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Psychoanalytic Approaches to Personality The area of psychology with perhaps the most controversial history, due to it’s complete lacking of empirical evidence, psychoanalysis, has it’s origins in the teachings of Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis is a form of therapy developed by Freud in the early 1900’s, involving intense examinations into one’s childhood, thought to be the origins of most psychopathology which surfaced during adulthood. Ideas about the subconscious, which saw the human mind …

…and Erikson, and so most of my experience with psychological thought was based on empirical findings with statistical significance’s. The psychoanalytic approach, however, while entirely theory-based and un-testable for validity, has shown itself to be a different and definitely interesting way to examine personality, as a lot of what has been written is relevant to-day, although, of course, it is important to realize that, as Freud said, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”.