Psychodynamic Approach To Personality

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Abstract
In this paper, I will be discussing the psychology of personality. What it means, and what makes up your personality. How the term personality is commonly misused in everyday language and how psychologists view and study personality. I will mainly be focusing on the different approaches to personality. Specifically, five of them which consist of: the cognitive approach, the trait approach, the psychodynamic approach, the humanistic approach, and lastly, the learning approach.

Summary From a psychologist's standpoint, personality is a person's unique long-term pattern of thinking, emotions, and behavior. It is the consistency of who you are inside or who you truly are. Personality doesn't tend to change because it who …show more content…

The psychodynamic approach was shaped by the works of Sigmund Freud. He believed the id (needs and urges), the superego (morals and principals), and the ego (the balance) played a big role in psychological development and that childhood experiences affected a person's personality. In the humanistic approach, it was thought that self-actualization was really important to psychological development and personality. They needed individual experiences and free will in order to fully develop their personality. In the trait approach, I was able to learn how a person is made up of a bunch of broad traits and that using those personality traits, they are able to show to show similar or stable behavior in similar situations. Once a psychologist has identified a persons' traits, they are able to predict future behavior in order to study their patients. Another approach was the cognitive approach. In the cognitive approach, the theorists believe that thought is the first thing that goes on. Thought comes before feeling and before action. This helped me realize how everyone is able to second-guess themselves, and they have to think of what they want to do, before they do it. Otherwise they cannot function. Take for example someone in a hospital who is, "brain dead". Without his or her thoughts, they are not able to function. Although there are some kinks to this theory, it …show more content…

In this approach, learning theorists reject the fact that "inner thoughts and feelings" have anything to do with our personality. Instead, as we are growing up, we learn from what we see, or in other words, our personality is just basically everything we have witnessed around us put together.

Discussion I really enjoyed reading about personality and the many different approaches to it. It helped me see it through many points of views and have an insight of how true psychologists think. I found the cognitive and learning approach quite interesting, even though I do not entirely agree with them. I do not believe that people do absolutely everything while thinking. That's where the expression "I did it without thinking" comes from. Sometimes your body does things out of habit or out of reflexes that doesn’t really require thinking for it to be done. In the learning approach, I really didn’t like how they didn’t believe that your inner thoughts had to do with your personality because in my opinion, that’s what personality is all about. Who you are on the inside. It all has to do with how you think and act, and even though the environment can impact your personality, it doesn't have everything to do with

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