PERSONALITY

• According to Allport, personality is a dynamic organisation within the individuals of those psychophysical systems that determine his/her unique adjustment to his/her surrounding.
• Temperament is a biologically based way of reacting.
• The APA describes temperament as the basic foundation of personality, usually assumed to be biologically determined and present early in life, including such characteristics as energy level, emotional responsiveness, demeanour, mood, response tempo, behavioural inhibition, and willingness to explore.
• In animal behaviour, temperament is defined as an individual's constitutional pattern of reactions, with a similar range of characteristics.
• A trait is a stable, persistent and specific way of behaving.
• The APA defines a trait as an enduring personality characteristic that describes or determines an individual's behaviour across a range of situations.
• A disposition is the tendency of a person to react to a given situation in a particular way.
• The APA defines a disposition as a recurrent behavioural, cognitive or affective tendency that distinguishes an individual from others.
• The character of a person is the overall pattern of regularly occurring behaviour.
• The APA describes the character as the totality of an individual's attributes and personality traits, particularly his or her characteristic moral, social, and religious attitudes. It is often used synonymously with personality.
• Habits are overlearned modes of behaving.
• The APA defines a habit as a well-learned behaviour or automatic sequence of behaviours that is relatively situation-specific and over time has become motorically reflexive and independent of motivational or cognitive influence - it is performed with little or no conscious intent.
• Values are goals and ideals that are considered important and worthwhile to achieve.
• The APA defines values as a moral, social, or aesthetic principle accepted by an individual or society as a guide to what is good, desirable or important.
• The concept of self refers to how one views oneself and personality traits.
• The APA defines the concept of self as the totality of the individual, consisting of all characteristic attributes, conscious and unconscious, mental and physical.
• Type theories are theories that adopt the type approach and advocate that human personalities can be classified into a few clearly defined types and each person, depending upon his behavioural characteristics, somatic structure, blood types, fluids in the body or personality traits can be described as belonging to a certain type.
• The conscious mind lies just above the surface of the water like tip of an iceberg and occupies only one-tenth of out total psyche or mental life. The ideas, thoughts and images we are aware of at any moment of our mental life are said to be within this upper layer of our mind.
• The subconscious mind lies just beneath the conscious layer. The middle portion of our mind stores all types of information just beneath the surface of our awareness, dormant or untapped which can easily been brought to the level of conscious awareness ar a moment's notice whenever required.
• The unconscious mind lies below the subconscious and is the more important part of our psyche according to Freud It is related to the vast part of our mental life which is hidden and usually inaccessible to the conscious. It contains all the repressed wishes, feelings, desires, drives and motives, many of which are related to sex and aggression.
• According to Freud, many of the symptoms which the patient experiences were a disguised and indirect reflection of thoughts and desires. The main goal of psychoanalysis is to bring repressed material back into conscious awareness. Thus the patient gains insight into early life experience that caused them to repress it.
• The id represents the animal in man and is seated in the unconscious. It includes various bodily needs, sexual desires, and aggressive impulses. This way it is quite selfish and unethical. It knows no reality, follows no rules and considers only the satisfaction of its own needs and drives. It operates according to the pleasure principle - the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain and in practice it does so by attempting to discharge the energy of the psyche quite irresponsibly.
• The superego is the direct opposite of the id and represents the ethical and moral aspect of the psyche. It usually develops in the child at the age of five and is referred to as the conscience or the judgment from within.
• The ego operates on the reality principle, develops out of the id and acts as an intermediary between three sets of forces, i.e. the instinctive, irrational demands of the id, realities of the external world and ethical, moral demands of the superego.
• Freud put forward the dynamic concept of personality by conceptualizing the continuous conflict between the id, ego and superego. While the id (operating on the pleasure principle) continuously presses for the immediate discharge of bodily tension, the superego (concerned with morality) prohibits such gratification. The ego, attempting to mediate the extent to which the ego is able to discharge its responsibility, decides the personality makeup of the individual.
• Individuals who have a strong or powerful ego are said to have a strong or balanced personality because the ego can maintain a balance between the superego and the id.
• superego > ego - repression, neuroticism

  id > ego - lack of comfort, delinquency
• Libido refers to the instinctual life forces that energise the id. The release of libido is closely related to pleasure, but the focus of such pleasure and the expression of libido changes as we develop. In each stage of development, we obtain different kinds of pleasure and leave behind a small amount of our libido. This is a normal course of events.
• Fixation occurs when an excessive amount of libido energy is tied to a particular stage. This can stem from either too little or too much gratification during the stage, and in either case, the result is harmful. Because the individual has left too much psychic energy behind, there is less available for full adult development. The outcome may be an adult personality reflecting the stage or stages at which the fixation has occurred.
• If too much energy is strained away by fixation at the earlier stage of development, the amount remaining may be insufficient to power movement to full adult development. Then an individual may show an immature personality and several psychological disorders.
• Erikson's Stages of Psychosocial Development is a theory introduced in the 1950s by the psychologist and psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. It is built upon Freud's theory of psychosexual development by drawing parallels in childhood stages while expanding it to include the influence of social dynamics as well as the extension of psychosocial development into adulthood. It posits 8 sequential stages of individual human development influenced by biological, psychological and social factors throughout the lifespan.
• According to Erikson, stages arise as individuals grows and face new decisions and turning points during childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Each stage is defined by two opposing psychological tendencies - positive/ syntactic and negative/ dystonic. From this develops an ego virtue/strength or maldevelopment respectively. If the virtue is adopted, it can also help subsequent changes of development and contribute to a stable foundation for core belief systems in relating to the self and the outer world. The opposite is true with the adoption of the maldeveloped quality.
• Karen Horney was one of the few females in the early psychoanalytical movement, and she disagreed with Freud strongly over his view that differences between men and women stemmed largely from innate factors - e.g. from anatomical differences resulting from penis envy in females. In addition, she maintained that psychological disorders stem from fixation of psychic energy, but rather from disturbed interpersonal relationships during childhood and what she termed as basic anxiety and basic hostility.
• Basic anxiety is the child's fear of being left alone, helpless and insecure. The children learn that they are weak and powerless, dependant on their parents for safety and satisfaction. If parents are loving, it can create a sense of security. But if not, it will sharpeen the child's sense of helplessness and vulnerability.
• Basic hostility accompanies basic anxiety. These are feelings of anger at one's parents or caregivers and frustration because of one's dependence on them. Hostility cannot be directly expressed with parents, hence it is repressed and this ultimately increases the child's anxiety. Thus, the child in this stage is caught in a bind - they are dependent on their parents, anxious because of their parents, hostile towards their parents, and unable to express their feelings directly.
• Humanistic psychology is a perspective that emphasises looking at the whole person and the uniqueness of each individual. Humanistic psychology begins with the existential assumptions that people have free will and are motivated to achieve their potential and self-actualise.
• Carl Rogers was a humanistic psychologist best known for his views on the therapeutic relationship and his theories of personality and self-actualisation. He believed that for a person to "grow", they need an environment that provides them with genuineness (openness and self-disclosure), acceptance (being seen with unconditional positive regard), and empathy (being listened to and understood). Without these qualities, relationships and healthy personalities will not develop as they should, much like a tree will not grow without sunlight and water.
• Carl Rogers developed client-centred therapy, which was a non-directive therapy, allowing clients to deal with what they considered important, at their own pace. This method involves removing obstacles so the client can move forward, freeing them for normal growth and development. By his use of non-directive techniques, Rogers assisted people in taking responsibility for themselves.
• Carl Rogers suggested that fully functioning people are people who strive to experience life to the fullest, live in the here and now and trust their feelings. They are sensitive to the needs and rights of others but they do not allow society's standards to shape their feelings or actions to an excessive degree. Fully functioning people aren't saints.
• According to Rogers, each person has a present and ideal self - the person s/he wants to become. Trouble occurs when there is a mismatch or incongruence between the two. A gap develops between our self-concept and reality or our perceptions of it. The larger such gaps, the greater individual maladjustment - and personal unhappiness. Rogers suggested that distortions in the self-concept are common because people grow up in an atmosphere of conditional positive regard - characteristics of our behaviour that we learn in childhood to associate with acceptance.