Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Preface
- 1 Historical precursors of personality theory
- 2 From illness to wellness models of human nature
- 3 Developmental perspectives on personality: from youth-based to life-span models
- 4 The biology of personality
- 5 Trait theories and the psychology of individual differences
- 6 The puzzle of the self
- 7 Culture and personality
- 8 Gendered personality
- 9 Emotions and reasoning: a definition of the Human
- 10 Taking the measure of the Human: benefits and inherent limitations of personality measures
- 11 Can personality change? The possibilities of psychotherapeutics
- 12 The disordered personality: evolution of nosological systems
- 13 Eight appendices: at the margins of personality psychology
- References
- Author index
- Subject index
2 - From illness to wellness models of human nature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Preface
- 1 Historical precursors of personality theory
- 2 From illness to wellness models of human nature
- 3 Developmental perspectives on personality: from youth-based to life-span models
- 4 The biology of personality
- 5 Trait theories and the psychology of individual differences
- 6 The puzzle of the self
- 7 Culture and personality
- 8 Gendered personality
- 9 Emotions and reasoning: a definition of the Human
- 10 Taking the measure of the Human: benefits and inherent limitations of personality measures
- 11 Can personality change? The possibilities of psychotherapeutics
- 12 The disordered personality: evolution of nosological systems
- 13 Eight appendices: at the margins of personality psychology
- References
- Author index
- Subject index
Summary
Science … is a creative human activity, its geniuses acting more as artists than as information processors. Changes in theory are not simply the derivative results of new discoveries but the work of creative imagination influenced by contemporary social and political forces.
Stephen Jay Gould (1977a)Changing conceptions of the human
In the practical world of human affairs, we often ignore those things that work to our satisfaction and are quick to give attention to those that break down. Unfortunately, the human psyche is just as prone to break down as the body of which it is a product (or in the view of some, in which it is merely embedded). To appreciate the theory and research that are the foundation of contemporary personality psychology and that continue to influence our thinking about it, we need to study nineteenth-century psychiatry, which was preoccupied, not surprisingly, with the ways in which the psyche could malfunction. The work of the psychotherapists of that period shaped current notions of human mentation and mental health. In addition, those ideas had a profound influence on the direction and the focus of their research and, consequently, defined theoretical schemas used by many modern personality psychologists and psychotherapists.
One must not discount the work of nineteenth-century laboratory-based psychologists as noted in Chapter 1. Using a model of research that had been developed and found to be highly successful by investigators in the natural sciences, they laid a solid foundation for the psychological research that flourished in the twentieth century.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A History of Personality PsychologyTheory, Science, and Research from Hellenism to the Twenty-First Century, pp. 35 - 74Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010