Conceiving of Personality

Description

The quest to comprehend the essence of human nature is as old as the capacity for reflective thought. In this provocative book, Dr. Michael Robbins proposes a new approach that draws upon psychoanalysis but is shaped by awareness of the limits that the particular circumstances of historical epoch, Western culture, male gender, and modal population from which psychoanalysis was derived impose on its modernist claims to being a universal theory. Dr. Robbins addresses these limitations from the perspective of philosophy of science, focusing on the paradigm shift from logical positivism, which seeks to reduce complexity and diversity to its presumptive causal building blocks, to the postmodern emphasis on pluralism and on relativistic, contextual, evanescent knowledge. He examines the implications of this shift for the disciplines that study human nature-neuroscience, psychoanalysis, gender studies, anthropology, and sociology. After considering whether typical personality has changed over historical time and studying the cross-cultural diversity of human nature, the relationship of gender to personality, the spectrum of personality variability within Western culture, and the relationship of the contextual embeddedness of the conceiver to his or her theory, he proposes a dialectical conception of personality based on systems and chaos theories that respects its multiple guises and circumstantial richness of content without abandoning the quest for universal principles of organization and development. Contents Preface CHAPTER 1 Introduction CHAPTER 2 Can We Conceive of Ourselves? Three Instances of Theoretical Conversion CHAPTER 3 A Brief History of Conceptions of the Person CHAPTER 4 Monistic Thinking and Modal Constructs CHAPTER 5 Constitution-Bound: The Neurobiological Basis of Personality CHAPTER 6 Ethnocentrism: Culture, Local Knowledge, and Universal Truth CHAPTER 7 Psychoanalysis as an Indigenous Psychology CHAPTER 8 Indigenous Psychologies of the East and West: Psychoanalysis and Buddhism CHAPTER 9 Gender, Personality, and Culture CHAPTER 10 Psychoanalytic Monism and Intracultural Diversity CHAPTER 11 How Models Become Movements: The Ideological Dimension CHAPTER 12 Summary of the Monism-Pluralism Debate CHAPTER 13 Systems in Transformation: A Model for the Dialectic between Discovery and Creation CHAPTER 14 Modeling the Dialectic between Discovery and Creation CHAPTER 15 Conceiving of Personality: The Warp and the Woof References Index