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The Origins of Personality

23 September, 2015 - 14:33

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

  1. Describe the strengths and limitations of the psychodynamic approach to explaining personality.
  2. Summarize the accomplishments of the neo-Freudians.
  3. Identify the major contributions of the humanistic approach to understanding personality.

Although measures such as the Big Five and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) are able to effectively assess personality, they do not say much about where personality comes from. In this section we will consider two major theories of the origin of personality: psychodynamicand humanisticapproaches.