Carl Erikson's Concept Of Personality Analysis

Grace P. Rato Psych 17 AB PSYCHOLOGY-2 March 19, 2016 “Relevance of Theories Of Personality In The Different Fields of Psychology.” First of all, what is Personality? Personality is what makes you unique and refers to individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling and behaving. But there is little common agreement among personality theorists. Gordon Allport, said that personality is something real within an individual that leads to characteristic behavior and thought, but for Carl Rogers, another personality theorist who focused on Humanistic Psychology that the personality or “self” is an organized, consistent pattern of perception of the “I” or “me” that lies at the heart of an individual’s experience.

1. Context From Ancient Greece to modern times, individual differences in behaviour have been commonly understood as linked to temperament or personality. Some psychologists, starting with Freud, believed that such differences could be the result of hidden unconscious factors (psychodynamic approach). The promoters of behaviourism, such as Skinner, believed that personality aspects may be the result of conditioning by external factors.

The psychology consists of a wide variety of psychological schools. The different directions are Psychoanalysis, Behaviorism, Evolutionary Psychology, Existential and Humanistic Psychology, Cognitive Psychology and Social Psychology.   Psychoanalysis, which focuses on the unconscious and experiences / conflicts in childhood, was founded in the late 1800s and the

Erikson was an expansion of Freud’s psychosocial stages of personality development. He also had different concepts such as identity confusion, and generativity. He shows how cultural, social, and historical forces could have an impact on personality, and emphasized greatly on the ego rather than on the id. Erikson views the ego as an independent party, therefore it is not dependent on the id of the personality. He said that alienation from cultural traditions seemed to be related to the symptoms displayed by others, which resulted in an uncertain self-image or self-identity. His theory of the identity explains that as human beings grow and develop, they experience a series of personal conflicts.

Jung’s personality refers to an individual’s pattern of thoughts, feelings and behaviors that make a person unique. According to Jung’s personality test, my personality is similar one known as an INTJ, which indicates that I am more of an Introversion, Intuitive, Thinking and Judging. Jung described an Introversion as an individual who’s source of energy is mainly from their own internal world, therefore possessing this trait, I am more likely to see the world in terms of how it affects me. Intuitive believes that information is received from the internal and imaginative world; one’s conception is based on his/her own understanding of the world.

Meanwhile, Freud concepts of the id, ego, and superego are ways of describing people personality and characteristics; the id is a desire drive that wants to be fulfilled. The examples that Freud gave to explained the purpose of the id is: "to seek pleasure... unencumbered by restrictions of ego and superego with no regards to what is possible, or what is proper" (Feist 30). The ego is described as people everyday personality. The superego is described as human’s cultural norms and their social impact. In addition Freud believed that our personality is largely developed through the stage of development.

I simply thought (as ignorant and naive as it was) that it was how we were born, just like the colour of our skin. By reading a couple of articles and essays about the influences of culture, I have already found out that members of collectivist cultures tend to be interdependent and to have self-concepts defined in terms of relationships and social obligations and in contrast, members of individualist cultures tend to strive for independence and have self-concepts defined in terms of their own aspirations and achievements. I also learned from psychologist Nalini Ambady that both the structure and function of the human brain throughout its development are shaped by the environment. The social environment, in turn, is shaped by culture. This makes a lot more sense concerning the topic of growing up in a cultured household with strict morals and

Carl Jung came up with two dynamics of personality which are:- 1) Causality and Teleology Causality is defined as the principle that nothing happens without cause or without internal or external influences. In this matter, it is the relationship cause and its effects whereas teleology can be defined as the study of past experience to explain a natural phenomenon. The middle ground of causality and teleology suggests that humans are motivated by both past personal experiences and predictions or expectations of the future. The middle ground of the two is able to shape one’s behaviour as well as personality. 2) Progression and Regression

Personality Psychology As referred in Jung’s theory on a journal in 2014, personality refers to an individual’s pattern of thoughts, feeling and behaviours that make a person unique. Carl Jung’s perspective on personality is quite insightful, for him personality is what appears to be random behaviour is actually the result of different in the way people prefer to use their mental capacity. There are two different types of personalities or attitudes that have been mentioned in Jung’s theory which are introversion and extraversion. According Jung, “each person seems to be energized more by either the external world (extraversion) or the internal world (introversion).”

Much of the work done to support the theory of personal identity has been through thought experiment and illusory scenarios. The psychological approach to personal identity discusses the theory of memory and the importance of our mind and brain in personal identity and creating who we are as an individual. Likewise, the psychological approach to personal identity addresses the role of our brain in creating what we’ve become through our past experiences. John Locke, the key theorist in the theory of memory believed consciousness and personal identity were strongly related. However, this theory fails to acknowledge a person’s beliefs, desires or characteristics through which they express themselves through.