PSYCH 1X03 Lecture Notes - Anna Freud, Castration Anxiety, Erik Erikson
Document Summary
Anytime you label someone as shy, considerate, talkative, sentimental, practical, traditional, or adventurous, you are describing someone using personality traits. Personality is difficult to describe since it is not real, unlike the brain, because it has no physical existence. Personality is an idea, and abstract concept that we use because it seems to express or capture something important about our experiences, referred to as hypothetical constructs . Different ways to study personality including different sets of assumptions about what personality is, how it develops, and how it should be studied. Type approach: approach that assumes that there are a small number of distinct personality types proposed by greek physician hippocrates (dominant in western thinking 16th 17th century). Hippocrates believed that the human body was made of four humours : blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile, with personality determined by the balance of these four humours.
