Theories of Personality

1. PSYCHODYNAMIC THEORIES:
Sigmund Freud's Psychoanalytic theory . A Viennese physician realized that many of his patient's problems seemed to lack physical causes. "My life has been aimed at one goal only; to infer or to guess how the mental apparatus is constructed and what forces interplay and counteract in it." He evolved the following theory of personality from 1890 till he died in 1939:

Structure or Personality [psyche] Freud viewed personality as a dynamic system directed by three structures, and each of these is a complex system in its own right --separate and conflicting mental processes -- but most behavior involves the activity of all three. Internal struggles and rechanneled energies typify most personality functioning. Ego sometimes giving in to the seduction of the Id, and sometimes forced by superego to displace or sublimate behavior to other activities. The ego is always in the middle dealing not only with id and superego, but also with external reality. Anxiety may occur when the ego feels overwhelmed --neurotic anxiety when impulses from the id are barely kept under control --moral anxiety when there are threats of punishment from the superego. Each person develops habitual ways of calming these anxieties, and many resort to using ego-defense mechanisms to lessen internal conflicts.

Id. Innate biological instincts and urges present at birth. Self-serving, irrational, impulsive, and totally unconscious, it operates on the pleasure principle: pleasure-seeking urges of all kinds are freely expressed. A well of energy [libido and thanatos] for the entire psyche [personality]:

Eros: LIfe instincts. It is like the well that contains:

Libido, energy, which promotes survival, underlies sexual desires, and is expressed whenever we seek pleasure.

Thanatos, responsible for aggressive and destructive urges [the long history of wars and violence as evidence of such urges]

NOTE: Most Id energies, then, are aimed at a discharge of tensions related to sex and aggression.

Ego. The "executive." It is guided by the reality principle --it delays action until it is practical or appropriate. It is the system of thinking, planning, problem solving, and deciding. It is in conscious control of the personality. It directs energies supplied by the id. The Id is like a blind king or queen whose power is awesome but who must rely on others to carry out orders. The Id can only form mental images of things it desires ("Primary process thinking.") The ego wins power to direct behavior by relating the desires of the id to external reality.

Superego. Acts as a judge or censor for the thoughts and actions of the ego --an "internalized parent" to bring behavior under control. A person with a weak superego will be a delinquent, criminal, or antisocial personality. In contrast, an overly strict or harsh superego may cause inhibition, rigidity, or unbearable guilt.

Conscience, a part of the superego, reflects all actions for which a person has been punished. When the standards of the conscience are not met, you are punished internally by guilt feelings.

Ego ideal, reflects all behavior one's parents approved of or rewarded. The ego ideal is a source of goals and aspirations. When its standards are met, pride is felt.

Levels of consciousness

Unconscious. Beyond awareness. Contains repressed memories and emotions, plus the instinctual drives of the Id. Modern scientists are beginning to find brain areas that seem to have the kinds of unconscious effects that Freud described. Especially important are areas linked with emotion and memory --such as the hippocampus in the limbic system (Reiser, 1985; Wilson, 1985). Unconscious thoughts, feelings, or urges may slip into behavior in disguised or symbolic form.

Conscious. The conscious level includes everything we are aware of at a given moment, including thoughts, perceptions, feelings, and memories.

Pre-conscious. Contains material that can be easily brought to awareness. If you stop to think about a time when you felt angry or rejected, you will be moving this memory from the preconscious to the conscious level of awareness.

Language, Customs, Rules, Roles, and Morals
Every society must socialize its children by teaching them language, customs, rules, roles, and morals. The job of preparing children to take part in society is typically placed in the hands of parents. This pattern is convenient and fateful. While carrying out socialization, parents leave traces of their won personality in their children.

Psychosexual Stages. A Freudian Fable? Freud theorized that the core of personality is formed before age 6 in a series of psychosexual stages. His account holds that childhood urges for erotic pleasure have lasting effects on development. His emphasis on infantile sexuality is one of the most controversial aspects of his thinking. However, Freud used the term sex very broadly to refer to several different physical sources of pleasure. He identified 4 psychosexual stages. At each stage a different part of the body becomes a child's primary erogenous zone (area capable of producing pleasure). Each area then serves as the main source of pleasure, frustration, and self-expression. Freud believed that many adult personality traits can be traced to fixations (unresolved conflict or emotional hang-up caused by overindulgence or by frustration) in one or more of the stages.

Oral. During first year of life most of infant's pleasure comes from stimulation of the mouth. If overfed or frustrated, oral traits may be created. Adult expressions of oral needs include gum chewing, nail biting, smoking, kissing, overeating, and alcoholism. Fixation early in the oral stage produces an oral-dependent personality --qullible, passive, and need lots of attention (want to be mothered). Frustrations later in the oral stage may cause aggression, often in the form of biting. Fixation here creates an oral-aggressive adult who like to argue, is cynical, and exploits others.

Anal. Between ages of 1 and 3. Child's attention shifts to the process of elimination. When parents attempt toilet training, the child can gain approval or express rebellion or aggression by "holding on" or "letting go." Therefore, harsh or lenient toilet training may lock such responses into personality. Freud described the anal-retentive (holding-on) personality as obstinate, stingy, orderly, and compulsively clean. The anal-expulsive (letting-go) personality is disorderly, destructive, cruel, or messy.

Phallic. Adult traits of the phallic personality are vanity, exhibitionism, sensitive pride, and narcissism (self-love). Freud theorized that such traits develop between the ages 3 and 6. At this time, increased sexual interest causes the child to be physically attracted to the parent of the opposite sex. In males this attraction leads to:

Oedipus conflict. The boy feels rivalry with his father for the affection of the mother --and feels threatened by the father (specifically, fears castration). To ease his anxieties, the boy must identify with the father. Their rivalry ends when the boy seeks to become more like his father. As he does, he begins to accept the father's values and to form a conscience.

Electra conflict: The girl loves her father and competes with her mother. However, according to Freud, the girl identifies with the mother more gradually. This, he said, is less effective in creating a conscience. Freud believed that females already feel castrated. Because of this, they are less driven to identify with their mothers than boys are with their fathers. This particular part of Freudian thought has been rejected --a reflection of male-dominated times in which Freud lived.

Latency. From age 6 to puberty. A time during which psychosexual development is interrupted --"on hold." Hard to accept. Nevertheless, Freud saw latency as a relatively quiet time compared to the stormy first 6 years.

Genital. At puberty, an upswing in sexual energies activates all the unresolved conflicts of earlier years. Cause for adolescent emotion and turmoil. It is marked, throughout adolescence, by a growing capacity for mature and responsible social-sexual relationships. The genital stage ends with heterosexual love and the realization of full adult sexuality.

[Neo-Freudians: Karen Horney, Anna Freud, Otto Rank, and Erich Fromm stayed close to the core of Freud's thinking. Alfred Adler, Harry Sullivan, and Carl Jung broke away more completely and created their own opposing theories.]

2. Alfred Adler (1870-1937). Disagreed with Freud's emphasis on the unconscious, on instinctual drives, and on the importance of sexuality. He felt that we are social creatures governed by social urges, not by biological instincts. In Adler's view, the main driving force in personality is a striving for superiority. A struggle to overcome imperfections, an upward drive for competence, completion, and mastery of shortcomings.

He felt that everyone experiences feelings of inferiority. This occurs mainly because we begin life as small, weak, and relatively powerless children surrounded by larger and more powerful adults. Feelings of inferiority may also come from our personal limitations. The struggle for superiority arises from such feelings. While striving for superiority, each tries to compensate for different limitations, and each chooses a different pathway to superiority. Adler believed that this situation creates a unique style of life (or personality pattern) for each individual. According to Adler the core of each person's style of life is formed by age 5. (And valuable clues to a person's style of life are revealed by the earliest memory that can be recalled.) However, later in his life, Adler began to emphasize the existence of a creative self. By this he meant that humans create their personalities through choices and experiences.

3. Karen Horney (1885-1952). Neo-Freudian. Faithful to most his ideas --altered and rejected some and some of her own. She resisted Freud's more mechanistic, biological, instinctive ideas. As a woman, Horney rejected Freud's claim that "anatomy is destiny" --woven into Freudian psychology holding that males are dominant or superior to females. Horney was first to challenge obvious male bias in Freud's thinking. She also disagreed with Freud about the cause of neurosis. Freud held that neurotic (anxiety-ridden) individuals are struggling with forbidden id drives that they fear they cannot control. Horney's view was that a core of basic anxiety occurs when people feel isolated and helpless in a hostile world. These feelings, she believed, are rooted in childhood. Basic anxiety then causes troubled individuals to exaggerate a single mode of interacting with others. Each of us can move toward others (by depending on them for love, support, or friendship),we can move away from others (by withdrawing, acting like a "loner," or being "strong" and independent), or we can move against others (by attacking, competing with, or seeking power over them). Emotional health reflects a balance. Emotional problems tend to lock people into overuse of only one of the three modes.

4. Carl Jung (1875-1961). Jung parted from Freud when he began to develop his own ideas. He, like Freud, called the conscious part of the personality the ego. However, he further noted that between the ego and the outside world we often find a persona, or "mask." It is the "public self." The persona is presented to others when people adopt particular roles (as is necessary in most professions) or when they hide their deeper feelings. Actions of the ego may reflect attitudes of introversion (in which energy is mainly directed inward), or extroversion (in which energy is mainly directed outward).

Personal unconscious was Jung's term for what Freud simply called the unconscious. A storehouse for personal experiences, feelings, and memories that are not directly knowable.

Collective unconscious, a deeper conscious shared by all humans --Jung believed that from the beginning of time, all humans have had experiences with birth, death, power, god figures, mother and father figures, animals, the earth, energy, evil, rebirth, and so on. According to Jung, such universals create archetypes: original ideas or patterns. Found in the collective unconscious, archetypes are unconscious images that cause us to respond emotionally to symbols of birth, death, energy, animals, evil, and the like. Jung believed that he detected symbols of such archetypes in the art, religion, myths, and dreams of every culture and age.

Two particularly important archetypes are anima (representing the female principle) and the animus (representing the male principle). Each person has both. For full development, Jung thought it is essential for both the "masculine" and "feminine" side of personality to be expressed. The presence of the anima in males and the animus in females also enable us to related to members of the opposite sex.

Jung regarded the self archetype as the most important of all. The self archetype represents unity. Its existence causes a gradual movement toward balance, wholeness, and harmony within the personality. Jung felt that we become richer and more completely human when a balance is achieved between the conscious and unconscious, the anima and animus, thinking and feeling, sensing and intuiting, the persona and the ego, introversion and extroversion. Jung was the first to use the term self-actualization to describe a striving for completion and unity. He believed that the self archetype is symbolized in every culture by mandalas (magic circles) of one kind of another. ['Memories, Dreams, Reflections,' Jung's autobiography.]

II. LEARNING THEORIES OF PERSONALITY
1. Behavioral personality theory. Any model of personality that emphasizes observable behavior, the relationship between stimuli and responses, and the impact of learning. The behaviorist position is that personality is no more (or less) than a collection of learned behavior patterns. Personality, like other learned behavior, is acquired through classical and operant conditioning, observational learning, reinforcement, extinction, generalization, and discrimination. Children can learn things like kindness, hostility, generosity, or destructiveness.

2. Learning theorists. A psychologist interested in the ways that learning principles shape and explain personality. They reject the idea that personality is made up of consistent traits. Situational determinants (Immediate conditions (for example, rewards and punishments) in a given situation that determine what behavior is likely to occur, independent of the actor's personality traits) of behavior ("Am I honest? In what situation?). Walter Mischel (1973) agrees that some situations strongly affect behavior. Other situations are trivial and have little impact. Thus, external events interact with each person's unique learning history to produce behavior in any given situation. Trait theorists also believe that situations affect behavior. But, in their view situations interact with traits. So, in essence, learning theorists favor replacing the concept of "traits" with "past learning" to explain behavior.

3. John Dollard and Neal Miller. In their view, habits make up the structure of personality. As for the dynamics of personality, Dollard and Miller believe that habits (a deeply ingrained, learned pattern of response) are governed by four elements of learning:

(1) Drive. Any stimulus (esp. an internal stimulus such as hunger) strong enough to goad a person to action (such as hunger, pain, lust, frustration, fear).

(2) Cue (external stimuli or signs that guide responses, especially those that signal the likely presence or absence of reinforcement). Signals from the environment that guide

(3) Responses (any behavior, either observable or internal) so they are most likely to bring about

(4) Reward or reinforcement.

4. Social learning theory. An approach that combines behavioral principles, cognition (perception, thinking, anticipation), social relationships, and observational learning. Behaviorists have recently had to face the fact that they have overlooked --that people think. The new breed of behavioral psychologists, called social learning theorists, include perception, thinking, and other mental events in their views. They also stress social relationships and modeling.

5. Julian Rotter (1975). The "cognitive behaviorism" of social learning theory can be illustrated by three concepts proposed by Rotter. They are:

Psychological situation. How the person interprets or defines the situation (not enough to know the setting in which a persona responds)

Expectancy. Anticipation that making a response will lead to reinforcement. To predict your response, we would also have to know if you expect your efforts to pay off in the present situation. Expected reinforcement may be more important than actual past reinforcement.

Reinforcement value. Humans attach different values to various activities or rewards. This, too, must be taken into account to understand personality.

6. Self-reinforcement. Praising oneself or giving oneself a special treat or reward for having made a particular response (such as completing a school assignment). At times, we all evaluate our actions and may reward ourselves with special privileges or treats when the evaluation is positive. Thus, habits of self-praise and self-blame become an important part of personality. In fact, self-reinforcement can be thought of as the behaviorist's counterpart to the superego.

7. Radical Behaviorism. An approach that avoids any reference to thoughts or other internal processes; radical behaviorists are interested strictly in relationships between stimuli and responses. A more extreme view of personality. "Intelligent people no longer believe that men are possessed by demons...but human behavior is still commonly attributed to indwelling agents," said B. F. Skinner (1971). For Skinner, the term personality is a fiction we invent to pretend we have explained behavior that is actually controlled by the environment. He believes that everything a person does is ultimately based on past and present rewards and punishments.

8. Behavioristic view of development. Many of Freud's major points can be restated in terms of modern learning theory. Miller and Dollard (1950) agree with Freud that the first 6 years are crucial for personality development - but, for different reasons. Rather than thinking in terms of psychosexual urges and fixations, they ask, "What makes early learning experiences so lasting in their effects?" Their answer is that childhood is a time of urgent and tearing drives, powerful rewards and punishments, and crushing frustrations. Also important is social reinforcement based on the effects of attention and approval from others. These forces combine to shape the core of personality.

9. Critical Situations. Miller and Dollard consider four developmental situations to be of critical importance:

(1) Feeding. Can affect later social relationships, because the child learns to associate people with satisfaction and pleasure or with frustration and discomfort.

(2). Toilet or cleanliness training.

(3) Sex training and

(4) Learning to express anger or aggression. The permissiveness for sexual and aggressive behavior in childhood is linked to adult needs for power (McCelland & Pilon, 1983). This link probably occurs because permitting such behaviors allows children to get pleasure from asserting themselves. Sex training also involves learning "male" and "female" behaviors --which creates an even broader basis for shaping personality. Sex-appropriate behavior. Identification and imitation contribute greatly to personality development in general and to sex training in particular. Identification (which refers to a child's emotional attachment to admired adults, esp. those the child depends on for love and care) leads to imitation. Conscious and unconscious. The actions we choose to imitate depend on their outcome. Girls are less likely than boys to imitate aggressive behavior because they rarely see female aggression rewarded or approved. Thus, many arbitrary "male" and "female" qualities are passed on at the same time sexual identity is learned. (Classroom situation in which aggressive or disruptive behavior is reinforced with attention for males and, quietly, rebuked in girls who were, thus, encouraged to be submissive, dependent, and passive.)