9780198811398_Ch1

1.1 INTRODUCTION 9

as psychology more generally. One major impetus was Freud’s psychodynamic work (detailed in Chapter 2), and this was followed by the behavioural and cognitive perspectives (detailed in Chapter 3) that provided two additional sources of scientific inspiration. As detailed in Chapter 4, it was not long afterwards that these grand perspectives came under sustained attack for being far too mechanistic and reductionistic, and dehumanizing . The humanistic challenge strived to return the whole person to the centre stage of psy chological life (much as it had been in literature, e.g. Shakespeare’s plays). Although the grand perspectives discussed in Chapters 2–4 are clearly important in per sonality and general psychology, they are by no means the whole story. Not all personality psychologists adhered to these grand perspectives, and many were inspired by other approaches discussed in this chapter (e.g. biologi cal accounts). Some personality psychologists defied easy characterization of their approach. For example, take the case of Hans Eysenck (discussed in Chapter 5). Even though he had been accused of being far too reductionistic and statistical in outlook, he still re mained focused on the whole person. For example, Stevens (2016) criticized Hans Eysenck’s empirical– statistical approach to personality description and understanding, yet Eysenck wrote books such as Psychology is About People (1977), which draws atten tion to the whole person, although not in a humanistic way (see Corr, 2016b). Such books by even apparently reductionistic personality scientists, with their focus on statistical methodology and biological processes, reflect something essential about personality psychol ogy: it reflects a generalist perspective on psychology and, by its nature, it tries to integrate the whole person (Revelle, 2016)—although, it must be said, often as an assembly of separate traits, factors, and such like. This is unlike much of general psychology, which is focused on only some parts of the psychological system (e.g. perception, or learning, cognition, social interactions, genetics, and so forth). Overall, we could say that personality psychology is ‘concerned with describing and explaining the ob served complexity of individual differences in the pat terning of (A) affect, (B) behaviour, (C) cognition and (D) desires over time and space’ (Revelle, 2008, p. 508). When we define personality in this way, we cannot

avoid synthesizing many processes that are more commonly kept separate in general psychology (e.g. emotion, motivation, social behaviour, development, and so on). Personality psychology demands that we unify the (often-separated) factors and processes to capture the essence: the whole person . It is for this rea son that we need to avoid the temptation of simplify ing the various theoretical approaches to personality description and explanation—the subject is far too in teresting to be reduced to spurious, sometimes called ‘straw (wo)man’, arguments. Nevertheless, there remains a tension in general psychology of, on the one hand, viewing the human mind as a collection of separate ‘faculties’, ‘processes’, ‘factors’, and the like, and, on the other hand, seeing the ‘subject’ as a flesh-and-blood whole person—this ten sion is found in personality psychology, too. Many stu dents entering academic psychology experience this tension, and they may well wonder what happened to the ‘person’ in the many and varied psychological the ories they encounter. Sometimes, of course, this ana lytical approach does not matter much—or may seem not to. For example, if we want to understand the vi sual system we do not need to know much about other systems, but most psychological phenomena cannot be so easily isolated. Personality psychology may be seen as an antidote to this ‘splitting’ in psychology and, in stead, it serves a more ‘lumping’ purpose. In any event, however we choose to perceive these tensions in the theoretical approach, they reflect fundamental issues that persist to this day (e.g. as seen in the trait approach to personality description which focuses on separate ‘factors’ to describe the whole person; see Chapter 6). Although we can choose to label them as‘historical and conceptual’, they run through present-day psychiatry, psychology (including clinical psychology), and the wider behavioural and social sciences (e.g. econom ics and sociology). For example, we are still debating to what extent we can understand mental illness out side of its social context (Bentall, 2009), and some have even asked if mental illness is a ‘myth’ (Szasz, 1974). Big questions remain to be answered, even to be asked. Nevertheless, in spite of these difficulties, personal ity psychology has made remarkable progress over the past 100 years, especially when we consider that it has to deal with complex and elusive concepts, constructs, and operations.

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© Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press