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Think of personality as the “business
end” of ourselves, or that part of us
that meets the world, and has an effect
on other people. It's different from the
inner world of our feelings, problems,
thoughts, motivations, and so forth,
which are our business and ours alone.
Personality is a social matter.
We are all personality theorists all the
time. We notice the behavior of those
around us, and attempt to derive
theories about what is going on: how
important the behavior is, how positive
or sinister, and how often it might
recur. We also try to put it in context,
to see if it's the tip of the iceberg,
or the iceberg itself. These are
tough questions, especially the
latter one, if we have no theoretical
framework in which to place the
behaviors.
There are a thousand academic and pop
psych formulas for understanding
personality, ranging from psychiatric
diagnostic classifications on one end of
the spectrum to astrology on the other. In between,
there are a number of popular systems
whose scientific underpinnings vary in
quality. Some are useful in certain
defined situations. For example, the
Myers-Briggs test, widely used in
corporations, is quite useful for
identifying characteristics in business
people, particularly in helping them
form effective work groups. Some have
tried to use the instrument for remote
personality reading by having people
close to the subject fill out the test
as they think the subject would. The
results have been mixed. The point is
that not every approach is useful
universally. Our challenge is to find the most useful for assessing personality remotely, when getting data from the "horse's mouth" is not possible.
The theory underpinning this site is
mostly that of modern psychiatry and
contemporary psychological thinking. I
find the widely available
American
Psychiatric Association Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual, 4th edition (DSM IV) to be
of considerable use, though in selected
situations, with selected groups of
people, other approaches have their place. Often
their utility is limited by the fact that they require
test-taking or other cooperation by the
person we are trying to understand.
Most of us have a faulty understanding
of the nature and distribution of
people’s idiosyncracies and
psychological problems, because we are
not taught correctly by our schools and
the media. We tend to think of people as
being normal, neurotic (“screwed up”),
or psychotic (“crazy”). This way of
looking at people is wrong. For one
thing, no one knows what “normal”
actually means. For another, very few
are “crazy” (grossly out of contact with
reality) and somewhat more are neurotic
(filled with painful, unfinished
business from their childhoods) or
suffering the residual effects of
trauma.
Far more (all of us, in fact, to varying
degrees) have issues with their
personalities, the part of them that
makes contact with other people. A
critical point is that personality
issues (remember, our style of doing
business with people, not the content)
tend to stay hidden and invisible to the
person who has them. They are
conflicts and confusions that do not cause psychological pain. There is
usually no internal experience of a
problem whatsoever. Instead of upsetting
us (and making us deal with them) they
silently play themselves out, without
our awareness, in relationships with
others and the world in general. This is
why personality issues are so rarely
understood and talked about; it is also
why they can be a danger.
Luckily, most people do not have such
“diagnosable” personality distortions.
However, in real life we all have some
personality issues, usually in
attenuated form. They are just one
aspect of our being. The important
point, more than presence or absence of
personality issues in normal people, is
a person's style of involvement, and the
pervasiveness of that involvement, with
others. If we really understand that
concept, we're on our way to seeing how
other people genuinely operate.
Let's take an example: suppose we say
someone is a “narcissist.” This could
mean any one of a number of things:
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1.
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it could be one trait among
many, but in fact mild or
moderate in scope, and just gets
our attention because it is
annoying.
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2.
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it could be major, but just a
part of the person’s
personality, and relatively
benign.
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3.
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it could be a major, full-blown
narcissistic personality
disorder, dominating the
individual and foretelling
catastrophic outcomes for all
concerned. |
The point here is that traits don't
exist in a vacuum. We need to understand
not only the traits we're looking at,
but also the context. This takes some
doing, though a fancy degree is
definitely NOT required!
Readers who have studied personality
will immediately realize there is more
to be said. There are three points that
need to be underscored, lest our on the
fly definition of personality seem
naïve.
First, there are numerous background
factors that go into personality. When I
teach this subject, I hand out a list
three pages long. It includes such things as:
-
sociological factors, such as
geographical and religious
background.
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family factors, such as the
personalities of parents, birth
order, and early influences.
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significant life events and present
situation
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the subject’s mind: overall
intelligence, specific areas of
intelligence, and cognitive style
(i.e. an individual’s typical mode
of thinking, remembering or problem
solving, which influences attitudes,
values, and the way a person deals
with others)
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handling of emotions, including stress
-
issues of the person’s body
(configuration, diseases, etc.)
All of the preceding factors, and many
more, go into personality. As a
practical matter, we may not be able to
discover all of them, but we can try to,
and we can be aware of which areas could
teach us important things. Some may
yield the key to personality in ways
that even the best boilerplate
categories could never provide. Which
leads us to the second point:
personality theory, however sophisticated, may
not give us enough information in a
given case. People tend to defy neat
categories. Past a certain point, we
need to understand people's uniqueness,
not their similarity to others. We may have to understand how personality elements are woven together in unique patterns, or understand some special aspect of the person that simply defies traditional analysis. Psychiatric boilerplate is almost never
enough. Sometimes this work is more the
stuff of art than of science, what
playwrights, artists, or biographers
struggle to describe every day.
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