DEFINITION:
In psychology, the term “personality” refers to the totality of the relatively stable characteristics and propensities (“traits”) that comprise an individual’s mental make-up and influence behavior under widely varied circumstances.
Personality traits include such things as interests, drives, values, abilities, self-understanding, and habits (recurrent affective and behavioral patterns).
ETYMOLOGY:
The English word “personality” is attested from the fourteenth century. It derives, via Middle English personalite, from the Late Latin noun, personalitas, personalitatis, which itself derives from the Late Latin adjective, personalis. Both words have essentially their modern meanings. They are also closely related to the Middle English and Old French word, persone, meaning “person.”
The Old French and Late Latin words derive from the classical Latin word persōna, which originally indicated the mask worn by an actor in a dramatic performance. This original meaning later expanded to encompass the character or role portrayed by the actor, to the actor himself, to individuals in general.
This shift had already occurred during the classical period.
DISCUSSION:
The idea of “personality” as a stable configuration of mental traits may be traced to Antiquity, especially, the book Ēthikoi charaktēres [Moral Characteristics] by Theophrastus (c. 371–c. 287 BC).
The notion entered modern medical thought through the 1801 book Traité médico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale [Medical-Philosophical Treatise on Mental Estrangement] by the French physician Philippe Pinel (1745–1826).
Gradually, over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “personality” gained acceptance as an essential diagnostic category for the study of abnormal mental states and behaviors.
Then, during the heyday of behaviorism (stimulus-response theory) between the 1930s and the 1950s, the concept of “personality” became somewhat sidelined as “unscientific.”
Beginning in the aftermath of World War II and attaining a modicum of mainstream acceptance by the 1960s, the notion of personality began to appear prominently in the work of psychologists—for example, Raymond Cattell and Hans Eysenck, among others—who were able to demonstrate its empirical utility by showing how various personality theories are capable of providing coherence to our understanding of many mental illnesses.
As it has developed over the past two or three generations, personality is now generally understood to be a complex, integrated, and dynamic psychological system whose features and capacities are the causal basis of human behavior. These features, or traits, may have biological or developmental sources (or both, in various proportions).
According to this conceptual framework, mental health is the result of a properly integrated set of personality traits, while mental illnesses such as anxiety and depression are understood as deriving from an improperly integrated personality.
The various different ways in which a healthy personality structure may be deficient thus give rise to the spectrum of diagnostic categories, such as narcissistic, obsessive-compulsive, paranoid, schizoid, borderline, and other personality disorders.