At its most basic, personality is the characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that make a person unique. It is believed that personality arises from within the individual and remains fairly consistent throughout life. While there are many different definitions of personality, most focus on the pattern of behaviors and characteristics that can help predict and explain a person's behavior.
Explanations for personality can focus on a variety of influences, ranging from genetic explanations for personality traits to the role of the environment and experience in shaping an individual's personality. So what exactly makes up a personality? Traits and patterns of thought and emotion play important roles as well as the following fundamental characteristics of personality:.
There are a number of theories about how personality develops , and different schools of thought in psychology influence many of these theories. Some of these major perspectives on personality include the following. Type theories are the early perspectives on personality. These theories suggested that there are a limited number of "personality types" that are related to biological influences, including:. Trait theories tend to view personality as the result of internal characteristics that are genetically based and include:.
Psychodynamic theories of personality are heavily influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud and emphasize the influence of the unconscious mind on personality. Behavioral theories suggest that personality is a result of interaction between the individual and the environment. Behavioral theorists study observable and measurable behaviors, often ignoring the role of internal thoughts and feelings.
Behavioral theorists include B. Skinner and John B. Humanist theorists include Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow. Research on personality can yield fascinating insights into how personality develops and changes over the course of a lifetime. This research can also have important practical applications in the real world. For example, personality assessments are often used to help people learn more about themselves and their unique strengths, weaknesses, and preferences.
Perhaps the most apposite approach to the philosophical discovery of personality is the study of the relation between personality and love. This is a false statement, and exhibits in Pascal a trace of the very rationalism against which he strove to protect himself. Love is not concerned with qualities. They are not the object of our love. We love the deepest, most substantial and hidden, the most existing reality of the beloved being. This is a metaphysical center deeper than all the qualities and essences which we can find and enumerate in the beloved.
The expressions of lovers are unending because their object is ineffable. Love seeks out this center, not, to be sure, as separated from its qualities, but as one with them.
This is a center inexhaustible, so to speak, of existence, bounty and action; capable of giving and of giving itself; capable of receiving not only this or that gift bestowed by another, but even another self as a gift, another self which bestows itself. This brief consideration of love's own law brings us to the metaphysical problem of the person.
For love is not concerned with qualities or natures or essences but with persons. Romeo, doff thy name, and for thy name, which is not part of thee, take all myself. Such a being must exist not only as other things do, but eminently, in self-possession, holding itself in hand, master of itself. In short, it must be endowed with a spiritual existence, capable of containing itself thanks to the operations of the intellect and freedom, capable of super-existing by way of knowledge and of love.
For this reason, the metaphysical tradition of the West defines the person in terms of independence, as a reality which, subsisting spiritually, constitutes a universe unto itself, a relatively independent whole within the great whole of the universe, facing the transcendent whole which is God. For the same reason, this tradition finds in God the sovereign Personality whose existence itself consists in a pure and absolute super-existence by way of intellection and love.
Unlike the concept of the individuality of corporeal things, the concept of personality is related not to matter but to the deepest and highest dimensions of being.
Its roots are in the spirit inasmuch as the spirit holds itself in existence and super abounds in existence. Personality is the subsistence of the spiritual soul communicated to the human composite. Because, in our substance, it is an imprint or seal which enables it to possess its existence, to perfect and give itself freely, personality testifies to the generosity or expansiveness in being which an incarnate spirit derives from its spiritual nature and which constitutes, within the secret depths of our ontological structure, a source of dynamic unity, of unification from within.
Personality, therefore, signifies interiority to self. And because it is the spirit in man which takes him, in contrast to the plant and animal, beyond the threshold of independence properly so called, and of interiority to oneself, the subjectivity of the person has nothing in common with the isolated unity, without doors or windows, of the Leibnizian monad.
It requires the communications of knowledge and love. By the very fact that each of us is a person and expresses himself to himself, each of us requires com munication with other and the others in the order of knowledge and love.
Personality, of its essence, requires a dialogue in which souls really communicate. Such communication is rarely possible. For this reason, personality in man seems to be bound to the experience of affliction even more profoundly than to the experience of creative effort.
The person is directly related to the absolute. For only in the absolute is it able to enjoy its full sufficiency. Its spiritual homeland is the whole universe of the absolute and of those indefectible goods which are as the pathways to the absolute Whole which transcends the world.
Finally, we turn to religious thought for the last word and find that the deepest layer of the human person's dignity consists in its property of resembling God -- not in a general way after the manner of all creatures, but in a proper way. It is the image of God. For God is spirit and the human person proceeds from Him in having as principle of life a spiritual soul capable of knowing, loving and of being uplifted by grace to participation in the very life of God so that, in the end, it might know and love Him as He knows and loves Himself.
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Individual Differences and Personality aims to describe how and why personality varies among people. Home Who Are We? Editorials tribes and culture Features education Fiction politics Sports Contact. Share with friends on: Tweet. Like this: Like Loading Tagged indidual personality. Published by Ola-lawal Muzzamil Oladayo. Published January 15, January 22, Next Post The Wind of Change. Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:.
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