UNIIT 6

PSYCHOLOGY OF PERSONALITY

• The word personality is derived from the word

‘persona‘, which has Greek and Latin roots and refers
to the theatrical masks worn by Greek actors.
• psychologists generally view personality as the
unique pattern of enduring thoughts, feelings, and
actions that characterize a person.
• Personality encompasses the behaviors that make
each of us unique and that differentiate us from
others.
• It is also personality that leads us to act consistently
in different situations and over extended periods of
time. 1
 Theories of Personality
• There are several ways in which the
characteristic/behavior of human beings can be
explained.
• The specific questions psychologists ask and the
methods they use to investigate personality often
depend on the types of personality theories they
take.
• Some of the theories of personality are:
psychodynamic/psychoanalytic, trait, and
humanistic.
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1. Freud’s Psychoanalytic Theory
• The psychoanalytic theory was formulated by the
Austrian physician and Psychologist named Sigmund
Freud.
• According to Freud, personality is formed within
ourselves, arising from basic inborn needs, drives, and
characteristics.
• Emphasizes on to the hidden emotional content of our
everyday actions, and to the ways in which the
individual is driven by powerful sexual and aggressive
impulses.

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 The assumptions of Freud’s psychoanalytic
theory can be generalized in the following two
areas:
A. Determinants of Personality
• Psychic determinism- much of our behavior is
not freely chosen; rather it is determined by the
nature and strength of intra-psychic forces called
id, ego, and superego
• Unconscious motivation- the intra-psychic forces
are largely operating unconsciously. The basic
and true motives of our actions are largely
unknown to us.
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• Early childhood experiences determine later
personality- One’s personality is almost complete by
the age of six or seven years.
• Thus, whatever one does or behave as an adult, it is
the reflection of one’s experience at early years of life,
what is known to be “the child is the father of the
man”.
B) Nature of Mankind- A human being by nature is
selfish, irrational, and destructive of him/herself and
others.
• Human beings have two basic instincts: Life instincts
(Eros) - are largely sexual impulses, though they
include all positive biological desires, and Death
Instincts (Thanatos)- are largely aggressive impulses. 5
 Structure of Personality
• The psychoanalytic theory includes a theory of
personality structure.
• In Freud's view, personality has three parts which
serves a different function and develops at
different times:-
• The id, the ego, and the superego.
• According to Freud, the way these three parts of
personality interact with one another determines
the personality of an individual.

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Id:- If It Feels Good, Do It
• The first and most primitive part of the personality in the
infant is the id.
• The id is a completely unconscious amoral part of the
personality that exists at birth, containing all of the basic
biological drives; hunger, thirst, sex, aggression.
• Operates according to the pleasure principle, in which the
goal is to maximize satisfaction and reduce tension or pain.
• It refers to the innate (inborn) psychic energy, which is
irrational and unsocial.
• for example. When these drives are active, the person will
feel an increase in not only physical tension but also in
psychological tension that Freud called libido, the
instinctual energy that may come into conflict with the
demands a society‘s standards for behavior. 7
• When libidinal energy is high, it is unpleasant
for the person, so the goal is to reduce libido by
fulfilling the drive; Eat when hungry, drink when
thirsty, and satisfy the sex when the need for
pleasure is present. Freud called this need for
satisfaction.
• The pleasure principle, which can be defined as
the desire for immediate satisfaction of needs
with no regard for the consequences.
• The pleasure principle can be summed up
simply as ―if it feels good, do it
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Ego: The Executive Director-
• According to Freud, to deal with reality, the second part of
personality develops called the ego.
• The ego, from the Latin word for ―I‖, is mostly conscious
and is far more rational, logical and cunning than the id.
• The ego works on the reality principle, which is the need
to satisfy the demands of the id and reduce libido only in
ways that will not lead to negative consequences.
• The agency that delays the immediate pleasure and
considers reality is the ego.
• This means that sometimes the ego decides to deny the
id its drives because the consequence would be painful or
too unpleasant.
• Mediates Id and Superego. 9
• Superego: The Moral Watchdog-Freud called the third and
final part of the personality, the moral center of personality,
the superego.
• The superego (also Latin, meaning ―over the self‖) develops as
a preschool-aged child learns the rules, customs, and
expectations of society.
• operates under perfection/morality principle. Superego worry
about society.
• There are two parts to the superego: the ego ideal and the
conscience.
• The ego-ideal is the sum of all the ideal or correct and
acceptable behavior that the child has learned about from
parents and others in the society.
• It tell us what is right and proper standards
• The conscience is part of the personality that tell us what is
bad or wrong
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• For Freud, our personality is the outcome of the continual
battle for dominance among the id, the ego, and the superego.
• This constant conflict between them is managed by
psychological defense mechanisms.
• Defense mechanisms are unconscious tactics that either
prevent threatening material from surfacing or disguise it
when it does.
• Some of the psychological defense mechanisms are discussed
below.
• Repression is a defense mechanism that involves hiding or
banishing threatening thoughts, feelings, and memories into
the unconscious mind.
Example: an Ethiopian husband who is defeated by his wife will
not remember/ talk it out again.
- A woman fails to recall that she was raped. 11
• Denial: is refusal to recognize or acknowledge a threatening
situation.
• It refers to not accepting reality or denying its occurrence.
• Example; Mr. Geremew is an alcoholic who denies/ doesn‘t accept
being an alcoholic.
- don’t accepting the death of our relatives.
- a person diagnosed his HIV status and found to be HIV positive and
may say It must be a mistake.
• Regression: involves reverting to immature behaviors that have
relieved anxiety in the past.
• Retreating (move back) to earlier stage of development which is
childish or primitive one.
• Example: a girl/a boy who has just entered school may go back to
sucking her/his thump or wetting the bed.
– a student might get grade “D” and start to cry.
- Adult coping strategies such as smoking or drinking, those are
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oral character at which we are fixated.
• Rationalization: giving socially acceptable reasons for one's
inappropriate behavior.
• It refers to distorting reality by using reason.
• Example: make bad grades but states the reason as being knowledge
rather than grade oriented; and grades only showing superficial
learning.
- After asking a girl for love if she didn’t accept, giving reason as he don’t
want her or he says that she was ugly anyways.
• Displacement: involves expressing feelings toward a person who is less
threatening than the person who is the true target of those feelings.
Example: Hating your boss but taking it out on family members.
- If your boss makes you anger, you may hit the table or the door.
- A child who quarreled with his mother hits his little sister.
• Projection: the defense mechanism that involves attributing one's
undesirable feelings to other people. Example: a paranoid person uses
projection to justify isolation and anger.
-The unfaithful husband is extremely jealous of his wife, and always 13
• Reaction formation: a defense mechanism that involves a
tendency to act in a manner opposite to one's true feelings.
Doing or thinking the opposite.
• Example: a person who acts conservation but focuses on
violence in their behavior.
• A person with sexual longing (craving) end up becoming an active
proponent of a demonstration against sex provoking movies.
• Sublimation: defense mechanism that involves expressing sexual
or aggressive behavior through indirect, socially acceptable
outlets.
Example: an aggressive person who loves playing football.
- A person with strong feeling of aggression becomes a soldier or
boxer.
• Introjection : - shifting wanted motives of others to our own.
E.g. if our brother or friend is celebrity (famous person) considering
us like him. 14
 Psychosexual development/stages

The basic assumptions underlying psychosexual theory are:

• Human beings are pleasure seeking
• Pleasure obtained by using the body is sex
• Because sex involves using any part of the body for pleasure, and
• sexual interest and activity exists long before the maturation of sex
organs during adolescence
• But the way sexual interest is satisfied changes with age.
• At different ages different parts of the body (erogenous zones)
become active sources of pleasure.
• The shift in the dominant source of pleasure with increasing age is
called psychosexual development.
• The person may over-satisfy or under-satisfy pleasure needs. This is
called fixation
• Fixation is behavior reflecting an earlier stage of development due
to an unresolved conflict. 15
• Freud’s concept of sex is very broad.
• In his view, sex includes not just sexual intercourse but practically
anything that produces bodily pleasure.
• Sexual feeling may be included in activities such as sucking/kissing
for pleasure, the wish to show one’s body or looking at bodies of
others, masturbation, anal expulsion or retention and acts of
cruelty.
• In case of child sexual activities Freud had two major reasons for
considering as sexual.
 Children seem to get pleasure from it because children enjoy sucking
even when they are not hungry.
 Later these activities emerge in adult sexual activities.
• Freud proposed that in a course of development children pass
through series of psychosexual stage in which gratification shifts
from one zone to the other.
• Erogenous zone: - it is parts of the body that have strong pleasure
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when it is touched.
• According to Freud any crises or conflict that occurred and left unresolved
at the first three stages of psychosexual development would give rise to
fixation.
FIVE STAGES OF PSYCHOSEXUAL DEVELOPMENT
• at each stage of development; we experience pleasure in one part of the
body more than in another.
1. The Oral stage (birth -18 months)
• It is the first Freudian stage of development, occurring during the first 18
month of life.
• The infant pleasure centers around the mouth and infants gain pleasure
through chewing, sucking, biting, etc.
• This action reduces tension in the infant.
• Fixation at this stage occurs if the child is either frustrated or overly
stimulated in his/her oral activities.
• Over indulgence or over gratification during oral stage leads to behaviors like
optimism, gullibility, manipulative, compulsive eaters, smokers, etc.
• Under indulgence or deprivation at this stage also leads to behaviors like
aggression, sadism, pessimism, suspicious, dependency, passivity, finger
biting, pen chewing etc ..during later age. 17
2. The Anal stage ( 18 months to 3 years)
• At this stage the pleasure center or libidinal energy attached to
the anal cavity or anus. A child gets gratification by toilet
practice.
• The anal stage can be divided in to the anal expulsion and the
anal retentive sub phase.
• In the first sub phase the child gains pleasure from expelling the
body’s waste products.
• In the second sub phases gratification is obtained from
withholding the body’s waste products (i.e. letting go Vs holding
on).
• Over gratification during this stage result in fixations such as
dirtiness, over generosity, and messiness result during later
personality.
• If the child is under gratified characters may arise, such as
selfishness, stinginess, cruelty, orderliness, meticulousness and
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neatness.
3. The Phallic stage ( 3-6 years)
• The name came from the Latin word ‘phallus’ which means ‘penis’
• Children at this stage gain pleasure by touching their genital
( penis in males and clitoris in females).
• In Freud view the phallic stage has especial importance in
personality development because during this period the Oedipus
complex appears.
• This name comes from Greek mythology, in which Oedipus, the
son of the king of Thebes, unwittingly killed his father and married
his mother.
• The Oedipus complex is the Freudian concept that the young child
develops an intense desire to replace the parent of the same sex
and enjoy the affections of the opposite sex parents.
• At this stage the young male experiences sexual feeling towards
his mother (Oedipus complex) and his father is a rival for mother
affection.
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• And the child realizes that he is at a great disadvantage in
competing with his father and fear that his father will discover his
desires and castrates him, he then experience Castration anxiety.
• To avoid this dread, castration anxiety, the child eventually
represses his feeling towards the mother and identified with the
father.
• On the other hand, the girl turns her affection and attention to her
father. When she realizes that she doesn’t have a penis, she
blames her mother for this situation.
• This gives raise to what is called “penis envy” which is a desire to
poses the male organ. In this case the attraction creates a conflict
known as Electra complex.
• Repressing these feelings and identifying with the mother resolve
this conflict. Feminine sex roles are then imitated from the mother.
• A fixation at this stage could result in sexual deviancies (both
overindulging and avoidance) and weak or confused sexual
identity according to psychoanalysts. 20
4. The Latency stage ( 6-12 years)
• The latency period is mostly characterized by the time when
sexual drives are relatively dormant and clam.
• The libido (sexual energy) is submerged and doesn’t center up on
any bodily area.
• At this stage sexual energy is directed towards school work, the
same sex friendship and the development of social, physical,
motor and intellectual skills.
5. The Genital stage (12 + years)
• It is a times of sexual reawakening.
• Hormonal changes stimulate the reappearance of the libido
(sexual energy).
• Source of sexual pleasure now become outside of the family.
• The young adolescent male turns his attention to a girlfriend
while the young adolescent female seeks a boyfriend.
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• Matured and adult sexuality starts.
 The trait theory of personality
• Psychologists who take the trait approach see
personality as a combination of stable internal
characteristics that people display consistently over
time and across situations.
• A consistent, long-lasting tendency in behavior, such as
shyness, hostility, or talkativeness, is known as a trait.
• In contrast, a state is a temporary activation of a
particular behavior. For example, Being quiet in a
library is a state; being quiet habitually is a trait.
• Trait theorists seek to measure the relative strength of
the many personality characteristics that they believe
are present in everyone.
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• The basic assumption of the trait point of view is
that people possess broad predispositions to
respond in particular ways.
• Trait theorists do not assume that some people
have a trait and others do not;
• rather, they possess that all people possesses
certain traits, but the degree to which a given
trait applies to a specific person varies and can
be quantified.
• For example, you might be relatively friendly,
whereas other person might be relatively
unfriendly. 23
• The trait approach to personality makes three main
assumptions:
1. Personality traits are relatively stable, and therefore
predictable, over time. So a gentle person tends to
stay the same way across time.
2. Personality traits are relatively stable across
situations, and they can explain why people act in
predictable ways in many different situations. A
person who is competitive at work will probably also
be competitive on the tennis court or at a party.
3. People differ in how much of a particular personality
trait they possess; no two people are exactly alike on
all traits. The result is an endless variety of unique
personalities. 24
 The Big Five/ five-factor model
• The five trait dimensions can be remembered by using the acronym
OCEAN, in which each of the letters is the first letter of one of the
five dimensions of personality.
What Are the Big Five Dimensions of Personality?
• Openness: can best be described as a person‘s willingness to try
new things and be open to new experiences.
• People who try to maintain the status quo and who don‘t like to
change things would score less on openness.
• Conscientiousness: refers to a person‘s organization and
motivation, with people who score high in the dimension being
those who are careful about being in places on time and careful
with belongings as well.
• include high levels of thoughtfulness, with good impulse control
and goal-directed behaviors.
• Someone scoring low on this dimension, for example, might always
be late to important social events or borrow belongings and fail25to
• Extraversion: is a term first used by Carl Jung, who believed
that all people could be divided into two personality types:
extraverts and introverts. Extraverts are outgoing and
sociable, whereas introverts are more solitary and dislike
being the center of attention.
• This trait includes characteristics such as excitability,
sociability, talkativeness, assertiveness and high amounts of
emotional expressiveness.
• Agreeableness: refers to the basic emotional style of a person,
who may be easygoing, friendly and pleasant (at the high end
of the scale) or grumpy, crabby and hard to get along with (at
the low end).
• Neuroticism: refers to emotional instability or stability.
• People who are excessively worried, overanxious and moody
would score high on this dimension, whereas those who are
more even-tempered and calm could score low. 26
 Humanistic theory of personality
• Humanistic approaches to personality emphasize
people‘s inherent goodness and their tendency
to move toward higher levels of functioning,
• instead of seeing people as controlled by the
unconscious, unseen forces (psychodynamic
approaches), and a set of stable traits (trait
approaches).
• It is this conscious, self-motivated ability to
change and improve, along with people‘s unique
creative impulses, that humanistic theorists
argue make up the core of personality. 27
• Humanists such as Carl Rogers and Abraham
Maslow wanted psychology to focus on the
things that make people uniquely human, such
as subjective emotions and the freedom to
choose one‘s destiny.
• As Maslow‘s theory discussed in Chapter Five, in
this chapter the discussion of the humanistic
view of personality will focus on the theory of
Carl Rogers.

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 Carl Rogers and Self-Concept
• Like Maslow, Rogers believed that human beings are
always striving to fulfill their innate capacities and
capabilities and to become everything that their genetic
potential will allow them to become.
• This striving for fulfillment is called self-actualizing
tendency.
• An important tool in human self-actualization is the
development of an image of oneself or the self-concept.
• The self-concept is based on what people are told by
others and how the sense of self is reflected in the
words and actions of important people in one‘s life,
such as parents, siblings, coworkers, friends, and
teachers. 29
• Real and Ideal Self - Two important components of
the self-concept are the real self (one‘s actual
perception of characteristics, traits, and abilities that
form the basis of the striving for self-actualization)
and the ideal self (the perception of what one should
be or would like to be).
• The ideal self primarily comes from those important,
significant others in one‘s life, most often the parents.
• Rogers believed that when the real self and the ideal
self are very close or similar to each other, people feel
competent and capable,
• but when there is a mismatch between the real and
ideal selves, anxiety and neurotic behavior can be the
result. 30
• When one has a realistic view of the real self,
and the ideal self is attainable, there usually
isn‘t a problem of a mismatch.
• It is when a person‘s view of self is distorted or
the ideal self is impossible to attain that
problems arise.
• Once again, it is primarily how the important
people (who can be either good or bad
influences) in a person‘s life react to the
person that determines the degree of
agreement between real and ideal selves.
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• Conditional and Unconditional Positive Regard
• Rogers defined positive regard as warmth, affection, love,
and respect that comes from the significant others
(parents, admired adults, friends, and teachers) in people‘s
experience.
• Positive is vital to people‘s ability to cope with stress and
to strive to achieve self-actualization.
• Rogers believed that unconditioned positive regard, or love,
affection and respect with no strings attached, is necessary
for people to be able to explore fully all that they can
achieve and become.
• Unfortunately, some parents, spouses, and friends give
conditional positive regard, which is love, affection, respect
and warmth that depend, or seem to depend, on doing
what those people want. 32
• Here is an example: as a freshman Tirhas was thinking about
becoming a math teacher or a computer programmer.
• Chaletu, also a freshman, already knew that she was going
to be a doctor.
• While Tirhas’ parents had told her that what she wanted to
become was up to her and that they would love her no
matter what she will be.
• Chaltu’s parents had made it very clear to her as a small
child that they expected her to become a doctor. She was
under the very impression that if she tried to choose any
other career, she will lose her parents’ love and respect.
• Tirhas’ parents were giving her unconditional positive
regard, but Chaltu’s parents were giving her conditional
positive regard.
• Chaltu was not as free as Tirhas to explore potential abilities.
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• For Rogers, a person who is in the process of self-
actualizing, activity exploring potentials and
abilities and experiencing a match between real
and ideal selves is a fully functioning person.
• Fully functioning people are in touch with their
feelings and abilities and can trust their
innermost urges and intuitions.
• To become a fully functioning, a person needs
unconditional positive regard.
• In Rogers's view, Chaltu would not have been a
fully functioning person.
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• Although self-actualization and to be fully functioning‘ are
highly related concepts, there are some subtle differences.
• Self-actualization is a goal that people are always striving to
reach, according to Maslow.
• In Rogers's view, only a person who is fully functioning is
capable of reaching the goal of self-actualization.
• To be fully functioning is a necessary step in the process of
self-actualization.
• Maslow (1987) listed several people that he considered to
be self-actualized people: Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi,
and Eleanor Roosevelt, for example.
• These were people that Maslow found to have the self-
actualized qualities of being creative, autonomous and
unprejudiced. We may add Nelson Mandela of South Africa
to this list. 35