Unconscious Determinants of Personality

Psychological Influences on Personality Development

Recognizing Various Unconscious Behavioral Determinants

Contemporary psychologists understand that myriad influences of variable origin contribute to the development of human personality. Some of those influences are more apparent than others and some operate on the conscious level whereas others operate on a completely unconscious level. Naturally, the latter present more complex potential issues simply because they are not known to the individual. That is especially true with regard to aspects of personality whose roots go back to infancy but that only become manifest in behavior only much later.

Different psychological theorists have provided conflicting explanations for the origin of major issues in human personality development. Freud, for example, regarded virtually all manifestations of psychological pathology as being the result of early trauma, sexual impulses, and the failure to successfully negotiate specific stages of infancy, such as the oral stage, anal stage, and the Oedipal stage. According to Freud, those early traumas and challenges are narcissistic in origin (Textbook, p. 179). They are repressed from the conscious memory but generate characteristic psychological defenses that define aspects of personality later (Textbook, p.185).

'Other theorists, such as Erikson, took a more general approach to understanding human psychology (and psychoses) development that acknowledged the importance of the same chronological periods, emphasized by Freud, particularly during the first year of life (Textbook, p. 244), but without reliance on those same specific themes focused upon by Freud in his classic psychodynamic approach to human psychology.

A Problematic Aspect of Personality

One of the more interesting problematic aspects of human personality development concerns the issue of attachment theory first elucidated by Bowlby and Ainsworth in the mid twentieth century in relation to the importance of the earliest relationship between infants and their mothers. In particular, Bowlby and Ainsworth illustrated that mothers could substantially influence the degree to which their children developed secure or insecure maternal attachments through the character and nature of their interactions with their infants (Bretherton, 1992 p. 766). Building upon the contributions of Bowlby and Ainsworth to attachment theory, other theorists studied the prevalence of securely attached and insecurely attached infants and disclosed that the majority of children (i.e. between 57 and 73%) tend to exhibit secure maternal attachments while a minority (i.e. between 15 and 32%) tend to exhibit what Bowlby and Ainsworth originally characterized as "insecure/avoidant" maternal attachment (Byng-Hall, 1995 p. 48).

Originally, Bowlby and Ainsworth devised a so-called "strange situation" experiment to test infants for the quality of their respective attachments to their mothers (Textbook, p. 236). More specifically, they noted and compared the reactions of infants exposed to unfamiliar situations and to brief separation from their mothers. In variants of those original experiments, the mothers were instructed on how to respond to their infants upon being reunited with them. Those series of experiments revealed that when mothers are less attentive and inconsistently attentive to the emotional needs of their infants, those infants can develop insecure maternal attachments and avoidant attachments (Textbook, p. 238). The first is associated with a lower threshold to psychological distress caused by strange situations and separation from the mother; the second is associated with a reactive avoidance of intimacy as measured by eye contact and desire for physical affection from the mother, and that factors such as the mothers' degree of enjoyment of breastfeeding is indicative of the quality of the developing maternal-infant bond (Bretherton, 1992 p. 766).

The most important aspect of the relative security or insecurity of the maternal-infant bond issue is the fact that it tends to carry over into adult personality in general and into adult intimate-partner relationships in particular (Textbook, p. 238). In principle, insecurely attached infants tend to be less trusting and less capable of establishing emotionally intimate relationships with others. This is consistent with the manner on which Freud suggested that traumas during infancy manifest themselves in latent manifestations later in life as well as with the suggestions of Erikson characterizing the first year of life as a period during which conflict can represent "the most fundamental crisis of life" and contribute to the development of a "sense of basic trust vs. basic mistrust" (Textbook, p. 244).