Four Major Personality Theories

There are many personality theories that exist and most of the major ones fall into the four major personality perspective theories. Each of these perspectives attempt to describe different patterns in personality. The four major theories are the Psychoanalytic Perspective, Trait Perspective, Humanistic Perspective, and Social Cognitive Perspective. The psychoanalytical theory of personality was conducted by Sigmund Freud. This theory emphasized the influence of unconscious mind on behavior and three elements of the human mind; the id, ego, and superego. The unconscious mind is a stockpile of feelings, thoughts, desires, and memories that are outside of a person’s conscious awareness. Most of the contents of the unconscious are feelings …show more content…
This theory rejects the psychoanalytical theory and social cognitive theory. It emphasizes on psychological growth, self development, and free will for personality development. It generally takes a positive outlook on human nature and is centered on how each person is able to achieve their potential. Roger’s approach suggests each person can achieve unconditional positive regard which is necessary love with no strings attached people need to be able to explore fully. But some people slow this process down with conditional positive regard which is love, affection, respect, and warmth that depend on what they want. Maslow suggested that people are motivated by the basic needs of necessary materials for living such as food and water. For humanist the drive towards self-actualization is an important part in personality development. Some things that can slow down the process of self-actualization are the expectations other have on us. One of the disadvantages is that the humanistic theories do not correlate with scientific studies thus it lacks empirical support. An advantage is it provides the foundations of active listening and helps to establish the counselor-to-client …show more content…
This theory emphasizes the importance of operational learning, self-efficacy, and cognitive processes. In social cognitive view, behavior is governed not just by the influence of external stimuli and response patterns but also by the cognitive processes such as anticipating, judging, and memory. Bandera believed that there were three factors influenced one another in determine the patterns of behavior that make up personality; the environment, the behavior itself, and the cognitive factors. These three factors impact each other, this is called reciprocal determinism. One of the most important variables is self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is a person’s expectancy of how effective their efforts are in accomplishing a goal. A person’s level of efficacy is determined by the persons past and support. An advantage of the theory is unlike behaviorism it includes social and metal processes and their influence on behavior which leads it to be tested under scientific