Freud, Adler and Jung: the psychodynamic items and how to keep the three apart.
Psychosexual stages and the structural model, social interest and birth order, archetypes and the collective unconscious. Plus the ego psychologists.
By Dr. Andrew Wichterman · September 15, 2026 · 5 min read · Updated October 4, 2026
The psychodynamic theories are tested as vocabulary, and three names carry most of it. Freud built the system, Adler and Jung left it in different directions, and the exam wants you to know which concept belongs to whom.
Freud
The structural model: id (pleasure principle), ego (reality principle), superego (conscience and ego ideal). The topographic model: conscious, preconscious, unconscious. Psychosexual stages: oral (0 to 1), anal (1 to 3), phallic (3 to 6; Oedipus and Electra complexes), latency (6 to puberty), genital. Fixation results from too much or too little gratification at a stage. Techniques: free association, dream analysis (manifest and latent content), interpretation, analysis of transference and resistance. Countertransference is the analyst's reaction. Anxiety types: reality, neurotic, moral. Freud is deterministic and focused on early childhood and sexuality.
Adler: individual psychology
Holistic and social. Concepts: social interest (Gemeinschaftsgefühl), inferiority feelings and compensation, striving for superiority (later, for significance), style of life, fictional finalism (goal-directed behavior toward an imagined ideal), birth order and family constellation, private logic, early recollections as assessment. Techniques: encouragement, acting as if, spitting in the client's soup, catching oneself, the push-button technique. Adler influenced Dreikurs, parent education, and most later cognitive and humanistic approaches. If the item says purposeful, goal-directed, social, or mentions birth order, it is Adler.
Jung: analytical psychology
The collective unconscious and archetypes (persona, shadow, anima and animus, the self). Individuation as the goal of the second half of life. Introversion and extraversion, and the four functions (thinking, feeling, sensing, intuiting), which became the MBTI. Complexes. Synchronicity. Dreams as compensatory. Jung is the one who says the unconscious is creative and spiritual, and who focused on midlife.
A session with each
A classical Freudian analysis has the client on the couch, the analyst out of view, and the instruction to say whatever comes to mind. The analyst listens for slips, resistances and the themes of dreams, and interprets sparingly, with the transference, the client's displacement of early relationships onto the analyst, as the central material. The work is long, several sessions a week for years, and the goal is making the unconscious conscious so that the ego can choose. Modern psychodynamic therapy is briefer and face to face, but the mechanism is the same.
An Adlerian counselor sits facing the client and works through four phases: establishing the relationship, investigating the lifestyle through the family constellation, birth order and early recollections, offering interpretation that produces insight into the client's private logic and mistaken goals, and reorientation, in which the client tries new behavior with encouragement. The tone is collaborative and educational. A Jungian analyst works with dreams by amplification, connecting the images to myth and symbol rather than to the client's personal history alone, uses active imagination, and attends to the shadow and the unlived parts of the personality, especially in clients at midlife. If the stem describes a dream, the method of interpreting it tells you whose office you are in.
Transference, resistance and the relationship in each
For Freud, transference is the engine: the client re-experiences early relationships with the analyst, the analyst remains a neutral screen so the projection is visible, and interpreting the transference is the cure. Resistance, whatever the client does to avoid the material, is interpreted rather than confronted. Countertransference is the analyst's own unresolved material and is managed through the analyst's own analysis and supervision. Items on these terms want the Freudian frame unless the stem names another school.
Adler rejected the neutral screen. The relationship is egalitarian and warm, the counselor is a model and an encourager, and what Freud called resistance Adler saw as a mismatch between the counselor's goals and the client's. Jung saw transference as real and mutual, including the analyst's participation, and treated it as a vehicle for the client's individuation rather than purely as a repetition of the past. A stem in which the counselor discloses, encourages and treats the client as a partner is Adlerian; one in which the analyst stays neutral and interprets the client's feelings toward him is Freudian; one in which the analyst explores a dream's archetypal images is Jungian.
The ego psychologists and object relations
- Erikson: eight psychosocial stages across the lifespan; the ego is adaptive.
- Anna Freud: defenses, child analysis.
- Hartmann: the autonomous ego.
- Klein: object relations, the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, play therapy.
- Winnicott: the good-enough mother, transitional objects, the holding environment.
- Mahler: separation-individuation.
- Kohut: self psychology, empathy, the selfobject.
- Horney: basic anxiety, moving toward, against and away from people; feminist critique of Freud.
- Sullivan: interpersonal theory, the self-system.
- Fromm, Rank, Reich: appear as distractors.
The tells
Stages, drives, sexuality: Freud. Social, purposeful, birth order, encouragement: Adler. Archetypes, collective, midlife, types: Jung. Lifespan psychosocial: Erikson. Mother-infant: object relations.
Three items, worked
A counselor asks a new client to describe his earliest memory in detail, then asks about his position among his siblings and what each was known for in the family. Early recollections and family constellation: Adler. The distractor is Freud, because the material is childhood, but a Freudian would wait for the material to emerge in free association rather than assess for it directly. A client in her fifties, successful and restless, brings a recurring dream of a dark figure following her through her childhood home; the therapist explores the figure as the shadow and connects it to the parts of herself she set aside to build her career. Jung: midlife, the shadow, individuation.
A client arrives late for the third week running and spends the session discussing the therapist's office décor. The therapist eventually notes the pattern and wonders aloud what it might be protecting them both from discussing. Resistance, interpreted gently, with the relationship as the material: Freud, or the broader psychodynamic frame. The distractor is Glasser, who would ask what the client is doing and whether it is working; the deciding feature is that the therapist treats the behavior as meaningful avoidance to be understood rather than as a choice to be evaluated.
Practice this. The flashcards and practice tests on this site are sorted by content area, so you can drill this one until it holds.
Three founders, three vocabularies. Learn the tells and the psychodynamic items are quick.