The MBTI test battery has been extensively studied, with many questioning how effectively it actually operationalized Jung’s theory but also acknowledging how difficult a task that would be. However, some data in a research paper by Robert McCrae and Paul Costa (1989) deserves attention because of its relevance to Big Five theory, covered in more detail in Chapter 12. McCrae and Costa compared the MBTI with their own personality assessment, the Neuroticism Extraversion Openness Personality Inventory (NEO-PI; Costa & McCrae, 1985), which is a widely accepted measure of the Big Five or Five-Factor-Model dimensions (namely,Extraversion, Neuroticism (the opposite of Emotional Stability), Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, and Openness to Experience). McCrae and Costa studied men and women and compared both self-reported and peer-rated NEO-PI data with MBTI self-report data. In all cases the four MBTI scales aligned the same way with the NEO-PI scales: the NEO Extraversion scale correlated significantly with MBTI Extraversion, the NEO Openness scale correlated significantly with MBTI Intuition, the NEO Agreeableness scale correlated highly with MBTI Feeling, and the NEO Conscientiousness scale correlated highly with MBTI Judging.
Consistent with how difficult it would be to encapsulate Jungian-type concepts in a conventional psychological test, McCrae and Costa suggested that the MBTI incarnation of Jung’s personality theory worked essentially like a Big Five personality assessment such as their NEO-PI, without the Neuroticism/low Emotional Stability dimension. That is, the MBTI had no scale measuring what McCrae and Costa called Neuroticism (the opposite pole of what the Big Five would call Emotional Stability). More important for our purposes, this means there is no provision in the MBTI for Panksepp’s three negatively experienced emotions, namely, RAGE/Anger, FEAR/Anxiety, and PANIC/Sadness, a finding further elaborated in Chapter 12. While Jung did include a shadow archetype, the trio of powerful negative primary emotions that are such key influences on personality and mental health were not well represented in the MBTI.
ADLER, HORNEY, AND SULLIVAN
Alfred Adler (1870–1937) was another of Freud’s early followers to leave his inner circle. He was an original member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, which at first met in Freud’s apartment, and he later served as the society president. However, like so many of the post-Freudian theorists, Adler rejected Freud’s strongly instinctual orientation. He broke with Freud in 1911, like Jung over the importance of sexuality, and began developing his own ideas, focusing on man’s social orientation.
Adler felt that our social nature was inborn, as was the major human motivation “striving for superiority” (what would now be called social dominance; for a discussion of the affective neuroscience of social dominance as a possible primary emotion, see van der Westhuizen and Solms, 2015). However, his social orientation toward personality led him to argue that it was not just instincts that explained human behavior but especially our goals that spurred our striving—our “attempts to express the great upward drive” (Adler, 1930, p. 398). These strivings often came from a sense of inferiority or imperfection ranging from a social disability to a child striving for a higher level of development. Thus, Adler’s theorizing moved even further away from a Freudian-styled personality based on instincts toward a more social, goal-oriented human nature. His thinking followed a post-Freudian pattern of becoming more conceptual and abstract as he attempted to explain human behavior from a clinical and educational perspective.
Karen Horney (1885–1952) was trained in medicine and psychoanalysis in Germany but moved to the United States in 1932, in advance of the wave of fascism. She became dissatisfied with orthodox psychoanalysis and was a founder of the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis. She especially rejected Freud’s concept of penis envy and the Oedipus complex. Like Adler, she objected to the “instinctivistic” limitations of Freudian psychoanalysis. However, Horney further separated humans from other animals and wrote: “An animal’s actions are largely determined by instinct . . . and beyond individual decision. In contrast, it is the prerogative as well as the burden of human beings to be able to exert choice, to have to make decisions. We may have to decide between desires that lead in opposite directions” (1945, p. 23). Yet, she did reinforce the principle that normal and pathological behavior represented the same psychological dimensions and differ only by degree, and that “the difference, then, between normal and neurotic conflicts lies fundamentally in the fact that the disparity between the conflicting issues is much less great for the normal person than for the neurotic” (p. 31).
From her clinical experience, she defined a series of ten neurotic needs (Horney, 1942), sources of inner cognitive conflicts, which she argued the neurotic personality could not resolve realistically. She later organized these needs (Horney, 1945) into three orientations: moving toward people (affiliation and love), moving away from people (self-sufficiency and perfection), and moving against people (power, prestige, and achievement). More like Adler, she did not feel that conflict and anxiety were built into human nature but arose from difficult childhood and other social experiences. As such, Horney represented another step away from biological origins toward social-developmental influences and unique personal experiences. Hers was a less tangible, more conceptual theory of personality dealing mainly with the complex workings of the human mind.
Harry Stack Sullivan (1892–1949) was another psychiatrist who became dissatisfied with Freudian psychoanalytic theory. He was a little younger than Adler and Horney and born and educated in the United States, which may have made it easier for him to deviate even more from Freud in his approach to personality. Sullivan did not accept instincts or libido as significant sources of human motivation. Although he incorporated stages of development into his theory, “by the end of the ninth month the infant is manifesting pretty unmistakable evidence of capabilities of the underlying human animal for becoming a human being” (Sullivan, 1953, p. 150). In other words, in the process of maturation, humans gradually lose their pure biological status as animals and become social human beings.
In his interpersonal theory of psychiatry, Sullivan further adopted the position that personality was a function of interpersonal events and could only be observed in interpersonal situations: “The personality that can be studied by scientific method is neither something that can be observed directly nor something . . . of which would be any concern of the psychiatrist”; namely, “psychiatry is the study of the phenomena that occur in interpersonal situations” (Sullivan 1964, pp. 32–33). While his “dynamisms” such as “malevolence,” “fear,” and “lust” appear similar to Panksepp’s primary emotions of RAGE, FEAR, and LUST, Sullivan has carefully separated his dynamisms from any biological roots, for example, “Like any mammalian creature, man is endowed with the potentialities for undergoing fear, but in almost complete contradistinction to infrahuman creatures, man in the process of becoming a person always develops a great variety of processes directly related to the undergoing of anxiety” (Sullivan, 1948, p. 3). As such, Sullivan continues the pattern of generating more intangible constructs and moving further away from biological roots.
HENRY A. MURRAY
There is another personality theorist, we would like to include here, who took a rather different approach. Henry A. Murray, who wrote the epigraph for this chapter, largely ignored the dominant behaviorist zeitgeist of his time and heroically attempted to inject life and purpose into human personality by wedding McDougall’s broader instinct theory with Freud’s psychoanalytic linkage of unconscious motivation, early human developmental experience, and a narrower selection of primary instincts. Murray labeled his approach “personology,” which combined psychological assessments and clinical practice with an emphasis on the full understanding of each individual case within an environmental context.
Murray (1893 – 1988), a native of New York City, began his academic life as an undergraduate history major, graduating from Harvard in 1915. He then completed a medical degree from Columbia and an M.A. in biology from Columbia in 1919
and 1920, respectively. Eventually his interests led him to complete a Ph.D. in biology from Cambridge in 1927. Murray experienced a major life turning point when in 1925 he spent three weeks with Carl Jung in Switzerland and became inspired to pursue a career in psychology. Having been trained in medicine and biology, but drawn to psychology, family social connections may have provided Murray the opportunity to direct the new Harvard Psychological Clinic, which gave him the chance to pursue his psychological interests and provided the research for his most famous work, Explorations in Personality, published in 1938.
The zeitgeist Murray found himself in can be grasped in a quote by Dan McAdams from the foreword to the 2008 edition of Explorations:
Psychoanalytic ideas were new and exciting and were forbidden fruit in most proper departments of psychology. Indeed, American academic psychology in the 1930s could not have been more opposed to what Murray was trying to do at the clinic. . . . Watson had already established behaviorism as the dominant psychological ethos. . . . At Harvard, . . . E. G. Boring committed Harvard psychology to the most rigorous canons of empirical science. He took a jaundiced view of Freud, Jung, and Murray. (p. xii)
However, at the Harvard Psychological Clinic, Murray saw himself bringing together the dynamic assumptions of Sigmund Freud, other early psychoanalytic theorists, and William McDougall to put the direction, motivation, and adaptive quality into human personality that was lacking in the behaviorist approach (p. 37). At the clinic, he was able to draw together resources, including a team of researchers, to intensely investigate fifty-one individuals over a period of several years and draw his tentative conclusions laid out in Explorations. Like his predecessor Freud, Murray felt that the “physiologists” would someday in the distant future discover the true nature of “regnant” processes occurring in the brain and accepted this limitation. While he and his team could not directly observe these brain activities, they inferred that the personality expressions they observed were accounted for by brain processes (p. 45).
Murray is perhaps best remembered for his list of twenty manifest needs. For Murray, these needs were hypothetical constructs occurring in the brain that were associated with personality traits (Murray, 1938/2008, pp. 61–62). These twenty needs are listed in Table 5.1 along with Murray’s descriptions of associated desires and effects (paraphrased and extensively abridged), as well as the likely placement of six of Panksepp’s seven primary emotions.
While Murray rejected behaviorist stimulus-response descriptions, despite following the lead of McDougall and Freud by providing dynamic motivations for behavior, Murray did not base his manifest needs on instincts. Although six of these needs closely reflect Panksepp’s primary emotions, Murray did not consider these needs to be of an emotional nature. Indeed, Murray distinguished his manifest needs from McDougall’s instincts and wrote the following: “The instinct theory of McDougall emphasizes the impulsive, emotional type of behavior . . . found . . . very commonly in animals and not infrequently as reactions to sudden stimuli in adults (emotional needs). But, according to our experience, a theory of motivation must be carried beyond the primitive, impulsive (thalamic) level of action. It must be made to include cool, carefully planned conduct” (1938/2008, pp. 94–95).
With this statement, Murray anticipates the need to specify the level of personality behavior one is describing. While Murray prefers to focus on what we would call the tertiary level of behavior/psychology, we would argue that until there is a clearer understanding of personality at the primary level, our understanding of the tertiary, derived level of human personality will remain incomplete. In fact, we hold open the possibility that, despite the intense socialization characteristic of our species, human personality may routinely include more primary-level representation than many cognitively-oriented theorists would like to recognize.
Table 5.1. Murray’s Twenty Manifest Needs Displayed in Murray’s Categorical Sequence
Need Desires and Effectsa Panksepp
Primary
Emotion
n Dominance To control one’s human environment. To influence or direct the behavior and opinions of Os.
n Deference To admire and support a superior O. To yield eagerly to the influence of an allied O.
n Autonomy To get free, shake off restraint, break out of confinement. To resist coercion and restriction. To be independent and free to act according to impulse.
n Aggression To overcome opposition forcefully. To fight. To oppose forcefully or punish an O. RAGE
n Abasement To submit passively to external force. To accept injury, criticism, punishment.
n Achievement To accomplish something difficult, and attain a high standard. To rival and surpass others.
n Sex To form and further an erotic relationship. LUST
n Sentience To seek and enjoy sensuous impressions.
n Exhibition To make an impression. To be seen and heard.
n Play To act for “fun,” without further purpose . To laugh and make good-natured humor, even if slightly aggressive. PLAY
n Affiliation To enjoyably cooperate or reciprocate with an allied O. To remain loyal to a friend.
n Rejection To separate oneself from an inferior O. To snub or jilt an O.
n Succorance The tendency to cry, plead, or ask for nourishment, love, protection, or aid. To have always a supporter. PANIC
n Nurturance To give sympathy and gratify the needs of an infant or any O that is weak. CARE
n Infavoidance To avoid humiliation. To refrain from action because of the fear of failure.
n Defendance To defend the self against assault, criticism, and blame.
n Counteraction To master or make up for failure by restriving. To overcome weaknesses.
n Harmavoidance To avoid pain, physical injury, and death. To escape from danger or take precautions. FEAR
n Order To put things in order. To achieve cleanliness, neatness, and precision.
n Understanding The tendency to ask or answer questions, analyze events, and be interested in theory.
Adapted from Murray (1938/2008, pp. 144–226).
a O = Object: any external entity (thing, animal, person) other than the subject;
Before closing this chapter with a more detailed discussion of the three-level, nested hierarchy of behavior and psychology, which reflects brain evolutionary progressions, we note that the acceptance of Murray’s manifest needs is illustrated by the development of the Edwards Personal Preference Schedule measuring fifteen of Murray’s needs (Edwards, 1954) and in the ongoing use of Douglas Jackson’s (1929–2004) more recent Personality Research Form, which includes measures for all twenty of Murray’s manifest needs (Jackson, 1974). At the Harvard Psychological Clinic, Murray and others also developed the Thematic Apperception Test, a projective assessment designed to measure a person’s underlying motivation, which is still in use and being revised (Gruber & Kreuzpointner, 2013).
THREE-LEVEL NESTED BRAINMIND HIERARCHY
Importantly, we are not arguing that any of the discussed theorist’s ideas are not valuable. Many of their books, especially those of Horney and Sullivan, were published by W.W. Norton & Company and are still in print. What we are saying is that there needs to be a way to have a clear conversation about such clinically derived ideas that are often highly conceptualized and difficult to test in humans, let alone in animal models, without diminishing the importance of the primary emotions that we feel they are built upon and embedded within. This is where the three-level nested hierarchy comes into play.
The Three-level Nested BrainMind Hierarchy (NBH) illustrates how each evolved primary-process emotion sets up secondary-process learning and, furthermore, is embedded in tertiary-process cognitions (see Figure 5.1). The red squares represent the primary-process emotions; the blue ovals depict the secondary-process learning; and the purple rectangles illustrate tertiary-process thought and language (see color insert). The shapes along with upward and downward pointing arrows are intended to model that (1)
lower level brain functions provide bottom-up influence on higher levels and are integrated into higher-level brain functions and that (2) higher level brain functions eventually exert top-down activation, inhibition and regulation of lower levels. Each primary-process emotion has a distinctive affective valence—that is, each has either a positive rewarding or negative punishing experience that not only guides decision making in survival situations but also promotes learning that allows for modifying these primary ancestral action systems to better meet current environmental demands. Experimental psychologists have traditionally called these evolved affective brain processes unconditioned stimuli and unconditioned responses. Indeed, FEAR and the homeostatic affect of HUNGER have been the affects that allow for diverse “reinforcements” (as discrete “objects” in the world, for example, foot shock and food) to be used by experimental psychologists to study learning. One of the functions of the primary emotions and other affects seems to be in guiding the organization of learning and memory within their respective affective spheres. As such, the primary level coordinates learning at the secondary level, which after the learning can, in turn, provide top-down adaptive modifications of the primary-level response systems (bottom arrows in Figure 5.1).
Further complexity is added as lower-level processes guide the maturation and development of tertiary-level cortical functions. We hypothesize that the functionality of the primary and secondary processes becomes represented functionally and symbolically (especially in humans) and embedded as acquired abilities in the tertiary (large cognitive/information-processing) mind. Moreover, the maturing tertiary mind, which is largely (but not exclusively) neocortical, is gradually able to add increasing sophistication and regulation to our responses to life events (top arrows in Figure 5.1). However, even as the tertiary mind gains the capacity to provide top-down cognitive regulation to our everyday psychobiological responses, our cognitive mind may still become subservient to the primary emotions when bottom-up primary affective influences suddenly appear as more challenging issues are confronted and experienced, leading at times to extreme emotional sensitivities—namely, affective states of mind that can trigger pathological displays. Thus, two-way, circular causation becomes an adaptive feature of the human mind and perhaps of mammalian minds in general, with bottom-up development and learning initially leading the way, and top-down regulations and reflections becoming part of the healthy mature (or, in extreme cases, pathological) BrainMind apparatus. The challenge of biological psychiatry and psychotherapy is to facilitate reorganization of such BrainMind dynamics.
The Emotional Foundations of Personality Page 11