Brain Development and Personality

Psychology

One of the earliest theorists of personality development was Sigmund Freud. Freud defined the development of the individual's personality primarily in terms of struggle, loss, and repression -- namely the individual's family romance with the mother that was finally supplanted through a series of phases or traumas. Eventually, the individual's personality achieved a stasis or a maturity whereby the superego checked the impulses of the id and the ego. Jung expanded upon this notion to include the notion of a collective unconscious that all individuals participated in, as personalities whose forms could be generalized into shapes common to all cultures called archetypes. However, humanistic psychologists such as Piaget and Maslow offered developmental views of the personality that were not necessarily traumatic, but based in developing cognitive structures within the brain. Maslow's hierarchy of needs is perhaps most persuasive, suggesting that an individual's personality is based upon satisfying basic needs, such as hunger, which after being satisfied empower the individual enough to ultimately attain self-actualization as a person. Maslow's theory is helpful in that it embraces the biological factors that influence development, such as malnutrition or the trauma of growing up in a dangerous environment but still allows for larger human impulses

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