Personality [antikvár]

IntroductionFor many people, personality is psychology. The concepts of most branches of psychology - learning, perception, animal behaviour, and so forth - often seem distant from the concerns of the layman. But personality is intuitively meaningful to everyone: it is the whole integrated pattern of behaviour which distinguishes one man from another as uniquely as fingerprints and as distinctively as photographs.Furthermore, personality consists not of incidental, emotionally neutral features such as the whorls of fingerprints, but of the most important things we can say about a person, the things that will make us love him or hate him or feel indifferent to his fate: personality includes what a man wants, what he will do to get it, and how he copes with his inability to get everything he needs and desires. Personality also deals with how a man is shaped by, and how he shapes, the social milieu in which he lives.The scientific study of personality shares with clinical medicine an unusual orientation among the sciences: both are interested not only in the typical cases that exemplify the general laws that apply to all, but both are also interested in understanding individual persons. One may agree with Allport (p. 66ff.) that the unique individual is of interest in himself, or with Holt (p. 38ff.) that one must study individuals who seem to be exceptions to general laws in order to improve the general laws. In either case, the study of personality is very much concerned with the sources of, and the consequences of, individual diiferences.In breadth of ideas and variety of research issues and strategies, the whole field of personality cannot be described within the covers of a single book. Furthermore, textbooks, which must summarize the subject matter, have a way of losing the depth and spice of the original contribution. The full flavour of thought and observation cannot be grasped without reading the original sources which have left their mark on the field. The main purpose of this book is to bring to the reader some of the recent works that are shaping modem thinking on personality and some older works which, because of their brilliance and insight, still influence research and thought.The subject matter of personality most naturally divides into four areas. These might be referred to as the four D's: description.