Personality Development - Essay Example

Personality Development Erich Fromm and Karen Horney have differing views on personality development, and set their theories up quite differently. Fromm uses six orientations to describe his theory, while Horney has three, though her orientations are based on the idea that all personality develops from neurosis and our constant struggle with trying to adjust to the anxiety of life. Fromm’s five orientations that are negative in nature are the receptive, exploitive, hoarding, marketing, and necrophilous.

In these we find people who are either shy and not confident in their own abilities, no good at decision making (receptive), or those who live to manipulate others, love to lead, and only support authority if it is in their best interest to do so (exploitive). In hoarding we see people who see the entire world as a possession that they must acquire, while the marketing orientation includes those who mold themselves to what they feel society’s image of them is, they dislike anything old and crave anything new.

These are closely related to Horney’s moving against people orientation, where we see the need for power, control, and recognition They also are similar to Horney’s moving away from people orientation, which includes the need of autonomy, the need for perfection, the need of self sufficiency, and the need to feel better than others. Like all of Horney’s orientations, moving toward people is also fraught with needs: the need to be loved, the need to gain the approval of others, and the need to please others.

Fromm’s last orientation, necrophilous, deals mainly with death and destruction, something that Horney does not touch on. Fromm’s one orientation that is positive is the productive one, where people continually learn to relate to the world and others in it, and learn to truly love, and have no fear of acceptance. I agree most with the theory proposed by Erich Fromm, as he does not base his orientations on a negative aspect like neurosis, and I feel there is more room for individual differences in his theory than with that of Karen Horney.

Henry Murray had 5 needs that he described, in addition to the physiological needs that we all require. Ambition needs incorporate achievement success, how much a person accomplishes, and how well they shock or thrill others. People are also striving to show the world what they can do, and what they have achieved. Materialistic needs include acquiring items, creating things, and keeping things, as well as keeping said things in a specific order. Affection needs are the desire of person to be loved, to nurture others, to play and have fun and to help and be protected by others, and it also includes rejecting others, as we do throughout our lives.

Murray does not attach ages to his needs scale, unlike Erik Erikson who in addition to having certain timelines to follow, uses a ‘versus’ system. You must weigh each side of the dilemma before coming out on the other side of Erikson’s stages. The two theories are similar though, both agree that personality is a life long endeavor, and I believe that with both theories you can be between stages or in a few stages at the same time. It is not a fluid idea, where you must get out of one stage before going on to the next with either of these ideas, with Murray you are probably in all or most of them at most times in your life, whereas with Erikson, you may not get out of a stage at the ‘right’ time, chronologically speaking, but you can go back and work on themes at different times of your life, so that by the end, you have achieved all that you need to achieve.

Murray’s needs are things we try to attain no matter our age, an infant will want to have fun with others, a young adult wants to seek independence, and a retiree may still want to acquire things, I believe that most of us go back and forth into and out of Murray’s stages throughout our life, just as we do with Erikson’s.