Personality Theories and Human Nature Insights
Personality Theories: A Comprehensive Look
1.6 Strategy
Definition of personality: The pattern of characteristic thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that distinguishes one person from another.
Major Personality Theories
- Psychoanalytic Theory: We are motivated by psychosexual forces.
- Id: The dominant force in personality; the deep, inaccessible part of personality that is devoid of values, ethics, and logic.
- Superego: The values of society presented to the child through punishments and rewards.
- Ego: The manager of personality that is rational and juggles the outrageous demands of the other two.
- Carl Jung: Our human nature seeks to constantly grow and become balanced.
- Erik Erikson (Psychosocial Forces): We are motivated by our social world, with 8 critical stages that unfold in a genetically determined sequence:
- Trust vs. Mistrust (hope or fear)
- Autonomy vs. Shame (willpower or self-doubt) ages 1-3
- Initiative vs. Guilt (purpose or unworthiness)
- Humanistic Theory: We are motivated by our need to grow personally and socially.
- Carl Rogers: People have at their deepest core a positive goodness.
- Abraham Maslow: People strive for growth, but growth is not an automatic process.
- Rollo May: The existential approach: as opposed to Freudian determinism, the past doesn’t determine the present or future.
- Alfred Adler: One can shape one’s own life.
- Eastern and Native Cultures: If you enhance the well-being of one group through unification, you will have individual well-being. Self-actualization is not needed.
- Behavior Theory:
- B.F. Skinner: Our conditioning, or the rewards and punishments used to shape our behavior, determines our behavior and personality.
- Social Learning Theory:
- Julian Rotter and Albert Bandura: Behaviorism ignored the role of cognitive factors such as thinking, planning, believing, and imagining, even during reinforcement.
- Trait/Type Theory:
- Gordon Allport and Raymond Cattell: Personality traits and types come from both heredity and childhood experience.
Nine Personality Types
- The Reformer: Emphasize strong principles, morals, and integrity. At their best, they are orderly and idealistic. When unhealthy, they may distrust authority due to bad experiences and learned to postpone rewards until their work was done.
- The Helper: Empathetic and generous; can skillfully empathize with the feelings of others. At average levels, they can become overly intimate and intrusive. When unhealthy, they become people-pleasers, using flattery and gifts since they don’t know if they are loved in return. As children, they may have helped raise younger siblings or received praise for helping parents.
- The Achiever: Healthy achievers are success-oriented, self-assured, attractive, and pragmatic. At average levels, they are too competitive and driven for success. When unhealthy, they fear failure and humiliation, and may distort the truth of their accomplishments. As children, they were often selected for teams and were family heroes.
- The Artist: Healthy artists are intuitive, self-aware, expressive, gentle, and creative, and they can turn a painful experience into a meaningful one. At average levels, they hold on to feelings/moods, thinking that’s who they are. As children, they felt disconnected from their parents.
- The Thinker: Alert, curious, and ask thoughtful questions; have a high ability to concentrate and focus; inventive and deep. At average levels, they often forget to eat, disappear into their projects, and become detached, secretive, and remote. They will minimize emotional needs since it interferes with their projects. When unhealthy, they become loners, retreating into their heads. As children, they may have been quiet and played a musical instrument.
- The Loyalist: Healthy loyalists are likable, form strong bonds with people, create stability, are cooperative, spirited, self-reliant, and serene. At average levels, they can over-exert themselves and complain about the stress they create. This is the most complicated type. As children, they often had a critical, damaging parent and weren’t encouraged to trust their abilities, which created self-doubt.
- The Enthusiast: Enthusiastic and excitable; the most extroverted type; spontaneous and do many things well. At average levels, they often amuse themselves with new experiences. When unhealthy, they become demanding, self-centered, addictive, and impulsive. As children, they were disconnected from the nurturing figure and lost the safe, consistent source of nurturance at some stage.
- The Challenger: Self-confident, strong, and assertive; heroic, use self-restraint, and resourceful. At average levels, they use bottom-line thinking, are proud, dominate the environment, must control situations, and have a lust for power. When unhealthy, they use threats to get obedience from others. As children, they learned to be tough and independent, learning that the best defense is a good offense.
- The Peacemaker: Accepting, emotionally stable, good-natured, and optimistic. At average levels, they are too willing to keep the peace, want things smooth and easy, and get complacent. When unhealthy, they can get depressed, repress feelings, become ineffectual, underdeveloped, and cut off from reality.
Thinking Model and Human Nature
Humans have always been attracted by life’s mystery: its origin, meaning, and finality. What is the human being? According to pantheist religions, a small part of the Ultimate Reality locked up by the illusion of physical experience. According to Theravada Buddhism, nothing but an illusion, a temporary combination of five aggregates, none of which is ultimately real. Dualistic religions, like Gnosticism and Manicheism, state that humans are spiritual beings originated in another world, a kind of fallen angels into a miserable bodily condition. According to monotheistic religions, the human being is a person created in the image and likeness of God.
But he or she can be assured that, if the soil of the mind and spirit are fertile, the stories will sprout and they will bear abundant fruit. Joel Weldon tells a story about a Chinese bamboo plant that further illustrates this point.
The moso is a bamboo plant that grows in China and other regions of the Far East. After the moso is planted, no visible growth occurs for up to five years–even under ideal conditions! Then, as if by magic, it suddenly begins growing at the rate of nearly two-and-one-half feet per day, reaching a full height of 90 feet within six weeks.
But it’s not magic. The moso’s rapid growth is due to the miles of roots it develops during those first five years, five years of getting ready.
So, oft in theologic wars
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!
Those of us on a spiritual path, and more specifically on a Vision Quest, believe that we are put on this earth for a special reason, but that reason is not always clear to us. We want to know what we need to accomplish in life for our highest benefit, and, in turn, the benefit of the world. The quest can reveal our life’s purpose, but it is an arduous journey into the core of our being that we should only embark upon with sincerity. William Walk Sacred cautions, “It’s very important for people to realize that this is not fun and games. Going into the spiritual world is very serious. If the intent isn’t clear, the spirits will not give the vision. The most important thing is being clear in your heart as to what you are seeking for yourself and the people of the world.”