Case Study
...ways? What accounts for similarities and differences among people? Do people have some choice in shaping their own personality? Do hidden, unconscious forces control people’s behavior? Is human behavior shaped by heredity or by environment? [1]
For centuries, philosophers and other great thinkers have sought to acquire answers for these questions as they pondered the nature of human beings. You may have heard this saying “There are few differences between people, but what differences there are really matter.” This proposition which embodies truth tends to sum up the personality psychologists’ viewpoint. They want to know what makes you different from the other person. Why do some people make friends easily, whereas others are lonely? Can we predict who will rise to the top of the business ladder and who will fall short? Why are some people introverted while others are so outgoing? Answers to these questions have indeed interest personality theorists in order to relieve the mind from doubt or uncertainty.[2]
Personality theorists then began to emerge, each with different way and method of explaining the nature of human beings in terms of their personality or how certain situations affect human’s behavior as well as how behavior reflects the individual. Sigmund Freud, for instance, the father of Psychoanalytic Theory, combine philosophical speculations with a primitive scientific method. That is, he listens to his patients in order to find out what hidden conflicts lay behind their acts of placing out something within them.
Freud’s method gradually became more scientific as he formulated hypotheses and checked their plausibility against his clinical experiences. As the years passed, he eventually evolved the first modern theory of personality. Later on, other people in the field of psychology also developed their own theories of...
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