The parts of Chapter 11 we’ll cover include:

· What is personality?

· Psychoanalytic Theories (excluding Freud’s Stages of Development)

· Humanistic Theories

· Trait Theories and Their Biological Basis

· Personality Assessment

Ah, personality! We all know what it is, but do we really? What is personality, exactly? Is it how we act or think? Is it what we desire or have? Is it what we project or keep deep inside? How does one study personality? These two questions: (1) what is personality? and (2) how do we study it? are the focus of this week’s discussions.

I want to start out with some quotes (Links to an external site.)on personality. I want you to read these here, and then circle back to these quotes after you read the chapter. These quotes are talking about many of these things we’ll discuss this week: how is personality created? Is it stable? Do we know what it is? What shapes our personality? Remember the questions of nature vs nurture and stability versus change from last week’s development chapter? Those ideas are very much in play this week as well.

· Personality is like a charioteer with two headstrong horses, each wanting to go in different directions. -Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

· Never underestimate personality. A sense of humor will make you popular; a little confidence will win you jobs; and the right amount of sass or cockiness will score you dates. Personality shines from within, mingling spirit and intelligence, so it’s safe to assume it originates in the brain. -Susan Scutti

· We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die. -Albert Camus

· I want freedom for the full expression of my personality. -Mahatma Gandhi

· Our lives are shaped as profoundly by personality as by gender or race. And the single most important aspect of personality … is where we fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum. -Susan Cain

What is Personality?

Your book defines personality as

“…the unique, core set of characteristics that influence the way one thinks, acts, and feels — characteristics that many psychologists would agree are relatively consistent and enduring throughout the life span and in a variety of settings.” (page 456)

Think about that. How would you describe your personality or someone else’s?

Theoretical Perspectives on Personality

Table 11.1 details the main points and criticisms of many of the theoretical perspectives that we’ll be talking about this week. While no perspective can claim to be the “correct” perspective, each perspective helps to describe, explain, and predict our behavior that is the result of our personality. These approaches include:

· Psychoanalytic

· Behavioral

· Humanistic

· Social-cognitive

· Biological

· Trait

These approaches shouldn’t sound unfamiliar to you since these are the same perspectives we’ve been talking about all semester long. In this chapter, we’ll use each perspective to try to explain personality development. We won’t cover all of these perspectives, but instead will focus on the psychoanalytic, humanistic, biological, and trait perspectives.

Psychoanalytic/Psychodynamic Perspective

When you think of psychology – really, whenever anyone thinks of psychology – they think of Sigmund Freud (Links to an external site.). While much of what Freud talked about was not based in the scientific method (Links to an external site.) and/or cannot be supported by empirical evidence (Links to an external site.), he did make some major contributions to psychological thinking. He is credited with being the founder of psychoanalysis – a field of psychotherapy where people talk about their unconscious thoughts and desires in order to bring them to the surface to feel the catharsis of feeling better (more on this in the therapy discussion in a few weeks). According to Freud, people’s unconscious thoughts and desires are the root of their problems. Freud also was one of the first to discuss how early childhood experiences shape our future selves.

Freud’s psychoanalytic theories were premised on the idea that we have these negative inner conflicts (usually of a sexual or aggressive nature and unconscious) that lead to our various neuroses. Our personalities are shaped by these inner conflicts. Various neuroses include anything that leads to mental illness or unwellness (anxiety, depression, etc). The point of psychoanalysis is to bring our unconscious conflicts to the surface and deal with them in a healthy manner so that we can be “cured” of our neuroses.