Interview Was Conducted With Mrs.

Interview was conducted with Mrs. Elena Ionescu, a 39-years old national from Romania living in the United States for the last 7 years. A mother of two, Mrs. Ionescu was a surgeon in Romania before relocating to the United States with her husband. Initially, she worked as a nurse for the first 5 years, a period during which she was also able to complete U.S. examinations and obtain the right to activate as a physician in the same hospital. The interview has covered issues for the whole 7-years period, equivalent with her stay in the United States and was meant to discover and describe various traits of her personality, as they appear from the discussion with her.

From a psychodynamic approach, the interview revealed the sense of inferiority with which Mrs. Ionescu was integrated in the new society she entered, aged 32. We can probably make an equivalence between this and Adler's theory according to which "each of us is born into the world with a sense of inferiority." For Mrs. Ionescu, coming to the U.S. As an emigrant meant leaving all her friends back in Romania, her job and social position, the appreciation of her colleagues in the hospital and of the medical community etc.

She described arriving in the U.S. As being reborn and having to learn all things you had begun to take for granted and be accustomed to back home. Even more importantly, her Romanian medical diploma and studies were not recognized and she had to take new classes and pass all the exams all over again. As she had to have the financial capacity to survive in society, she accepted a job as a nurse at the Bradley Memorial Hospital & Health Centre, in Southington, Connecticut. At the same time, her husband, a former software developer in Romania, worked as a taxi driver for 2 years before finding a job as a developer at one of the local companies.

Mrs. Ionescu's sense of inferiority derived from the way she was integrated in the new society AND from her former position in the Romanian society. As mentioned, she had to pass from a respected surgeon whose services everybody sought in Bucharest to an immigrant nurse everybody pretty much ignored during the first months on the job. However, her reaction fits excellently with Adler's theory and general psychodynamic theories. Indeed, she worked from the first moment on the job to overcome difficulties and strived for superiority. She told us in the interview that this was not only a job-related issue, but also a challenge about her overall integration in society. She learned to get along with her new colleagues, many of them immigrants themselves, looking for a better life in the U.S. The fact that she joined night school to complete the necessary courses helped her overcome any inferiority complex that could have developed.

From a psychodynamic perspective, her ego, following Erik Erikson's belief and theories, helped her drive forward towards achieving her goals. The fact that she had a job and a family she needed to take care of did not stop her from successfully completing her studies. Her ego, pride, belief that she would be able to succeed made her strive to achieve what she had come to America to find. She declared in the interview that, at times, she felt like quitting and going back home to Romania, but it was a sense of pride and confidence that things would eventually pull together for her that made her stay.

Looking at some of Erikson's eight stages of development, many of them were recognizable in Mrs. Ionescu's experience from her descriptions, notably the trust vs. mistrust case (the initial mistrust in the entire American society gradually transformed itself in a more receptive state), industry vs. inferiority and generativity vs. stagnation.

From a humanistic perspective, the interview relieved the fact that Mrs. Ionescu axed her entire perspective into the present she was living in the United States. Indeed, she told us during the interview that she could not afford to look back into the past into the period she was entirely successful in Romania and truly happy, but work hard in the present so as to achieve a new status in the new society she lived in.

Her improvement as a now member of the American society and capacity to become integrated in this new society became her goal of life. Before proceeding to accomplish her goals, she told us that she had an evaluation of herself and decided that none of the fundamental values of herself as an individual had changed. She was still extremely intelligent, was still an excellent surgeon, even if she could not practice it at the current time (this did not change the intrinsic value of herself as a surgeon or as a physician, determined by her knowledge, not by her position in society) and had the capacity to activate all these latent qualities. She mobilized herself so as to reach all the objectives she had proposed for herself.

Once on the top of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, Mrs. Ionescu found herself somewhere on the third level, needing both acceptance as an individual from the new world she lived in and esteem and self-actualization. In the interview, she revealed that her initial steps were all determined by the need for esteem from the new society she had embraced. Before resuming her self-actualization process, she needed to re-obtain the acceptance of society.

From a trait factors theory, the interview revealed important characteristics of Mrs. Ionescu's personality. First of all, following on Hans Eysenck's division of personalities, she was identified as a combination of a sanguine type and a melancholy type, but with a solid inclination towards the former. The presence of melancholic characteristics in Mrs. Ionescu's characteristics came in the first period of her existence in the U.S. And was associated by the fact that she tended to be pessimistic about her future success in the U.S., both in her career and in integrating in the American society, and memories from her home, family and friends in her native country of Romania.

However, after she had established her goals and started to work on completing the studies needed to achieve her diploma, corroborated with her communicating better with her colleagues at the hospital and with an increase in confidence in her own forces, Mrs. Ionescu turned more towards the sanguine type. Optimistic and confident, she began to return to her sociable self.

If we follow some of Raymond B. Cattell's 16 Personality Factors, we see the same trend from a timid, sensitive and follower type of personality towards a uninhibited, tough-minded and leader-type person. Indeed, we can note from our interview and from Mrs. Ionescu's descriptions that the more she became used to the new society she lived in, the more she retrieved her old characteristics from her personality in Romania.