipulative
Productive – considered healthy
• For the proper functioning of a particular society - the child’s
character be shaped to fit the needs of society.
• The task of the parents and of education is to make the child want to
act, as it has to act if a given economic, political, and social system is
to be maintained.

Contrast to Freud –
For Freud, both life and death instincts are inherent
in the biology of humans, whereas for Fromm, life is
the only primary potentially. Death is merely
secondary and only enters the picture when the life
forces are frustrated.
v/s

v/s
Freud Erich Fromm
Based on pleasure principle Based on inevitability of
separatedness.
Determinants of personality-
id,fixation,unconsciousness.
Determinants-Freedom, type of
family, society.
Never typified personality. Described 5 types of
personality.

Karen Horney
Contribution to personality theory:
• Basic anxiety: - children naturally experience anxiety,
helplessness, and vulnerability.
Without loving guidance to help children learn to cope with threats
imposed by nature and society, they may develop the basic anxiety.
• Basic evil – Domination, indifference, erratic behavior, lack of respect
for the child’s individual needs, lack of real guidance & reliable
warmth, disparaging attitudes, too much admiration or the absence
of it, parental disagreements, too much or too little responsibility,
overprotection, isolation, injustice, discrimination, unkept promises,
hostile atmosphere

• The basic evil experienced by the child naturally provoked
resentment, or basic hostility.
• It produces a dilemma or conflict for the child, because
expressing the hostility would risk punishment and would
jeopardize his or her receipt of parental love.
• Children deal with their hostility by repressing it.
• Regardless of cause, the repression exacerbates the
conflicts, leading to a vicious cycle: the anxiety produces
an excessive need for affection. When theses needs are
not met, the child feels rejected and the anxiety and
hostility intensify.
Basic hostility

• The insecure, anxious child develops various strategies to
cope with its feelings of isolation and helplessness.
Hostile
Submissive
Develop an unrealistic, idealized picture of itself
Bribe others into loving it
Use threats to force people to like it
Seek to obtain power over others.
Highly competitive attitude, winning is far more important than
the achievement
• Any one of these strategies may become a more or less
permanent fixture in the personality.
Basic hostility

Neurotic needs
• A particular strategy may assume the character of a drive or need in
the personality dynamics.
• Needs are “neurotic” because they are irrational solutions to the
problem.
• Horney presented list of 10 needs that are acquired as a
consequence of trying to find solutions for the problem of disturbed
human relationships.
• All of the foregoing needs are unrealistic

• Theses needs are
Affection and approval
“Partner” who will take over one’s life
Restrict one’s life within narrow borders
Power & Prestige
Exploit others
Personal admiration
Ambition for personal achievement
Self-sufficiency and independence
Perfection and unassailability
• These 10 needs are the sources from which inner
conflicts develop
Neurotic needs

Three solutions
Every one has these conflicts. While the normal person can resolve
these conflicts by integrating the three orientations, the neurotic
person because of greater basic anxiety utilize irrational and
artificial solutions.
Solutions Needs Elements of
basic anxiety
Moving toward people - Compliance
or the self-effacing solution
love helplessness
Moving away from people
-withdrawal or the resignation
solution
independence isolation
Moving against people - aggression
or the expansive solution
power hostility

• Alienation : -An alternative coping strategy on the part of the
neurotic. Neurotic may defensively turn away from the real
self toward some idealized alternative.
• Consequence of the child’s attempt to cope with basic
anxiety.
• Series of auxiliary approached to the neurotic conflicts.
“rationalization”, “cynicism” or “excessive self-control”.
All of these unconscious devices serve as pseudosolutions to
the neurotic’s basic conflict.
• As a final strategy, the neurotic may attempt to deal with
inner conflicts by externalizing them.
Neurotics may resort to “the tendency to experience internal
processes as if they occurred outside oneself and, as a rule, to
hold these external factors responsible for one’s difficulties”.

Contrast to Freud -
• Objected strongly to concept of “penis envy” as the determining
factor in the feminine psychology.
– Lack of confidence and an overemphasis of the love relationship
– Very little to do with the anatomy of sex organs.
• Oedipus complex - not a sexual-aggressive conflict but an anxiety
growing out of basic disturbances in the child’s relationships with
mother and father.

Contrast to Freud –
• Aggression is not inborn, but is a means by which humans try to
protect their security.
• Did not feel that conflict is built into the nature of humans and is
therefore inevitable, arise out of social conditions.
• Narcissism is not really self-love but self-inflation and overevaluation
owing to feelings of insecurity.

Harry Stack-Sullivan
Interpersonal theory of psychiatry
Personality is “ the relatively enduring pattern of
recurrent interpersonal situations which characterize a
human life”.
• Hypothetical entity that cannot be isolated from interpersonal
situations, & interpersonal behavior is all that can be observed
as personality.
• The unit of study is the interpersonal situation and not the
person.

• Perceiving, remembering, thinking, imagining, and all of the
other psychological processes are interpersonal in character.
• Even nocturnal dreams are interpersonal, usually reflect the
dreamer’s relationships with other people.
• Did not deny the importance of heredity and maturation in
forming and shaping the organism; which is distinctly human is
the product of social interactions.
• The organization consists of interpersonal events rather than
intrapsychic ones. Personality only manifests itself when the
person is behaving in relation to one or more other individuals.

Theory of personality
• Dynamic center of various processes that occur in a series
of interpersonal fields. The principal processes are
Dynamism
Personifications
Cognitive processes
Dynamism: -
• The relatively enduring pattern of energy transformations, which
recurrently characterize the organism in its duration as a living
organism.
• An energy transformation is any form of behavior. It may be overt
and public, or covert and private.

• Distinctively human in character are those that characterize one’s
interpersonal relations.
• Any habitual reaction towards one or more persons, whether it be in
the form of a feeling, an attitude, or an overt action, constitutes a
dynamism.
• Same basic dynamism, mode of expression of dynamism varies in
accordance with the situation and the life experience
• Usually employs a particular zone of the body such as the mouth, by
means of which it interacts with the environment.
• Most dynamisms serve the purpose of satisfying the basic needs of
the organism.
Receptor apparatus
for receiving stimuli
Educators in
CNS
Effector apparatus for
performing action

The self-system
• Dynamism that develops as a result of anxiety
• Anxiety is a product of interpersonal relations, being
transmitted originally from the mother to the infant and
later in life by threats to one security.
• To avoid or minimize actual or potential anxiety, people
adopt various types of protective measures
• These security measures form the self-system that
Good-me self = sanctions certain forms of behavior
Bad-me self = forbids other forms
Not-me self = excludes from consciousness still other
forms that are too alien and disgusting to even be
considered

• Though these processes the self-system acts as filter
for awareness.
• Selective attention - unconscious refusal to attend to
anxiety-generating events and feelings.
• The self-system as the guardian of one’s security tends to
become isolated from the rest of personality: it excludes
information that is incongruous with its present
organization and fails thereby to profit from experience.
• In general, the more experiences people have with anxiety,
the more inflated their self systems becomes and the more
it becomes dissociated from the rest of the personality.
• Although the self-system serves the useful purpose of
reducing anxiety, it interferes with one’s ability to live
constructively with others.

Personifications
• An image, an individual has of him- or herself or of another person.
• A complex of feelings, attitudes, and conceptions that grow out of
experiences with need satisfaction and anxiety.
– The good-me = rewarding in character,
– The bad-me = anxiety-arousing situations
• Formed in the first place, but once formed, they usually persist and
influence our attitudes towards other people.
• Serves an anxiety-reducing function in early life may interfere with
one’s interpersonal relation later in life.
• Stereotypes – Personifications, shared by a number of people.
Consensually validated conceptions, ideas that have wide acceptance
among members of society and are handed down from generation to
generation

Cognitive processes
• Place of cognition in the affairs of personality in classification
of experience.
• Experience occurs in three modes
Prototaxic – discrete series of momentary states of the sensitive
organism.
• Experience is the raw sensations, images, and feelings that
flow through the mind of a sensate being.
• No necessary connections among themselves and possess no
meaning for the experiencing person.
• During the early months of life and is necessary precondition
for the appearance of the other two modes.

Parataxic - consists of seeing causal relationship
between events that occur at about the same time but
are not logically related.
• Much of ours thinking does not advance beyond this level;
see causal connections between experiences that have
nothing to do with one another. e.g. superstitions.
Syntaxic – highest mode of thinking, consists of consensually
validated symbol activity, especially of a verbal nature.
• Symbol - has been agreed upon by a group of people as
having a standard meaning. e.g. words and numbers.
• Produces logical order among experiences and enables
people to communicate with one another.

The dynamics of Personality
• Personality as an energy system whose chief work consists of
activities what will reduce tension.
Tension: - theoretically can vary between the limits of absolute
relaxation, or euphoria, and absolute tension as exemplified
by extreme terror.
Two type of tension –
1. Arise from the needs of organism –connected with
physiological requirement of life.
• One result of need reduction is an experience of satisfaction:
tension can be regarded as needs for particular energy
transformations that will dissipate the tension, often with an
accompanying change of ‘mental’ state, a change of
awareness

2. Result from an anxiety – anxiety is experience of
tension that results from real or imaginary threats
to one’s security.
In large amounts, it reduces the efficiency of the
individuals in satisfying their needs, disturbs
interpersonal relations, and produce confusion in
thinking.
Energy transformations: - energy is transformed by
performing work (overt action or mental).
• These activities have as their goal the relief of tension.
They are to a great extent conditioned by the society in
which the person raised

Contrast to Freud
• Not believe that instincts are important sources of human
motivation, and not accept the libido theory of Freud. An individual
learns to behave in a particular way as a result of interactions with
people.
• In contrast to Freud’s view that development is largely an unfolding
of the sex instinct, Sullivan argued persuasively for a more social
psychological view of personality growth, one in which the unique
contributions of human relationships would be accorded their proper
due.

Critics of Neo-Freudians
• Just enlarged the scope of Freudian psychology by
providing room for the social determinants of personality.
• Elaborate one aspect of classical psychoanalysis, namely
the ego and its defenses. The needs, trends, styles,
orientations, personifications, dynamisms, and so forth, are
accommodated in Freudian theory under the heading of
ego-defenses.
• Humans evolved by these, is too sugar coated and
idealistic. These theories blamed society for deplorable
state of affairs.

• Person presented by these is less a product of research and more a
result of their normative preconceptions. They are moralists and not
scientist.
• All these oppose Freud’s instinct doctrine and the fixity of human
nature, none of them adopts the radical environmentalist position
that an individual’s personality is created solely by the conditions of
society into which he or she is born
• Failure of these theories to specify the precise means by which a
society molds its members. How does a person acquire social
character: How does one learn to be a members of society?
Critics of Neo-Freudians

Conclusions
• The Neo-Freudian psychologists were those followers of
Sigmund Freud who accepted the basic tenets of his theory
of psychoanalysis but altered it in some way
• They emphasize the influence of social, cultural, and
interpersonal variables in shaping personality.
• They Just enlarged the scope of Freudian psychology by
providing room for the social determinants of personality

All the theorist emphasized the
influence of social variables
in shaping personality, yet
each of the theorist
acknowledge their
indebtness to the seminal
thinking of Freud they have
invested personality with a
social imension equally if not
superior in importance to the
biological dimensions
provided by Freud.

Bibliography
• Comprehensive text book of Psychiatry,
vol 1,(2nd
edition.)
• Comprehensive text book of Psychiatry vol
1,(9th
edition.)
• Synopsis of Psychiatry, Kaplan and
Saddock,(10th
edition.)
• Theories of Personality, Hall, Linbzey,
Campbell(Wiley’s publication 4th
edition.)
• Text book of PG Psychiatry,J.Nvyas ,Niraj
Ahuja(2nd edition.)
• Internet : www.googleimages.com
• Morgan and king:
Introduction to Psychology Thank

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