Theories of Personality

September 25, 2022

Prof. Yeng Gatchalian

Theory
- A model of reality that helps us to understand, explain, predict, and control that reality.
- Have different ways of understanding personality
- Context-based; a guide to action; not fully factual

The Study of Personality

How does personality develop?
- Through forces and factors
Keypoints:
● The study of personality is concerned with generalities about people (human nature) as
well as with individual differences
● Personality is understood in terms of:
- What: characteristics that individuals have
- How: they became that way (the determinants of personality
- Why: they behave the way they do (motivation)

Purpose and Goals of Theories:

Understanding: Humanists and Existentialists
Prediction and Control: Behaviorists and Freudians
Measure and Predict: Trait Theory

Commonalities of Theories:
- Nearly all theories have been highly creative
- Most theories have outstanding literary skills
- Unusually romantic
- Superior intelligence
- Lonely at least at one time or another
- They fervent belief that they were scientists and were making observations and
constructing theories within the framework of science
- Balance

“It is not what happened to me, it is what I choose to become” - Carl Jung
“Unknown forces are not real” - George Kelly

Balancing Act:
Freud:
● ID - “I want that right now!”
● EGO - “Let’s figure out a way to work together”
● SUPEREGO - “Good people don’t think about those things”
Jung
● Persona - the public image of someone; mask of a person
● Anima - feminine aspect in men
● Animus - masculine aspect in women
● Shadow - dark side of the personality
- Contains primitive animal instincts
- Must be tamed for harmony among men
- Restrain, overcome, defend
- Also the source of creativity, vitality, spontaneity and emotions
- Must not be totally repressed
● Self - represents the unity, integration, and harmon of the total personality
- Striving towards wholeness is the goal of life
- Realization of the self lies

Middle age - self archetype usually happens on this stage; individuation

- The stage where the process of realizing and actualizing the self begins
- Conscious is integrated with the unconscious and individuation is attained
Mandala: model for self

Karen Horney
3 Ways to Combat Basic Anxiety
- Moving away from people: looking for independence and growth
- Moving toward people: submission; exploitation
- Moving against people: manipulative
● Normal adjustment patterns utilize all three
● When you only have 1 way to combat basic anxiety, you tend to be neurotic

Erich Fromm
Human Needs
● Relatedness but also Identity
- Need to be connected, caring and cared for but also need to develop one’s uniqueness
● Transcendence but also Rootedness
- Need to rise above our animal nature (creatively or destructively), but also need for a
sense of belonging to community, family etc.
● Excitation but also Frame-of-orientation
- Stimulating and changing environment but also a consistent view of the world and an
object of devotion

“If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellowmen, his love is
not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.” - Erich Fromm
Carl Rogers
Humanistic
Other term: Phenomenological
- Emphasizes the importance of self-perception and world perception. It assumes that
individuals have the innate capacity to fulfill their potential; however, a controlling and
conditional world keeps individuals from reaching that potential
- Meaning of the experience to the individual
- Focused on uniquely human issues (the self, health, hope, love, creativity, nature, and
individuality.
- Believed in innate goodness - born good
- Derived somewhat from existentialism ( a strong belief in free will and conscious rational
decision-making)
- Arose in reaction to behaviorism and psychodynamic theory
- Meaning of life:

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”
- Carl Rogers
“If ‘genuineness, unconditional acceptance, empathy’ not present, path toward actualization can
be distorted” - Carl Rogers

The Actualizing Tendency - the directional trend which is evident in all organic and human life –
the urge to expand, extend, develop, mature – the tendency to express and activate all
capacities of the organism, or the self”

● Human motivation is fundamentally growth-directed and healthy

● The core personality is positive

Negative socialization:
Conditions of Worth
● Children accepted by parents when ‘good’ and rejected when ‘bad’
● We develop the view: ‘I ought to be good’, ‘I have to be good’
● We lose touch with our true nature (real self and actualizing tendency)
● Develop and Ideal self: Who we feel we should be (superego)

Roger’s View of Self:

❖ Organismic self - the real self; what one “is”; one’s entire being
❖ Self concept - evaluation of one’s own characteristics; the subjective self; may differ from
‘real’ self; cognitive
❖ Ideal self - self as one ‘would like to be’
Conflict between self-concept and ideal self
High incongruence = unhealthy personality; defensive; living unsatisfyingly
Adaptive behavior = congruence
*self-image ang tinatama and not the true self
Unconditional Positive Regard
- Accepting a person without condition
- healthy/positive socialization
- ‘Person’ distinct from ‘behaviour’

Abraham Maslow
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Self-Actualization - maximizing potential
● Deficiency motivation - you need to fulfill the needs up to 70%
1. Physiological needs: food, water, sleep, sex, etc.
- If not satisfied, one would feel sick and unsafe
2. Safety needs: security
3. Love/Belongingness needs
4. Esteem needs
5. Self-actualization needs

*Frustration of deficiency needs: leads to anti-social emotions (hostility, jealousy, etc.)

*Psychopathology results from the frustration of a human being’s essential nature
*Moments of self-actualization do not often occur in life and some people may never achieve
this.
*If a pattern of your goal does not follow the behavior = maladaptive

Jonah Complex
- The fear of one’s own greatness, the evasion of one’s destiny, or the avoidance of
exercising one’s talents
- Reason why everyone live up to his/her potential
“Everything you want is one the other side of fear”

“What a man can be, he must be.” - Abraham Maslow

“Self-belief does not necessarily ensure success, but self-disbelief assuredly spawns failure”
- Albert Bandura

Albert Bandura
Triadic Model of Reciprocal Determinism
Personal Factors: Behavior and Environmental
● The interaction between the person and their behavior is influenced by their thoughts
and actions
● The interaction between the person and the environment involves beliefs and cognitive
competencies developed and modified by social influences
● The interaction between the environment and their behavior involves the person’s
behavior determining their environment, which in turn, affects their behavior

Self-regulation: performing the right behavior at the right time

Self-efficacy: the belief in your ability to perform a certain task or function
Ways to maximize potential and building self-efficacy
- Mastery experience
- Social modeling
- Social persuasion
- Physical and emotional states (eat and sleep right; pray)

“People who have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failure; they approach things in
terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about what can go wrong” - Albert Bandura