Theories of Personality: Understanding Persons - Hardcover

Cloninger, Susan C.

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9780131832046: Theories of Personality: Understanding Persons

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0131832042 ISBN 13: 9780131832046

Publisher: Prentice Hall, 2003

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Designed to prepare readers to apply theories of personality to understanding particular individuals who they may encounter in professional work and in their personal lives, this engaging volume provides an overview of major classic and current theories of personality, together with clear explanation of the latest research. It brings the theories to life through the interpretation of illustrative historic and current biographies. This book covers the important theories in personality research—psychoanalysis, individual psychology, personological trait theory, psychoanalytic learning theory, behaviorism, cognitive social learning theory—as well as the people that pioneered those theories—Freud, Adler, Allport, Skinner, Staats, Dollard, Miller, Mischel, and Bandura. For anyone who wants a better handle on understanding the people in their professional and personal lives.

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From the Publisher:

This engaging text provides an overview of major classic and current theories of personality, integrating clear explanation of theory with the latest research. It conducts an up-to-date evaluation of the scientific status of theoretical assertions, bringing theories to life through the interpretation of illustrative biographies. The Second Edition has been updated to include the most current research available.

Before adopting the scholarly persona, I ask your indulgence for some personal comments. If you are like my students at The Sage Colleges in upstate New York (the women's Russell Sage College in Troy, and its affiliated co-educational Sage College of Albany), you will oblige me. This book's first edition was completed over a decade ago, bringing the incomparable thrill that a first book brings to one who grew up loving books and the academic track, among life's many potentials. I've been pleased to see it appear in Portugese and Russian translations (thanks to the connections that Prentice Hall has made). Its cycles of revision have become part of the rhythm of my life. The first revision (second edition) marked my son's college graduation and the beginning of his career as an architect, and so it seemed each cycle would correspond to a personal step forward, but it was not to be. The next edition was the time when my mother died unexpectedly, plunging me into a period of personal exploration in which I came to realize that the author Susan was in large part the legacy of my mother's potential (had life circumstance and schizophrenia not blocked her). As I write the preface for the fourth edition of this text, I am saddened that the major event during this interval is my father's death; his "are you still writing?" questions are now memory. So this edition is a bittersweet personal milestone for me, as I change the book's dedication, as always to my parents, to the past tense. Writing pulls motivations from deep in the psyche, even in textbook form (as contrasted with the creative freedom that I imagine novelists enjoy). Sometimes those motivations inspire hard work and creativity, though they also bring writing blocks (as my patient editors have witnessed). Yet textbook writing also produces an object impersonal enough to be shared with strangers, and so I turn attention from the personal to that which I share with my mostly anonymous readers.

Personality theory and research are exciting, as an academic place to map the bridges between our biological nature (with its potential and its limitations) and the culture that, for better or for worse, we have created. On both fronts, personality theory is advancing. Current biological knowledge adds details to the vision of early personality theorists, who recognized the importance if not the mechanisms of the nature side of the nature-nurture issue. Cultural awareness, though still rather limited in our theories, points to the higher-order reorganization of our innate potential that can take us to the divine or the demonic, and to an interface of personality with social psychology and related fields in the social sciences.

This edition brings some noteworthy changes. Biological trait approaches have, after expansion in previous editions, been promoted to their own chapter, reflecting their growing importance in personality theory and research. The importance of biology to personality has been a familiar theme throughout the history of the field, but only now, with studies of heredity and of physiological correlates of personality, do we have a way to detail the way heredity influences personality. In addition, evolutionary and other biological approaches have become sophisticated enough to permit consideration of individual developmental experience (such as the effects of reward and punishment), making biological approaches more applicable to themes traditionally important in the field of personality. Object relations theory, mentioned in earlier editions, is now given its own major section. It is placed in the Karen Homey chapter, since I consider her often neglected statements about the role of interpersonal relationships to be the clearest conceptual connection with the object relations approach, though perusal of the references cited by most papers in that area would not lead to this placement. The approach may be growing to demand its own chapter in the future (but what to displace? Ah, that's the author's nightmare.) Positive psychology has emerged as a current focus for the debates that humanistic psychologists have long considered, and so it 4s added to the humanistic perspective.

In addition, I have updated content within various chapters, adding here and pruning there. Researchers have contributed to sound, empirically based developments in existing theories: empirical studies of defense mechanisms in psychoanalytic theory; developmental and adult studies of attachment; cognitive research on suppression and memory, as some examples. The explosion of biological knowledge finds connections with diverse topics (including memory, learning, and traits), so biological material is referenced in many places. Although I have humbly toned down some of my comments in earlier editions about moving toward a more integrated, multi-level theory, there are enough developments in our field at all levels, from biological bases of personality, to increasing interest in cultural themes, to the almost visionary sentiments expressed in humanistic and positive psychology, to make me optimistic about an integrated multi-level theory. In fact, the connections among various theories have always been present, though not developed and often not highlighted in textbooks, since it is easier to present beginning students with distinctions among theories than with bridges connecting them. The theories that will be complex enough to incorporate multiple levels of explanation will not have the simple, literary quality of early theories, and they move scientific psychology farther from "pop psychology," but they are likely to contribute much more to our understanding.

The Illustrative Biographies that have been a feature of this text since the first edition are now reformatted, in response to reviewers' and teachers' requests for application of several theories to each biography, instead of only one theory, as in previous editions. So I have placed the biographies within the six Parts of the book instead of within each theoretical Chapter, in order to make systematic interpretation of these personalities from related theories in the same perspective. In addition, each biographical analysis includes suggestions about how theories in other theoretical perspectives could be applied; perhaps students and teachers would like to expand on these suggestions in their classes. Several of these Illustrative Biographies describe people not included in previous editions, and I hope you enjoy reading about them as much as I enjoyed reading their life stories (following the advice of Disraeli, quoted in Chapter 1).

Many reviewers and other advisors have offered helpful suggestions for this and previous editions. Unfortunately I have not been able to incorporate all of their advice, but even the suggestions that are not explicitly incorporated in this edition are incubating in my thoughts about personality and may surface later. Particular thanks to these reviewers, who helped make the transition from the previous edition.: Jeanine Feldman (San Diego State University); Eric Shiraev (George Mason University); Julie Ann Suhr (Ohio University); Eunkook Suh (University of California-Irvine); and Ehsha G. Klirs (George Mason University). Their advice adds to suggestions made by others, as reviewers of previous editions and, less formally; others who have offered advice: Kurt D. Baker (Emporia State University); Mary Louise Cashel (Southern Illinois University at Carbondale); George Domino (University of Arizona); Bernadette Tucker Duck (Chicago State University); Maria J. Lavooy (University of Central Florida); Thomas J. Martinez, III (private practice); Tom M. Randall (Rhode Island College); and Arthur W. Staats (University of Hawaii). Others have also helped by sending papers and books.

I am fortunate to work with great editors and their assistants at Prentice Hall. Thank you, Stephanie Johnson, Jill Liebowitz, Jeff Marshall, and many others, for attention to myriad details (such as procuring photographs and producing a cover). Bruce Hobart at Pine Tree Composition is again overseeing the production of the book from the manuscript, much to my delight, as he has done in each of the previous editions. Each time, the physical layout of the book becomes even more pleasing.

For many years, my students have been applying personality theories to biographies, and autobiographies, and listening to more personal applications and speculations than I dare to present in print. Their curiosity and quest for truth continue to energize me and to help me decide which old ideas are still useful, which should be set aside, and which need to test intuition with empirical research. In some cases, the biographies students have chosen to analyze for course assignments have inspired my choices for this new edition, though the interpretations are my own.

As I write these remarks, the world is debating the future of the Middle East and America's military actions. The memory of the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001 still haunt us. My son stood close enough to New York's World Trade Center during the attack to witness the horror of it, and that close call, especially since it came not long after my father's death, gave me a greater appreciation of the precious yet fragile gift of peace. Many people responded, as terror management theory would predict and as my student Cindy Smith verified in her honors research, with a surge of patriotism. The study of individual personalities, exciting as it is, must be supplemented by insights from other disciplines if we are to live wisely; personality dynamics sometimes resonate on the drums of history, and our continuing search for understanding has an urgency.

Susan C. Cloninger

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