From 'character' to 'personality'

The lack of a generally accepted, unifying theory hasn't curbed research into the study of personality.

In the early 19th century, when astronomers timed the passage of stars overhead, they noticed that they all came up with different results. These individual differences were chalked up to differences in response or "personality" of the eye and ear.

Such "personality" differences led to the study of human reaction times in the earliest days of experimental psychology. "Character" was a more commonly used term then for what we mean by personality today.

In those days, phrenologists, from Franz Josef Gall to the Fowler brothers, described "faculties" of mind that were clearly personality variables. French writers dealt with personality in the late 19th century as a significant aspect of human life. Theodule Ribot, director of the first psychological laboratory in France, developed a physiological theory of personality in the tradition of somatic psychiatry, while Pierre Janet postulated conscious and unconscious personalities or selves. The latter influenced William James in his "Principles of Psychology."

For James, the first fact for psychologists to consider is that "thinking of some sort goes on." And thinking, he said, is personal: Every thought is part of a personal consciousness that leads the individual to choose which experiences of the outside world to deal with or reject.

James recognized that the self was made up of constituent selves--material, social, spiritual and the pure ego--all aspects of personality in 20th century psychology. The term "personality," however, did not become popular in America until Morton Prince's 1906 book "Dissociation of a Personality." Mary Calkins extended James's work on self in her theories on self-psychology.

Attempts to measure personality traits began in Germany the same year.

Heymans and Wiersma used rating scales to investigate interests, aptitudes and temperaments. The number of such scales grew quickly thereafter, including Webb's very elaborate scale in England. In the United States, an early attempt to measure personality variables was made by Robert S. Woodworth in his Personal Data Sheet, also known as the Psychoneurotic Inventory, which became the model for such tests.

Later, Gordon Allport brought personality into the psychological mainstream of the United States with his 1937 work "Personality: A Psychological Interpretation." He defined personality as "the dynamic organization within the individual of those psychophysical systems that determine his unique adjustments to his environment."

He gave personality the same survival value that James gave consciousness. Allport and the group he gathered at Harvard in the 1930s did much to establish personality as a legitimate field within psychology.

Other key works at the time include Henry Murray's "Explorations in Personality" and H.H. Morgan and C.D. Murphy's development of the Thematic Apperception Technique. The latter used pictures with sufficient vagueness to allow subjects to project their personalities into the results. Another projective technique, the Rorschach "inkblot" test, was introduced and later updated and extended by Wayne Holtzman.

In 1940, Starke Hathaway and J.C. McKinley of the University of Minnesota introduced one of the century's most popular self-report personality inventories: the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory or MMPI. The tool was particularly useful for manipulation by correlation statistics.

In the 1960s, the Myers-Briggs test translated Carl Jung's personality theory into a measure that has become widely used.

There has been no lack of personality theories. To Freud, personality was a dynamic concept in which mental life was an interplay of urging and blocking forces. Carl Jung's 1928 theories of introversion and extroversion opened new dimensions for describing normal personality types.

Type theories, an attempt to classify people into a few categories, have been around since phrenology and physiognomy. In the 1920s, Kretschmer's somatotypic theory of personality emerged and was expanded by William Sheldon with his endomorphic, mesomorphic and ectomorphic body types and their resulting personality types.

Later, Gordon Allport and Philip Vernon concentrated on clusters of traits rather than attempting to group people under one classification. The humanistic psychology movement, particularly through the influence of Abraham Maslow's 1954 "Motivation and Personality," emphasized personal needs for self-actualization rather than biological determination.

Behavioral psychology entered the fray in 1941 with Neal Miller's and John Dollard's "Social Learning and Imitation," while their landmark "Personality and Psychotherapy" of 1950 brought environmental factors into consideration.

The issue of whether personality is something persistent and basic or learned and transient led to dissatisfaction with the psychodynamic, trait and type theories. Walter Mishel's "Personality and Assessment" in 1968 was a particularly telling criticism, although each of these theory types remains in evidence as the century comes to a close.

Personality has never truly coalesced as a subject matter in psychology, as has developmental or social psychology. There has never been an overarching theory or even a thoroughly acceptable definition as to what personality is.

None of this has prevented personality from being the subject of psychological research and theory-making, however. It is perhaps the implicit belief that personality is somehow at the core of who we are that has kept it under consideration and contention throughout this century and is likely to continue the discussion well into the next.

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