Personality Formation

a phenomenon of great importance for the formation and development of personality, namely the creation within it of various ‘authorities.’ Besides the ego, analytical psychology distinguishes as such authorities the self, the persona, the anima (or animus in women), and the shadow.

Neumann identifies the differentiation of the psyche’s internal ‘authorities’ — ego, self, persona, anima/animus, shadow — as the definitive structural event in personality formation, each authority combining archetypal and individual determinants.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis

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We come now to the formation of those components of personality whose discovery we owe to the analytical psychology of Jung: the persona, the anima and animus figures, and the shadow. They are produced by the differentiation processes we have already described, which occur during the first half of life.

Neumann establishes that the principal components of personality are products of archetypal differentiation processes operating across the first half of life, each combining personalistic and transpersonal features.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019thesis

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The natural result of this attempt is the formation of two psychic systems in the personality, one of which usually remains completely unconscious, while the other develops into an essential organ of the psyche… The system which generally remains unconscious is the shadow; the other system is the ‘facade personality’ or persona.

Neumann argues that the ethical demands of collective adaptation bifurcate the personality into a conscious facade (persona) and a repressed shadow system, making ethical suppression structurally constitutive of personality formation.

Neumann, Erich, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 1949thesis

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The major developmental project in the first half of life is ego and persona development to the point of individual viability, cultural adaptation, and adult responsibility for raising children.

Stein frames the first half of life as fundamentally oriented toward ego-persona consolidation, grounding personality formation in the interplay of archetypal potentials and typological tendencies within a given cultural and familial matrix.

Stein, Murray, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998thesis

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A further aspect of the child’s development to be discussed is his character formation. I have given some instances of how destructive impulses, envy and greed, and the resulting persecutory anxieties disturb the child’s emotional balance and his social relations.

Klein positions character formation as the developmental resultant of the interplay between innate destructive and reparative forces, with early envy and persecutory anxiety constituting central obstacles to healthy personality development.

Klein, Melanie, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957thesis

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there are varying degrees of capacity for resistance, which decide the extent to which a person’s character fends off or accepts the influences of the history of his erotic object-choices.

Freud grounds character and personality formation in the sedimentation of abandoned object-cathexes, with individual constitutional resistance determining how thoroughly the history of erotic choices shapes the final character structure.

Freud, Sigmund, The Ego and the Id, 1923thesis

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The mature personality and the deeper, archetypally based identity will not form… It is a quality of depth and integrity, rooted in layers of the psyche beyond the superficial levels of social adjustment (persona formation) based upon a need to please, to join in, and to get along.

Stein distinguishes between superficial persona-based social adjustment and the deeper archetypally grounded personality formation that requires the transformative crisis of midlife, warning that avoidance of this crisis arrests genuine maturation.

Stein, Murray, Transformation Emergence of the Self (Volume 7) (Carolyn, 1998thesis

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Strength of character is based on some very early processes. The first and fundamental relation in which the child experiences feelings of love as well as of hate is the relation to the mother… the identification with her makes possible inner peace.

Klein traces the foundation of character strength to the successful introjection of a ‘good enough’ maternal object, positioning early object relations as the bedrock upon which all subsequent personality development rests.

Klein, Melanie, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957supporting

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impersonality is in the original undifferentiated truth of things the pure substance of nature of the Being, the Person; in the dynamic truth of things it differentiates its powers and lends them to the building of his personality.

Aurobindo reframes personality formation as the progressive differentiation of impersonal, universal forces into individualised expression, with the surface personality serving as a temporary vehicle for the evolution of a deeper suprapersonal being.

Aurobindo, Sri, The Life Divine, 1939thesis

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Personality is only a temporary mental, vital, physical formation which the being, the real Person, the psychic entity, puts forward on the surface… In each return to earth the Person, the Purusha, makes a new formation, builds a new personal quantum suitable for a new experience.

Aurobindo situates each surface personality as a provisional formation constructed anew across successive incarnations, subordinating individual personality formation to the longer evolutionary trajectory of the deeper psychic entity.

Aurobindo, Sri, The Life Divine, 1939supporting

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the psychosocial personality is contemporaneous with the genesis of the group, which is an individuation. The group is not what contributes to the individual being a fully formed personality, like a cloak tailored in advance.

Simondon argues that personality is not a pre-constituted structure subsequently socialised but emerges co-originally with group individuation, dissolving the priority of individual over collective in the genesis of personality.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020supporting

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Persona development has two potential pitfalls. One is over-identification with the persona. The individual becomes unduly concerned with pleasing and adapting to the social world and comes to believe that this constructed image is all there is to the personality.

Stein identifies persona over-identification and anima/animus possession as the two characteristic pathological outcomes of personality formation, each representing a failure to maintain the appropriate tension between inner and outer orientations.

Stein, Murray, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998supporting

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early childhood has such a profound effect upon adult personas. Even after parents are long since outgrown and left behind, they continue to affect the persona because they are projected into the world from the parental complexes.

Stein demonstrates that parental complexes are structurally inscribed within the persona through projection and introjection, establishing early relational experience as a persistent determinant of adult personality formation.

Stein, Murray, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998supporting

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these researches indicate a far-reaching parallelism of biological tendencies that readily explains the sometimes astonishing similarity in the destinies of parents and children. Our destinies are as a rule the outcome of our psychological tendencies.

Jung’s early empirical work links personality formation to intergenerational transmission of psychological tendencies, positioning familial identification and imitation as primary vectors through which character is transmitted and consolidated.

Jung, C. G., Collected Works Volume 1: Psychiatric Studies, 1902supporting

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certain contributions to character-formation originating in the earliest oral stage coincide in important respects with others derived from the final genital stage. This is probably explicable from the fact that at these two stages the libido is least open to disturbance from an ambivalence of feeling.

Abraham refines the psychoanalytic theory of character formation by tracing specific personality traits to their libidinal developmental origins, with oral fixation playing a foundational role later reinforced or modified by contributions from subsequent stages.

Abraham, Karl, Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis, 1927supporting

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the middle period is characterized by a decisive change of personality. Centroversion becomes conscious. The ego is exposed to a somewhat painful process which, starting in the unconscious, permeates the entire personality.

Neumann describes the midlife transformation as a decisive second phase of personality formation, in which centroversion becomes conscious and the integrative development of the self supersedes the ego-differentiating project of the first half of life.

Neumann, Erich, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton, 2019supporting

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In making claims for the centrality of narrative to ongoing identity formation, these researchers follow in the tradition of psychobiography and the idiographic study of lives.

Singer locates narrative construction at the centre of ongoing identity and personality formation across the lifespan, situating this perspective within the broader tradition of depth-psychological and idiographic inquiry into personal development.

Singer, Jefferson A., Narrative Identity and Meaning Making Across the Adult Lifespan: An Introduction, 2004supporting

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psychological growth occurs as a result of the tensions, especially those between opposites, in the psyche… Only through the integrating power of consciousness can we attain the highest levels of adaptability and survival.

Ulanov argues that personality formation proceeds through the ego’s capacity to hold and integrate psychic tensions, particularly the foundational tension between consciousness and the unconscious, without which differentiation lapses into repetitive stasis.

Ulanov, Ann Belford, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology and in Christian Theology, 1971supporting

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Jung’s notion of ego development arising from collisions with the environment offers a creative way of viewing the potential in all of those inevitable human experiences of frustration in the face of an ungratifying environment.

Stein articulates Jung’s model in which the ego — the nucleus of personality — is strengthened and individuated through productive encounters with environmental resistance, making frustration a necessary catalyst of personality formation.

Stein, Murray, Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction, 1998supporting

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In the case of the formation of a group-personality, the unknown factor is the ‘score’ of this group-personality itself; but even there astrology might interpret significantly the birth-chart of the group.

Rudhyar extends personality formation beyond the individual to the level of the group-personality, proposing that astrological symbolism can render legible the blueprint of collective as well as individual character formation.

Dane Rudhyar, The Astrology of Personality: A Re-formulation of Astrological Concepts and Ideals in Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy, 1936aside

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the ensemble of psychical contents could be considered as the result of the resolution of a series of problems posed to the living being, problems the latter must resolve by individualizing; psychical structures are the expression of this fractured individualization.

Simondon reconceives personality structure as the residue of successive problem-resolutions imposed on the living being through individuation, treating psychical contents as functional solutions rather than static endowments.

Simondon, Gilbert, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020aside

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