Personality Theories and Development
Personality Overview
- Definition: An individual’s unique and relatively consistent pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving.
- Four Major Theoretical Perspectives:
- Psychoanalytic
- Humanistic
- Social Cognitive
- Trait
Freud: Psychoanalytic Perspective
- Key Concepts:
- Emphasizes unconscious forces, sexual/aggressive instincts, and early childhood experiences on personality development.
- Techniques for Psychological Disorders:
- Free Association: A method of therapy where a patient speaks freely to uncover unconscious thoughts.
- Dream Interpretation: Analyzing dreams to understand unconscious desires.
- Freudian Slips: Mistakes in speech that reveal unconscious thoughts.
- Projective Tests: Tests designed to reveal hidden emotions and internal conflicts.
Structure of Personality
- Unconscious:
- Reservoir of unacceptable thoughts, wishes, feelings, and memories.
- Contemporary viewpoint involves information processing of which we are unaware.
- Components:
- Id:
- Contains unconscious psychic energy.
- Strives to satisfy basic sexual and aggressive drives.
- Operates on the pleasure principle, demanding immediate gratification.
- Superego:
- Presents internalized ideals and standards for judgment (the conscience).
- Ego:
- The conscious, “executive” part of personality.
- Mediates demands of the id, superego, and reality.
- Operates on the reality principle, satisfying desires realistically.
Personality Development
- Psychosexual Stages:
- Stages of development where id’s pleasure-seeking energies focus on distinct erogenous zones.
- Fixation: A lingering focus of pleasure-seeking energies at a prior stage due to unresolved conflicts.
- Stages:
- Oral (0-18 months): Pleasure centers on mouth (sucking, biting).
- Anal (18-36 months): Focus on bowel/bladder elimination; coping with control demands.
- Phallic (3-6 years): Pleasure zone is genitals; dealing with incestuous feelings.
- Latency (6 to puberty): Dormant sexual feelings.
- Genital (puberty onwards): Maturation of sexual interests.
Defense Mechanisms
- Ego's methods for reducing anxiety by distorting reality:
- Repression: Banning harmful thoughts from consciousness.
- Regression: Retreating to a more infantile stage.
- Reaction Formation: Acting against one's feelings (e.g., expressing hate when feeling love).
- Projection: Attributing one's own unacceptable thoughts/feelings to others.
- Rationalization: Justifying actions with reasonable but false explanations.
- Displacement: Shifting impulses to a more acceptable target (e.g., kicking a dog when angry).
Neo-Freudians
- Carl Jung: Emphasized the collective unconscious.
- Karen Horney: Challenged Freud’s masculine bias and introduced social conflicts in personality.
- Alfred Adler: Highlighted the importance of childhood social tensions.
Humanistic Perspective
- Abraham Maslow: Focused on self-actualization (realization of one's potential).
- Carl Rogers:
- Emphasized growth and fulfillment through genuineness, acceptance, and empathy.
- Unconditional Positive Regard: Acceptance regardless of circumstances.
- Self-Concept: Thoughts and feelings about oneself, answering "Who am I?".
Social-Cognitive Perspective
- Key Focus: Conscious thought processes, self-regulation, and situational influences.
- Albert Bandura:
- Reciprocal Determinism: Interacting influences between personality and environment.
- Self-Efficacy: Subjective belief in one's capability to meet challenges.
- Control:
- Personal Control: Belief in controlling one’s environment versus feeling helpless.
- External Locus of Control: Belief that outside forces determine fate.
- Internal Locus of Control: Belief in personal control over one’s fate.
Contemporary Research - The Trait Perspective
- Trait: A characteristic pattern of behavior.
- Personality Inventory: A questionnaire used to assess various personality traits.
- Raymond Cattell’s 16 Personality Factors (16 PF): A model assessing different personality traits.
- Eysenck’s Personality Factors:
- Two primary factors:
- Unstable-Stable
- Introverted-Extraverted
- Examples of Traits:
- Moody (unstable, introverted) to Lively (stable, extraverted).
The Trait Perspective
- MMPI: Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a widely used and researched personality test originally designed to identify emotional disorders but now applied broadly.