Personality

Perspectives on Personality

A long line of biological as well as cultural evolution has led to the

formation of “Personality”

What exactly is personality?

How fixed is the personality of an individual?

If it does change, what exactly changes it?

 Personality can be understood as enduring patterns in peoples
thoughts, desires, emotional states and behavior

These enduring patterns are set by our childhood experiences, by our

cultural relationships, and biological responses to the world around us

Personality can be understood as a default mode of functioning,

something that persists when we have interactions without perfect
awareness of them

These patterns can help us identify long-standing needs and wants

within our psyches
Each trait isn’t a fixed point, but a spectrum that fluctuates based
on how easily the need can be satisfied in that given moment

Extraversion

Less Individual’s More

potential

Agreeableness

Less Individual’s More

potential
 There are quite a few significant theories with claims about
personality

They are all true to some extent and help us find starting points
through which we can explore ourselves

Is there a norm of the ideal personality?

What personality traits are considered most desirable?

What personality traits are considered undesirable?

 Agreeable, extraverted, conscientious, dominating, persevering,
cheerful, hopeful

Deceptive, confrontational, introverted, narcissistic, submissive,

whimsical, morose, cynical

The realization of the presence of undesirable traits immediately creates

a pressure in an individual that can cause three distinct responses
They either seek to modify that trait to fit into the norm (Integrate)
or
They display the trait more aggressively and hyper-focus on it (Fight)
or
They seek to hide the trait from other people (Flight)
 All of these responses are reactive in nature

None of them help the individual explore the underlying need being
satisfied by the trait

An understanding of the need can lead individuals to satisfy it in

ways that don’t lead to increased pressure

A reactive response can build pressure and either bolster traits or

cause the formation of new traits as defenses
The Freudian Perspective
Need Conflict Coping Need Conflict Coping

Coping Conflict Need Coping Conflict Need

Need Conflict Coping Need Conflict Coping

Need
Most conflicts between the Id, the Ego, and the Superego get resolved
immediately

But some can stay on for a while, even for years, creating an anxiety
that needs to be dealt with

The superego is the most social of all the three structures

It is concerned with morality, sexuality and aggression as they are the

most socially-controlled out of all human characteristics

The anxiety created by a superego conflict spurs individuals

into developing alternate outlets for one’s desires
These outlets tend to be crude and function ineffectively as they are
fashioned without much conscious effort

Largely ineffective outlets are called defense mechanisms

Freud identified a structural pattern to the development of
needs in an individual

This structural pattern is shaped by biology as well as

cultural frameworks of growth

He called these the “Psychosexual Stages”

What type of psychological processes has our outside world (Our
religious, medical, cultural, philosophical and scientific traditions)
placed a value on?
The influence of the Catholic Church on Philosophy
“If god is all good, then god is not
all powerful because evil exists.

If god is all powerful, then god is

not all good because evil exists”
 St. Augustine solved the argument by positing the
following axioms :

God is all good and all powerful

God had to permit evil to exist in order for there to be a fair

and just basis for the final judgement of our souls

Humans must be given the ability to freely choose and act evilly so
that they and they alone would be responsible for it and could be
judged
 Descartes and the Renaissance

Claimed that the soul rested in the Pineal gland

Separated us from the rest of the animals using this

The conscious mind was our superpower

and made us God-like
 Sigmund Freud

Introduced the unconscious mind

The Id, Ego and Superego

The unconscious became the scapegoat

 The cognitive revolution

The failure of behaviourism

Positive self-regulation and Executive control

Describes the unconscious as unintentional

behaviour
 We tend to glorify the conscious mind by attributing positive
social behaviours to it

We tend to demonize the implicit, automatic aspects of behaviour as

the origin point of socially deviant behaviours
 We create narratives to subsume any positive aspects of automatic
impulses under the domain of conscious thought

We create narratives that push negative aspects of our behaviour towards our
more uncontrollable processes, protecting our identity from a negative self-
image
 Jungian Theory of Personality

Psyche Flow of Energy Integration

Principle of Opposites Principle of Equivalence Principle of Entropy

Ego

A complex of representations which constitutes the centrum of

the field of consciousness and appears to possess a very high
degree of continuity and identity.
 Personal Unconscious

Forgotten experiences that have lost their intensity. They include impressions
to our senses too weak to be processed consciously. Accessible to the conscious
mind under certain conditions

Collective Unconscious

A deposit of world processes embedded within the structure of the brain and
the sympathetic nervous system which constitutes in its totality, a kind of
timeless and eternal image that counterbalances our conscious momentary
picture of the world
 Adlerian Theory of Personality

Individual Psychology

Masculine Protest Inferiority complex Fictional Finalism

Struggle for superiority

Striving for Perfection

 Styles of Life

Ruling Type Getting Type Avoiding Type

Socially Useful Type

Teleological

Holism Birth Order Early recollections

Carl Rogers’ Person-centred approach

Self-concept

Actual Self

Incongruence

Anxiety

Unconditional Positive Regard

 Terror Management Theory

Death Anxiety

Symbolic Immortality

Health-oriented responses Self-esteem oriented responses

The paradox of self-consciousness

 Basic Human Motives

Self-Esteem Motive Social Cognition Motive

Social Cognition Motive

Accuracy

Leads to higher survival rates

Gets affected by our naïve realism

 Self-Esteem Motive

The need to feel good about oneself

You’re worth putting in the effort to survive

Acceptance of negative peer groups

Acceptance of roles and events antithetical to survival

Rigidity
 The paradox of self-consciousness

Conscious thoughts about death can instigate health-oriented

responses aimed at removing death-related thoughts from current
focal attention

The unconscious resonance of death-related cognition

promotes self-oriented defenses directed toward maintaining,
not one's health, but a sense of meaning and self-esteem

Confrontations with the physical body may undermine

symbolic defenses and thus present a previously unrecognized
barrier to health promotion activities
The mechanisms of Personality

Instincts built in
through ancestry

Needs created by relationships

formed during childhood

Goals created by a
sense of inferiority in a
chaotic world
 The human approach to duality

Exceptions
Develop Conflict between
Category lifestyle with Category
Idea lifestyle and new
Not that this Not that information
category framework category

Exceptions
Rejection New
Idea
The Structure of Personality

Needs

Conditioned
traits

Observed
traits
 Is your personality
fundamentally “You”?
 The Self

What is the self? How is it different from

personality?

Is your self you?

 The earliest conceptions of the self divided it
into two specific parts

The Self as “I”, the knower

The Self as “Me”, the object that is known

These parts feed into each other in a cyclical manner, with each
giving rise to characteristics in the other
 The true self and the false self

According to Winnicott, the true self exists as a spontaneous

and authentic experience of life

When a child’s parent’s are not “Good enough”, they tend to encroach
upon that spontaneity, giving rise to the false self

Other people’s expectations can become of overriding importance,

contradicting the original self and it’s needs
Is your self connected with
your memory?
Personal episodic memory generates a phenomenological
continuity of identity

Personal semantic memory generates a narrative

continuity of identity
 The self differs from personality on one key
level

While personality is a unique combination of traits, each of

those traits exist as labels that help derive an experience of
“Sameness” in people

The self exists as a conception that helps individuals separate

themselves from the environment around them, generating a sense of
“Otherness”
 Does this really matter to us as we experience
and interact with the world?

Does our experience of our “Selves” have anything to do

with our culture?

What kind of implications does our individual

conception of ourselves lend itself to?
The Self-concept

Self-knowledge

Self-aversion

Self-control

Self-efficacy

Self-presentation

Self-esteem
 This is you!

As you unravel the mechanisms …But until you

that you use to navigate the understand the
world mechanism, this belief
is not too useful

You realize there isn’t anything

under them….. The self might not be
tangible or real, but it
is not illusory either
The self is an exertion rather than a specific something

The self can be thought of as an effect of

psychological energy akin to how movement
is an effect of kinetic energy

Personality, behaviour, goals and desires are

components that provide energy to this exertion
The Structure of the self

Behavioral/ Cognitive
responses

Secondary
emotions

Observed
traits

Needs

Primary
emotions

Conditioned
traits
 Core needs tend to be simplistic and innocent

They tend to get layered with interpretations over time

Individuals tend to try and satisfy the interpretations

instead of the original needs

This leads to a frustration building up

This leads to the need becoming more and more prominent in the
individuals mind

The individual begins to experience shame as the need presents itself in

situations they consider inappropriate leading to further suppression