PSY 405 Week 1 Psychoanalytic and Neo-Analytic Theories Example

The Tyranny of the Shoulds: A Psychoanalytic and Neo-Analytic Reading of a Driven School Principal

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PSY/405: Theories of Personality

Week 1 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The principal and her history are composites written for a model paper; theory and research come from the sources listed.

Psychodynamic theories hold that much of personality operates outside awareness, shaped by early relationships and inner conflict. Freud founded the tradition, and later theorists revised it to emphasize social forces and the self. This paper introduces a composite case that will be analyzed through a different theory each week and reads her first through psychoanalytic and neo-analytic eyes.

The Case

Renée Castillo is forty-five and the principal of a large public high school in Tucson, Arizona. She is the oldest of four children of parents who emigrated from Sonora and ran a small restaurant. From age ten, she helped in the kitchen after school and looked after her siblings; her father praised results and criticized mistakes sharply. She was the first in her family to finish college. As principal, she is known for energy, high standards and devotion to students, and she routinely works seventy hours a week. This year, her school's state rating dropped one level. Since then she has slept poorly, rewritten teachers' lesson plans at midnight and snapped at staff in meetings, then felt ashamed afterward.

Freud's Structure of Personality

Freud described personality as three interacting systems: the id, seeking immediate gratification; the superego, carrying internalized moral standards and ideals; and the ego, which balances these against reality. Anxiety arises when the ego is pressed by conflicting demands, and it uses defense mechanisms, largely unconscious strategies, to reduce anxiety.

Renée's superego appears unusually strict. Her inner standard, absorbed from a father who praised only success, demands perfection, and the rating drop registers as moral failure. The midnight rewriting of lesson plans serves the superego's demand that she personally fix everything.

Defenses at Work

Her outbursts at staff fit displacement, redirecting anger from its true source to a safer target. The district supervisor who delivered the rating news is powerful and cannot be challenged; teachers who report to her are safer targets. Her overwork may also serve as a defense, keeping painful feelings of inadequacy out of awareness by staying constantly busy.

Adler: Striving and Birth Order

Alfred Adler broke with Freud by placing social striving, rather than sexual drives, at the center of personality. Adler argued that people strive to overcome feelings of inferiority and to achieve superiority or perfection, and that healthy striving is joined with social interest, concern for others. Adler also suggested that birth order shapes personality, with oldest children often taking responsibility and fearing loss of status.

Renée's history fits this account: an oldest child who cared for siblings and earned her father's approval through achievement, she built her identity on competent striving. Her strong social interest, devotion to students, keeps the striving healthy in most respects; the rating drop threatens her sense of competence and intensifies the striving.

Renée did not choose perfectionism as a strategy; she learned at ten that being flawless was the price of her father's praise.

Horney: The Idealized Self

Horney (1950) argued that children who experience insecure or conditional acceptance develop basic anxiety and cope by creating an idealized image of who they should be. People then live under a "tyranny of the shoulds," inner commands to match the ideal, and react with self-hatred when they fall short. Horney also described three patterns of relating, moving toward, against or away from people.

Renée's idealized self is the principal who never fails her students. Her "shoulds" are explicit: she should know every teacher's lessons, should never let scores drop, should handle everything alone. The rating drop exposes a gap between real and ideal self, and her shame after outbursts reflects the self-condemnation Horney described. Under stress, she shifts from moving toward people, her usual warmth, to moving against them, her sharpness.

Erikson's Stages as a Bridge

Erik Erikson extended the tradition across the whole lifespan, describing a series of psychosocial tasks. At midlife, the central task is generativity, contributing to the next generation, set against stagnation. Renée's devotion to students is generativity in its clearest form, which helps explain why a rating that seems to judge her contribution strikes so deeply. Erikson's view adds something the earlier theories lack: her drive is not only a defense against old insecurity but also a healthy investment in others' futures.

Does the Tradition Have Scientific Support?

Bornstein (2005) argued that psychoanalysis has been isolated from mainstream psychology, partly through its own resistance to testing, even though research in cognitive and social psychology has confirmed key ideas such as unconscious processing and defensive biases. Bornstein called for psychodynamic theorists to state hypotheses in testable form and to engage with experimental findings.

Shedler (2010) reviewed outcome research and reported that psychodynamic therapy produced benefits as large as those of other well-supported therapies, with benefits that often continued to grow after treatment ended. Shedler also noted that the active ingredients of other therapies often overlap with psychodynamic techniques, such as exploring emotions and recurring relationship patterns.

Strengths and Limits for This Case

Psychodynamic theories capture something important about Renée: her drive and distress connect to early relationships and to an inner standard she did not consciously choose. Horney's idealized self, in particular, explains her shame better than a simple account of stress. The limits are real, however. Concepts such as a harsh superego are hard to measure, interpretations can be fitted to almost any behavior and the theories say little about her strengths, such as resilience and skill, or about the cultural meaning of being the first in her family to succeed. Later weeks will test whether trait, learning, humanistic and integrative theories add precision.

Conclusion

A psychoanalytic reading sees in Renée a demanding superego and displacement of anger onto safe targets. Adler explains her drive as healthy striving tied to social interest and shaped by her role as oldest child, and Horney explains her shame as the cost of an idealized self. Research supports some psychodynamic ideas and the effectiveness of psychodynamic therapy, while the tradition's untestable claims call for caution.

References

Bornstein, R. F. (2005). Reconnecting psychoanalysis to mainstream psychology: Challenges and opportunities. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 22(3), 323-340. https://doi.org/10.1037/0736-9735.22.3.323

Horney, K. (1950). Neurosis and human growth: The struggle toward self-realization. W. W. Norton.

Shedler, J. (2010). The efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy. American Psychologist, 65(2), 98-109. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0018378