Personality Essay

Personality

PSY/211

September 22, 2013

Personality

 Personality can be defined as an individual’s unique and relatively consistent patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. There are multiple theories related to personality, however they can be grouped into one of four main perspectives; psychoanalytical, humanistic, social cognitive, and trait. Personality theories are attempts to explain the similarities and differences between people and to encompass the whole person.

The psychoanalytic perspective emphasizes the importance of unconscious processes and the influence of early childhood experience. Sigmund Freud founder of psychoanalysis developed this theory gradually while observing patients over twenty years in private practice and basing it on self-analysis. Using a technique developed by Freud in which the patient spontaneously reports all thoughts, feelings, and mental images as they come to mind is called free association. Utilizing free association could often reveal memories that had been suppressed and bringing these memories into consciousness could lead to catharsis.  Due to lack of evidence and testability, the psychoanalytic perspective is at times thought to be skewed by imposing one’s own ideas onto their patients, or seeing what they expected to see. Psychoanalytic concepts are often impossible to disprove.

Another perspective is the humanistic perspective which represents an optimistic look at human nature, emphasizing the self and the fulfillment of a person’s unique potential. Humanistic psychologists saw people as being innately good, which is the opposite of Freud’s pessimistic views of people being motivated by unconscious sexual and destructive instincts. Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers were two very influential contributors to the humanistic theory; Maslow with his hierarchy of needs and Rogers with his beliefs that the most basic human motive is the actualizing tendency, or the innate drive to maintain and enhance the human organism. Humanistic theories, like psychoanalytic theories are difficult to validate or test scientifically and tend to be based on philosophical assumptions or clinical observations.

A different perspective referred to as the social cognitive perspective emphasizes learning and conscious cognitive processes, including the importance of beliefs about the self, goal setting, and self-regulation. Albert Bandura’s early research showed that many behaviors are learned by observing, and then imitating, the behavior of others. Bandura also points out consequences of behavior are also observed and behaviors are regulated according to the consequence.  Bandura explained the process of human behavior and personality as being caused by environmental, cognitive, and behavioral factors; called the reciprocal determination. Unlike psychoanalytic and humanistic theories, social cognitive theories are scientifically testable. Social cognitive theories ignore unconscious influences, emotions, or conflicts and are often believed to be focused on very limited areas of personality such as learning, the effects of situations, and the effects of beliefs about the self.

Lastly, trait perspective emphasizes the description and measurement of specific personality differences among individuals. Approaches to the trait theory are very different than psychoanalytic, humanistic, and social cognitive as they represent the similarities among people and the trait perspective focuses on the individual differences. There are two types of traits; surface traits are personality characteristics or attributes that can be easily inferred from observable behavior and source traits are the most fundamental dimensions of personality; the broad, basic traits that are hypothesized to be universal and relatively few in number. Much like psychoanalytical, humanistic, and social cognitive theories, trait theory approaches have weaknesses as well. One could consider that trait theories do not explain human personality, how or why individual differences develop, or they fail to address other important personality issues such as motives.