When we walk down the street and we meet one of our loved ones or we see someone who we know, regardless of whether it is our neighbor or our friend, we cannot help but stop and, between one thing and another, spill all the tea that we have been gathering up during the time that we haven't seen each other even if we have been talking on the phone a little less than an hour ago, especially now that we have our beloved Confinement on top of us.
Nor can we deny that, between one gossip and another, we have said (at least) one of those two sentences: " he has a lot of personality" or, on the other hand, "he has very little personality". Well, let us ask you a question: based on what do you know if someone has a high or a low personality? Do we know exactly what personality is, or do we confuse it with the term ''character''? Well, in this new post on Philosophyium we are going to discover what is actually the personality.
First things first, before we start thoroughly with the post, what we have to do is clarify concepts. Thank you twelfth grade psychology teacher... Let's differentiate between personality, character and temperament:
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PERSONALITY is the concept by which we refer to behavior of a person or a community of people. Among other traits, personality includes the way each individual thinks, is or feels.
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CHARACTER is the word with which we include the qualities that indicate the way in which a person acts, and by which he differs from others. That is, the character of a human being is the way in which he usually reacts to a specific situation, whether it's adverse or not. We can divide the character into strong (this is the character of those who are able to maintain their own choice despite the situation) and weak character (typical of people who are easily dominated by others).
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TEMPERAMENT is the general nature of a person's personality. Temperament is based on the individual characteristics of our nervous system, making it innate.
What is the actual definition of PERSONALITY?
The concept of PERSONALITY gets together quite a few, really varied characteristics that are common to all its planes and definitions. Personality encompasses the behavior of a person when facing their private and personal experiences (that is, his desires, thoughts, memories, etc.). So, to make it shorter, personality is something specific to each individual although we all know, and from Philosophyium we will explain later, that there are several types of personality.
There is a curious quote, said by Burham, that reads: "Everyone knows what personality is, but no one can express it in words." And exactly so it is. Not only is there no single definition of the term, but although we all know what we mean when we name it, we aren't really able to explain exactly what it is. Therefore, our team brings to you some more extensive yet interesting definitions of the term.
- Bermúdez, 1985. Bermúdez proposes a definition of personality that integrates a large part of the aspects that have been pointed out as "necessary" for the understanding of the concept: "It is the organization, relatively stable, of those structural and functional characteristics (both innate , and acquired) that make up the peculiar and defining team of behavior with which each one of us faces situations. ''
- Costa and McCare, 1994. They relied on Allport's definition of 1961, and presented a personality model where basic tendencies included personal dispositions (innate or acquired) that may or may not be modifiable according to the experiences throughout our lifetime. In easier words, in these basic tendencies, external influences would be considered the main sources of explanation of behavior, spreading them out as pieces of a big puzzle: personality.
- Pervin, 1998, defines personality as a complex organization of knowledge, emotions and behaviors that give coherence to a person's life. Personality, for Pervin, is made up of different processes, and reflects nature and learning as well as encompassing our past, present and future.
Authors and Theories on Personality:
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud has been baptized as the father of psychoanalysis. He was an Austrian neurologist of Jewish origin, as well as one of the scientists who investigated the most about psychology, marking a before and after with his discoveries.
As if this wasn't enough, our Freud was the one who laid the bases of modern psychology and paved the way for psychoanalysis.
The Theory of Personality proposed by Freud was changing as he advanced in his development. For Freud, the human personality was the result of the struggle between our destructive impulses and our search for pleasure. However, he also determined that it was regulated by social limits.
In this way, for this scientist, the personality marked the way in which each one of us develops in our social environment and the way in which we face our conflicts and problems, both external and internal.
Freud exposed five different models to form a clear concept of personality:
Topographic model. This model was explained by Freud with his Metaphor of the Iceberg and his intention was to make the understanding of the three regions that made up our mind easier.
The tip of the iceberg relates to our conscious mind, which refers to what we perceive, remember, think, and our fantasies.
The submerged area of the ice block would be our subconscious area, the one in which we keep moments that we cannot bring to consciousness.
And finally, in the thick area of ice, submerged in water, is the unconscious mind, in which we keep memories and feelings that are inaccessible to our consciousness. Usually, there are unpleasant, painful, conflicting memories in there.
Economic model. This is the one which presents the way in which - what Freud called- ''the drive'' works. Freud defined ''the drive'' as the energy that leads us to seek a certain end.
He introduced two types of drives that motivated each of our behaviors: the life drive, called Eros, which is our ability to create, protect and relate to oneself; and the death drive, called Thanatos, related to the destructive tendencies of the human being towards yourself or others.
Dynamic model. This is one of the most complex models proposed by Freud, since in it, he tried to explain the psychic dynamics that occur in our mind. With this model, the scientist sought a clear explanation for the way in which our impulses, those who ''want'' to make us excessively happy, and the defense mechanisms that seek to inhibit these impulses (repression, introjection, sublimation ...) interact with each other .
Genetic Model - Freud found that not only did adults find some satisfaction in stimulating the erogenous zones of their bodies, but children did too. That is why he determined that excessive gratification of erogenous zones at different stages of development, or sudden frustration, caused different personality types to develop.
These are the stages of psychosexual development defined in Freud's theory of personality:
- Oral Stage (0-18 months), where the focus of pleasure is related to the mouth, whether to suck, kiss or bite. The gratification in this phase is related to a perceptive oral personality to seek pleasure through the mouth when development is complete, such as smoking or eating a lot. However, sudden frustration will lead to an aggressive oral personality, which can lead to seeking pleasure in verbal aggressiveness.
- Anal stage (18 months - 4 years), where the focus of pleasure is the anus, that is, pleasure is obtained by retaining or expelling. Very strict control at this stage can lead to a petty personality, while if the adult is less strict with the child, it will lead to a wasteful personality in the child.
- Phallic stage (4-7 years), where the focus of pleasure are the genitals. At this stage, children identify with their parents, depending on their sex, and a complex is solved that structures their own personality and helps to accept the child's social norms.
- Latency stage (7-12 years). Freud supposed that at this stage the sexual drive was changed by the learning one, in order to facilitate a cultural integration of the child with his environment.
- Genital stage (+12 years), where Freud reaffirms that the sexual drive reappears (in adolescence) in the face of sexual relations. In this way the child's sexual identity is created.
Structural Model, in which Freud distinguishes three instances with different but overlapping functions in our mind:
- ID, which is an innate part of the personality. It is responsible for satisfying our impulses.
- EGO, which evolves with age and is the intermediary between it and Superego.
- SUPEREGO, are the moral and ethical thoughts received by the culture. Represents laws and regulations.
To conclude, Freud's model divides the personality into five models that interact with each other and which condition us to act in one way or another according to circumstances.
Personality disorders:
Multiple personality disorder.
- What is dissociative identity disorder?
Dissociative Identity Disorder, also known as Multiple Personality Disorder, is a distortion of a person's personality that causes him / her to be 'under the control' of several different identities alternately. Furthermore, the patient who suffers from it cannot remember any kind of information when he/she is ‘’under the influence ’’ of one of his various personalities.
This distortion can be shown in two ways:
- In the form of possession, in which the identities (generally two or more) of the patient appear as if they were external agents which have taken control of the person. The external agent can be defined either as a ’spirit’ who can demand the punishment of the patient for his actions in the past or as if it was another person.
- In the form of non-possession, which tends to be much less evident. The patient may notice a sudden alteration, perhaps as if he was observed from his own emotions and actions instead of being the one who executes them, that is, as if he was watching himself in a movie.
- How is this disorder caused?
First of all, from the Philosophyium team we want to clarify that this information is purely educational, and that we should not take it literally. To be sure that we are healthy and well, we must visit a specialist and not get carried away by what is written on the internet no matter what topic are we talking about.
Dissociative identity disorder usually appears in patients who suffered some type of traumatic emotional stress during childhood. In the United States, Canada, and Europe, approximately 90% of people with this disorder are known to have been previously victims of severe physical, sexual, or emotional abuse, or to have been abandoned as children. Other patients have not been abused, but have experienced serious illness or the death of someone important to them.
Children who have been abused, over time, may develop an increasing ability to escape that abuse by dissociating from their unhealthy environment or by withdrawing themselves into the depths of their own minds. Each phase or experience that has been traumatic can be used to produce a different identity from the others. However, if these children obtain sufficient protection from adults in a situation of vulnerability, especially if they are protected by adults who really care about them, they are less likely to develop this disorder.
- What symptoms can patients with it have?
- Amnesia, which may include gaps in the memory of past events, failures in it or the discovery of evidence of things that the patient did but does not remember.
- Multiple identities. In the form of possession, the various identities are clearly distinguishable for relatives and external people who know the patient, since he himself acts and speaks in a different way, as if he was someone else. However, in the form of non-possession, identities are not so evident, since instead of acting as if another being had possessed the patient, the patient may feel disconnected from some aspects of their own life, as if they were seeing themselves in a movie. It is important to note that some of the developed personalities (those especially who know more personal information) are probably unaware of the existence of other personalities
— Listen to voices inside your mind, almost like Schizophrenia, because of the interaction in the memory of the different personalities.
- Identity intrusions. This occurs when, for example at work, a personality "is" angry and then screams into the patient's mind, causing the patient to suddenly yell at a partner.
- On what is the treatment of the same disorder usually based?
The goal of dissociative identity disorder treatment is often to integrate different personalities into one. However, this is not always possible, so various methods must be used.
- Pharmacotherapy can alleviate some specific coexisting symptoms but fails to unite personalities.
- Psychotherapy is the main treatment used to integrate different identities, which is usually long and difficult. Sometimes it is even possible that hypnosis or guided visualization is used as therapies. Furthermore, sometimes hypnosis can help patients who suffer from this disorder learn how to access their identities, facilitate communication between them and control the alternation between them.
Want to learn more about how Multiple Personality Disorder works? Here we leave you a trailer: Split.
It is an American psychological horror and thriller film of 2017, directed and written by M. Night Shyamalan.
Three girls, Claire, Marcia and Casey, are kidnapped by "Dennis", one of the twenty-three personalities present in the mind of Kevin Wendell Crumb, a victim of abuse who was diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder.
Have you seen the movie yet? Take a look and tell us what you think, we will read you!
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