Three Goals For Personality Development

“When you are whole, you have discovered yourself once again, and you know what you have been all the time.” - Carl Jung

Introduction

Carl Rogers, a great American psychotherapist, believed that "Man’s awesome scientific advances into the infinitude of space as well as the infinitude of sub-atomic particles seems most likely to lead to the total destruction of our world unless we can make great advances in understanding and dealing with interpersonal and intergroup tensions" (Rogers, 1995). I agree with Rogers, and that's one of the reasons why I'm trying to become a psychologist rather than an economist or political scientist. I don't think people are fundamentally motivated by culture, biological determinism, or economic conditions, although all of those factors no doubt play a role in human behavior. I believe that these facts culminate into an idiosyncratic personality which could be thought of as a system of values (Ellenberger, 1970). Our adaptation, our personality development, necessarily involves wrestling with these different forces, failing to act properly due to an incorrect valuation, and learning from those experiences. It is the individual's ability to integrate all of the complex layers of being (physical, biological, social, psychological) that makes him an embodiment of the proper patterns attention that align not only himself but those around him with the natural order of reality. It is also this alignment with the natural order that makes individuals and groups resistant to ideological capture, something that I've been paying attention to in our current culture, with the seemingly increasing proliferation of parasitic ideas (Saad, 2020). What I want to do in this paper is detail some ideas of what a developed personality can look like with the hope that these can become goals towards which you can work in your own life.

Understand Your Complexity

You are not simple, rigid, or transparent entity. You are complex beyond your own imagination. Let's walk through the nature of this complexity and its impact on our experience. We have three types of knowledge and memory systems: Behavioral, imagistic, and semantic (Schacter, 1996). We also have many different emotional and motivational psychobiological systems which do not always work in a harmonious fashion (Panksepp, 1998). Another paradigm that attempts to capture your complexity is found at the level of personality and asserts that you have five dimensions along which you express your perceptions, behaviors, emotions, and motivations (McCrae, 1992). These are just a few examples of how you are best understood as a complex and dynamic entity that consists of hierarchically organized sub-systems. Many of these systems, such as your motivational and emotional systems, evolved to solve specific problems that have plagued living organisms for a long time. While they are incredibly useful and sophisticated, they can also lead to perceptions and behaviors that are socially inappropriate, or they can cause distress if they come into conflict with each other. We have this capacity to say one thing, feel another way, and then behave in a completely different manner. This incongruence, as Rogers would call it, can be a great source of anxiety, frustration, and confusion. Part of developing a personality is integrating across all of these components that make a gestalt, or a whole that makes up more than the sum of the parts. Think of a beautiful piece of music. You could listen to the instruments, vocals, and read the lyrics separately, but when you put them all together, you get something that cannot be found in any individual piece alone. One goal in developing your personality is to become a beautiful musical piece that revolves around a conductor which harmonizes and organizes the individual instruments with their necessary and important functions. The conductor must be in an integrative relationship with each section, for neither can manifest their full potential on their own. The first step along this path of personality development is to acknowledge that you have different semi-autonomous sub-personalities that, if not attended to properly, can rise up throw off the whole performance.

Listen to Yourself

Once you've come to terms with the fact that you aren't a master in your own home, the next step is to build a relationship with those different parts of you. Carl Jung, a famous psychoanalyst, believed that a major part of your psyche was the unconscious, and within the unconscious were these sub-personalities that we've been speaking of (Jung, 1990). He thought of these sub-personalities as archetypes, deep patterns of being that have existed at least as long as there have been animals. For Jung, part of developing a personality, a process which he called individuation, entailed giving voice to the archetypes, but not in a way that allowed them to take over your entire being. For example, anger is an archetypal expression. Its purpose is the domination of a threat so that the individual can survive. It has its own set of perceptions, behaviors, and emotional salience. We, as amateur conductors of our psychological orchestra, can attempt to ignore and silence our anger, but we can only manage this to such an effect. Jung believed that our psychic energy adhered to the law of the conservation of energy. Thus, if anger, with its psychic energy, manifested into consciousness but we did not allow its full expression, it would find an outlet in some other way, perhaps in an unconscious expression or in a dream. This can often result in a displacement. Let's say my boss makes me angry, but I suppress this rage. I may come home and purposely, but unconsciously, get into a fight with my wife just so that the rage can find its outlet. Once you realize that you are a personality that consists of different sub-personalities, the next step is to find the appropriate outlets and forms of expression for those emotions, as ignoring them will likely push them further outside of your control.

Integrate Your Persona

While an underdeveloped personality may struggle to harmonize across its sub-personalities, leading to a suppression of certain primary experiences, another problem may manifest itself in terms of integrating your persona. Your persona is the psychological mask you wear to simplify yourself to society. Through numerous social interactions across hundreds and thousands of years, groups, communities, and cultures come to develop joint expectations and norms that enable more efficient communication, collaboration, and competition. Cultural norms allow groups to do more while exerting less energy. At the same time, cultural norms can be constricting and even tyrannical. In many cultures today, and for most of human history, slavery, the domination of women, and deception are and were the norm. Changes in cultural norms start in the psyches of individuals, and this implies that individuals must have some capacity to identify their preferences and desires as separate from that of the group. It's a difficult problem, because sometimes the right thing to do is to subordinate your selfish wants for the group, and sometimes the group has become a mob, and the moral thing to do is to stand out against the crowd. Part of discerning the correct course first requires the ability to integrate the social expectations of others. Integration is a specific process. It is not suppression, which is to drown out the persona with other experiences or phenomena. Nor is it over-identification, which would be the sacrifice of the greater psyche and the loss of your own voice for the shallow protection of societal conformity. Integration is the ability to develop a relationship that is oriented towards a common goal, and ideally a goal that is good and allows for the maintenance of all parties involved. Just as you and your intimate partner dance in a game of give-and-take as you navigate conflicts, all oriented towards a future vision of a meaningful and engaging relationship, that same pattern can be used to frame how you should deal with your persona. You need to take the expectations of others into account, but this must be balanced with your own notions of what is right and wrong. The best way to do this, in my opinion, is by setting goals that are good, communicating these goals with those around you, and attending to the world in a manner that enables the attainment of your goals, and theirs, all while allowing each person to feel like they are participating in something worthwhile.

Conclusion

Rogers believed that we had to develop ourselves morally if we were to keep up with the increasing rate of technological power that is finding its way in the hands of more and more people, not all of them being good actors. In my opinion, there's no difference between developing yourself morally and developing your personality. Most of us started off not being able to distinguish ourselves internally. Perhaps we simply shifted from being possessed by one sub-personality to being possessed by the next. During these possessions, such as a temper tantrum, a state of paralyzing fear, or being overwhelmed by anxiety to the point of tears, we become single-minded. It is as if the violin section started screeching, bringing all of the other sections to a halt and straining the ears of the audience. On top of this, still being characterized as having an undeveloped personality, we may overvalue the criticisms of other people, drowning out our own inner thoughts and feelings. A developed personality, one that may increase the likelihood of allowing us to navigate the landscape of technological innovation and inoculate ourselves against ideological capture, is one that accepts the fact that we are incredibly complex creatures that consist of different sub-personalities, that listens to and enables the integration of these sub-personalities, and that attends to the social environment in a manner that creates harmony across your individual goal-oriented behaviors and the actions and expectations of others.

References

Ellenberger, H. F. (1970). The discovery of the unconscious: the history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry. Basic Books.

Jung, C. G. (1990). The Archetypes and The Collective Unconscious. Princeton.

McCrae, R. R., & John, O. P. (1992). An introduction to the five-factor model and its applications. Journal of personality, 60(2), 175–215. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.1992.tb00970.x

Panksepp, J. (1998). Affective Neuroscience. Oxford University Press.

Rogers, C. R. (1995). On Becoming a Person. Houghton Mifflin.

Saad, G. (2020). The Parasitic Mind. Regnery.

Schacter, D. L. (1996). Searching for Memory: The Brain, The Mind, and The Past. BasicBooks.