by Carol Wohlfeil

Created on: November 14, 2008

What determines who we are? Is our personality a product of our primitive ancestors or a response to our environment? Psychologists have suggested many theories to explain the origin of personality, the similarities in personality traits from one person to another, and the unique personalities in our world that seem to be an exception to all the rules.

Austrian physician, Sigmund Freud, developed the psychoanalytic theory which suggested that "much of our behavior is motivated by the unconscious, a part of the personality of which a person is not aware." He believed that personality was made up of three parts working together to balance the conscious and unconscious and control our behavior; the id, which encompasses primitive inborn drives such as hunger and sex; the ego, which controls the primitive desires of the id; and the superego, which acts upon what we have been taught is right and wrong according to society.

From those who studied the Freudian theory evolved a new group of theorists, known as neo-Freudian psychoanalysts. These theorists agreed that personality traits are consistent among people. However, neo-Freudians such as Carl Jung disagreed with the value Freud placed on sexual urges as a driving force in personality, and instead suggested that "people have a collective unconscious, a common set of ideas, feelings, images, and symbols that we inherit fromthe whole human race."

Other personality theories such as the trait theory agree that there is some consistency throughout human personalities. However, they do not credit primitive unconscious drives for this regularity, but rather common personality characteristics called traits. Some psychologists believe that certain traits can be found in all people. However, the degree to which each trait affects different individuals can vary. Although trait approaches' to personality have allowed psychologists to measure and compare the personalities of various people, trait theorists have had

difficulty determining which personality traits are the basic, expressive traits of human personality.

But are we all basically the same person, with slight alterations, each in a different package? Some psychologists don't think so. Learning theorist, B.F. Skinner, believed that the development of personality was an external process, made up of "a collection of learned behavior patterns." Skinner suggested that an individual's personality is the product of learned responses, and that, by learning new behavior patterns,

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