Personality Development Term Paper

human personality is a complex process that has been tackled by a number of great psychologists, each with important contributions. Each theory outlined below offers something new to the study of personality, and as such, I feel that any "ultimate" theory of personality must try to incorporate the best parts of each theory.

Gordon Allport, along with Maslow and Rogers was one of the early humanists. He argued that the proprium, or sense of self was made up of seven different components that include sense of body, self-image, self-esteem, and rational coping. Carl Rogers was a humanistic theorist who felt that people have a basic "actualizing tendency" that drives all of their behaviors and thoughts. The personality, or "self" in Roger's terms is created by the sum of a person's conscious and unconscious experiences. Abraham Maslow's famed hierarchy of needs, in which he argues that all humans move toward self-actualization, has become one of the most important concepts in humanistic psychology today. Rollo May was an existential psychologist who felt that human personality was essentially self-determined.Behaviorist psychology has been largely influential in the past decades. B.F. Skinner is one of the founders of the behaviorist approach, who based his system on operant conditioning. Personality, for Skinner, is determined by reinforcements and punishments. Hans Eysenck's theories of personality are rooted in behaviorism, although he felt that personality was largely genetically determined. Albert Bandura based his psychology primarily in the behaviorist camp, and saw personality as a complex interaction of behavior, environment, and individual psychological processes. His work with imagery sometimes leads him to be considered as one of the important "fathers" of cognitive psychology, however.

Commonly known as the social psychologists Alfred Adler and Karen Horney took some Freudian ideas, but focused more on the social aspects of personality. Alfred Adler's theory of personality was concerned with the whole of a person, and he focused on their "style of life," or how they chose to live life, and deal with interpersonal relationships and problems. Karen Horney's ideas on personality are very similar to those of Alfred Alder, although….....