PERSONALITY – Feeling ‘Stuck’ in Your Development, Growth & Recovery?

Are You Feeling ‘Stuck’ in Your Development, Growth & Recovery?

“The fundamental method for the development of personality is self-education.” ~ Kazimierz Dabrowski

An individual’s personality is an aggregate conglomeration of the decisions they have made throughout their life and the memory of the experiences to which these decisions led. There are inherent natural, genetic, and environmental factors that contribute to the development of our personality.

According to process of socialization,

“personality also colors our values, beliefs, and expectations … Hereditary factors that contribute to personality development do so as a result of interactions with the particular social environment in which people live.”

There are several personality types as Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers illustrated in several personalities typology tests, which are based on Carl Jung’s school of Analytical psychology.  However, these tests only provide enlightenment based on the preliminary insight scored according to the answers judged by the parameters of the test.

Other theories on personality development include Jean Piaget’s stages of development, Erik Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development, and personality development in Sigmund Freud’s theory being formed through the interaction of id, ego, and super-ego.

Personality includes those stable psychological characteristics that define each human being as unique. Both children and adults have personality traits (long-term characteristics, such as temperament) and states (changeable characteristics, such as moodiness). While a variety of explanations are possible, most experts agree that whatever the causes, an individual’s personality is solidly established by the end of early childhood.

According to Freud, the second year of childhood is the anal stage of psychosexual development, when parents face many new challenges while toilet training their children. Fixations at this stage may give rise to characteristic personality traits that fully emerge in adulthood. These personality traits include anal retention (excessive neatness, organization, and withholding) or anal expulsion (messiness and altruism).

Personality theorists after Freud have attempted to explain early childhood personality development. Learning theorists claim that personality develops as a result of classical conditioning (Ivan Pavlov’s learning by association), operant conditioning (B. F. Skinner’s learning by reinforcement and punishment), and observational learning (Albert Bandura’s learning by imitation). This latter category involves identification, or internalization, whereby children observe and adopt the values, ideas, and standards of their significant others. Cognitive psychologists speculate that personality arises, in part, from the attitudes and biases expressed by the adults around them. Gender theorists claim that personality develops from “gender identification” and “gender socialization”.

Geneticists speculate that personality arises from “wired in” genetic and biochemical influences rather than psychosocial ones.

Those who emerge from the adolescent stage of personality development with a strong sense of identity are well equipped to face adulthood with confidence and certainty. This sort of unresolved crisis leaves individuals struggling to “find themselves.” They may go on to seek a negative identity, which may involve crime or drugs or the inability to make defining choices about the future. “The basic strength that should develop during adolescence is fidelity, which emerges from a cohesive ego identity”.

Erikson described identity as “a subjective sense as well as an observable quality of personal sameness and continuity, paired with some belief in the sameness and continuity of some shared world image. As a quality of unself-conscious living, this can be gloriously obvious in a young person who has found himself as he has found his communality.

In him we see emerge a unique unification of what is irreversibly given—that is, body type and temperament, giftedness and vulnerability, infantile models and acquired ideals—with the open choices provided in available roles, occupational possibilities, values offered, mentors met, friendships made, and first sexual encounters.”
 

Personality Development
 

 
 

In the final analysis, no perspective alone can adequately explain the complex processes of personality development. A combination of psychosocial, parental, and biological influences are likely responsible for the ultimate determination of human traits and states. TAKE ACTION – YOU are Worth the Effort !!!

 

PERSONALITY DISORDERS – TREATMENT & CARE