Personality
Personality is the set of characteristics of a person that determine how he or she will react to situations throughout his or her life. It is also known as temperament or character. It is not by evaluating the favorable and/or unfavorable traits that determine whether an individual has more or less personality.
In Roman times, theater actors used masks called “personae” that symbolized the character they were playing. That is where the word personality comes from.
Each individual has his or her own characteristics, his or her development throughout his or her life is what makes up his or her personality. We must add inherited tendencies and the modifications that experience brings. It is a circular process: according to our physical constitution, heredity, and temperament, we interpret the experiences we live in one way or another and react to them, and these experiences in turn modify our personality.
Freud is known as the man who, at the end of the 19th century, ventured into the scientific study of personality development. He distinguished three primary levels in the human mind: the Id (the instinctive and its satisfaction), the Ego (putting into practice what has been decided) and the Superego (conscience, family teachings, principles, the brake). According to Freud, in a healthy person these three levels should act in balance, harmoniously.
However, Alfred Adler, one of Freud’s disciples who later formed his own school, stated that the most accurate way to explain personality development was the effort to overcome and the awareness of oneself as an individual.
He referred to compensation: if I am an individual who does not know how to dance and this makes me feel inferior to others, I will adapt myself by compensating for this by being the best dancer or the best student at school or by training myself in singing in a way that surpasses me. From Adler comes the concept of the inferiority complex.
However, both Freud and Adler agreed on the importance of the influence of childhood on the development of personality and, of course, of the norms that govern the society in which the individual lives.
