The story of personality is, in many ways, the story of the secularization of the human soul. From early in its history, the term has been closely linked to notions of what it means to be a person. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, however, the connotations were distinctly non-psychological: personality referred to the distinction between persons and things, and it was the theological and ethical dimensions of personhood that were paramount. Individual differences in preferences were discussed largely in terms of temperaments; personality, on the other hand, referred rather to what was deemed to be fundamental and universal, the moral and rational nature of the human subject. As the importance of religion within Western culture waned, however, the meaning of ‘personality’ shifted. In the wake of Romanticism's celebration of idiosyncratic individuality and the growing psychological/psychiatric interest in naturalistic investigations of mental abnormality, the term became reoriented decisively toward the individual and psychological.
By the turn of the century, the new clinically inspired theories of Emil Kraeplin, Sigmund Freud, Théodule Ribot, and Pierre Janet had made personality a concept of great interest, both within certain specialist circles and for the public at large. Adopted by the general public in the 1900s and by mainstream academic psychology in the 1920s and 1930s, the meanings of the term sedimented around the notion of personality as those qualities of an individual that persist across time and contexts and that distinguish that person from all others. Americans have been particularly fascinated with the composite nature of personality, its malleability, and its dynamic relations to the social environment; Europeans, on the other hand, have been more concerned with deep structures, fundamental continuities, and the internal aspects of its development.
For all of the differences in orientation, most personality research has been guided by the same fundamental questions: Is personality one thing or many? Is it relatively constant or does it vary across situations? Does it result from internal drives or external pressures? How does personality develop and how can it be changed? What are the relative influences of conscious and unconscious processes? And how does personality become pathological? Although the responses to these issues have been, and continue to be, extremely varied, they have tended to cluster around two poles associated with two different types of investigative sites: personality as a collection of distinguishable traits analysed via techniques drawn from the experimental laboratory, and personality as a holistic assessment of an individual's overall make-up, determined through close observation in a clinical setting.
Holistic depictions of personality received their most influential modern articulation in the psychoanalytic depth psychology of Freud and his followers. For Freud, individual personality is developmental, indeed almost archaeological; the accumulated product of an ultimately unresolvable conflict, beginning in infancy, between deep-seated sexual and aggressive drives associated with the id, and various defences against them arising from the ego and superego. Developed out of Freud's psychopathological work and oriented towards the ideal of the integrated personality, psychoanalytic theory stresses the role of the unconscious and of repression in the formation of personality. Because of the presumed intransigence of the unconscious to reliable self-knowledge, psychoanalytic theory has relied for most of its data on clinical observation, although projective techniques, such as the Rorschach inkblot test, have also been developed to supplement direct analysis. In the hands of other depth psychologists — Carl Jung and Alfred Adler, among others — psychoanalytic theory has been pushed in a number of directions, mostly by shifting emphases from the sexual to other drives, from the unconscious to the conscious, or from the inner to the outer. Nonetheless, all have remained committed to the notion that personality as an integrated entity exists and that it can be causally explained within a framework that unites biological and psychosocial forces.
Counterpoised to these holistic approaches to personality have been various composite theories, arguing that personality is a collection of discrete traits which vary in degree from person to person and/or from situation to situation. Interest in trait theories has been high since the 1930s-40s, when factor analytic statistical techniques, and the development of assessment instruments such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MPPI) and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, allowed researchers to isolate and intercorrelate particular personality variables. Studies by Raymond Cattell and Hans Eysenck have been particularly prominent in this regard, and have helped produce the current consensus around a five-factor model of major personality elements: neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness to experience. While most researchers have assumed that personality traits such as these are nomothetic (equally applicable to all individuals) and vary only in degree, some recent work has argued for an idiographic or contextualist approach, seeing traits as individual- and situation-specific, with behaviour the product of environmental influences interacting with underlying characteristics.
Three other approaches to personality within psychology also bear mention. Physiological or biological theories have accounted for personality primarily on the basis of physical factors, such as body type (Ernst Kretschmer, William Sheldon) or genetic make-up (Dean Hamer). Stimulus-response or learning theories, including those of B. F. Skinner and Albert Bandura, have taken an opposite tack, explaining personality on the basis of external stimuli and the individual's responses to them. Within these theories, patterns of behaviour are believed to develop as the result of reinforcement of personal experiences or imitations of others, and differences between individuals derive from the varied sets of stimuli experienced from early childhood. Finally, in recent years the cognitive revolution has engendered social-cognitive theories that explain behaviour on the basis of internal representations of context-specific situations. Behavioural consistency (personality) exists because most individuals operate on the basis of a small repertoire of interpretive schemas or scripts, which they then use to guide action in a wide variety of particular circumstances.
These academic constructions of personality, however, do not exhaust its post-Enlightenment resonances. Coming into vogue as part of a reaction against the heavily freighted Victorian conception of character, personality came within popular culture to signify more external affect than internal essence. In this guise, while personality has been in one respect understood as synonymous with identity, at the same time it has also been indicative of a kind of surface feature, a way of being seen by the external world rather than a reflection of an internal self. This tension between the internal and the external, and between the persistent and the contextual, visible as well within psychological theory, continues to characterize notions of personality up to the present day.
— John Carson
