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Chapter 1 Introduction to Personality Psychology 24

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FIGURE 1.5 Phrenology as a useful pseudoscience. Image of a phrenology journal (a) and a lithograph showing a caricature of Franz Joseph Gall ‘reading the bumps’ on the skull (b). Credit: (a) Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. (b) Wellcome Collection. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The idea that the brain is the basis of the mind appealed to the general public. As the Association of Psychological Science reported, phrenology was the intellectual rage of nineteenth-century America. Although phrenologists ‘got the details laughably wrong’, personality neuroscience now uses advanced methods to explore the brain basis of personality traits—one of the leaders in this field, Colin DeYoung, is the co-author of Chapter 13 of this book. During the middle to late nineteenth century, there was ‘something in the air’ around the biology of the mind and personality. We see this in the work of Ivan Pavlov that we discuss in section 1.5.4. It might surprise some that it also captured the attention of a young physician by the name of Sigmund Freud. During his earlier years, Freud was certainly inter ested in the brain, although later the mental processes he postulated became increasingly abstract and only loosely, if at all, tied to what was known about the brain at the time. However, Freud held firm to the prospect that, one day, his theory would be confirmed by brain 1.5.2 FREUD AND THE BRAIN

science; namely the ‘attempt to make the complica tions of mental functioning intelligible by dissecting the function and assigning its different constituents to different components of the [mental] apparatus’ (Freud, 1900). It is interesting to note that in 1999, the academic journal Neuropsychoanalysis was established which took Freud’s ideas back to neuroscience. Freud laid out his plans in his 1895 book, am bitiously entitled Project for a Scientific Psychology . Indeed, such was Freud’s interest in the brain, accord ing to Centonze et al. (2004), that a good case can be made for him anticipating future brain research into the neural formation of memory, later articulated by Bliss and Lømo (1973) in terms of long-term potenti ation of memory/learning. In fact, Freud’s ‘Project’ was an attempt to provide a neurobiological basis for men tal functions. While in his later writings, Freud veered away from neurophysiological theories towards a purely psychological one (discussed in Chapter 2), many others continued down the neurophysiological path and chose not to follow in Freud’s psychody namic footsteps. Around the same time of the mid nineteenth cen tury, interest in the relationship between the brain and personality was found in other quarters. Although

© Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press