Personality: A Topical Approach

Theories, Research, Major Controversies, and Emerging Findings

Robert B. Ewen

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134798216
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

Many texts attempt to bridge theory and research. They include one or two pages dealing with important theorists--Jung, Adler, Freud, et al.--inserted into chapters focused on academic studies. In most cases, the discussion fails to do justice to the theorists and the relationship between the ideas and the empirical work is often tenuous at best. This book takes a different approach. An alternative to Ewen's An Introduction to Theories of Personality, this book features a chapter on each major type of theory followed by a separate chapter reviewing the relevant research, controversies, and emerging findings. Although it incorporates material from the previous text, there are substantial differences. Personality: A Topical Approach devotes more attention to psychological research, and considerably less attention to the more minor and abstruse aspects of various theories. Chapters are devoted to the following theories:
*pychoanalytically-oriented,
*tait,
*cgnitive,
*self-humanistic, and
*behaviorism. While the book emphasizes major research foci (the Big Five personality factors, self-efficacy, self-esteem, and more), it also includes a chapter on research methods and coverage of issues often omitted from other texts such as dream interpretation, cognitions and the Holocaust, scientific inquiry, and near-death experiences. The book also provides study questions, a "help" section, and a glossary.

1

Introduction

This book is about one of the most fascinating of all subjects: the human personality. The theorists and researchers whose views we will examine often disagree with one another, so any reader who is seeking a field with clear-cut answers will be disappointed. But if you are intrigued by the challenge of trying to understand human nature (including your own behavior), and by comparing and evaluating different and thought-provoking ideas, you should find the study of personality to be highly rewarding.

The Meaning of Personality

Most of us have an intuitive understanding as to the meaning of personality.(Note: terms in boldface are defined in the Glossary at the end of this book.) Although there is as yet no one universally accepted definition of personality, most psychologists do agree on certain general considerations.

First of all, personality refers to important and relatively stable aspects of a person’s behavior. For example, consider a young woman whose personality includes the trait called “painfully shy.” She will behave shyly in many different situations, and over a significant period of time. Of course, there may well be exceptions. She may be more outgoing with her family or a close friend, or at her own birthday party. But, most often, her behavior will be consistent: She will have difficulty dealing with other people, which will continue for months or even years and will have a significant effect on her general well-being.

Most psychologists also define personality as originating within the individual. Gordon Allport put it this way: “Of course the impression we make on others, and their response to us are important factors in the development of our personalities‥‥[But] what about the solitary hermit…or Robinson Crusoe before the advent of his man Friday? Do these isolates lack personality because they have no effect on others? [My] view is that such exceptional creatures have personal qualities that are no less fascinating than those of men living in human society…[and that] we must have something inside our skins that constitutes our ‘true nature’“ (1961, p. 24).

Personality deals with a wide range of human behavior. Virtually everything about a person—mental, emotional, social, and physical—is included. Some aspects of personality are unobservable, such as thoughts, memories, and dreams; while others are observable, as is the case with overt actions. Personality also includes aspects that are concealed from yourself, or unconscious, as well as those that are conscious and well within your awareness.

If we try to summarize these ideas in a single definition, we get the following: Personality refers to important, relatively stable characteristics within the individual that account for consistent patterns of behavior. Aspects of personality may be observable or unobservable, and conscious or unconscious. This is by no means the only acceptable definition of personality; it does reflect the approach and orientation of the present text.

Theories and Theorists

With regard to the term theory, there is less controversy and greater agreement. A theory is an unproved speculation about reality, one not known to be either true or false. Established facts are often lacking in scientific work, and a theory offers guidelines that will serve us in the absence of more precise information.

A theory consists of a set of terms and principles constructed or applied by the theorist, which are referred to as constructs. Like the author or inventor, the theorist is a creator (of constructs). And like creators in other disciplines, the theorist borrows from and builds on the work of his or her predecessors. Freud’s well-known constructs of id, ego, and superego are not actual entities that exist somewhere within your mind; they are terms which he devised to help explain how our personalities operate. Nor was he the first to use the term “id,” which was coined by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

It should now be apparent why there are often serious disagreements among personality theorists. These theorists sought to explore a relatively new and unknown world, the human psyche. To explain their discoveries, therefore, they were forced to develop their own terms and concepts (constructs). And because they deal with areas where the facts are unknown, their theories often differ significantly. With this in mind, let us survey some of the important theorists whose work we will examine.

Sigmund Freud: Psychoanalysis

Throughout the course of history, scientists have dealt three great shocks to our feelings of self-importance. Nicolaus Copernicus demonstrated that the Earth is not the center of all creation, but merely one of several planets that rotate around the sun. Charles Darwin showed that humans are not a unique and privileged life form, but just one of many animal species that have evolved over millions of years. Sigmund Freud emphasized that we are not even the masters of our own minds, but are driven by many powerful unconscious processes (wishes, fears, beliefs, conflicts, emotions, memories) of which we are totally unaware (see Freud, 1917a; 1916–1917/1966, pp. 284–285).

In Freudian theory (psychoanalysis, which is also the name of the form of psychotherapy that he developed), you will find many constructs that express his belief that much of personality is unconscious and cannot be called to consciousness on demand. You will also find:

• An extremely pessimistic view of human nature that attributes all of our behavior to two innate instincts, sexual and destructive, which include the desire for incest and the lust for killing.
• The belief that nothing in the human psyche happens by chance; all mental behavior is determined by prior causes.
• Constructs designed to explain how personality can become a house divided against itself, including the id, ego, and superego.
• Constructs designed to explain how we hide the truth about ourselves from ourselves, including various defense mechanisms.
• The construct of anxiety, an important and highly unpleasant emotion that is similar to intense nervousness.
• The belief that your personality is determined primarily during infancy and early childhood.
• An explanation of personality development in terms of psychosexual stages, including the occurrence of the all-important Oedipus complex.
• Various procedures designed to bring unconscious material to consciousness, including free association, dream interpretation, and the analysis of resistance and transference.

Biographical Sketch. Sigmund Freud was born on May 6, 1856, at Freiberg, Moravia (now Czechoslovakia). His parents were Jewish and his father worked as a wool merchant. Freud spent nearly all of his life in Vienna, where his family moved in 1860.

Freud was an excellent student throughout his academic career, receiving his medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1881. He was not overly enthusiastic about becoming a practicing physician, a slow route to economic security in those days, and longed for the brilliant discovery that would bring him rapid fame. In 1885 he won a travel grant to study in Paris with Jean-Martin Charcot, a noted hypnotist. Charcot was experimenting with the use of hypnosis to cure illnesses that we now regard as psychological, but which he (and his contemporaries) believed to be physiological. Intrigued by Charcot’s work, Freud returned to Vienna and became the colleague of a prominent physician, Josef Breuer, who was using hypnosis to treat patients with hysterical behavior disorders (paralysis of a leg or arm, loss of speech, and other symptoms that had no physical cause).

During 1880–1882, Breuer treated the 21-year-old hysterical patient known as “Anna O.” She suffered from a veritable museum of symptoms: paralyzed limbs, hallucinations, nervous coughing, sleepwalking, various speech disorders, and even a second personality that lived exactly one year in the past. Breuer discovered a most unusual way to alleviate these formidable difficulties. He hypnotized Anna 0., and had her relive each previous occurrence of a symptom in reverse chronological order! This procedure enabled her to release powerful emotions that she had been afraid to express at the time (the process of catharsis). Unfortunately, Breuer’s sympathetic care aroused such powerful love from his attractive patient that he became upset, his wife became even more upset, and he dropped the case with considerable embarrassment. But he had shown that unconscious forces within the mind could cause psychological illness, and could be brought to light with words and ideas alone (see Ellenberger, 1970, pp. 480–484; Freud & Breuer, 1895/1966, pp. 55–82; E. Jones, 1953/1963, pp. 142ff).

Freud was most impressed by this demonstration. He worked with Breuer for a decade, and they co-authored Studies on Hysteria in 1895. However, Freud eventually found that the hypnotic method left much to be desired. Cures were likely to be only temporary, with the patient becoming dependent on the therapist and suffering a relapse as soon as treatment was discontinued. The cathartic removal of a symptom left the underlying causes unresolved, free to create new difficulties. Thus hypnotic therapy acted more like a cosmetic cover-up than successful surgery. And some of Freud’s patients were unable to go into a trance, partly because he wasn’t a particularly good hypnotist (Freud, 1916–1917/1966, pp. 450–451; Freud & Breuer, 1895/1966, pp. 145ff). For these reasons, Freud abandoned hypnosis (and catharsis) and gradually developed the form of psychotherapy that has become known as psychoanalysis.

Freud’s professional life had many interesting highlights, and also a few major blunders. In 1884, a friend of his suffered an extremely painful illness and became addicted to the morphine that he took as medication. Freud recommended a “harmless” substitute—cocaine—and even published an article praising the new drug. Unfortunately, cocaine also proved to be highly addictive, and Freud was justifiably criticized. In 1896, Freud announced that most of his psychoanalytic patients were ill because they had been seduced by immoral adults during childhood. A few years later he concluded to his chagrin that these incidents were actually imaginary, and that the unconscious cannot distinguish between memory and fantasy. (Interestingly, the current concern with child abuse suggests that Freud’s original theory may not have been as incorrect as he thought. Incest may well be more prevalent than is generally believed, but is not publicized because of understandable feelings of shame and guilt.)

Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams, the cornerstone of his theory, in 1900. Fame was far from instant, and this classic took 8 years to sell all of 600 copies. By now Freud had completed his break with standard medicine, however, and was more self-assured as the leader of an established movement. Some of his more controversial theories drew scathing criticism, and he clearly identified with the role of the lonely hero struggling against insuperable odds. Nevertheless, the belief that he was ostracized by Vienna for his beliefs is one of the unfounded legends that surround his life. Rather, his position and fame steadily improved (see Ellenberger, 1970, p. 450; Freud, 1925/1963a, pp. 44, 91; E. Jones, 1955/1963b, pp. 237, 291).

Freud’s own life provided him with a great deal of psychological data. He was himself Oedipal, had powerful unconscious hostility toward his father, and was quite close to his mother (who was some 19 years younger than her husband, and devoted to her “golden Sigi”). Freud began his self-analysis in 1897, probing the inner depths of his own mind with the psychological techniques that he developed. He continued to do so for the rest of his life, reserving the last half hour of each day for this purpose.

Personally, Freud was highly moral and ethical. Some found him to be cold, bitter, rejecting, the kind of man who does not suffer fools gladly, and more interested in the discoveries to be made from his patients than in themselves. Others depicted him as warm, humorous, profoundly understanding, and extremely kind (e.g., see Ellenberger, 1970, pp. 457–469; E. Jones, 1953/1963; Reik, 1948/1964, p. 258; Rieff, 1959/1961; Roazen, 1975/1976b; and Schur, 1972). Some colleagues remained devoted to Freud throughout their lives, while others (including Breuer, Carl Jung, and Alfred Adler) engaged in acrimonious partings because of their theoretical differences.

Freud married Martha Bernays on September 30, 1886. His letters to his betrothed show him to have been an ardent and devoted lover, and the marriage was for some time a happy one. The Freuds had six children, three boys and three girls, with the youngest (Anna) becoming a prominent child psychoanalyst and ultimately assuming the leadership of the Freudian movement. Although Freud usually declined to practice his psychological ideas on his own family, he did create a rather bizarre Oedipal situation by psychoanalyzing Anna himself. No doubt due in part to this unusual emotional involvement with her father, she never married, devoted her life to the cause of psychoanalysis, and eventually replaced Martha as the most important woman in Sigmund’s life (Roazen, 1975/1976b, pp. 58–59, 63, 439–440).

In 1909, Freud visited the United States and delivered a series of lectures at Clark University. They were well received, but he left with the impression that “America is a mistake; a gigantic mistake, it is true, but none the less a mistake” (E. Jones, 1955/1963, p. 263). World War I impressed on him the importance of aggression as a basic human drive, and the ensuing runaway inflation cost him his life savings (about $30, 000). Fortunately his reputation enabled him to attract English and American patients, who paid in a more stable currency. But his hardships were not yet over.

During the last 16 years of his life, Freud was afflicted with an extremely serious cancer of the mouth and jaw. This required no fewer than thirty-three operations, forced him to wear an awkward prosthesis to fill the resulting gap between what had been the nasal and oral cavities, and prevented him at times from speaking and swallowing, yet he bore this ordeal with his customary stoic courage. Nor did he curtail his prolific and literate writings, which fill some twenty-three volumes.

Still one more trial was in store: the Nazi invasion of Vienna in 1938, during which Anna was detained by the Gestapo but eventually released. Freud and his family successfully escaped to London, where he was received with great honor. There he finally succumbed to the cancer on September 23, 1939.

Neo-Freudian Theories

Several prominent personality theorists started out as Freudians. Eventually, however, their efforts to understand the human personality led them to develop constructs that differed significantly from Freud’s. When Freud refused to accept their proposed changes, their only recourse was to abandon psychoanalysis and develop their own theories of personality.

To these theorists, and to serious students of personality theory, the differences between neo-Freudian constructs and Freudian psychoanalysis are substantial. However, many modern psychologists disagree. They prefer to focus on the more observable and conscious aspects of personality, which are much easier to subject to the rigors of experimental research. And so they regard the theories of Freud and his dissidents as fairly similar because all of these theories stress the importance of unconscious processes.

A second issue involving neo-Freudian theories has to do with terminology. In order to convey their ideas most effectively, and to emphasize their differences with Freud, the neo-Freudians devised many new constructs—so many, in fact, that studying each theory is like trying to learn a new language. Partly for this reason, neo-Freudian theories have had less influence on modern psychology than has Freudian psychoanalysis. Only c...