By: THEODORE MILLON
et al.
The interpersonal perspective argues that personality is best conceptualized as the social product of interactions with significant others. From beginning to end, we are always trans-acting either with real or imagined others and their expectations. Personality cannot be understood from the inside out, because it is intrinsically immersed in context. Harry Stack Sullivan is regarded as the father of interpersonal perspective.
Sullivan’s
contribution lay in realizing that some forms of mental disorder, while perhaps
most dramatically and tangibly manifest through the individual, are
nevertheless created and perpetuated through maladaptive patterns of social
interaction and communication. The issue with which Sullivan struggled, the
essential basis of the interpersonal approach, concerns the nature of the self.
Implicitly, all of us regard the self as a thing, a concrete entity or
substance with sharply defined boundaries, like a rock. If so, we should know
exactly who we are all the time. According to Sullivan, that is not the case.
No essential self lies hidden beneath the veils of the unconscious. Instead,
there is only a self-concept that is continually being defined and redefined by
the interpersonal communications of others.
After Sullivan, the
next important figure in the emerging interpersonal movement was Timothy Leary,
who believed that personality should be thought of in terms of levels, not
unlike the psychodynamic idea of levels of consciousness: public communication,
conscious description, private symbolization, attributions, unexpressed
unconscious, and values. Leary also contributed to the development of the interpersonal
circumplex, a figure that organizes personality constructs like the segments of
a circle, which is formed by crossing the two content dimensions believed to
define interpersonal communication—dominance and affiliation. Interpersonal
principles map directly to the circle. According to complementarity, for
example, interpersonal behavior is designed to elicit from others actions that
validate the sense of who we are. Pathologically rigid individuals possess a
constricted conception of self. Only a particular kind of response from others
is experienced as validating, and only this kind of response is sought from interpersonal
interactions. Since their needs are strong and consistent, individuals with a
constricted self-concept may be experienced as controlling or coercive. The
most creative contemporary development of interpersonal theory is Benjamin’s
(1974, 1996) SASB.
The SASB seeks to
integrate interpersonal conduct, object relations, and self-psychology in a
single geometric model. Cognitive psychology began in the 1950s as a reaction
against behaviorism. As an information processor, the mind actively gathers and
selects information about the world, self, and others at both conscious and
nonconscious levels. When cognitive distortions cohere as a pattern, they may
be thought of as cognitive styles. Different personalities process consensual
reality in different ways. Each of the personality disorders has its own style
of cognitive processing.
Cognitive
therapists hold that behavior can be explained by examining the contents of internal mental structures called schemas. Schemas are
assumed to mediate cognitive processing at every level, from sensation to
paradigms, and on to action plans that the organism can use to affect the
world. Like a cognitive filter, they are ever ready to be applied to create an interpretable
world. Everything put through the filter is automatically processed. As such, their
primary advantage lies in allowing experience to be processed with great efficiency. The
information-processing economy that schemas afford, however, also comes at a
cost. Because schemas necessarily exist between the raw data of sensation and the
meaningful world of subjective experience, they introduce interpretive biases
that preempt other construals, possibly distorting consensual reality. Beck
et al. (1990) applied
the cognitive perspective to the personality disorders, describing
the schemas, or core
beliefs, that shape the experience and behavior of personality-disordered
individuals. In addition, they emphasize the importance of cognitive
distortions. These are chronic and systematic errors in reasoning, which
promote the misinterpretation of consensual reality.
In personality,
the inductive perspective is intimately tied up with the history of psychology.
The most influential factor model of personality is the Five-Factor Model,
derived from analyses of various personality inventories, not words from the
dictionary. As the name indicates, this
model consists of five broad higher order factors: Neuroticism, Extroversion,
Openness to Experience, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. In turn, each dimension consists
of several lower order facet traits, thus lending the model a hierarchical structure.
The
evolutionary-neurodevelopmental model believes that evolution is the logical choice as a foundation for an integrated science of
the person. Psychological health is dependent on the fit between the entire configuration
of a person’s characteristics and potentials with those of the environments in which the
person functions. The first task of any organism is its immediate survival. Organisms
that fail to survive have been selected out, so to speak, and fail to
contribute their genes and characteristics to subsequent generations.
Evolutionary mechanisms related to survival tasks are oriented toward life enhancement and
life preservation. Such mechanisms form a polarity of Pleasure and Pain. Behaviors
experienced as pleasurable are generally repeated and generally promote survival,
while those experienced as painful generally have the potential to endanger
life and thus are not repeated. The second evolutionary task faced
universally by every
organism is adaptation. To exist is to exist within an environment.
Organisms must
either adapt to their surroundings or adapt their surroundings to conform to and
support their own style of functioning. The choice is essentially between a Passive versus Active orientation, that is, a tendency
to accommodate to a given ecological niche and accept what the environment offers,
versus a tendency to modify or intervene in the environment, thereby adapting
it to themselves. The third universal evolutionary task faced by every organism pertains to
reproductive styles, essentially sociobiological mechanisms, that each gender uses to
maximize its representation in the gene pool. All organisms must ultimately reproduce to
evolve. A parallel framework of neurodevelopment is outlined to demonstrate the
ontogenetic stages through which humans progress so as to acquire the
sensitivities and competencies required to function in accord with their evolutionary
origins.
According to
evolutionary theory, personality is manifested in eight different domains: expressive
acts, interpersonal conduct, cognitive style, defense mechanisms, self-image,
object-representations, morphologic organization, and mood-temperament.
References
Personality
Disorders in Modern Life, second edition, 2000, 2004 by John Wiley & Sons,
Inc.
Read Also
Development of Personality DisordersAssessment and Therapy of the personality Disorders
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