Personality

Personality is the set of thoughts, feelings, traits, and behaviors that are characteristic of an individual. Where identity describes who we are, personality describes how we act and react to the world. Psychologists have proposed dramatically different explanations for where personality comes from — unconscious drives, social relationships, self-actualization, or enduring traits — and the MCAT expects you to recognize each perspective and the theorist behind it.

Key Takeaways

• Freud's structural model divides personality into the id (pleasure principle, primary process), ego (reality principle, secondary process), and superego (conscience and ego-ideal), operating across conscious, preconscious, and unconscious levels; defense mechanisms — repression, regression, reaction formation, projection, rationalization, displacement, and sublimation — are the ego's tools for managing the anxiety between id and superego.

• Carl Jung's analytical psychology divides the unconscious into personal and collective components, the latter built from archetypes (persona, anima/animus, shadow, self) and expressed through three personality dichotomies (extraversion/introversion, sensing/intuiting, thinking/feeling) that underlie the MBTI.

• Adler located personality's driving force in striving for superiority (following an initial inferiority complex) and a person's unique style of life; Horney argued personality comes from interpersonal relationships and identified ten neurotic needs along with three coping strategies (moving toward, against, and away from people).

• The humanistic perspective (Force Field Theory, Maslow's self-actualization and peak experiences, Kelly's personal construct psychology, and Rogers' client-centered therapy with unconditional positive regard) focuses on healthy people striving toward self-realization, in direct contrast to the psychoanalytic perspective.

• Type theories (humors, somatotypes, Type A/B, MBTI) sort people into discrete categories, while trait theories (the PEN model, the Big Five, Allport's cardinal/central/secondary traits, and N-Ach) describe people along continuous dimensions.

• The behaviorist, social cognitive (reciprocal determinism, locus of control), and biological perspectives round out the major explanations for where personality comes from — reinforcement history, environment-personality interaction, and genetics/brain anatomy, respectively.

The Psychoanalytic Perspective

Psychoanalytic, or psychodynamic, theories of personality contain some of the most widely varying perspectives on behavior in all of psychology. What unites them is a shared assumption: unconscious internal states motivate a person's overt actions and, over time, determine their personality.

Freud: The Structural Model of Personality

Sigmund Freud proposed a structural model of personality made up of three components: the id, ego, and superego.

The Id, Ego, and Superego

The id consists of all the basic, primal, inborn urges to survive and reproduce. It functions according to the pleasure principle — its goal is immediate gratification that relieves pent-up tension. When gratification isn't immediately available, the id resorts to the primary process: using mental imagery to fulfill the need for satisfaction, as in daydreaming or fantasy. The id's motto is to obtain satisfaction as soon as possible, not later — this is called wish fulfillment.

The ego exists to reduce tension on a more permanent basis. It operates according to the reality principle, taking objective reality into account as it guides or inhibits the id's activity — a guidance process called the secondary process. The reality principle's goal is to postpone the pleasure principle until satisfaction is actually achievable. The ego only comes into play when objective reality won't allow the id's primary-process mechanism to work on its own. Using the ego alongside reality promotes the growth of perception, memory, problem-solving, thinking, and reality testing. The ego can never be fully independent of the id, since the id powers it — the ego is better understood as an organizer of the mind than as a separate, self-sufficient force.

The superego holds refined desires focused on the ideal self. It's the personality's perfectionist, judging our actions and responding with pride at accomplishments or guilt at failures. The superego divides into two subsystems, both reflecting morals taught to a child by caregivers: the conscience (the collection of improper actions for which a child was punished) and the ego-ideal (the proper actions for which a child was rewarded).

Freud also proposed that the id, ego, and superego operate across three levels of awareness: the conscious (thoughts we have conscious access to), the preconscious (thoughts we're currently unaware of but can access), and the unconscious (thoughts that have been repressed).

Instincts: Eros and Thanatos

Freud postulated that behavior is also influenced by instincts — the innate psychological representation of a biological need, and the propelling force behind his dynamic theory of personality. Instincts fall into two types: Eros, life instincts that promote an individual's quest for survival (thirst, hunger, sexual needs), and Thanatos, death instincts representing an unconscious wish for death and destruction.

Defense Mechanisms

Defense mechanisms describe how the ego relieves the anxiety that arises from the clashing desires of the id and the superego. All defense mechanisms share two characteristics: they deny, distort, or falsify reality, and they operate unconsciously.

• Repression: The ego's way of forcing undesired thoughts and urges into the unconscious. Repression underlies many of the other defense mechanisms, and its aim is to disguise threatening impulses that might otherwise find their way back into consciousness. Suppression is the more deliberate, conscious form of forgetting.

• Regression: Reversion to an earlier developmental state — for example, an older child sucking their thumb or throwing a temper tantrum when stressed.

• Reaction Formation: Unconsciously converting an urge into its exact opposite — for example, hating something you desperately want but can't have.

• Projection: Attributing your own undesired feelings to someone else — blaming others for the way you feel. "I hate my parents" becomes "my parents hate me." Projection is an important part of personality analysis and underlies tests designed to gain insight into the unconscious mind. The Rorschach inkblot test, developed by Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach in 1921, relies on the assumption that a client projects their unconscious feelings onto an ambiguous inkblot shape. The Thematic Apperception Test, created in the 1930s by Henry Murray and Christiana Morgan, assumes that a story a person makes up about an ambiguous picture reveals insight into their own unconscious thoughts and feelings.

• Rationalization: Justifying behavior in a way that's acceptable to oneself and to society.

• Displacement: Transferring an undesired urge from one person or object to another — for example, anger at work transferring over to anger at home.

• Sublimation: Transforming unacceptable urges into socially acceptable behaviors.

MCAT Callout — Pleasure principle vs. reality principle: The id demands immediate gratification through the primary process (wish fulfillment). The ego postpones that gratification through the secondary process, waiting until satisfaction is actually achievable. Notice that the superego runs on neither principle — it's driven by an idealized standard of perfection, not by tension-reduction at all.

Carl Jung: Analytical Psychology

Carl Jung thought of libido as psychic energy generally, not just sexual energy. He defined the ego as the conscious mind, and divided the unconscious mind into two parts: the personal unconscious, similar to Freud's notion of the unconscious, and the collective unconscious, a powerful system shared among all humans, considered a residue of the experiences of early ancestors. The collective unconscious is built from images of common experiences — devils and angels, for example — called archetypes.

Jungian Archetypes and the Self

• Persona: Like a mask worn in public, the persona is the part of the personality a person presents to the world. It's adaptive to social interactions — qualities that improve social standing are emphasized, while other, less desirable qualities are suppressed.

• Anima and Animus: Describe sex-inappropriate qualities — feminine behaviors in males (anima) and masculine behaviors in females (animus).

• Shadow: Responsible for the appearance of unpleasant and socially reprehensible thoughts, feelings, and actions in one's own consciousness.

• Self: The point of intersection between the collective unconscious and the personal unconscious. The self strives for unity, acting as the reconciler of opposites and the promoter of harmony. It's symbolized as a mandala, or circle.

Jung's Dichotomies of Personality

Jung proposed that personality can be described along three dichotomies:

• Extraversion (E) vs. Introversion (I): Extraversion is an orientation toward the external world; introversion is an orientation toward one's inner, personal world.

• Sensing (S) vs. Intuiting (N): Sensing is obtaining objective information about the world; intuiting is working with information more abstractly.

• Thinking (T) vs. Feeling (F): Thinking relies on logic and reason; feeling relies on a value system or personal beliefs.

Most people have both sides of each dichotomy present to some degree, but one side usually dominates. Jung's dichotomies laid the groundwork for the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which uses the same three categories and adds a fourth: Judging (preferring orderliness) vs. Perceiving (preferring spontaneity).

Other Psychoanalysts

Alfred Adler

Adler proposed the inferiority complex — an individual's sense of incompleteness, imperfection, and inferiority — as the starting point for personality development. Striving for superiority is what he believed drives personality: this striving enhances personality when it's oriented toward benefiting society, but produces disorder when it's selfish. The creative self is the force by which each individual shapes their uniqueness and establishes their personality; its manifestation is a person's style of life — their unique way of achieving superiority, crucially shaped by family environment. Adler also proposed fictional finalism: the idea that a person is motivated more by their expectations of the future than by past experience — human goals are based on a fictional estimate of life's values rather than objective data from the past.

Karen Horney

Horney argued against Freud, suggesting instead that personality results from interpersonal relationships. She proposed that neurotic personalities are governed by one of ten neurotic needs (for example, a need for affection and approval, a need to exploit others, or a need for self-sufficiency and independence), each directed toward making life and interactions more bearable. Healthy people have these needs to some degree; they become problematic only when a need is disproportionate in intensity, indiscriminate in application, partially disregards reality, or has a tendency to provoke intense anxiety.

Horney's primary focus was anxiety, which she believed stemmed from a child's early perception of self, rooted in their relationship with their parents. Basic anxiety is caused by inadequate parenting, producing vulnerability and helplessness. Basic hostility results from neglect and rejection, producing anger. Both must be overcome by attaining a sense of security, typically through one of three strategies: moving toward people to secure their goodwill, moving against people by fighting to gain the upper hand, or moving away from people by withdrawing. Healthy people use all three strategies depending on the situation; a highly threatened child instead uses one strategy rigidly and exclusively.

Object Relations Theory

Object relations theory, associated most closely with psychoanalysts Melanie Klein, W.R.D. Fairbairn, and Donald Winnicott, uses "object" to refer to a person's mental representation of a parent or other caregiver — a representation built from subjective experiences during early infancy. These objects then persist into adulthood, shaping how a person interacts with others.

The Humanistic Perspective

The humanistic perspective stands in direct contrast to the psychoanalytic perspective. Rather than focusing on "sick" individuals, humanistic, or phenomenological, theorists focus on the value of individuals and take a more person-centered approach, attempting to describe the ways healthy people strive toward self-realization. The humanistic perspective is associated with Gestalt therapy, whose practitioners take a holistic view of the self, seeing the individual as a complete person rather than focusing on individual behaviors or drives.

Force Field Theory

Force Field Theory focuses on the present, placing little weight on personality constraints (habits, fixed traits, and the like) or personality structures like Freud's id, ego, and superego. The "field" is defined as a person's current state of mind — simply the sum of forces, or influences, acting on the individual at that time. These forces divide into two groups: forces that assist in the attainment of goals, and forces that block the path to attaining them.

Abraham Maslow and Self-Actualization

Abraham Maslow identified individuals he felt had lived rich and productive lives — Albert Einstein and Beethoven among them — and studied them, believing them to be self-actualizers. He identified several characteristics shared among these people, including a non-hostile sense of humor, originality, creativity, spontaneity, and a need for some privacy. Self-actualized people are also more likely to have peak experiences — profound and deeply moving experiences in a person's life.

Personal Construct Psychology

George Kelly used himself as a model to study human nature, rejecting the traditional concepts of motivation, unconscious emotion, and reinforcement. He thought of individuals as scientists — people who devise and test predictions about the behavior of significant people in their lives. Under this view, an individual constructs a scheme of anticipation for what others will do. An anxious person is someone having difficulty constructing and understanding the variables in their environment. Psychotherapy, in Kelly's model, is a process of insight that allows a person to acquire new constructs, letting them successfully predict troublesome events.

Client-Centered Therapy

Client-centered, person-centered, or nondirective therapy is a psychotherapy technique based on the belief that people have the freedom to control their own behavior — a direct contrast to psychoanalysts (who believe people are slaves to their unconscious) and behaviorists (who would say people are simply subjects of faulty learning). This therapy helps patients reflect on their problems, make choices, generate solutions, take positive action, and determine their own destiny. Carl Rogers designed this therapy and introduced the concepts of the real self and ideal self; its techniques aim to reconcile the difference between these various selves and reduce stress-inducing incongruence between them. A central technique is unconditional positive regard: the therapist accepts the client completely and expresses empathy, promoting a positive therapeutic environment.

The Type and Trait Perspectives

Both the type and trait perspectives were born out of dissatisfaction with psychoanalytic theories. Type theorists attempt to create a taxonomy of personality types. Trait theorists describe individual personality as the sum of a person's characteristic behaviors.

Type Theorists

The ancient Greeks devised personality types based on humors — bodily fluids whose imbalance was thought to cause various personality disorders. Somatotypes, proposed by William Sheldon, suggested that body type could predict personality: short, stocky people were presumed jolly, while tall people were presumed high-strung and aloof. Modern psychology now considers somatotype-based personality theory scientifically outdated, and it isn't supported as a real predictor of personality.

Type A and Type B is another type theory: Type A personalities are characterized by competitive, compulsive behavior, while Type B personalities are generally laid-back and relaxed. The original research linking Type A behavior to a higher risk of heart disease reported roughly double the rate of coronary heart disease in Type A individuals compared with Type B individuals. Later, larger studies substantially complicated this picture — some found no significant link between Type A behavior and mortality at all, and at least one well-known study of heart-attack survivors even found lower mortality among Type A patients, a result sometimes called the "Type A paradox." The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, discussed above under Jung, is also a type theory.

Trait Theorists

Trait theorists tend to use clusters of behaviors to describe individuals.

The PEN model used factor analysis to group behaviors that typically occur together, assigning labels to those groups. It describes personality along three traits: Psychoticism (a measure of nonconformity or social deviance), Extraversion (a measure of tolerance for social interaction and stimulation), and Neuroticism (a measure of emotional arousal in stressful situations). The reasoning was that people could be distinguished from one another based on where they fell along each of these three dimensions. This theory has since been expanded into the Big Five, which describes personality along five dimensions: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.

Gordon Allport listed three basic types of traits, or dispositions: cardinal traits, the trait around which a person organizes their entire life (not everyone develops one); central traits, the major characteristics of a person that are easy to infer; and secondary traits, other personal characteristics limited in occurrence, which appear only in close groups or specific social situations. Allport's concept of functional autonomy — the idea that a behavior continues despite the satisfaction of the drive that originally created it — is a fundamental part of his theory.

N-Ach, the need for achievement, describes a trait linked to how concerned a person is with achievement and with taking pride in their accomplishments. People with high N-Ach tend to avoid both high risks (to avoid failing) and low risks (since easy tasks don't generate a sense of achievement).

MCAT Callout — Type theories vs. trait theories: Type theories (humors, somatotypes, Type A/B, MBTI) sort people into discrete categories. Trait theories (the PEN model, the Big Five, Allport's traits) describe people along continuous dimensions, where everyone falls somewhere on a spectrum rather than into a single bucket. If a question sorts someone into a named category, it's testing type theory; if it scores someone along a dimension, it's testing trait theory.

Other Theories of Personality

Behaviorist Perspective: Based heavily on the concepts of operant conditioning, this perspective holds that personality is simply a reflection of behaviors that have been reinforced over time. Therapy under this view focuses on learning skills and changing behaviors through operant conditioning techniques — for example, token economies, used in therapeutic settings, where good behavior is rewarded with tokens that can later be exchanged for privileges.

Social Cognitive Perspective: This perspective focuses not only on how the environment influences behavior, but also on how individuals interact with that environment — taking behaviorism one step further. Reciprocal determinism is the idea that thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and environment all interact with each other to determine actions in a given situation: people choose environments that suit their personalities, and their personalities also determine how they feel about and react to events in their environment. Locus of control is also an important concept here — whether someone believes they control their environment, or that their environment controls them, plays a large part in the makeup of their personality. For this perspective, past behavior in similar situations is the best predictor of future behavior.

Biological Perspective: This perspective holds that personality can be explained as a result of genetic expression in the brain. Theorists maintain that many traits can be shown to result from genes or from differences in brain anatomy.

Why Personality Matters for the MCAT

Personality questions tend to test whether a reader can correctly match a described behavior, therapy technique, or personality description to the right theorist and framework:

• Id, ego, and superego. Know which principle governs which structure — pleasure principle (id), reality principle (ego), and the superego's separate drive toward an idealized standard.

• Defense mechanism identification. A passage describing a specific unconscious coping behavior is testing whether you can name the mechanism — projection, displacement, and reaction formation are especially easy to confuse with each other.

• Jung's archetypes and dichotomies. Distinguish the persona (public mask) from the shadow (repressed, unacceptable impulses) and from anima/animus (opposite-sex qualities within oneself).

• Adler vs. Horney vs. Freud. All three are psychoanalytic, but each locates the driving force of personality somewhere different: Freud in unconscious drives, Adler in striving for superiority, and Horney in interpersonal relationships.

• Type theory vs. trait theory. Type theories sort people into categories; trait theories place people along continuous dimensions. The PEN model's three dimensions and the Big Five's five dimensions are a common source of mix-ups.

• Perspective identification. A passage describing reinforcement history is testing the behaviorist perspective; one describing environment-personality interaction is testing the social-cognitive perspective; one describing genetics or brain anatomy is testing the biological perspective.

Common MCAT Mistakes

• Confusing the pleasure principle with the reality principle, rather than recognizing the id (pleasure principle, immediate gratification) and the ego (reality principle, delayed gratification) as governed by different structures — and forgetting the superego runs on neither, driven instead by an idealized standard.

• Mixing up projection, displacement, and reaction formation, rather than distinguishing projection (attributing your own feelings to someone else), displacement (redirecting an urge toward a different person or object), and reaction formation (converting an urge into its exact opposite).

• Confusing Jung's persona (the public mask a person presents to the world) with the shadow (repressed, socially unacceptable impulses) or with anima/animus (opposite-sex qualities within oneself).

• Treating type theories and trait theories as interchangeable, rather than recognizing that type theories (humors, somatotypes, Type A/B, MBTI) sort people into discrete categories while trait theories (the PEN model, the Big Five, Allport's traits) place people along continuous dimensions.

MCAT-Style Concept Check

Question: After a stressful meeting with their boss, a man goes home and unconsciously begins yelling at his spouse over a minor issue, without any awareness that his anger actually originated at work. Which defense mechanism does this best illustrate?

• A) Reaction Formation

• B) Displacement

• C) Projection

• D) Sublimation

Answer: B

Explanation: Displacement is the transfer of an undesired urge from one person or object to another — the article's own example is anger at work transferring to anger at home, exactly the scenario described. Reaction Formation (A) would involve unconsciously converting the anger into its opposite, such as excessive affection. Projection (C) would involve attributing his own anger to his spouse instead ("my spouse is angry at me"). Sublimation (D) would involve channeling the anger into a socially acceptable activity, not directing it at another person.

FAQ

What's the difference between the id, ego, and superego?

The id operates on the pleasure principle, seeking immediate gratification through the primary process. The ego operates on the reality principle, postponing gratification through the secondary process until satisfaction is actually achievable. The superego is the personality's perfectionist, judging actions against an idealized standard via the conscience and ego-ideal.

What's the difference between type theories and trait theories of personality?

Type theories — humors, somatotypes, Type A/B, and the MBTI — sort people into discrete categories. Trait theories — the PEN model, the Big Five, and Allport's cardinal, central, and secondary traits — describe people along continuous dimensions, where everyone falls somewhere on a spectrum rather than into a single bucket.

What are Jung's four archetypes?

The persona (the public mask a person presents to the world), the anima/animus (sex-inappropriate qualities within a person), the shadow (unpleasant, socially reprehensible impulses), and the self (the point of intersection between the personal and collective unconscious, symbolized as a mandala).

How does Adler's theory of personality differ from Horney's?

Adler located personality's driving force in striving for superiority, following an initial inferiority complex, expressed through a person's unique style of life. Horney instead argued personality comes primarily from interpersonal relationships, identifying ten neurotic needs and three coping strategies — moving toward, against, and away from people.