It consists of all the inherited (i.e., biological) components of personality, including the sex (life) instinct – Eros (which contains the libido), and aggressive (death) instinct – Thanatos. The id is the primitive and instinctive component of personality. These are systems, not parts of the brain, or in any way physical. Sources of pleasure are determined by the location of the libido (life-force).Īs a child moves through different developmental stages, the location of the libido, and hence sources of pleasure, change (Freud, 1905).Įnvironmental and parental experiences during childhood influence an individual’s personality during adulthood.įor example, during the first two years of life, the infant who is neglected (insufficiently fed) or who is over-protected (over-fed) might become an orally-fixated person (Freud, 1905).įreud (1923) saw the personality structured into three parts (i.e., tripartite), the id, ego, and superego (also known as the psyche), all developing at different stages in our lives. People – including children – are basically hedonistic – they are driven to seek pleasure by gratifying the Id’s desires (Freud, 1920). Personality and mental health problems in adulthood can usually be traced back to the first five years. Parental behavior is crucial to normal and abnormal development. Personality development depends on the interplay of instinct and environment during the first five years of life. – Early childhood influences (re: psychosexual stages ) – especially the parents – Instinctual drives – food, sex, aggression Sigmund Freud”s psychodynamic theory of personality assumes there is an interaction between nature (innate instincts) and nurture (parental influences). Trait theories of personality imply personality is biologically based, whereas state theories such as Bandura’s (1977) Social Learning Theory emphasize the role of nurture and environmental influence. We must also consider the influence and interaction of nature (biology, genetics, etc.) and nurture (the environment, upbringing) with respect to personality development. People differ in their positions along a continuum in the same set of traits. This approach tends to use self-report personality questions, factor analysis, etc. This viewpoint sees traits as having the same psychological meaning in everyone. The nomothetic view, on the other hand, emphasizes comparability among individuals. It tends to use case studies for information gathering. The idiographic view assumes that each person has a unique psychological structure and that some traits are possessed by only one person and that there are times when it is impossible to compare one person with others. “The characteristics or blend of characteristics that make a person unique” (Weinberg & Gould, 1999).īoth definitions emphasize the uniqueness of the individual and consequently adopt an idiographic view. “Personality is the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine his characteristics behavior and thought” (Allport, 1961, p. What is this thing we call personality? Consider the following definitions, what do they have in common? This new model significantly contributed to the wide acceptance and increased popularity the five-factor model received.In the 1980s, after an almost four decade long hiatus, Lewis Goldberg and colleagues (1980) revived Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal’s (1961) exploration of five major personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (commonly abbreviated as the acronym OCEAN).Similarly, British-American psychologist Raymond Cattell developed a Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire, a 185 multiple-choice self-report questionnaire used to measure personality in both the clinical and non-clinical settings.The list was eventually refined by Louis Leon Thurstone to 60 words, and through analyzing roughly 1,300 participants, the list was reduced again to seven common factors (Goldberg, 1993). Beginning in the late 19th century, Sir Francis Galton, a British polymath (an expert in many fields) estimated the number of adjectives in the English dictionary that described personality.Personality tests date back to the 18th century, when phrenology, measuring bumps on the skull, and physiognomy, analyzing a person’s outer appearance, was used to assess personality (Goldstein & Hershen, 2000).
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