The Phenomenological Approach To Personality

Personality is not as easily defined as one would think it is. An imperfect definition according to Funder, “personality refers to an individual 's characteristic patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior, together with the psychological mechanisms, hidden or not, behind those patterns” (Funder, 2012). Personality is a collection of the processes that dictate how we think, how we feel emotion, and how we behave as a result of these emotions and thought processes. Funder 's definition helps explain how an intangible concept can explain the more tangible results of what we think of as personality. The problem with Funder 's definition is that is quite broad. Psychology and the study of personality has a gamut of schools of thought that focus

The Phenomenological approach to personality is the idea that an individual 's conscious experience of their world is more important that the physical world itself which they inhabit. Followers of the phenomenological approach will argue that studying the mind is different than studying an inanimate object such as a molecule because the human mind is self-aware, and is thus a wholly different beast than the simple study of a hard science such as physics (Funder, 2012). Through a phenomenological lens, a person is defined by their conscious experience of the world, and their actions as a result of this

The three theories I have been exploring likewise do not have a perfect answer, but they do shed some light on the human condition. I do not think that humans are inherently good or evil. However, the three theories all have something radically different to say about human nature. Thinkers with a biological approach would argue that there is no good or evil, just nature (Gahtan, 2014). Freud postulated that humans are inherently evil and flawed. At our core, the Id, part of our unconscious mind seeks to extract as much pleasure from the world as possible. The ego and superego emerge as a response to keep the Id behaving in a rational and moral way. (Funder, 2012). Phenomenological thinkers, however, have generally more optimistic views than Freud. Maslow, for instance believed that people are inherently good. He thought that everyone sought to self-actualize, which is the pinnacle of perfection an individual can reach (Maslow, 1987). In contrast, humanistic and existentialist Sartre said that “This means that man first exists, occurs, arises in the world, and is only defined later” (Sartre, 1973). What Sartre is saying is that humans are created without good, evil, or a purpose. We emerge from nothingness. What I find so profound about this statement is that if a person chooses to be good, it means that they achieved the ability to be a good person