3.

A personality is an individual’s characteristic pattern of thinking, feeling, and acting. Our conflict centers are based
on interacting systems of id, ego, and superego.
From the psychoanalytic perspective, inquires the personality development occurs through life’s first few years.
Freud concluded that children pass through a series of psychosexual stages during which, the id’s pleasure – seeking
energies focus on distinct erogenous zones.
The stages of development are oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. Freud believed that during the phallic
stages, boys experience a collection of feelings called the Oedipus complex which is a boy’s sexual desires toward his
mother and feelings of jealousy and hatred for the rival father.
Children eventually cope with threatening feelings and the go through an identification process. This process is
when children incorporate their parent’s values into their developing superegos.
If people were either orally overindulged or deprived, the might fixate at the oral stage. Fixation meaning a
lingering focus of pleasure seeking energies at an earlier psychosexual stage, where conflicts were unresolved.
Orally fixated adults exhibit a passive dependence by acting touch but sarcastic. They continue to seek oral
gratification by excessively smoking and eating. Those who never resolve the anal conflict will remain highly controlled
and compulsively neat or messy and disorganized.
Since Andy is a high school sophomore and excessively anxious, he is probably doing a lot of things in excess
due to his anxiety, this is explained by the unresolved oral stage. The unresolved anal stage explains Andy’s anal
retentive personality.
From the humanistic perspective, both Maslow and Rogers can help explain Andy’s personality. Maslow
believed that in our lives, we always seek self actualization, the process of fulfilling our potential. Those who are secure
and self accepting are not paralyzed by others opinions.
Roger’s offered the unconditional positive regard which was the attitude of total acceptance toward another
person. This is an attitude that values us even knowing our failings. In Andy’s case, he may not understand his own
failings, leading him to continue to strive toward unreasonable goals which he later falls short of.
A central feature of personality is one’s self concept or otherwise known as all the thoughts and feelings about us,
in answer to the question, “Who am I?” If we fall short of our ideal goals, perhaps in Andy’s case, we become dissatisfied
and unhappy.
The social cognitive perspective was proposed by Albert Bandura. This perspective views behavior as influenced
by the interaction between people and their social context. Many factors in this perspective could have created Andy’s
personality.
First, the interacting influences between personality and environmental factors is described in reciprocal
determinism. Different people choose different environments, our personalities shape how we interpret and react to events
and our personalities help create situations to which we react. In Andy’s situation, his anxious personality may have been
created by his failure to choose a healthy environment.
Psychologists also emphasize our sense of personal control. Personal control is our sense of controlling our
environment rather than feeling helpless. Research has proven that when humans are given more self control, they thrive.
So in Andy’s case, he may be afflicted by the external locus of control which is the perception that chance or outside
forces beyond one’s personal control determine one’s fate (this is opposite of internal locus of control which explains the
perception that one controls their own fate). Andy has too many stresses and doesn’t believe he can do anything to
change his situation.
Finally Andy may be affected by learned helplessness, which is the hopelessness that occurs when a human
learns when unable to avoid repeated aversive events. Any has failed many challenges and frequently obsesses over too
many tasks, he is probably feeling helpless and this probably leads to his anxiety.