Chapter 14 - Personality Overview

Personality

• Personality is the distinctive and relatively enduring ways of thinking, feeling, and acting that characterize a person's responses to life situations.
• Aspects of personality have three characteristics:
  • Seen as components of identity that distinguish that person from other people.
  • Behaviours viewed as being caused primarily by internal rather than environmental factors.
  • Behaviours seem to fit together in a meaningful fashion, suggesting an inner personality that guides and directs behaviour.

Psychodynamic Perspective: Freud's Psychoanalytic Theory

• Freud considered personality to be an energy system, powered by instinctual drives, which constantly presses for either direct or indirect release.
• Mental events are divided into three categories:
  • Conscious: events that we are presently aware of.
  • Preconscious: memories, thoughts, feelings, and images that we are unaware of at the moment, but can be recalled.
  • Unconscious: dynamic realm of wishes, feelings, and impulses that lie beyond our awareness.

Structures of Personality

• Personality is divided into three separate but interacting structures:
  • Id: primitive and unconscious part of the personality that contains the instincts, operating according to the pleasure principle.
  • Ego: executive of personality that is partly conscious, operating according to the reality principle.
  • Superego: moral arm of personality that internalizes standards and values of society, rewards compliance with pride, and non-compliance with guilt.

Defense Mechanisms

• Unconscious processes by which the ego prevents the expression of anxiety-arousing impulses, including:
  • Repression: preventing anxiety-arousing memories from entering consciousness.
  • Sublimination (displacement): completely masking the sinister underlying impulses through other forms (art, sports, etc.).
  • Rationalization: reinterpreting the urge in acceptable terms.
  • Projection: seeing one's own urges in others.
  • Isolation: memories allowed back into consciousness without motives or emotions.
  • Regression: mentally returning to an earlier, safer state.
  • Conversion: conflict converted into physical symptom.

Psychosexual Stages

• Stages of development in which psychic energy is focused on certain body parts, including:
  • Oral (0-2 years old).
  • Anal (2-3 years old).
  • Phallic (4-6 years old).
  • Latency (7 years old until puberty).
  • Genital (puberty and onwards).
• Deprivation or overindulgences in a stage can result in fixation, in which instincts are focused on a particular theme.

Evaluating Psychoanalytic Theory

• Alfred Adler's Psychoanalytic Theory: humans are social beings motivated by social interest (the desire to advance the welfare of others).
• Carl Jung's Analytic Psychology: humans possess a personal unconscious of life experiences and a collective unconscious of memories accumulated throughout the history of humanity.
• Memories are shared among humans through the collective unconscious.