Chapter 8: A Key to the Making the Course Work?
The portion of the personality course devoted to personality structure marks a transition from studying parts of personality to looking at the whole system. Structure is useful in helping students to grasp personality, because it provides several potentially valid models of how to divide the system. Structure is also among the most unique and defining topics in personality and its study. For these reasons, I regard Chapter 8 as key to teaching about personality psychology,
Chapter 8 As Relatively Unique in Personality: A Systems Approach
As you teach with Personality: A Systems Approach, you probably have observed that the individual chapters, or sections within them, often resemble chapters or sections of other kinds of textbooks. This reflects, in part, the integrating mission of personality psychology.
Chapter 8, on fitting the parts of personality together, diverges sharply from most other chapters. To me, this fairly distinctive chapter begins to pull the course together in a powerful way. In the remainder of this section, I will explain how that can occur, through describing some of what I do in the classroom around the chapter.
The Overall Organization of the “Structure” Week
In my course, I allot one week of class to teach about personality structure. The lecture, which follows Chapter 8, “How the Parts Fit Together,” occurs slightly past the midpoint of the semester. At that point, the students and I have gone through the introduction to personality (Part 1), and personality’s parts (Part 2). I have just reviewed and returned the students’ second exam, on personality’s parts. I come back the next class period and introduce personality structure.
My own lectures for the week of October 21 st, 2006 – to which this essay pertains – are available for download from this web site. This year, I chose the following lectures:
Tuesday:
- Overview Lecture, Chapter 8. Defines structure, mentions criteria for structure, and divides structural models into four areas.
- Focus on Personality Structure. Defines structure in a bit more detail, explains how there can be more than one type of structural model of personality.
- Trait Structure. A very brief lecture on supertraits and the origins of the Big Five.
Thursday
- Focus on Awareness Models. Describes structural models based on a person's conscious awareness of his or her internal models (e.g., unconscious—preconscious—conscious).
- Focus on Processing Area Models. Describes structural models based on different areas of function in personality (e.g., emotions, motives, cognition).
A Topic-by-Topic Description of the Week
I begin coverage of Chapter 8 by making a fairly big deal that, whereas in the earlier chapters (e.g., before the second exam), we were describing and studying individual parts of personality (and some groups of parts), we are now going to begin to look at personality as a whole. Knowing some key parts of personality, I say to the class, is crucial. Studying parts for the entire semester, though, would become tedious. There are simply too many parts, and just studying a list of them, to me, would be a fragmented, poorly constructed educational experience for the student (and professor!). So, I say, now, we were now going to put the parts together and examine how the parts operate together.
The Overview Lecture – And Some Color Commentary on It
The parts are now to be assembled into a puzzle and, as the puzzle is assembled, a picture, or a map, of the system would emerge (puzzle...map... I mixed metaphors freely). I then follow the Chapter 8 overview lecture. It defines structure, mentions criteria for structure, and divides structural models into four areas.
Parenthetically, somewhere at the outset of the week, I mention my own personal belief that the study of personality structure has often proved to be an embarrassment to personality psychologists. Structure often is identified either with antiquated notions of the id, ego, and superego, or with popularized notions of left-brain—right brain, or with empirical analyses of traits such as the Big Five.
The id, ego, and superego are embarrassing because they are out-of-date; the left-brain-right-brain distinction is embarrassing because it is overly simplistic. Although the Big Five trait group isn't embarrassing per se, together with the other two, it seems to contradict notions of what structure is.
The lectures I employ explain, in part, that one should expect markedly different structural approaches -- and that this isn't a problem. On the other hand, I argue, certain among these divisions persist mostly because they have not typically been viewed as a group – in which some divisions are better than others.
Next, I explain that, once good criteria for such divisions are employed, and one recognizes the possibility of having multiple valid divisions, one need no longer be embarrassed.
In fact, such divisions are crucial to the communication and growth of the field. At that point, I introduce the criteria for good personality structure (found in Table 8.1). In my own overhead, I add in as another criterion, utility – correspondence, for example, to brain areas and/or social institutions.
I then go through some structures in greater detail.
The Trait Structure Lecture
I start with the very brief material on trait structure and the Big Five, noting the importance of the set, that it was already introduced in Chapter 3, and that many studies we will examine – particularly those studies in Personality Development use it. By this time in the course, students already have heard of the Big Five (e.g., in Chapter 3, in the section on traits). This serves both as a review and as an opportunity to see the Big Five as not just five important traits, but as an attempt to structure a large group of human traits.
Levels of Awareness Structures
I then move on to examine levels of awareness models of personality – from the unconscious to the conscious. I remark on the importance of such models: how they dovetail nicely with the “Who am I?” question, in that the presence of the unconscious puts a limit on what people can know. I talk about Freud’s first topological model and its influence on the field. I say that Freud’s model was essentially a good one, but that since the days of the unconscious—preconscious—conscious, further levels of awareness have been elaborated. I then go over those. I lead this lecture off using images of the perceptual illusions. There are some in the powerpoint lecture (focus lecture), but you can also find fairly amazing video clips of illusions on YouTube, and this years I used one of those as well, just for fun.
Special Issues with Freud’s Id, Ego, & Superego
Almost every introductory psychology textbook today still teaches Freud’s structural model of the id, ego, and superego. Initially, I used to teach these three parts in some detail. Now I say they represent a key insight by Freud: That it is important to divide the structures of personality into important areas.
Processing Area Structures
I conclude my lectures with a consideration of processing-area structures because I believe that these, ultimately, integrate the other kinds of structure. For example, once one divides personality into its major areas or processes (e.g., motives, emotions, etc.), one can then divide traits according to those categories as well. If one of the processing areas identified is consciousness, then one can discuss levels of awareness in terms of the degree to which consciousness has access to the operation of a given processing area.
(If I can, I do go on to connective structures, but by this point in the week, we are usually out of time).
