Informative Essay Sample on Personality Based on Theories
Posted on February 19, 2008
Personality is a hard thing to understand and who will understand it will control the world. In this research I want to analyze two theories and show how they are close to my own theory of personality.
The first theory is based on the works of Karl Gustav Jung. Like Freud he devoted himself to the study of dynamic unrealized drawings on a human behavior and experience. But his learning was a little different from Freud’s. Jung told that that maintenance of unconscious there is nothing greater, than low-spirited sexual and aggressive motives. According to Jung’s theory on personality, as known as analytical psychology, individuals are motivated by some psychical forces and appearances, the origin of which leaves deep into history evolution. This innate unconscious contains some spiritual material which has deep roots, which explains the aspiring to the creative self-expression and physical perfection of humanity.
Also there is another source of differences in the Jung’s and Freud’s theories. The difference is about sexuality as prevailing force in the structure of personality. Freud, mainly, interpreted libido like sexual energy but Jung examined it as diffuse creative life-breath, which you can recognize in various ways, as for example in religion or aspiring to power. In Jung’s thoughts libido is concentrated in different necessaries – biological or spiritual – as they arise up. So Jung rejected Freud’s statement that brain is an “appendix to the sexual glands”.
Jung asserted that personality consists of three different but interactive structures: ego, personal unconscious and collective unconscious.
Ego is the central of sphere of consciousness. It is component psyche, which includes those ideas, senses, flashbacks, and feelings, due to which we feel our integrity, constancy and the feeling of humanity. Ego serves as the main of our consciousness and due to it we are able to see the results of the ordinary conscious activity.
The personal unconscious contains conflicts and flashbacks which were once realized but now low-spirited or forgotten. So it contains perceptible impressions, which don’t have enough brightness to be marked in consciousness.
And finally he told us the idea of existence of deeper layer in structure of personality, which he named collective unconscious. It is a depository of latent tracks in memory of humanity and even our anthropomorphous ancestors. Ideas and senses, general for all human creatures and subsequent upon our common emotional pas, are reflected in it. As Jung told: “in collective unconscious there is all spiritual legacy of human evolution, regenerating in the structure of brain in every individual”.
The second theory which also lays very deep in each of us is based on the works of B. F. Skinner (March 20, 1904 – August 18, 1990) who was an American psychologist and author. He conducted pioneering work on experimental psychology and advocated behaviorism, which seeks to understand behavior as a function of environmental histories of experiencing consequences.
Personality – it is that experience which humans purchased in flow of life. It is the accumulated set of the studied models of behavior. Unlike Freud and many others scientists, the theorists of Behavioritical teaching direction do not think that it is necessary to work on the psychical structures and processes which is hidden in brains. Opposite to this thought they examine external surroundings as a key factor of human behavior. Exactly surround of the human, but not the internal psychical phenomena, forms it.
The works of Skinner show us most prove that influence of environment is determined by our behavior. Not like other psychologists, Skinner asserted that almost the behavior is explained of possibility of reinforcement from the environment. According to his opinion , to explain the behavior ( and in such way understand the personality) , we need only to analyze functional relations between a visible action and visible consequences. Work of Skinner served like a foundation for science about behavior which has no analogues in history of psychology. Taking the opinion of others we can say that he is on of the high-honored psychologists of our time.
The most important that was in him is that he didn’t advocate the use of punishment. His main focus was to target behavior and see that consequences deliver responses. His great example about the child who refused to go to school and he showed that the focus should be on what is causing the child’s refusal not necessarily the refusal itself. His researches showed that punishments wasn’t the way of changing behavior obviously he wanted to show that after punishment humans don’t stop doing bad things they begin to do in such way so the punishment couldn’t get them. For example if take such thing as jail. Then somebody does crime and gets in jail after that this person want stop doing crimes it only will be trying to avoid punishment and become more sophisticated at avoiding the punishment.
And bringing my research to the end I want to show how this theories fits me and how some parts of them will reflect on perspective of my personality. I can always feel that I am motivated by some psychical forces, because I often can do thing about which I will think how could I do it? This forces is displayed in Jung’s works. Libido is not only a sexual force it can motivate us for the strong leadership. This you can see in all your dialogue with society – one of thought which displayed Jung.
About Skinners works I can only say that it that it is my common life because of the theory of punishment. Every time when I get my punishment I think that this will be the last time when I do such a bad thing but when the punishment ends all things stands on its places and I can do such bad thing again but this time I shall be more careful and maybe I would avoid my next punishment. This avoiding will teach me how to live in future.
