Psychodynamic approaches: Freud, Adler and Jung
Last reviewed September 2026 by Dr. Andrew Wichterman · Aligned to the current NCE blueprint. Valid for exams through June 30, 2027.
AI-narrated overview made with Google NotebookLM. The written lesson below is by Dr. Andrew Wichterman.
You cannot say why you keep dating the same kind of person. Freud's claim was that the reason exists but is hidden from you. This lesson maps the unconscious with the iceberg, the defenses, transference, then follows the family tree through Adler, Jung, and the later analysts, with a case and a worked item.
Try to answer each from memory first, even if you have to guess. Guessing before reading makes the answer stick; reveal only after you have tried.
Start here: most of the mind is out of sight
You cannot explain why you always date the same kind of person, why a particular smell makes you sad, or why you snapped at your partner over nothing. Sigmund Freud's big claim, in Vienna around 1900, was that the explanation exists but is hidden from you: most of mental life happens in an unconscious you cannot see directly, formed in early childhood, and it runs the show. Everything in psychoanalysis follows from that: the goal of therapy is to make the unconscious conscious, and the techniques are ways of getting at it sideways.
Two of Freud's early followers, Alfred Adler and Carl Jung, accepted the unconscious but rejected Freud's view of what was in it, and each built a different theory. Later analysts moved the focus from drives to the ego and then to relationships. This lesson walks through the family tree, and the exam mostly asks whose word is whose.
Freud: the map of the mind
Freud drew the mind two ways at once. One is about levels of awareness; the other is about three parts that fight over what you do.
When the id's wishes and the superego's prohibitions collide, the ego feels anxiety. Freud named three kinds: reality anxiety (fear of a real danger), neurotic anxiety (fear that the id will break loose and you will do something shameful), and moral anxiety (guilt; fear of the superego). To manage the anxiety, the ego uses defense mechanisms: automatic, unconscious ways of distorting reality so it hurts less. Everyone uses them. The exam gives you an example and asks you to name it.
| Defense | Plain meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Repression | Pushing a threatening memory or wish out of awareness. The most basic; the others build on it | No memory of a childhood accident everyone else remembers |
| Denial | Refusing to accept a reality that is obvious to others | "The doctor is wrong; I'm fine," after a clear diagnosis |
| Projection | Attributing your own unacceptable feeling to someone else | A man attracted to a coworker accuses his wife of flirting |
| Displacement | Redirecting a feeling from its real target to a safer one | Yelled at by the boss, comes home and kicks the dog |
| Rationalization | Inventing a reasonable-sounding excuse for something done for other reasons | "I didn't get the job, but I didn't really want to move anyway" |
| Reaction formation | Acting the opposite of what you feel | Someone who resents a sibling is exaggeratedly sweet to them |
| Regression | Retreating to an earlier stage of development | A five-year-old starts wetting the bed when the new baby arrives |
| Sublimation | Channeling an unacceptable impulse into something socially valued. The healthiest defense | Aggression becomes a career as a surgeon or a boxer |
| Intellectualization | Escaping into abstract thought to avoid feeling | Discussing the statistics of a cancer diagnosis rather than the fear |
| Identification | Taking on the qualities of someone else, often someone powerful | A bullied child begins acting like the bully |
| Compensation | Making up for a perceived weakness by excelling elsewhere (also Adlerian) | A poor athlete becomes the top student |
| Undoing | Trying to cancel out an act with an opposite one | Cruel remark followed by lavish gifts |
Freud: how analysis works
If the trouble is unconscious, you cannot just ask about it. Freud developed ways of catching the unconscious off guard. Free association: the client lies on a couch, out of eye contact, and says whatever comes to mind without censoring; the slips, pauses and odd connections point to what is buried. Dream analysis, which Freud called the "royal road to the unconscious": the dream as remembered is the manifest content; its hidden meaning, disguised by the mind's censor, is the latent content. Interpretation: the analyst explains the meaning of the material, timed carefully. And analysis of resistance: everything the client does to avoid the painful material (arriving late, changing the subject, "forgetting") is itself data.
Classical analysis meant four or five sessions a week for years. Modern psychodynamic therapy keeps the ideas (the unconscious, defenses, transference, the influence of early relationships) but meets face to face, once a week, for months rather than years, and focuses on current patterns. When the exam says "psychodynamic," it means this broader family; "psychoanalytic" or "psychoanalysis" points to Freud specifically.
Three men, three engines
Adler: individual psychology
Alfred Adler was in Freud's inner circle until 1911, when he broke away over Freud's insistence that sex was the primary drive. Adler thought the primary drive was social. People are born small and helpless and spend their lives striving for superiority, by which he meant striving to overcome inferiority feelings and become competent, not to dominate others. Mental health is measured by social interest (Gemeinschaftsgefühl, "community feeling"): concern for other people and a sense of belonging to the human community. Neurosis is striving for superiority without social interest.
| Adlerian term | Plain meaning |
|---|---|
| Inferiority feelings | Universal and normal; the engine of growth. An inferiority complex is when they become paralyzing |
| Striving for superiority | The drive to overcome and to master, ideally in ways that serve others |
| Social interest | Concern for others and for the community; Adler's yardstick of mental health |
| Style of life (lifestyle) | The unique pattern of beliefs, goals and strategies each person forms by about age 5 or 6, and then lives by |
| Fictional finalism (guiding self-ideal) | The imagined future goal that pulls behavior ("if only I were the smartest person in the room, I'd be safe"). Adler was teleological: people are pulled by goals, not pushed by drives |
| Family constellation and birth order | Position in the family shapes personality. Adler cared about psychological position more than actual order: the oldest may be dethroned by the second; the youngest may be pampered; the only child grows up among adults |
| Private logic | The person's idiosyncratic reasoning, often based on mistaken beliefs ("basic mistakes") |
| Encouragement | The central Adlerian intervention; the opposite of discouragement, which Adler saw as the root of misbehavior |
Adlerian counseling is phenomenological (what matters is how the person perceives things), holistic (the person is a unity; "individual" psychology means indivisible), teleological (goal-directed), and egalitarian (counselor and client sit as equals; Adler worked in schools and community clinics and is the ancestor of parent education programs like STEP). Its techniques have memorable names, and the exam uses them.
| Technique | What it is |
|---|---|
| Lifestyle assessment | A structured interview about family constellation, early recollections and current functioning to uncover the style of life |
| Early recollections | Asking for the earliest specific memories; Adler believed people remember what fits their current view of life, so the memories reveal the lifestyle |
| Encouragement | Building courage and belief in oneself; different from praise, which rewards an outcome |
| Acting "as if" | Behaving as though you already were the person you want to be, for a week |
| Spitting in the client's soup | Pointing out the hidden purpose of a symptom so it loses its appeal ("your headaches do get your husband's attention, don't they?") |
| Catching oneself | Learning to notice the old pattern as it starts, and stopping |
| Push-button technique | Deliberately recalling a happy memory, then a sad one, to demonstrate that you control your feelings by what you think about |
| Paradoxical intention (anti-suggestion) | Prescribing the symptom, which Adler used before Frankl or Haley |
| Task setting and homework | Concrete assignments to practice social interest |
Jung: analytical psychology
Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, was Freud's chosen heir until they split in 1913, again over the primacy of sex and over Jung's interest in mythology and religion. Jung kept the personal unconscious but added a deeper layer: the collective unconscious, a shared inheritance of all humanity, containing archetypes, universal patterns and images (the mother, the hero, the trickster, death and rebirth) that appear in every culture's myths and in everyone's dreams.
The goal of Jungian therapy is individuation: becoming a whole, integrated, distinct individual by bringing the unconscious parts into relationship with the conscious ego. Jung saw this as the task of the second half of life; the first half is for building a persona and a place in the world. He worked heavily with dreams, but unlike Freud he saw them as messages from the unconscious pointing toward growth rather than as disguised wishes.
Jung also gave psychology its most famous personality vocabulary. Introversion and extraversion describe where a person's energy flows, inward or outward. The four functions, thinking, feeling, sensing and intuiting, describe how a person takes in and judges information. Isabel Myers and Katharine Briggs built the MBTI on these ideas. Complexes are emotionally charged clusters in the personal unconscious (a "mother complex"); Jung coined the term.
After Freud: ego psychology, object relations, self psychology
Freud's successors kept the unconscious and the importance of childhood but moved the spotlight. First it moved to the ego, then to relationships.
| School and person | Contribution | Key idea in one line |
|---|---|---|
| Ego psychology: Anna Freud | Catalogued the defense mechanisms; pioneered child analysis | The ego has its own development and its own defenses worth studying |
| Ego psychology: Heinz Hartmann | The ego has "conflict-free" autonomous functions (perception, memory, motor skills) | Not everything is about drives |
| Ego psychology: Erik Erikson | Eight psychosocial stages across the whole lifespan (covered in the development lessons) | Development continues past childhood and is shaped by society |
| Object relations: Melanie Klein | Infants relate to "part objects" (the breast) and split them into all-good and all-bad before integrating | Splitting is the earliest defense and returns in borderline functioning |
| Object relations: Donald Winnicott | The good-enough mother; the transitional object (the security blanket); the true and false self; the "holding environment" | Perfect parenting is neither possible nor necessary |
| Object relations: Margaret Mahler | Separation-individuation: normal autism → symbiosis → differentiation → practicing → rapprochement → object constancy (about age 3) | The toddler who runs off and runs back is doing developmental work; failure here is linked to borderline personality |
| Self psychology: Heinz Kohut | A cohesive self develops through empathic mirroring by caregivers ("selfobjects"); therapy repairs it with empathy | Narcissism is a developmental injury, not just a vice |
| Attachment: John Bowlby | Early bonds create internal working models of relationships (own lesson in Clinical Focus) | Bridges psychodynamic theory and research |
"Object" in object relations just means "person" (or the internal image of a person). The core claim is that we internalize our early relationships and then carry them into every later one, including the relationship with the counselor. Borderline and narcissistic personality patterns are usually explained in these terms on the exam.
A 38-year-old client tells her counselor she always feels like the least capable person in any room, though her record says otherwise. She was the second of two children; her older sister was "the star." Her earliest memory is of watching her sister receive a prize while she stood at the edge of the crowd. The counselor notices the client keeps apologizing to her and asking if she is "doing this right," and that she herself feels an unusually strong wish to reassure.
- Adler hears inferiority feelings, a dethroned second-born's family constellation, and an early recollection that encodes the lifestyle ("I stand at the edge while others shine"). Intervention: encouragement, and examining the private logic.
- Freud hears transference (the counselor as the judging parent) and notices his countertransference (the wish to reassure).
- Kohut hears a self that did not get enough mirroring and is still seeking it.
- On the exam, the early recollection and birth order make this an Adler item; the apologizing and the counselor's reaction make it a transference/countertransference item.
How the exam asks about this
A client who is furious with his supervisor comes home and shouts at his children over a minor mess. Which defense mechanism BEST describes this?
Name the defense. Forgetting entirely: repression. "I'm fine": denial. Accusing others of your feeling: projection. Redirected target: displacement. Good excuse: rationalization. Opposite behavior: reaction formation. Acting younger: regression. Productive channel: sublimation.
Whose term? Id, libido, transference, latent content: Freud. Social interest, inferiority, birth order, early recollections, encouragement, "as if": Adler. Collective unconscious, archetype, shadow, persona, individuation, introversion: Jung. Good-enough mother: Winnicott. Separation-individuation, rapprochement: Mahler. Splitting: Klein. Mirroring, selfobject: Kohut. Autonomous ego functions: Hartmann.
Freud versus Adler versus Jung. Past determines present, drives push: Freud. Goals pull, society matters, teleological: Adler. Wholeness, second half of life, shared inheritance: Jung. If the item mentions dreams, note whether they are disguised wishes (Freud) or messages toward growth (Jung).
Transference items. The client reacting to the counselor as if to a parent is transference; the counselor's own reaction is countertransference; the psychoanalytic view is that working through the transference is the central mechanism of change.
Without scrolling up, write everything you remember from this lesson. Then check yourself against the key terms. Recalling the whole lesson once, right after reading it, does more than reading it twice.
Ten questions from this domain, with an explanation after each answer.
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