Today, 23 women lead Fortune 500 companies, including General Motors, IBM, and Yahoo (Stybel, 2014). Women have generally made considerable progress in terms of the social status and power they can wield in the public sphere in recent decades, overcoming many of the obstacles that previously placed them in supportive and submissive roles to men . Could this phenomenon somehow be explained by some of the different theories developed by Freud and Adler? For this article, I would first give a brief overview of Freud and Adler's theories and then attempt to compare some of the theories introduced by Freud and Adler in relation to women in power. Adler's theories placed more emphasis on interpsychic relationships while Freud focused on interpsychic relationships. intrapsychic forces. For Adler, humans are essentially social beings who need to interact with their environment and the people around them (Engler, 2009). He believed that human beings have an innate desire, a social interest, to adapt to conditions in the external world and his principle of finalism therefore suggests that individuals are oriented toward goals that guide their behavior. (Engler, 2009). Adler also theorized that humans should be understood as a holistic, integrated whole, unlike Freud, who took a more reductionist approach and believed that the individual was separated into parts (Engler, 2009). A fundamental difference between Freud and Adler is that Adler considered the search for superiority to be far more important than sexuality as a motivating force in action (Engler, 2009). For Adler, the primary goal of the psyche is to seek superiority and achieve mastery over what one hopes to achieve (Engler, 2009). Each individual finds themselves in the middle of the document......making philosophical assumptions – that a philosophy is useful if it “promotes productive living and improves our lives” (Engler, 2009) – perhaps what matters really is simply the usefulness of these personality theories and the fact that these theories attempt to make sense of the world in one way or another, regardless of their theoretical orientations, strengths, and limitations. Works Cited Engler, B. (2009). Psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud. Theories of personality (9th ed., pp. 27-60). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning. Engler, B. (2009). Interpsychic theories: Alfred Adler, Harry Stack Sullivan. Theories of personality (9th ed., pp. 27-60). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning. Stybel, L. (January 18, 2014). Powerful women are coming. Psychology Today. Retrieved from http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/platform-success/201401/powerful-women-are-arriving