PERSONALITY!

Here's more excerpts from the same class of mine that the ego material was from. This material is on "personality." Again, feel free to ask questions.

PERSONALITY

Webster’s Dictionary - The visible aspects of one’s character; a person as an embodiment of a collection of qualities.

Psychiatric Dictionary - The personality represents a compromise between inner drives and needs and the controls that limit or regulate their expression. The personality functions to maintain a stable, reciprocal relationship between the person and his environment. The personality, in other words, is a set of habits that characterize the person in his way of managing day to day living; under ordinary conditions, it is relatively stable and predictable, and for the most part it is ego-syntonic.

Freud - Three aspects of the personality: Id, Ego, Superego.
Id: Completely unconscious, its sole function is to provide for the immediate discharge of energy or tension. It contains the Pleasure Principle and the survival instinct. It is the “obscure, inaccessible part of our personality...the reservoir of the psychic representations of the drives of sex and aggression.”
Ego: The executive of the personality, controlling and governing the id and superego and maintaining communication with the external world in the interest of the total personality and its needs. It is governed by the Reality Principle, the aim of which is to postpone the discharge of energy until the actual object that will satisfy the need has been discovered or produced.
Superego: The moral or judicial branch of the personality that represents one’s perceived ideal, striving for perfection rather than pleasure or reality. It includes idealized images of parents, positive and negative, and judgments about good and bad, right and wrong, and what is deserving of reward or punishment.


Jung - Three levels of the psyche: Consciousness, Personal Unconscious, Collective Unconscious.
Consciousness: The only part of the mind that is known directly by the individual. It has four mental functions (thinking, feeling, sensing and intuiting) and two attitudes (introversion and extroversion).
Personal Unconscious: Contains all psychic activities and contents which have been repressed or disregarded such as distressing thought, unsolved problems and personal conflict. The contents here are usually accessible to the consciousness when the need for them arises.
Collective Unconscious: A reservoir of latent, primordial images inherited from our ancestral past manifested as predispositions or potentialities for experiencing or responding to the world. The contents of the collective unconscious are called archetypes (meaning original models after which other similar images are patterned), a major one being the persona which is a mask or facade one exhibits publicly with the intention of presenting a favorable impression in order to be accepted. A person may have more than one mask, and collectively, all of one’s masks constitute the persona. Other major archetypes include the anima, which is the feminine side of the male psyche, the animus, the masculine side of the female psyche, and the shadow, which contains the human being’s basic animal nature and is the source of the best and the worst in humanity.

Berne - Transactional Analysis emphasizes the influence of the ego states of Parent, Adult and Child on a person’s interactions with others. The Parent ego state relates to limit-setting and nurturing; it is based on the subject’s perception of their own parents. The Adult ego state is concerned with reality testing and estimating probabilities in transactions with the outside world. The Child ego state comprises the feelings, wishes, and adaptations actually experienced in childhood.
Most outcomes of an exchange are determined by ulterior transactions, psychological responses that are outside the awareness of the participants. People play games, adopting the role of Persecutor, Rescuer, or Victim, using ulterior transactions in such a way that everyone loses.

Pierrakos - Three levels of personal reality: Core, Lower Self, Mask
The Core: the human being’s whole capacity, a glowing, vital mass, both the source and the perceiver of life force. The Core has complete unity, no either-or, no good-bad. It is an indivisible vibratory operation, a process in which every person knows the truth instinctively by sensing the pulse of life. The qualitative characteristics of the core are the primal positive emotions, or movements to make contact and unify with the outside world, summed up as one supreme expression: love.
Lower Self: the source of the primal negative emotions. These destructive emotions are galvanized when positive impulses from level 1 are negated, whether from inside or outside of the organism. This negation is the seat of fight or flight reactions in their various forms and degrees - rage and hatred, panic and terror, cruelty and selfishness, the negative impulses described by Freud.
Mask: The outer husk of the human defensive structure, which presents a false face, an idealized, self image to the world. The mask seeks to conceal the Lower Self by misappropriating the energy of the Core.

Gomez - Three aspects of the personality: Childish Self, Adult Self, True Self
Childish Self: The Childish Self contains the primal basic human needs and the raw, negative feelings, such as rage and terror (and their derivatives), when those needs are not gratified. The Childish Self develops enough intellect to know that if it expresses itself directly from its raw feelings, it will receive a negative response from the environment, so it creates the Masked Self (False Self). In that effort, the Childish Self creates an idealized self image and then tries to act as if it really were that image to get what it needs and wants, trying to appear pleasing or cooperative, special, etc.
Adult Self: The Adult Self is the current, but temporary, “captain” of the personality with its will power and intellect/reasoning capacities; its tasks are to be in contact with inner and outer reality, with the Childish Self and the True Self, to facilitate a “dialogue” between the three aspects of the personality, and to know from which aspect one is coming from at any given moment; the main task of the Adult Ego is to integrate with the True Self, to give itself up, ultimately, and surrender to the True Self (This can only be done if the ego is strong, and the adult ego is strengthened by bringing the unconscious Childish Self to the surface so it can be seen and transformed, so the adult can be its mentor, to educate and love the child, finding and correcting the erroneous beliefs, and clearing the held negative feelings and the motives and constructs behind those feelings).
True Self: (Inner Self, Higher Self) This aspect is eternal, contains all of the creativity, intuition, wisdom and pure pleasure of one’s being; it is the Universe itself, consciousness in the deepest and highest sense, eternally moving; it manifests as inspirations and knowingness; the more we are in contact with the Higher Self, the more secure and safe we feel, the more able to cope with everything, the more apparent contradictions unify, fears disappear, and life becomes pleasurable; this is the real potential in everyone; it is the destiny towards which evolution moves us; it is the deep constant longing that we have inside.

Broch (“Guide”) - Personality is based on these three attributes - Love, Wisdom and Divine Will (True Self) which become Emotions, Reason and Will Power (Adult;) which become Fear, Pride and Self-Will (Child, distorted), with a predominance of one or two. The three aspects each have a place in the personality when we are functioning harmoniously. (Often, however, they are directed into the wrong channels. For example, when you need to use your love attribute, but you use your will instead.)