Introduction
The value of books has long been duly appreciated by the humanity. Books contain knowledge and wisdom, as well as induce readers to thinking and sometimes even change their perception of reality. Theories of Personality: Understanding Persons by Susan Cloninger is one of books which are informative and educational, but entertaining and fascinating at this. It often happens that serious books seem uninteresting to the readers, mostly because they are oversaturated with sophisticated terms and unknown concepts which are hard to comprehend. Cloninger’s book is accessible to any kind of a reader and, though it concerns serious notions which a number of the researchers have explored, the examples presented in it perfectly illustrate even the most complicated ideas. Cloninger’s Theories of Personality: Understanding Persons deals with the issue of personality which has long been interesting to the humanity; this book perfectly explains how people’s characters are formed and developed throughout their lives, as well as how different the researchers’ views on this matter are.
The Issue of Personality
It has long been clear that all people possess different character traits, but no one has known why these traits are different. Personality researchers call these differences “individual differences” and use them to classify people into separate groups, or personality types (Cloninger, 2008). Each group of people has its own personality traits, or characteristics which vary from one member of the group to another and can be used as distinctive features of his/her behavior. At this, traits “permit a more precise description of personality than types because each trait refers to a more focused set of characteristics” (Cloninger, 2004, p. 4). As a rule, certain biological variables are responsible for these traits and, since people are different biologically (with respect to genes, for instance), they have different personality traits. Moreover, personality is largely dependent on gender and past experiences. Thus, the personality of a person “depends in complex ways on heredity, on childhood experiences, on the development of the self-concept, and on specific learning experiences” (Eysenck, 2004, p. 445). Studying the issue of personality is interesting and important for it allows understanding people’s behavior and even predicting it sometimes.
Personality Development
Another interesting fact about personality is that it develops and changes throughout the individual’s life. Of course, partially, personality is predetermined genetically and recently, as Cloninger (2008) states, this idea started to be paid more attention to,
With the explosion of research in genetics and neuroscience, modern personality researchers are moving beyond the speculation of classic theorists about the role of biology, identifying biological mechanisms that contribute to such aspects of personality as the tendency for some people to be outgoing and others to be shy (p. 7).
Indeed, it is easy to notice how characters of people are similar within one family for instance. In most of the cases this hardly depends on gender, though there are instances when daughters inherit personality traits of their mothers and sons are similar in character to their fathers. This, however, depends greatly on the factors which influence the individual because quite often personality forms in the process of learning. Thus, for instance, by confronting obstacles and finding solutions to the problems, a person may develop a more endurable and resistant character or, on the contrary, become submissive.
Views of Researchers on Personality
One of the greatest facts about the book under consideration is that it presents views of different researchers on the issue of personality. For example, the book discusses Sigmund Freud and his classical psychoanalysis, Carl Jung and his analytical psychology, Alfred Adler and his individual psychology, Erik Ericsson and his theory of psychological development, Karen Horney and her interpersonal analysis, etc (Cloninger, 2008). This not only extends the readers’ knowledge about personality and the issues related to it but gives information about the researchers with their biography being presented in detail. This is one of the features which make this book attractive to the reader; it looks like a simple book about people who have researched a specific problem but, in reality, it incorporates this information into a discussion about different personality theories which these researchers advanced. In this way, the author allows the reader to compare these theories without pointing directly which of them is more or less correct. Of special interest is Freud’s psychoanalytic theory which is based on the interrelation of such components as ego, superego, and id (Berzoff, Flanagan, & Hertz, 2007). This may induce reader to further research and help him/her enlarge the knowledge about this issue.
Conclusion
Cloninger’s book Theories of Personality: Understanding Persons is not only a valuable contribution into the field of psychology, but a great tool for a person not involved into a psychological research to explore the issue of personality. After reading this book, one may get a feeling of knowing much about human personality being able either to carry out one’s own research or simply apply the obtained knowledge in order to explain or predict behaviors of different people.
Reference List
Berzoff, J., Flanagan, L.M., & Hertz, P. (2007). Inside out and outside in: psychodynamic clinical theory and psychopathology in contemporary multicultural contexts. Lanham, Maryland : Rowman and Littlefield.
Cloninger, S.C. (2008). Theories of Personality: Understanding Persons. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Eyzenck, M.W. (2004). Psychology: An International Perspective. New York: Taylor & Francis.