Motivation, personality organization, and the four psychologies of psychoanalysis

Four psychologies currently significant in psychoanalytic thinking are described. An attempt is made to (a) advance developmental proposals describing how the phenomena of each of the four achieve motivational status in the intrapsychic life of the individual and (b) develop a model for the understanding of personality organization across the four psychologies, based on the development of personal hierarchies that establish which issues are superordinate and which subordinate. Taken together, these two points are used to suggest that the four psychologies may not simply represent differing perspectives on intrapsychic phenomena (though they do that, in part) but that they also, simultaneously, represent relatively independent ways in which intrapsychic life is organized.