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• Classic-Fiction

• Rationalization—offering socially acceptable reasons for our inappropriate behavior; making unconscious excuses.

• Projection—attributing our own undesirable thoughts, feelings, or actions to others.

• Displacement—shifting unacceptable thoughts, feelings, or actions from a more threatening person or object to another less threatening person or object.

• Reaction formation—acting in a manner exactly opposite to our true feelings.

• Sublimation—the redirection of unacceptable sexual or aggressive impulses into more socially acceptable behaviors.

Freud’s Psychosexual Theory of Development—sequential and discontinuous stages with changing erogenous zone and conflict in each stage; if conflict is not successfully resolved, result is fixation.

• Oral stage—pleasure from sucking; conflict is weaning from bottle or breast; oral fixation; oral-dependent personalities are gullible, overeaters, and passive, while oral-aggressive personalities are sarcastic and argumentative.

• Anal stage—pleasure from holding in or letting go of feces; conflict is toilet training; anal fixation; anal-retentive personalities are orderly, obsessively neat, stingy, and stubborn; or anal-expulsive personalities are messy, disorganized, and lose their temper.

• Phallic stage—pleasure from self-stimulation of genitals; conflict is castration anxiety or penis envy. Healthy resolution of Oedipal/Electra complex results in identification with same sex parent; fixation; homosexuality or relationship problems.

• Latency stage—suppressed sexuality; pleasure in accomplishments; if accomplishments fall short of expectations, development of feelings of inferiority.

• Genital stage—adolescent to adulthood; pleasure from intercourse and intimacy with another person.

Carl Jung’s analytic theory emphasized the influence of our evolutionary past on our personality with the collective unconscious—the powerful and influential system that contains universal memories and ideas that all people have inherited from ancestors over the course of evolution.

• Archetypes—inherited memories or common themes found in all cultures, religions, and literature, both ancient and modern.

• Individuation—psychological process by which we become an individual; a unified whole, including conscious and unconscious processes.

Alfred Adler’s individual or ego theory emphasized social interest as the primary determinant of personality. We strive for superiority and try to compensate for inferiority complexes.

Karen Horney attacked Freud’s male bias and suggested the male counterpart for penis envy is womb envy. She thought females were more envious of the male’s social status.

Humanistic approach—Humans are born good and strive for positive personal growth.

• Abraham Maslow emphasized the goal of self-actualization—reaching toward the best person we can be.

• Carl Rogers’s self-theory or the view that the individual’s self-concept is formed by society’s conditions of worth and the need for unconditional positive regard—acceptance and love from others independent of how we behave.

Behavioral approach—According to Skinner, our history of reinforcement shapes our behavior, which is our personality.

Cognitive and social cognitive/social-learning approach—Cognitive theories say human nature is basically neutral and we are shaped by our perceptions of the world.

• George Kelly’s personal construct theory looks at how we develop bipolar mental constructs to judge and predict others’ behavior.

• Social cognitive/social-learning theories stress the interaction of thinking with learning experiences in a social environment.

• Albert Bandura’s reciprocal determinism states that three types of factors all affect one another in explaining our behavior: personality characteristics and cognitive processes; the nature, frequency, and intensity of actions; stimuli from the social or physical environment, and reinforcement contingencies.

• Self-efficacy is our belief that we can