Introduction to personality  (Page 2/21)

Definitions and descriptions of personality

It would seem to make sense that we should begin our study of personality by defining the term. Unfortunately, there is no single definition that fits the variety of theories that have been developed in the field of personality research. Most psychologists agree that the term personality comes from the Latin word persona , a term referring to the masks worn by actors performing ancient Greek plays. Often there were not enough actors available to play all of the roles in a play, so they would wear these masks to let the audience know that they were playing different roles. But are our personalities just masks? Freud certainly considered the unconscious mind to be very important, Cattell considered source traits to be more important than surface traits, and Buddhists consider the natural world (including the self) to be an illusion. Adler believed the best way to examine personality is to look at the person’s style of life, and Rogers felt that the only person who could truly understand you is yourself. What definition could possibly encompass all that?

Still, we need a working definition as a starting point for discussion. Borrowing loosely from Allport’s definition of personality, personality can be viewed as the dynamic organization within an individual of various psychological factors that determines the person’s characteristic thoughts and behaviors. In simpler terms, a variety of factors blend together to create each person, and as a result of those factors the individual is most likely to think and act in somewhat predictable ways. However, given the complexity of human life, those predictions may prove to be elusive. Theodore Millon (1996, 2004; Millon&Grossman, 2005), a renowned clinician and theorist in the field of personality disorders, has sought a definition of personality broad enough to encompass both normal and abnormal personality. Millon describes the modern view of personality as a complex pattern of psychological characteristics that are deeply embedded, largely unconscious, and resistant to change. These intrinsic and pervasive traits arise from a complex matrix of biological dispositions and experiential learning, and express themselves automatically in nearly every aspect of the individual’s unique pattern of perceiving, feeling, thinking, coping, and behaving (e.g., Millon, 1996).

Another challenge we face in defining personality is how we approach the question in the first place. Traditionally, there have been two basic approaches to the study of personality: the nomothetic perspective and the idiographic perspective. The nomothetic perspective seeks to identify general rules that pertain to personality as a construct (a working hypothesis or concept used to identify something we can describe but not see, such as IQ or the self). Thus, it can be rather abstract, and often fails to appreciate the uniqueness of individuals. In contrast, the idiographic perspective focuses specifically on the individuality and uniqueness of each person. Although the idiographic approach often seems more appealing to students, especially since it enhances their self-esteem by considering them as individually important, it is difficult for any theory of personality to encompass research that treats only one person at a time. Such a theory would naturally suffer from problems of generalizability, and may be useful for therapists working with one patient or client at a time, but it will not be particularly useful for enhancing our overall understanding of personality in general. It is important to note, however, that many early personality theories were based on individual case studies, and this critique is one that we will see several times in this book.