The Importance Of Personality In Psychology

Personality does not have a specific definition, however its popular definition is ‘a dynamic organisation, inside the person, of a psychophysical systems that create the person’s characteristic patterns of behaviour, thoughts, and feelings’ by Allport (1961, as cited in Maltby, Day, & Macaskill, 2013, p. 5). Personality is important in many areas of life as it can be used to predict behaviour (Maltby et al., 2013). Thus, psychologists are interested to seek to explain the motivation basis of behaviour, development of personality, personality disorders and how it influences psychology research. One of the most comprehensive theories to personality is the psychoanalysis approach, which was first founded by Sigmund Freud (Maltby et al., 2013).

In Freudian theory, the mind has three level of consciousness: conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. Freud (1940/1969) stated that behaviour of human is driven by instinctual drives, being the unconscious motives. Freud (1901/1965; 1923/1960) also stated that there are three basic structures of personality that graft the instincts – id, superego and ego. Id contains all the raw instinctual energy, superego is the conscience and ego is the balance between id and superego, which operates according to reality (as cited in Maltby et al., 2013). Psychosexual development of personality is the central element of Freudian theory. Freud (1940/1969) believed that personality development is mainly depends on biological factors while social factors have little influence. He also stated that people are born with instinctual drives, which are developed in five stages – oral, anal, phallic, latent and genital. Each stage has its own erogenous zone in different parts of the body, which is where the libido energy is invested in. The erogenous zone of each stage is very sensitive to stimulation and is the core of pleasure. If a child is

Erikson believed that personality is developed throughout the lifespan, and not restricted to any age. Ego identity is the central element of Erikson’s theory (Erikson, 1968, as cited in Carver & Scheier, 2007). Ego identity is the conscious sense of self, which is derived from the social reality (Carver & Scheier, 2007). Beside ego identity, competence and personal adequacy are other important elements of psychosocial theory. A person will either feel a sense of competency or inadequacy, depending on how well each stage of development is managed (Carver & Scheier, 2007). There are eight stages of development. Each stage has a crisis (psychosocial crisis) and a conflict (psychosocial conflict). Psychosocial crisis refers to the turning point of a stage, where the potential for growth is high while psychosocial conflict refers to the struggle of attaining a psychological quality at a stage (Carver & Scheier, 2007). At each stage, there are two psychological qualities against each other, one being more adaptive while another is less (Carver & Scheier, 2007). A person has to balance between the two qualities of each stage. For example, at infancy stage, the two qualities are trust and mistrust. The child has to have a balance between the two qualities, otherwise he will trust others who are not trustworthy or does not trust others even when they are trustworthy (Carver & Scheier, 2007).