Bordin's 5 problem categories:

1. Dependence
2. Lack of information
3. Self-conflict
4. Choice anxiety
5. No problem (client just wants a little reassurance for decision already made)

Bordin's 3 stages of career counseling:

1. Exploration and contract setting
2. Critical decision
3. Working for change

Personality Approaches to Career Counseling:

As the name suggests, personality approaches pay only incidental attention to outside economic, social, market, and job characteristics, and concentrate almost wholly on individual personality. This goes deeper than traits and preferences, and it applies personality theories to career development.

Bordin, Nachmann, and Segal created a Freudian architecture of career development standing on eight premises:

1. Human development is all of a piece, with the psychological and physiological functions of infancy continuing to relate to adulthood.
2. Adults find gratification from the same sources as do children, but the forms are different.
3. A person's needs are patterned early, usually by age 6.
4. People seek careers/occupations that will satisfy these needs.
5. This process goes for everybody and their work, but can be stopped by financial and/or societal concerns.
6. People sublimate infantile needs through the work they do.
7. Career expectations can be thwarted by emotional blocking or ignorance.
8. Jobs can gratify various psychological and/or bodily needs.

In later work, Bordin covered the importance of play, particularly in career choice, and augmented his theory with seven other premises:

1. Everyone seeks the completeness and flow experience of play, including in their work.
2. How closely work and play mesh depends on how compulsion and effort figure in individual personality development
3. Career choices made over a lifetime chart a search for an idealized unity of the self and work.
4. A model that mirrors and/or absorbs developmental concepts best reflects this search.
5. Personal dimensions of career development originate all through early development, at times going back to infancy.
6. Everyone wants to achieve a unique, autonomous self that includes parts of Father and Mother.
7. Doubt and frustration relating to one's sense of self can cause puzzlement and inertia in the face of career decisions.