One of the most fundamental questions for the field of
psychology is how it is that we come to be the way that we are. What
is it that makes us human? To what extent are we all like one another and to what extent are we each unique? The paper shows that two of the founding scholars of the discipline of
psychology, Sigmund Freud and George Herbert Mead, both created models to explain how fundamental and arguably universal human psychic
structures developed. The paper explains that while sharing some common ideas about the ways in which human nature and human personality are formed, the two scholars proposed distinctly different interior road-maps of the human psyche as well as very different pathways by which core psychic structures develop. The paper therefore examines, discusses and compares Mead's Interactionist Model and Freud's ideas on the power of the ego.