Definitions of the concept of personality in foreign psychology

General characteristics of personality theories

Currently, there is no generally accepted opinion about what approach personologists should take to the study of personality to explain the main aspects of human behavior. In fact, at this stage of development of personology, various alternative theories coexist, describing the personality as an integrated whole and at the same time explaining the differences between people. Therefore, first of all, let us dwell on what this or that theory is and what methods it uses to study and understand man. A theory is a system of interrelated ideas, constructs and principles that aims to explain certain observations of reality. A theory is always speculative in its essence and therefore, strictly speaking, cannot be “right” or “wrong.” However, a theory is generally accepted in the scientific world as valid and trustworthy to the extent that the results of observations of a phenomenon (usually based on data obtained in specific experiments) are consistent with the explanation of the same phenomenon implied by the theory itself. If human behavior were completely understandable from the point of view of ordinary common sense, there would be no need to create theories of personality. Personality theories are carefully calibrated conclusions or hypotheses about what people are like, how they behave, and why they act the way they do.

Theories have two main functions: they explain and predict behavior. Personality theory is explanatory in the sense that it presents behavior as organized in a certain way that makes it understandable. In other words, a theory provides a semantic framework or schema that allows us to simplify and interpret everything we know about the relevant class of events. The explanatory function of a theory becomes especially important when we are dealing with a huge number of facts and observations related to behavior. A good theory of personality provides a meaningful context within which it becomes possible to consistently describe and interpret human behavior.

A theory must not only explain past and present events, but also predict future ones. It should provide a basis for predicting outcomes and events that have not yet occurred. This goal clearly implies that theoretical concepts should not only be open to testing, but that they may or may not be confirmed. A good theory of personality directly stimulates psychological research. Conversely, the scientific value of untestable theories (that is, those that cannot be used to make predictions for further research) cannot be determined. Theories must have an exploratory impulse if they are to contribute to our understanding of human nature in all its uniquely individual manifestations.

Personality theories serve different functions in psychology. They enable us to explain what people are like (identify relatively constant personality characteristics and the way they interact), understand how these characteristics develop over time, and why people behave in certain ways. Theories also allow us to predict the emergence of new relationships that have not been studied before. From the perspective of the predictive function, theories outline directions in which planned research can lead to new discoveries in many hitherto unexplored areas. However, it is extremely important that all theories of human behavior are created by people themselves. Personologists are the same people and, just like others, have different views on human nature. For example, some theorists are convinced that the roots of human actions are deep in unconscious motives, the true nature of the latter is not realized by the individual, and the sources of motivation are buried in the distant past. Others believe that people are largely aware of their motives and that their behavior is primarily the result of current circumstances. Whatever the opinion of each particular theorist, it is quite clear that the basic assumptions about human nature held by personologists are different, and this is what makes their views so dissimilar. The theorist can realize and reveal the meaning of these provisions, or he may fail in this or simply generalize all his premises in such a way that it will be difficult to recognize exactly the initial provisions in them.

Concept of personality

At this historical stage in psychology there is no unambiguous and generally accepted definition of personality. The most common is the idea arising from the distinction between the individual, personality and individuality:

• An individual is a person as a biological being;
• Personality – man as a social being;
• Individuality is a person as a unique being. The concept of individuality emphasizes the uniqueness of each individual person.

Since consciousness, speech, etc. are not transmitted to people in the order of biological heredity, but are formed in them during their lifetime, they use the concept of “individual” as a biological organism, the bearer of the general genotypic hereditary properties of a biological species (we are born as an individual) and the concept of “personality” as a social - the psychological essence of a person, formed as a result of a person’s assimilation of social forms of consciousness and communication, the socio-historical experience of mankind (we become individuals under the influence of life in society, education, training, communication, interaction).

Psychodynamic direction in personality theory: Sigmund Freud.

According to Freud, the main driving factor in personality development are innate instincts, all the diversity of which is combined into two main groups: life instincts (Eros) and death instincts (Thanatos). Freud considered the most significant for the development of personality to be sexual instincts, the energy of which he called libido. Subsequently, Freud began to use the term “libido” to designate the energy of life instincts in general.

Freud identified three main personality structures: It (Id), I (Ego) and Superego (Superego). It represents the source of all the motivating energy that is necessary for human life activity. This energy is inherent in the sexual and aggressive drives that form an essential part of the id. The basic principle of the functioning of the id is the principle of pleasure. It seeks pleasure and avoids pain, strives for immediate and total release. The complete opposite of the Id is the Super-Ego, which represents the system of values, norms and rules of behavior accepted in society, as well as the ideals and punishments that a person expects if the rules are violated. The ego is the substructure of the personality responsible for making decisions. The ego, functioning in accordance with the reality principle, strives to satisfy the desires of the id, coordinating them with the requirements of the superego. The id, the ego and the superego are in constant struggle; strong conflicts between these structures can lead to mental and somatic illnesses.

Activity theory

In Russian psychology, the most popular theory was the activity theory, which was developed by several scientists, and the founder was S.L.
Rubinstein. According to the developments of scientists, only the direction of activity becomes the main one in the system of existential and existential properties of a person. The structure of an individual, in accordance with activity theory, consists of the direction of actions, abilities, characteristics and self-control. A conscious subject directs all his own efforts to satisfy his goals and ambitions.

Modern theories of personality in foreign and domestic psychology try to find commonality in each individual. Biological and social in this case are considered the main parameters through which individual characteristics can be interpreted. For example, a comparison of some theories clearly traces the relationship between congenital, social and individual factors.

The table indicates that the main issue in all psychological theories is recognizing the essence of the human personality. It is the problem of human interaction and development that occupies the minds of psychologists and scientists around the world.

Alfred Adler: individual theory of personality.

The idea that man is a single and self-consistent organism constitutes the main premise of Adlerian psychology. Adler gave his theory the name "individual psychology" because in Latin "individuum" means "indivisible" - that is, it means an entity that cannot be divided. Adler proceeded from the fact that not a single manifestation of life activity can be considered in isolation, but only in relation to the personality as a whole. The individual is an indivisible whole, both in relation to the relationship between the brain and the body and in relation to mental life.

Arguing that a person strives for perfection, Adler proceeded from the consideration that people do not push away from internal or external reasons, but rather pull forward - they are always in motion towards personally significant life goals.

Recognizing the importance of heredity and environment in the formation of personality, Adler insisted that the individual is more than just the product of these two influences (Adler, 1964). Namely, he believed that humans have a creative power that influences every facet of human experience: perception, memory, imagination, fantasy and dreams. It makes each person a self-determining individual, the architect of his own life.

Individual psychology views and studies the individual as embedded in society.

Cognitive theory

There are only two questions in the cognitive theory of personality:

1. What's happening now?
2. What does the future hold?

It is these two dilemmas that torment a person all his life, according to the founder J. Kelly. A person perceives the world according to an individual internal model of behavior, which is called a constructor and is interpreted through the influence of intellectual processes. To put it briefly, according to the psychologist, only similar constructors are able to interact normally with each other.

Carl Gustav Jung: analytical theory of personality.

Jung argued that personality consists of three separate but interacting structures: the ego, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious.

The ego is the center of the sphere of consciousness. It is a component of the psyche, which includes all those thoughts, feelings, memories and sensations through which we feel our integrity, constancy and perceive ourselves as people. The ego serves as the basis of our self-awareness, and thanks to it we are able to see the results of our ordinary conscious activities.

The personal unconscious contains conflicts and memories that were once conscious but are now repressed or forgotten. It also includes those sensory impressions that are not bright enough to be noted in consciousness. Jung notes that the personal unconscious contains complexes, or accumulations of emotionally charged thoughts, feelings and memories, brought by the individual from his past personal experience or from ancestral, hereditary experience. These complexes, arranged around the most common themes, can have a fairly strong influence on the behavior of an individual.

The collective unconscious is a repository of latent memory traces of humanity and even of our anthropoid ancestors. It reflects thoughts and feelings common to all human beings and resulting from our common emotional past. As Jung himself said, “the collective unconscious contains the entire spiritual heritage of human evolution, reborn in the structure of the brain of each individual.” Thus, the content of the collective unconscious is formed due to heredity and is the same for all humanity.

Jung hypothesized that the collective unconscious consists of powerful primary mental images called archetypes (literally, “primary patterns”) Archetypes are innate ideas or memories that predispose people to perceive, experience, and respond to events in a certain way. In reality, these are not memories or images as such, but rather predisposing factors under the influence of which people implement universal patterns of perception, thinking and action in their behavior in response to any object or event.

Jung's most famous contribution to psychology is considered to be his description of two main orientations, or attitudes: extraversion and introversion.

Jung classified thinking and feeling as rational functions because they allow us to form judgments about life experience. The thinking type judges the value of certain things using logic and arguments. Feeling types focus their attention on the emotional side of life experience.

Jung called the second pair of opposing functions - sensation and intuition - irrational, because they simply passively “grasp”, register events in the external (sensation) or internal (intuition) world, without evaluating them or explaining their meaning. Sensing types are especially perceptive about taste, smell, and other sensations from stimuli in the world around them. The intuitive type relies on premonitions and guesses to grasp the essence of life events.

Every person is endowed with all four psychological functions.

Afterword

The concepts discussed are similar in some ways, but completely different in others. In particular, there is no clear answer about what ultimately comes first: man or society, nature or the environment.

But if we focus on domestic concepts, we can note that a person becomes a person under the influence of society, through relationships and the assimilation of cultural experience.

You can read more about what personality is in the articles “The concept of personality in psychology: essence and structure” and “Personality orientation - what is it in psychology.”

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In foreign psychology there are a huge number of different theories of personality. Conventionally, all of them can be divided into three large groups: psychoanalytic, behavioral and humanistic theories.

1. Psychoanalytic concept of S. Freud. One of the most widespread theories that still influences personality psychology is Freudianism. This theory arose during that period of personality research, which we defined as clinical. The creator of this theory is S. Freud. Subsequently, on the basis of Freudianism, a whole series of theories arose that can be conditionally united into the group of theories of neo-Freudianism.

Considering the problem of behavior, Freud identifies two needs that determine human mental activity: libidinal and aggressive. But since the satisfaction of these needs encounters obstacles from the outside world, they are repressed, forming the region of the unconscious. But still, sometimes they break through, bypassing the “censorship” of consciousness, and appear in the form of symbols. The main sections of Freud's personality theory were problems of the unconscious, the structure of the mental apparatus, personality dynamics, development, neuroses, methods of studying personality. Subsequently, many famous psychologists (K. Horney, G. Sullivan, E. Fromm, A. Freud, M. Klein, E. Erikson, F. Alexander, etc.) developed, deepened and expanded precisely these aspects of his theory.

2. K. Jung’s personality typology. He distinguishes two types of personality: extroverts (oriented towards the outside world) and introverts (oriented towards the world of their own experiences). K. Jung was one of the first students of Freud to dissociate himself from his teacher. The main reason for the disagreement between them was Freud's idea of ​​pansexualism. But Jung fought against Freud not from a materialistic, but from an idealistic position. Jung called his system “analytical psychology.” According to Jung, the human psyche includes three levels: consciousness, the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The decisive role in the structure of a person’s personality is played by the collective unconscious, formed from traces of memory left by the entire past of humanity.

3. A. Adler’s theory of inferiority complex. Another, no less famous student of Freud, who left his teacher, was A. Adler, the founder of the so-called individual psychology. He sharply opposed Freud's biologizing theory. Adler emphasized that the main thing in a person is not his natural instincts, but a social feeling, which he called the “sense of community.” This feeling is innate, but it must be socially developed. He opposed Freud's view that man is from birth aggressive, that his development is determined by biological needs.

In his opinion, the personality structure is uniform, and the determinant in personality development is a person’s desire for superiority. However, this desire cannot always be realized. Thus, due to a defect in the development of bodily organs, a person begins to experience a feeling of inferiority; it can also arise in childhood due to unfavorable social conditions. A person strives to find ways to overcome feelings of inferiority and resorts to various types of compensation. Adler examines different forms of compensation (adequate, inadequate) and talks about its possible levels

4. Personality Theory by K. Horney. The listed authors did not consider themselves direct followers of Freud. The main representatives of neo-Freudianism are the direct students of Z. Freud - K. Horney and G. S. Sullivan. Karen Horney was at first a devoted student of Freud. In 1939, already in the USA, she published the book “The Neurotic Personality of Our Time,” in which she warmly thanks her teacher. However, she soon began to sharply criticize Freud for his attempt to reduce the mechanisms of human behavior to two tendencies - libidinal and aggressive, as well as for pansexualism.

5. Concept (theory) of personality by K. Rogers. He called his method of therapy non-directive, i.e. focused on the patient. According to this method, the doctor should not put pressure on the patient. Contact between doctor and patient should be based on respect for each other; Moreover, both of them are full participants in the conversation or contact. The function of the therapist is to create a situation where the doctor acts as the second “I” of the client and treats his inner world with understanding. Deep respect for the individual position of the individual is the only rule of therapy. The client in such a situation feels that all his internal experiences and sensations are perceived with interest and approval, this helps to discover new aspects of his experience, sometimes for the first time to realize the meaning of certain of his experiences.

6. Personality theory by A. Maslow. According to him, the basic human need is self-actualization, the desire for self-improvement and self-expression. To the main question of his theory - What is self-actualization? – Maslow answers: “Self-actualizing people are all, without exception, involved in some kind of work... They are devoted to this work, it is something very valuable to them - it is a kind of calling.” All people of this type strive for the realization of higher values, which, as a rule, cannot be reduced to something even higher. These values ​​(among them - goodness, truth, decency, beauty, justice, perfection, etc.) act as vital needs for them. Existence for a self-actualizing personality appears as a process of constant choice, as a constant solution to Hamlet’s problem “to be or not to be.” At every moment of life, an individual has a choice: moving forward, overcoming obstacles that inevitably arise on the path to a high goal, or retreat, giving up the fight and giving up positions.

7. Janet's theory of personality. Speaking about various personality theories, we cannot fail to say a few words about the French psychological school and its most outstanding representative, P. Jean. Janet expressed the opinion that various mental processes are phenomena that prepare actions. Feelings and thinking are processes that regulate actions. The basis for the development of personality is the doctrine of behavior. But Janet does not use the concept of behavior in the behaviorist sense. It is considered as including not only the externally observable activity of the individual, but also the internal mental content, which becomes an integral part of behavior, its regulating link.

Janet's position that the structure of mental processes includes the process of regulation is extremely important. Essentially, here the idea is already anticipated, which found its further development in the works of Russian psychologists L. S. Vygotsky, S. L. Rubinstein, A. N. Leontiev, L. I. Bozhovich and others, namely, the transformation of an individual into a person is determined by the fact that there is an opportunity for regulation and self-regulation. Janet says that the human psyche develops in cooperation with other people. First, a person cooperates with others and only then, on the basis of this, can he regulate his own behavior. The structure of the behavioral act proposed by Janet seems interesting. In accordance with it, three stages are distinguished in a behavioral act: internal preparation for action, execution of action and completion of action. As we see, this description of the behavioral act already includes an idea of ​​the purpose of the action.

8. D. Watson's concept of personality. All human behavior can be described schematically using the terms “stimulus” (S) and “response” (R). Watson believed that a person is initially endowed with some simple reactions and reflexes, but the number of these hereditary reactions is small. Almost all human behavior is the result of learning through conditioning. The formation of skills, according to Watson, begins at the earliest stages of life. The systems of basic skills or habits are as follows:

1) visceral, or emotional;

2) manual;

3) laryngeal, or verbal.

Watson defined personality as a derivative of systems of habits. Personality can be described as the sum of actions that can be detected through the practical study of behavior over a sufficiently long period of time. Personality problems and mental health disorders for behaviorists are not problems of consciousness, but behavioral disorders and habit conflicts that should be “treated” through conditioning and deconditioning. All subsequent studies following Watson's work were aimed at studying the stimulus-response relationship. Another famous American scientist B.F. Skinner tried to go beyond this formula to take into account the effects of the environment on the body after the reaction has occurred. He created the theory of operant conditioning.

Sources used:

• https://psychologist.tips/733-teorii-lichnosti-otechestvennye-i-zarubezhnye.html
• https://studopedia.ru/2_57316_osnovnie-zarubezhnie-teorii-lichnosti.html

Erich Fromm, Abraham Maslow: a humanistic theory of personality.

Fromm sought to expand the horizons of psychoanalytic theory, emphasizing the role of sociological, political, economic, religious and anthropological factors in the formation of personality. Fromm's theory attempts to show how broad sociocultural influences interact with unique human needs in the process of personality formation. His fundamental thesis was that character structure (personality types) is related to certain social structures. In keeping with the humanist tradition, he also argued that radical social and economic change could create a society in which both individual and social needs could be satisfied.

One of the most fundamental theses underlying Maslow's humanistic position is that each person must be studied as a single, unique, organized whole. According to Maslow, destructive forces in people are the result of frustration, or unmet basic needs, and not of any innate defects. He believed that every person naturally possesses the potential for positive growth and improvement. Maslow viewed creativity as a trait potentially present in all people from birth. He strongly insisted on the study of self-actualizing mentally healthy people as the basis for a more universal science of psychology.

Maslow proposed that all human needs are innate, or instinctoid, and that they are organized into a hierarchical system of priority or dominance.

Foreign psychology

In foreign psychology, several approaches can be distinguished within the framework of which the phenomenon of personality is interpreted.

Biologization approach

It is based on the idea of ​​the biological processes of maturation of the organism, divided into universal stages.

S. Hall's theory

In his concept, the author was guided by the law of recapitulation, that is, he argued that in his development, each person goes through the stages of development of the entire society.

Theory of E. Kretschmer

The author claims that there is a connection between a person’s constitution and his personal development.

S. Freud's theory

According to this concept, all human behavior and development is permeated with unconscious drives and instincts, especially sexual ones.

Sociogenetic approach

Representatives of this direction focus on the relationship between personal development and socialization, the development of society, and the relationship of the individual with the environment. That is, a person becomes a person only in society, in the process of social relations.

Theory of E. Thorndike and B. Skinner

The life of an individual is the result of reinforced learning, assimilation of knowledge and skills.

K. Levin's theory

The author developed a “field theory”, or “living space”. According to the concept, personality is controlled by aspirations and intentions. They, in turn, are expressed in the direction, size and point of contact with the personality field.

Psychogenetic approach

Representatives of this direction do not exclude the influence of both factors (biological and environmental). But the development of mental processes comes first in importance.

E. Erikson's theory

A psychodynamic concept according to which the leading elements of personality are non-rational, for example, emotions and aspirations.

Theories of J. Piazget, J. Kelly

Cognitive concepts that focus on the cognitive development of the individual.

Theories of E. Spranger, K. Bueller, A. Maslow, K. Rogers

Personological concepts, the authors of which considered the development of personality as a whole, and not by categories.

Theories of personality specificity

Some authors devoted their research to identifying characteristic personality traits, behavioral factors, and characteristics.

R. Cattell's theory

The author identified 16 factors (stable traits) that can be used to predict a person’s behavior (figure below).

Basic personality traits according to R. Cattell

G. Eysenck's theory

An English psychologist considered 2 distinctive areas of personality:

• extraversion (introversion);
• neuroticism (stability or instability of the emotional sphere).

The combination of these elements creates a personality type. As a result, 4 personality types can be distinguished (picture below).

Eysenck's personality types

Even against the background of the analysis of these concepts, one can note the blurring of the boundaries between the concepts of personality, individual, individuality, character, temperament, innate and acquired.