www.psychspace.com心理学空间网Andras Angyal
In this paper I shall present a particular model which I have advocated previously for the formulation of a theory of personality (1), reformulating certain aspects of this theoretical orientation and illustrating my points with pertinent examples taken mainly from the field of psychotherapeutic theory and practice.
A Theoretical Model for Personality Studies
(1951)
Note
The main concepts of this essay are those ofself-determinationandself-surrenderas the basic aspects of personality development. The tendency towards self-determination makes the individual unique and the one towards self-surrender allows him to participate in society, sharing ideas and ways of life. The development of only one of those tendencies produces an unhealthy personality and a distasteful society. But this is precisely what the state and the state-oriented education do by fostering the emergence of power-hungry people (that become then political leaders) and power-prone masses (that become then the indistinct magma of state subjects).
In this paper I shall present a particular model which I have advocated previously for the formulation of a theory of personality (1), reformulating certain aspects of this theoretical orientation and illustrating my points with pertinent examples taken mainly from the field of psychotherapeutic theory and practice.
Personality may be described most adequately when looked upon as a unified dynamic organization - dynamic, because the most significant fact about a human being is not so much his static aspect as his constituting a specificprocess: the life of the individual. This process, the life of the person, is an organized, patterned process, a Gestalt, an organization. A true organization presupposes an organizing principle, a unifying pattern. All part processes obtain their specific meaning or specific function from this unifying over-all pattern. Therefore it seems plausible that a tentative phrasing of the nature of this total pattern - the broad pattern of human life - may serve as an adequate model for the formulation of the problems pertaining to the study of personality.
The over-all pattern of personality function can be described from two different vantage points. Viewed from one of these vantage points, the human being seems to be striving basically to assert and to expand his self-determination. He is an autonomous being, a self-governing entity that asserts itself actively instead of reacting passively like a physical body to the impacts of the surrounding world. This fundamental tendency expresses itself in a striving of the person to consolidate and increase his self-government, in other words to exercise his freedom and to organize of self. This tendency - which I have termed "the trend toward increased autonomy" - expresses itself in spontaneity, self-assertiveness, striving for freedom and for mastery. In an objective fashion this tendency can be described as follows: the human being is an autonomous unity that, acting upon the surrounding world, molds and modifies it. His life is a resultant of self-determination on the one hand and the impacts of the surrounding world, the situation, on the other. This basic tendency, the trend toward increased autonomy, expresses the person's striving from a state of lesser self-determination (and greater situational influence) to a state of greater self-determination (and lesser situational influence) . Seen from another vantage point, human life reveals a very different basic pattern from the one described above. From this point of view the person appears to seek a place for himself in a larger unit of which he strives to become a part. In the first tendency we see him struggling for centrality in his world, trying to mold, to organize, the objects and the events of his world, to bring them under his own jurisdiction and government. In the second tendency he seems rather to strive to surrender himself willingly to seek a home for himself in and to become an organic part of something that he conceives as greater than himself. The superindividual unit of which one feels oneself a part, or wishes to become a part, may be variously formulated according to one's cultural background and personal understanding. The superordinate whole may be represented for a person by a social unit - family, clan, nation - by a cause, by an ideology, or by a meaningfully ordered universe. In the realm of aesthetic, social, and moral attitudes this basic human tendency has a central significance. Its clearest manifestation, however, is in the religious attitude and religious experience.
I wish to state with emphasis that I am not speaking here about a tendency which is an exclusive prerogative of some people only, e.g., of those with a particular religious bent or aesthetic sensitivity, but of a tendency that I conceive as a universal and basic characteristic in all human beings.