Unconscious Determinants of Personality Essay

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Psychological Influences on Personality Development

Recognizing Various Unconscious Behavioral Determinants

Contemporary psychologists understand that myriad influences of variable origin contribute to the development of human personality. Some of those influences are more apparent than others and some operate on the conscious level whereas others operate on a completely unconscious level. Naturally, the latter present more complex potential issues simply because they are not known to the individual. That is especially true with regard to aspects of personality whose roots go back to infancy but that only become manifest in behavior only much later.

Different psychological theorists have provided conflicting explanations for the origin of major issues in human personality development. Freud, for example, regarded virtually all manifestations of psychological pathology as being the result of early trauma, sexual impulses, and the failure to successfully negotiate specific stages of infancy, such as the oral stage, anal stage, and the Oedipal stage. According to Freud, those early traumas and challenges are narcissistic in origin (Textbook, p. 179). They are repressed from the conscious memory but generate characteristic psychological defenses that define aspects of personality later (Textbook, p.185).

'Other theorists, such as Erikson, took a more general approach to understanding human psychology (and psychoses) development that acknowledged the importance of the same chronological periods, emphasized by Freud, particularly during the first year of life (Textbook, p. 244), but without reliance on those same specific themes focused upon by Freud in his classic psychodynamic approach to human psychology.

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A Problematic Aspect of Personality

One of the more interesting problematic aspects of human personality development concerns the issue of attachment theory first elucidated by Bowlby and Ainsworth in the mid twentieth century in relation to the importance of the earliest relationship between infants and their mothers. In particular, Bowlby and Ainsworth illustrated that mothers could substantially influence the degree to which their children developed secure or insecure maternal attachments through the character and nature of their interactions with their infants (Bretherton, 1992 p. 766). Building upon the contributions of Bowlby and Ainsworth to attachment theory, other theorists studied the prevalence of securely attached and insecurely attached infants and disclosed that the majority of children (i.e. between 57 and 73%) tend to exhibit secure maternal attachments while a minority (i.e. between 15 and 32%) tend to exhibit what Bowlby and Ainsworth originally characterized as "insecure/avoidant" maternal attachment (Byng-Hall, 1995 p. 48).

Originally, Bowlby and Ainsworth devised a so-called "strange situation" experiment to test infants for the quality of their respective attachments to their mothers (Textbook, p. 236). More specifically,….....

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