Theories of Personality Final Paper (12-27-11)

Three Fundamental Ideas of Theories of Personality

            The three most useful ideas that one can learn from this course is that: we are subject to the influence of unconscious forces, that ideas have power, and that the ego is something we construct based on the stimulus of our social environments.

            Along with our conscious awareness of our existence, there is a larger and greater mental world that influences our perception of reality in the form of the unconscious. Sigmund Freud states that the unconscious mind is “a repository for urges, feelings, and ideas that are tied to anxiety, conflict, and pain” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 162). This repository is responsible for the “core operations” of our personalities (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 162). These core operations of Freud also contain the Eros, or life instincts, and the Thanatos, or death instincts (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 170). As much as we are able, we can still only express so much in one lifetime, most often we have to “displace” or “sublimate” our unconscious desires and urges (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 172). Displacement is “a change in how energy is used or the object toward which its used”, or directing feelings which we may be uncomfortable expressing in our personal lives into an environment where we are more comfortable (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 172). Sublimation is a shifting “socially unacceptable” actions into actions that are “acceptable or even praiseworthy” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 172). Along with these urges, feelings, ideas, and instincts that comprise the core operations of our personalities that we can displace and sublimate, we are also subject to unconscious reflexes that we become conditioned to perform when some stimulus from our environment activates these automatic responses. These unconscious reflexes can be changed when we recognize that we are performing these automatic, yet unconscious responses to our detriment in our lives. Upon discovering our conditioned, yet self-sabotaging responses to some environmental stimulus, we can then counter condition ourselves to display “a new response that is incompatible” with our former behavior (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 506). A great deal of our lives is guided and influenced by forces which are largely unconscious, yet nevertheless these forces play an important part in our functioning and participation in the world.

           The world constantly projects upon our minds information that has a power over us, whether or not one recognizes this fact. In the cognitive self-regulation perspective, we are introduced to the idea of schema, or “mental organizations of information” that forms our mental experience, and our personal interpretations of the world (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 373). These schemas “develop over experience” and are adapted to emulating the behavior of successful “prototypes” which are actual or idealized representatives that we respect and admire (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 396). “Problems in behavior can come from information-processing deficits”, according to Carver and Scheier (2008), come from our inability to encode or absorb information from our environment, from “ineffective allocation of attention” to information that would assist us in developing our potentials, and “negative self-schemas” or the beliefs that we create and maintain about ourselves which limit our proper functioning in the world (p. 396). Ideas as powerful information is also reflected in the social-cognitive learning perspective. This perspective recognizes that “thought processes” play an integral part in our behavior, and through observing successful people, one can “learn from one another” to emulate this successful behavior (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 315). In this perspective people can be divided into an “internal” who recognizes the importance of reinforcement on their behavior, or an “external” who is not motivated by “social reinforcers such as acceptance and approval”, and who believes “their outcomes to be unrelated to their actions” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 316). One can also find in the observational conditioning perspective a basis for the concept of world as powerful information. In the observational conditioning perspective, one observes a model of desired behavior to absorb “huge amounts of information quickly” by “paying attention to the model”, and retaining this observed behavior by mental imaging or “imaginal coding”, or by “verbal coding” which is mentally describing the behavior which has been observed (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 301). Once we recognize the fact that our world is constantly projecting information upon us, it then up to us to best learn how to make use of this information to our own personal advantage.

            The egos with which we use to participate in our social environment is a personal construction with which we can continuously update and modify to improve our functioning in the world. Freud states that the ego is only one part of our conscious, waking mind that is responsible for mitigating and maintaining a balance between the other two components of our minds, the id and the superego. The id “is all the inherited instinctive, primitive aspects” of our personality that largely remains unconscious, coming from basic, biological drives which are constantly looking to our environments for stimulation and satiation (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 163). Our superego is the value system our mind creates to mediate the id desires against the need for control and order within our social environments (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 166). The need for the ego to constantly balance the desires of the id, against the moralizing superego, can result in much stress if a person is unable to construct a strong, yet flexible sense of self. Once one understands that it is crucial to our success in our social environment, and to our own healthy development, we can then create an ego identity with which we can achieve a life of satisfaction. Our “ego identity”, Carver and Scheier (2008) state “is the consciously experienced sense of self”, deriving “from transactions with social reality”, which constantly modifies itself “in response to events in the social world” (p. 244). Our ego identities go through eight “psycho-social stages” in our lifetimes, each of which has its own respective crisis “that dominates each stage” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 245). The respective eight stages (and their respective crisis) are: infancy (the sense of trust), early childhood (independence), preschool (influence and power in social environment), school age (sense of personal value), adolescence (the consolidation of self), young adulthood (learning intimacy), adulthood (creating something that will outlive oneself, whether it is art or children), and old age (sense of satisfaction). Our highest potential can only be reached by navigating each stage as best as we are able to learn to accomplish. There are various psychological perspectives that we can use to evolve and adapt our personal construction of the ego throughout our lives. One such perspective is known as the personal construct theory, where one attempts to create a structure of personality “through the lens” of an interpretation of reality that is based on predicting and anticipating future events (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 351). In this personal construct perspective, a person essentially becomes a scientist of self, measuring their self-created hypotheses against their effect in social environments (Neimeyer and Bridges, 2003, para. 2). Identifying the fact that our egos are of our own creation, we can then learn to construct an ego that can evolve and adapt to place ourselves in the best position that we are capable of, and achieving the highest potential that we are wholly committed to and determined to pursue.

           There are three useful ideas that can be learned from this course. The first is the influence of unconscious forces upon our lives, and once we recognize the effect that these forces have, we can then begin to distinguish what decisions we are making consciously, and what is motivating us without our conscious realization into automatic behavior. The second most useful idea is that ideas have power, and these ideas are merely a reflection of the information that our world is constantly projecting upon our senses. It is up to us to learn to decipher this information and how we can use this knowledge for our own, and for others betterment as well. The third and final most useful idea is that the ego is something we construct based on the stimulus of our social environments. Instead of seeing ourselves as having a fixed and unchanging personality, we should see our egos as a mere tool that can continuously be enhanced for higher functioning within our social environments, modifying and adapting it to our present circumstances, yet attempting to prepare our egos for possible and probable events in the foreseeable future as well.

References

Carver, C. S. & Scheier, M.F. (2008). Perspectives on Personality, 6th ed.   Boston, MA:  

Pearson.

Neimeyer, R.A. & Bridges, S.K. (2003). “Personal Construct Theory”. The Internet

Encyclopaedia of Personal Construct Psychology. Retrieved from

http://www.pcp-net.org/encyclopaedia/main.html

(Picture)  http://davidwees.com/eportfolio/sites/default/files/WeesD.jpg

An Analysis of “The Philosophy of Composition” by Edgar A. Poe (American Literature 12-23-11).

 An Analysis of “The Philosophy of Composition” by Edgar A. Poe

            Edgar Allen Poe was an accomplished writer, poet, and literary critic who produced many famous works that are still popular in our modern era. Over the span of his literary career he developed a method of writing that he used to create his literary pieces and recorded this method in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition”. In his “The Philosophy of Composition”, Edgar Allan Poe sets out the successful method by which he wrote his popular works and offers it to other hopeful writers as a guideline for creating their own literary masterpieces.  

            Edgar Allen Poe believed that an author of prose or poetry must begin with the end of a literary work, or the denouement, in mind before the work is even begun. “Nothing is more clear than that every plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its denouement before any thing be attempted with the pen” (Poe 905). Poe goes on to state that only with the “denouement” in mind that the author can establish the steps toward the “tone at all points” and the “development of the intention” (905). It is only after the denouement has been clearly established in one’s mind that the writer can then proceed to insert the structures by which the literary work can reach its successful conclusion.

            Once the denouement of a literary work is established, according to Poe the next step to consider is one of “effect”, or the overall framework with which the literary work will occupy and fill. Poe states, “of the innumerable effects, or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?” (906). After deciding upon a narrative, and then the effect he wishes to produce within the reader, Poe then states the writer must then “consider whether” how effect “can best be wrought” (906). Concerning the frame work of effect, Poe gives us gives us two categories: “incident” and “tone” (906). Within these two categories of incident and tone, Poe believes that combinations of “ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity of both incident and tone”, and by searching his environment and within himself for similar combinations of desired incident and tone, “shall best aid me in the construction of the effect” (906). The effect that Poe intends to put across to the reader is the framework that Poe creates from observing incidents, from either himself or his environment, that seem most similar to the incident and tone he has in mind for his literary work.  

            The second step to composing a piece of literature for Poe is of length, or what he calls “extent” (907). According to Poe, “if any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression” (907). Poe believes that if a literary work is too long to be read in one sitting then its “totality is at once destroyed” (907). To deal with this loss of totality, Poe states that the writer must maintain the “excitement or elevation” during whatever length or “brevity” of the piece in proportion to the “intensity of the intended effect” (907). Poe remarks that “a certain degree of duration is absolutely requisite for the production of any effect at all” (907). To Poe, the length, or “extent” of a literary work must maintain a consistent emotional consistency throughout a length of a literary work.

            The third step to completing a work of literature is the impression the writer wants to impart to be popular among many readers. Poe states, “I kept steadily in view the design of rendering the work universally appreciable” (907). The three main categories to which Poe believes a literary work is found favorable with the general public is: Beauty, Truth, and Passion (907). Poe goes on to assign Beauty, which most readily appeals to the soul, as the “sole legitimate province of the poem” (907). Truth and Passion, the other two means to appeal to the reader, is the “satisfaction of the intellect” for the former, and a satisfaction to “homeliness” or plainness for the latter (Poe 908). While Beauty is the realm of the poem, Truth and Passion to Poe are “far more readily attainable in prose” (908). Poe concedes that Truth and Passion can be “profitably introduced into a poem” to serve as an “effect” by “contrast”, Beauty is still “the atmosphere and the essence of the poem” (908). Once the effect, or overall framework, and the length of a literary work is established, the third step for the author in creating the literary work is impression, or the actual filler for the structure that the author has already created.

            Poe gives us his poem The Raven as his example by which he intends to demonstrate his philosophy of literary composition. Poe states that after he determined “the length, the province, and the tone” of the work, he then searched for the “pivot upon which the whole structure might turn” (908). Poe decides upon using the refrain, or “a phrase, verse, or group of verses repeated at intervals throughout a song or poem, especially at the end of each stanza”, or a “a repeated utterance or theme” (www.thefreedictionary.com). The refrain being “limited to lyric verse”, depending upon how it sounds and looks, creates the “sense of identity” in its repetition (Poe 908). This refrain to Poe, establishes the effect, or repeated pattern or structure of continued tone or mood, as well as the length of the structure, and the impression or substance with which Poe creates his literary work.

            The particular refrain with which Poe settles upon for his example is the word “nevermore” (909). Poe selected this word “nevermore” to frame each stanza closing, after deciding upon a word that had a “force”, and was a word “sonorous and susceptible of protracted emphasis” (908). Poe decided upon a word with a “sonorous vowel” in the “long o”, and “in connection with r as the most producible consonant” that would most easily be matched with other rhyming words to achieve the aims with which he could best tell the tale that he intended (908). The use of the word “nevermore” for Poe, encompasses the refrain that could best achieve his intended effect and impression, while also allowing him the most rhyming words as he interspersed “nevermore” throughout the structure of The Raven.

           Edgar Allen Poe developed a method after many years of writing which he sets out in his “The Philosophy of Composition”. In this work he sets out the criteria by which he believes a literary work should be created: its overall effect, the length by which this effect can be maintained, and the impression by which the structure is filled to create the desired effect. Once the denouement, or the conclusion of a literary work is decided upon, Poe gives us in “The Philosophy of Composition”, the guideline in the categories of overall effect, the required length, and general impression by which the reader can most satisfactorily be brought to the denouement that the author had first decided upon.   

Works Cited

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/refrain

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Philosophy of Composition”. The American Tradition in Literature. 12^th ed. Ed. George Perkins and Barbara Perkins. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2009. 905-913. Print.

Clint Eastwood and his Evolution in the Western Genre (American Cinema)

           Clint Eastwood is an American actor and director, most identifiable in his roles as the lone gunslinger and avenging angel in his western movies. Clint Eastwood embodied the strong yet silent masculine ideal in these western films which featured him alone in the wasteland, surrounded by corrupt individuals, and with nothing between them other than the speed and accuracy with which he could draw his gun. In A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Pale Rider (1984), and Unforgiven (1992) one can chart the evolution of the masculine ideal with which Clint Eastwood embodied his roles and the development of his persona over time in the genre of Western films.

            As Richard Slotkin writes, the Western myth portrays "the redemption of American spirit or fortune as something to be achieved by playing through a scenario of separation [from 'civilization'], temporary regression to a more primitive or 'natural' state, and regeneration through violence.'" In the Western myth, ritualized violence is purgative because it cleanses society of the "Other" in eliminating the outlaw or "savage" (654). As we see in the three films A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Pale Rider (1985), and Unforgiven (1992), we follow the evolution of the stereotype of the lone gunslinger in the embodiment of Clint Eastwood as he goes into the midst of a savage world, cleansing it of outlaws who terrorize and oppress the innocent.

            In A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Clint Eastwood plays the “Man With No Name”, or Joe as he is sometimes called, which is another name of anonymity. This movie was a western remake of the Kurosawa movie Yojimbo (1961), a samurai who plays two outlaw factions against each other in the attempt to get them to destroy each other, and free an oppressed town from their presence. According to www.clinteastwood.net, “A Fistful of Dollars marked a change in the way western heroes were portrayed” (A Fistful of Dollars page). The stereotypical honest and upright, the “Gary Cooper sheriff type who would never draw first” was replaced by an anonymous character embodied by Clint Eastwood as the “Man With No Name”, with “dubious morals, who emerges as the hero more by comparison with the other characters than by his own merits” (www.clinteastwood.net). According to www.clinteastwood.net, “this change of attitude gave the western a new lease of life in the changing social climate of the sixties” (A Fistful of Dollars page). In the era of chaotic and turbulent societal change of the 1960’s, Clint Eastwood in his role as the “Man With No Name”, becomes one of the first anti-heroes, who embodies “personal power, flint-like resolution, resourcefulness, uncanny endurance, and above all, heroism”, but only a hero because he is less evil than the one’s that are doomed to suffer his punishment. Clint Eastwood in his role of the “Man With No Name”, embodies an American character that had yet to suffer its Vietnam, while still trying to reconcile the horrors of a previous war, in a land that no longer had any clear demarcation between right and wrong, good or evil, only what one could accomplish in the pursuit of one’s goals. 

            In Pale Rider (1985), Clint Eastwood plays another lone gunslinger as avenging angel, but in this instance Eastwood is reinvented as an honest righter of wrongs, and an avatar for good and justice in his character aptly named the Preacher. In this movie, Clint Eastwood is reinvented from the nameless and cunning self-interested manipulator, to the honest hero who delivers a terrified people suffering under the power and whims of evil men, after one of the oppressed prays to God for a savior.

            In Pale Rider (1985) Clint Eastwood evolves not only his stereotypical character, and his role as actor and movie star, but evolves himself into the role of director as well. Clint Eastwood, now a successful and accomplished veteran performer from decades in film, “chose the theme for the film and then commissioned a screenplay” for the story that Mr. Eastwood was compelled to tell (www.clinteastwood.net). In the early nineteen eighties, Clint Eastwood had already become a well known actor with a highly recognizable name, becoming the “established star” that guarantees “a certain return on the high-venture capital invested in a film” (Belton 89). The tale that Mr. Eastwood wanted to tell was one of a moral savior of a fearful people, exploited by the rich and powerful tyrant who ruled with brutality, a theme originating in the stories of religion. In the nineteen eighties as well, America had suffered the war in Vietnam and was still trying to heal from this lingering wound, trying now to define a new sense of morality while fighting a cold war with an enemy that was capable of ending the world in a nuclear war.

            In Unforgiven (1992), Clint Eastwood is now an old widowed farmer named William Munny, who having promised his dead wife that he had retired from violence, and having no great talent at being a farmer, returns the life of a paid gunslinger when prostitutes put a bounty on some cowboys who abused one of them, and they could not receive any satisfactory closure from the legal authorities. William Munny has no choice but to return to a life of violence when his farm suffers from misfortune, and his children’s financial future is now at risk.       

            Unforgiven (1992) was produced and directed by Clint Eastwood, as well as featuring him in its starring role. The movie features several other accomplished actors: Gene Hackman, Richard Harris, and Morgan Freeman, each being veterans of decades of Film, and recognizable for their own starring roles in popular films. The movie featured the typical tale of the hero who is searching for “personal redemption in a modern-day world corrupted by selfishness and greed”, a tale told endlessly in film, but in Unforgiven (1992) this timeless theme had been refined to resonate with a modern audience by experienced and professional storytellers (Belton 246). Because of these refinements Unforgiven (1992) won multiple Oscars at the 1993 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director for Clint Eastwood, and a nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role for him as well (http://www.imdb.com). Unforgiven (1992) was a polished project created by Clint Eastwood’s decades of experience in film, utilizing familiar faces of other successful A-list actors, telling a refined tale to a modern audience using the most sophisticated techniques available to visual storytellers at the time, and using the western genre of film which at the time had been abandoned as tired and outdated.

            By the time of Unforgiven (1992), Clint Eastwood had become a familiar face to the American audience, not only for his roles in film, but from his introduction on “the TV series "Rawhide" (1959-1965), where he was a supporting cast member for six years” (www.imdb.com). Clint Eastwood had experience in multiple roles, both in and out of the genre of the western, becoming familiar with its strengths as well as the limits of this masculine ideal with which Mr. Eastwood perpetuated throughout his movie career. This masculine ideal with which Mr. Eastwood perpetuated began in the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone who directed Eastwood as the strong yet silent type of protagonist who rides into town to pursue his own self-interests while taking advantage of his skill and cunning at outwitting predators who had made themselves tyrants over a fearful people. This role of the “Man With No Name” made Clint Eastwood a recognizable star overnight but also perpetrated a false and dangerous masculine ideal of a lone thug who manipulates the situation for his own good, and despite whatever lasting good or harm his actions cause, he rides off into the sunset to presumably continue the same cycle of violence upon others, alone and unattached to anyone or anything.  

            It was Unforgiven (1992) that allowed Clint Eastwood his opportunity to dispel this harmful perpetuation of the masculine ideal of the anti-social anti-hero who is only out for his own gain that was becoming a mainstay of our entertainment culture. Clint Eastwood, in this point in his career, had evolved not only in his roles but in his capacity to develop and portray both our American mythology and his own mythology as well. In regards to Unforgiven (1992), Clint Eastwood states, the movie “gave me a chance to sum up what I think violence does to the human soul” (Jardine par. 9). Mr. Eastwood was now an accomplished and experienced actor and director who could now tell his own stories as he saw fit to tell them. “Instead of glorifying masculine violence, Unforgiven (1992) exposes it as a costly masculine endeavor” (Jardine par. 8). Unforgiven (1992) according to Jardine “offers a "hero" alien to American masculine mythology: a celibate, broken-down widower who can no longer mount a horse or shoot straight, a man who expresses genuine remorse over his violent past, a father of two who prays over his deceased wife” (par.8). Unforgiven (1992), according to Jardine, “stands as a culmination of Eastwood's career-long interrogation of American culture, providing an accurate historical expression of women's lives and raising questions about the disturbingly oppositional construction of gender” (par. 9). Up until this point in his career, Clint Eastwood’s characters were lone killers unattached to anyone, and women were just another background character that served to be used and manipulated like all the others.            

           Clint Eastwood, in his three roles in A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Pale Rider (1985), and Unforgiven (1992) shows not only an evolution in his characters but in his own personal evolution from character actor to accomplished director and producer of film as well. Clint Eastwood, having gained his start as a supporting character on the television screen of the late 1950’s, had now become in the early 1990’s a major player in the development of our entertainment culture, standing side by side with other accomplished actors in their own right, and featuring himself in the starring role as a criticism of the type of character that had first brought him to the attention of America. Clint Eastwood reflects through his characters in these three films, not only the times that these movies were made in: the turbulence of the sixties, the greed of the nineteen eighties, and the uncertainty of the 1990’s but also his personal evolution from a barely speaking character actor to a man who is capable of show casing his multiple talents in the realm of film. Clint Eastwood, in A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Pale Rider (1985), and Unforgiven (1992) shows an evolution in not only his stereotypical character, his personal capacity and abilities in the creation of storytelling, but he also evolved the western genre and the art of film as well.

 Works Cited

A Fistful of Dollars. Dir. Sergio Leone. Perf. Clint Eastwood, Gian Maria Volonté, and Marianne Koch. Constantin Film Produktion. 1964. Film.

Belton, John. American Cinema/American Culture. 3rd ed. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. 2009. Print.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105695/awards.

Jardine, Gail. “Clint: Cultural Critic, Cowboy of Cathartic Change.” Art Journal 53.3 (1994): pp. 74-75. Web. 10 Dec. 2011.

McDonald, Archie P. Shooting Stars: Heroes and Heroines of Western Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1987. Print

Pale Rider. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Perf. Clint Eastwood, Michael Moriarty, and Carrie Snodgress. Warner Bros. 1985. Film

Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. New York, NY: HarperCollins. 1993. Print

Unforgiven. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Perf. Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, and Morgan Freeman. Warner Bros. 1992. Film.

Self-Control (12-15-2011)

The man who has erased

and eroded,

eliminated

and extracted,

erupted

and excavated,

exorcised

and enlightened himself of

all fear

must always

maintain his will for

self-control.

The College Student and Various Theories of Personality (Theories of Personality)

The College Student and Various Theories of Personality

            As a college student trying to earn a Bachelor’s degree, many issues and complications arise during the years and the various courses that one must take to successfully meet all the requirements for the degree. Despite the various subjects that a college student must take, and the variety of requirements that each one necessitates for a successful completion, as well as mediating the expectations of one’s personal and professional responsibilities, there is a behavior of the student that determines his or her successful outcome in their educational pursuit. Using the various concepts from cognitive self-regulation perspective, social-cognitive learning, classical, operant, humanistic, and personal construct theories we seek to find which is best for this analysis and why.

            According to Carver and Scheier (2008) the cognitive self-regulation perspective is based on the schema “or mental organizations of information” that forms our mental experience, or our personal interpretation of the world (Carver and Scheier, 2008, p. 373). Schemas “develop over experience” and evolve by recognizing and emulating the “prototypes” of an actual or idealized representative of a category to which we desire membership (Carver and Scheier, 2008, p. 396). According to Carver and Scheier (2008) “problems in behavior can come from information-processing deficits” whether they result from difficulty in “encoding” or absorbing information from our social environments, “ineffective allocation of attention” to information that would increase our potentials, and “negative self-schemas” or beliefs that we accrue about ourselves which may hinder and limit our functioning properly in our social environments (p. 396). The college student may have followed the prototypical behavior of college graduates in the hopes of finding the same professional and personal advantage that a degree from a school of higher learning confers. The college student succeeds or fails by how well they utilize skills of absorbing and making use of the information presented within their courses, how well they focus their attention to this information while ignoring or limiting their attention to useless information, and how well they address negative core beliefs which may limit how successful they are in the attainment of a college education. 

            The social-cognitive learning perspective is based on the idea that “thought processes” play an important part in behavior, and that “people often learn from one another”, or adopt other people’s successful behavior by observation (Carver and Scheier, 2008, p. 315). “Social reinforcers such as acceptance and approval” can motivate the person to become either an “internal” who recognizes the importance of reinforcers on their behavior, or an “external” who believes “their outcomes to be unrelated to their actions” (Carver and Scheier, 2008, p. 316). The college student pursuing a higher education in this case observes successful people, adopts the behavior which they see successful people be rewarded for, and acknowledge the power of social reinforcement in their successful attainment of a college diploma.   

            The classical conditioning perspective, Myers (2002) states, “associates neutral stimuli with important stimuli that produce responses which are often automatic” (p. 237). In the classical perspective a student observes and follows other students into the expectation of society that a college education is the next logical step after graduating from high school, that going to a university is just a matter of doing a thing that the student believes will bring favorable praise from one’s social environment. Therefore, in regards to classical conditioning, a college education is just an automated task that one pursues as social ritual and social expectation.

            In the operant conditioning perspective a person “associates behaviors with their consequences” or “operates on the environment” in response to “rewarding or punishing stimuli” (Myers, 2002, p. 237). In the operant perspective a student expects that his college education is a stepping stone toward a more “satisfying state of affairs” in one’s later career goals and personal life by attaining a degree for which society will reward you in various forms (Carver and Scheier, 2008, p. 271).

           The humanistic perspective emphasizes that “the potential for positive, healthy growth expresses itself in everyone if there are no strong opposing influences” (Carver and Scheier, 2008, p. 322). Carver and Scheier (2008) go on to call this growth "actualization”, or a “tendency to develop capabilities in ways that maintain or enhance the organism” (p. 322). For the college student who is self-actualizing, one recognizes that a college education is one of the few opportunities that life offers towards becoming the most “fully functioning person” that one can become, and broaden one’s ability to “experiencing the world” (Carver and Scheier, 2008, p. 322).

           The personal construct perspective involves predicting and anticipating future events and then reacting to these events “through the lens of” a personal construction of one’s interpretation of reality rather than actual reality itself (Carver and Scheier, 2008, p. 351). In the personal construct perspective a college student pursuing a higher education, predicts and anticipates how one’s future life will be enhanced by the attainment of a degree, and assumes that one’s reality will be enhanced and improved after earning a diploma.

           Out of all these theories of personality that are available to understanding the college student, the cognitive self-regulation perspective seems the best for our analysis. We are what our minds make of our environments, or how our particular brain organizes and interprets information from the world. The organization of information within our minds is greatly assisted by an education in the proper functioning of various subjects, and in a learned observation of other people. It is the information that a person chooses to pay attention to, or ignores, how well a person utilizes this information in their personal spheres, and how well a person develops their belief of self, or self-schema, to function in the world that helps us best to understand why or why not a college student develops into their own prototype of personal success.

References

           

Carver, C. S. & Scheier, M.F. (2008). Perspectives on Personality, 6th ed.   Boston, MA:  

Pearson.

Myers, David G. (2002). Exploring Psychology, 5^th ed. New York, NY: Worth      

Publishers.

Fixing Men: Sex, Birth Control, and AIDS in Mexico by Matthew Gutmann (Sex and Gender)

            Matthew Gutmann in his book Fixing Men: Sex, Birth Control, and AIDS in Mexico provides some startling facts on AIDS and describes how various forces play a part in its unheeded spread in the Oaxaca state of Mexico, and perhaps the world as a whole. Various forces in the form of cultural misperceptions, global institutions, the economic and political policies of Mexico, the lack of men’s participation in reproductive health, and the health behaviors of men play a part in the spread of this highly contagious and deadly disease. According to Gutmann (2007), these cultural misperceptions of Mexicans toward other Mexicans, the role of global institutions, as well as Mexico’s own political and economic policies, and the behavior of Mexican men allow the spread of AIDS to become a genocide engineered against the poverty stricken people of Mexico.

            In the Oaxaca state of Mexico there is a cultural misperception that takes it for granted that men are sexual animals with very limited self control. In his meetings with doctors at a local health clinic, the medical professionals relate to Gutmann (2007) that migrant men acquire AIDS from their homosexual activity in the United States (p.3). When Gutmann (2007) questions one medical professional about this belief he is told, “that’s what Mexican men do: they have sex with other men” (p. 3). Gutmann (2007) also states that there is a “widespread belief that men have stronger sexual drives than women” which perhaps leads them to engage in more at risk behaviors which puts them in the position of acquiring HIV (p. 202). Gilmore (n.d) states in his study of machismo in Spain, that the three ideals of Spanish masculinity is “virility, valor, and virtue” (Brettell and Sargent, 2009, p. 198). While the valor and virtue of Spanish of masculinity may not be so clearly defined in Spanish culture, the urge to prove one’s virility is encouraged in Spanish culture by the stigmatization of a man being labeled a “flojo” or someone that is “flaccid”, “weak”, “soft”, or “who can’t get it up” (Brettell and Sargent, 2009, p. 199). Perhaps this cultural misperception of Mexican men being sexually out of control is actually a result of a culture that encourages men to be sexually proactive as a means of proving their masculinity?

           Global institutions play an important role in the fight against AIDS in not only Mexico but the entire world. Gutmann (2007) states “the pharmaceutical companies, government health institutions, the Catholic church, and the planned parenthood federations” among other global “influences” effect the sexual and reproductive health practices made by the typical Mexican, whether this is known or not (p. 202). In the governments of the first world there have been measures put into place to “balance the need for social regulation of the population with the rights of parents and of individual women to control their own fertility” to deal with the epidemics of sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis and HIV (Weeks, Brettell and Sargent, 2009, p. 377). As our first world governments and global organizations are “more concerned with the threat of overpopulation in the Third World”, they create policies which are designed to limit negative sexual activity that encourages the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, especially in the homosexual sector where HIV shows its most prevalent growth (Brettell and Sargent, 2009, p. 378). As the source of much aid to the Third World, these global institutions export their polices to poorer countries to regulate the spread of AIDS by using their influence in shaping and developing sexual and reproductive policies of the countries that they give financial and material assistance to.  

           Mexican economics and politics play an important role in the spread of AIDS in Mexico. “In the 1970’s and 1980’s health care coverage” saw an increased trend which tried to expand and spread services more evenly throughout Mexico (Gutmann, 2007, p. 24). In the late 1990’s though this trend began to diminish and reverse as health care was “shifted away from public to private institutions” (Gutmann, 2007, p. 25). Gutmann (2007) states, “as a result of neoliberal economic reforms, health care spaces, like clinics and hospitals, that had been touted as public became increasingly inaccessible to those without the personal funds to pay for health services” (p. 25). In regards to AIDS and its treatment, Mexico, according to Gutmann (2007), “pays whatever the drug companies demand” rather than negotiating with pharmaceutical companies for lower cost medications that can be used to help the most people as possible (p. 46). This results in what Gutmann (2007) states is “only a fraction of people who need” AIDS medication “are able to receive them”, and that Mexicans are not made aware of existing AIDS clinics, nor encouraged to seek out AIDS testing (p. 48). The economic and political policies of Mexico play a major factor in the spread of AIDS in the Mexican population.   

            The cultural permission for Mexican men not to participate in reproductive health adds to the spread of AIDS in Mexico. Gutmann (2007) asks “how is culture inscribed on male bodies through beliefs and practices associated with their sexuality?” (p. 5). Before the invention of the birth control pill, Gutmann (2007) states, the only options that men had in preventing a woman’s pregnancy was “slipping on a condom prior to sexual intercourse or, more often, withdrawing from the woman prior to ejaculating: coitus interruptus” (p. 11). With the invention of the birth control pill men could now be free to “enjoy sex”, as well as women, without the fear of becoming trapped in a “chronic round of pregnancy and childbirth” (Gutmann, 2007, p. 11). The past few decades of advances in reproductive health have displaced men from reproductive health and focused primarily on the female due to what was seen as an “urgent need” to focus on woman’s biological and reproductive role as mother (Gutmann, 2007, p. 12). Gutmann (2007) states that for men “there was no parallel or complementary demand in men’s health” and in “government and nongovernmental institutions, men were in effect excluded from participation in many health and development programs” (p. 12). By officially omitting men from advances in reproductive health, men are further removed from practices that could hinder the spread of HIV and AIDS.

          The health behavior of Mexican men contributes as an additional factor in the spread of HIV and AIDS. Since health care is often prohibitively expensive to the citizen of Mexico, men search out alternative means to modern health care. Gutmann (2007) speaks about Mexicans taking “Cocos a la Viagra” which are nothing more than “coconuts mixed with octopus and shrimp” to cure their erectile dysfunction (p. 194). Gutmann (2007) talks about citizens going to “boticarios” or community pharmacies that sell all kinds of concoctions for all kinds of illnesses, rather than pursuing modern and proven methods yet expensive treatments for their ailments (p. 174). Gutmann (2007) relates the experience of dirt poor migrant workers who live in such dismal and unsanitary conditions, conditions which often cause “chronic stomach pains and diarrhea” (p. 52). These men “sought to relieve these symptoms by injecting themselves with vitamins and antibiotics”, often times using syringes that were unsterilized and shared (Gutmann, 2007, p. 52). Due to the prohibitive cost of health care in Mexico, men are often forced to seek out alternative means to health problems, rather than modern medicine which could determine whether they are carriers of the HIV/AIDS virus.

          In his book Fixing Men: Sex, Birth Control, and AIDS in Mexico, Matthew Gutmann provides some startling facts on AIDS and how cultural beliefs about sex and gender determine how AIDS is dealt with in Mexico, rather than from a true scientific exploration of the subject. Gutmann describes how the patriarchal hegemony is maintained in Mexico by the social constructionism in the form of global institutions that distance men from their sexual and reproductive health, while placing the responsibility for these concerns solely on women. Due to the need for cheap labor in the United States, Mexican men cross the border every day in search of work that they cannot find at home, enduring stresses and pressures that they naturally seek to relieve through the means they have available, but these men are somehow and in some way acquiring the HIV virus in the United States. And because it is believed that these men are homosexuals in a society that is homophobic, these migrant workers return to their country with a highly contagious disease for which they will likely spread before they themselves die a horrible death, solely for the sin of being poor in a world that needs their cheap labor to build other people’s wealth. 

References

Gilmore, D.D. (2009). My Encounter with Machismo in Spain. In C.B. Brettell & C.F.

Sargent, (Eds.), Gender in Cross-Cultural Perspective 5^th ed. (pp. 196-210).

Upper Saddle River, N.J: Pearson/Prentice Hall.

                           

Gutmann, M. (2007) Fixing Men: Sex, Birth Control, and AIDS in Mexico. Berkeley and

Los Angeles, C.A: University of California Press.

Weeks, J. (2003). An Unfinished Revolution: Sexuality in the 20^th Century. In LaFont, S.

(Ed). Constructing Sexualities: Readings in Sexuality, Gender, and Culture (pp. 376-386). Upper Saddle River, N.J: Prentice Hall.

Discussion Post to Theories of Personality (11-26-11).

We have to examine and educate ourselves in our own mental symbols and phenomena to align them with the behaviors of successful people we hope to become. Self-regulation allows us to "reprogram" the information in our minds after we discern the worthiness of our own self-created and self-accumulated information against other more functional and efficient "prototypes", or sources of idealized representatives that our culture produces. We are what we can learn and how well we can apply the qualities of information we accrue.

Success Minded versus Self-Actualizers (Discuss Post to Theories of Personality).

The phenomenological perspective discusses a “real self” that is often neglected, but that must be accepted if we are to become self-actualized. What’s often hard for people to understand is that this real self is not the same as “success” as we usually understand it. So there is a tension between success and self-actualization. Imagine two people at work:  one success-motivated, and the other driven by self-actualization. How would they work differently?

The difference between success-motivated people and self-actualized people is the person(s) that they want to please. A success-motivated person tries to learn what other people think of a successful and then mimic the behavior of the person(s) that have attained the level of success that will please the greatest amount of people. For example, most of us in our society are taught that a college education will get you the good paying job, a better lifestyle, money that can permit you to do and buy more things than people without money. A college education leads to working with one’s brain at a comfortable desk rather than using your hands in some dismal warehouse or factory or fast food restaurant. Once most people graduate from college and find a job that sustains their lifestyle then they spend the rest of their life maintaining this lifestyle. This maintaining of lifestyle is maintaining the appearance of success that others find desirable or at least more desirable than what others may find comfortable at subsistence living. We are our drives and motives, if we can satisfy our drives and motives at the level we are functioning on then why bother finding other levels to function on.

The self-actualized person needs to function on a higher level than simply pleasing and maintaining the good relations of others. I believe the self-actualizing person who is “accurate in perceiving reality” perceives this reality will end someday and is aware of this fact more so than other people (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 335). The self-actualizing person is “concerned with eternal philosophical questions” and experiences “a sense of oneness with nature that transcends time and space” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 335). A self-actualizing person has a “childlike and fresh creativity and inventiveness” while maintaining “an inner detachment from the culture in which they live” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 335). A self-actualized person appears to be “strong, independent, and guided by their own inner visions that they sometimes appear temperamental and even ruthless” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 335). A self-actualizing person is thus a person who is not trapped by the limitations of trying to please other people at their levels, is not satisfied with the entertainment that the media markets to us as our culture, and realizes that life is a limited period of time to learn, to explore, and to produce something out of it. That is why I think most self-actualizers tend towards being scholars and academics who hope to discover new knowledge like Einstein, or artists who try to give the world another way of perceiving and thinking about their world like Picasso.

The difference in how the two would work is that the unself-actualized person is content to go to work eight hours a day, forty hours a week, to go through the motions of a job to maintain a comfortable lifestyle. They play these social games with others to maintain a comfortable existence at home and at work, live life through video games, television, movies, Facebook, the bar scene, etc.

The self-actualized person is more interested in giving purpose to their limited time on this earth and probably is not focused on being great at a job, but continuing what allows the person to keep the job for the advantages it gives them. For instance, when one finishes their work they could then use their time to surreptitiously research their real interests, i.e. science, the arts, etc. The self-actualized person may even cause themselves problems by entertaining their interests rather than entertaining their bosses.

A Literary Analysis of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. (American Literature I).

Joseph Melanson

Professor McAllister

American Literature I

16 October 2011

A Literary Analysis of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.

            Thomas Paine was one of our country’s greatest freedom fighters, using his command of the English language in his pamphlet Common Sense as a literary weapon in the goal of defeating Great Britain, and overthrowing her as America’s overseer. His aim was the use of language to pursue a country already embroiled in war, to come together in the cause to fight oppression. “Common Sense” played an important part in the American Revolution, in its use of rhetoric, to demonize Great Britain, and paint her as a brute, a monster, and a parasite among other things. Thomas Paine used this ability for rhetoric and language to create one of the one of the world’s most powerful and effective pieces of propaganda through the use of various themes.

           The use of the title “Common Sense” infers that his ideas are the result of logic and reason, coming from basic and universally known facts, known to the majority of sane, educated people. Paine introduces his argument by notifying the reader of his “simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense” (335). He appeals to the reader to put aside “prejudice and prepossession, and suffer his reason and his feelings to determine for themselves”, giving the reader the choice to listen to his argument at a time when the king of England only offered subjugation (Paine 335). It is by appealing to the intellect and reason of the common man that Paine asserts separation from Great Britain is common sense.

            Paine hopes to inform the reader of the current political state of affairs and the hopelessness with which politics would bring England and America to a peaceful resolution. Paine states that much has been written concerning “the struggle between England and America” and many people from all kinds of backgrounds have weighed in with their opinions. Resulting in no clear outcome, according to Paine the “period of debate is closed” (336). Paine goes on to state “by referring the matter from argument to arms, a new era for politics is struck – a new method of thinking has arisen” (336). England has made the choice to pursue bloodshed, he reminds the reader, by referring to the nineteenth of April (1775) the date that England troops tried to commandeer American ammunition stores. With this act England has decided loyalty will be determined by force, that friendship is only a thing for a king to accept or deny. This summation of the political state of affairs hopes to inform the reader the people of the day must decide for themselves whether to fight for freedom or let others decide their fates for them.

            Paine hopes to appeal the common man and decide what actions they should take for the sake of their progeny. “The sun never shined on a cause of greater worth”, says Paine (336). This same sun will shine on future generations and this generation will have to decide whether their children live in freedom or under the tyranny of England. “‘Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected even to the end of time by the proceedings now” (Paine 336). He goes on to state that our heirs will benefit or suffer for our action or inaction, that posterity will read our about indecisions “in full grown characters” (Paine 336). Paine argues that the present state of the government is not reliable enough to “which we may bequeath to posterity” (339). The theme of posterity is used throughout Common Sense to make the reader aware of one’s heirs.

            Paine hopes to appeal to men’s sense of masculinity by persuading them that anything less than freedom from America results in their own emasculation. Responding to Prime Minister Henry Pelham words “they will last my time” in regards to measures he wanted to make concerning America, Paine remarks that such a short-sighted and selfish attitude that disregards its effects on future generations was “fatal and unmanly” (336). “The true character of a man”, Paine states, is found in those who can look beyond themselves to “generously enlarge his views beyond the present day” (335). “Men of passive tempers”, Paine says, are those that overlook the “offenses of Great Britain” and hold out hope for reconciliation (339). Paine hopes to persuade the reader that a man is one who makes decisions not only for himself, but for future generations, by choosing to fight for freedom from England. 

            Paine demonizes the king of England as a distant ruler selfishly unconcerned with the rights and property of Americans. He refers to the “many material injuries which these colonies sustain, and will always sustain” by being connected with Great Britain (336). Paine states that Britain only sees America as a “secondary object”, only considering how America can serve England’s “purposes” (342).  By Great Britain’s attacks upon the American colony, Paine argues that the king of England can never compensate them for “the expense of blood and treasure we have been already put to” (341). By using the terms “material”, “secondary objects”, and “treasure”, Paine hopes to give the reader the inclination to see the king of England as more concerned for property and resources that can be gained from America, rather than what the colonists could produce willingly for their shared and mutual exchange.

            Paine uses his rhetoric to portray the king of England as more of an animal than a man, a scavenger who exists only to prey on her colonies. “Even brutes do not devour their young, nor savages make war upon their families” as England had chosen to do in America (Paine 336). The king, Paine states, makes company with “parasites” who try to gain “an unfair bias on the credulous weakness of our minds” (337). America had first been settled by those who hope to escape from civil and religious persecution, England being one of those cruel “monsters” that had caused oppressed people to flee. Paine states that no one rules the colonies other than God, and not the “Royal Brute of Great Britain” (344). Thomas Paine, in Common Sense, reduces England to beast, something less than what a man should willing follow (337).

           Thomas Paine, in his pamphlet Common Sense, uses his great literary capacity to bring the American people against a common enemy, the tyranny of England, but most importantly against the tyranny of the royal kingdoms of Europe.  The use of various themes in Common Sense illustrates the dichotomy of the freedom and ideals of the New World, versus the oppression and tyranny of the Old World through the uses of literary technique. Thomas Paine, in Common Sense, made plain the reasons between the divide of the colonies and the mother country in associating England with the behavior of brutes, giving her the label of a monster, and objectifying the king of England as a parasite only concerned with feeding upon the resources that the colonies would bring him. Thomas Paine, in Common Sense, used this ability for rhetoric and language to create one of the one of the world’s most powerful and effective pieces of propaganda through the use of various literary themes.

Works Cited:

Paine, Thomas. “Common Sense”. The American Tradition in Literature. 12^th ed. Ed. George Perkins and Barbara Perkins. New York: McGraw Hill, 2009. 335-44. Print.

The Ego as Fundamental Component of Personality and Three Therapies to Modify it. (Theories of Personality)

Joseph Melanson

Prof. Cloninger

Theories of Personality

13 November 2011

The Ego as Fundamental Component of Personality and Three Therapies to Modify it.

            In a normal human life, a person is susceptible to various forces that one is not usually consciously aware of. These unconscious forces still nevertheless remain a constant influence upon us and a constant stimulus that results from the interplay between our environment and our continuous and evolving sense of self. In order to become a highly functional person in our society, a person must become aware of these unconscious influences that constantly surround oneself, acknowledge that the ego and its development is the most crucial aspect of our lives, and only by learning healthy methods of mitigating our motives and needs against the opportunities and limitations of our environments will we be able to attain the highest levels of success in our lives.

            Besides our conscious awareness of the world there are unconscious influences which play an integral role in how we function within our environment. According to Sigmund Freud, the unconscious mind is “a repository for urges, feelings, and ideas that are tied to anxiety, conflict, and pain” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 162). Our waking consciousness can be seen as only a small component of the mind, while the greater majority of our individual mental world is comprised of an unconscious and unseen element which Freud states is responsible for the “core operations” of our personality (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 162). If this is true, then our conscious experience is only a small fragment of the greater functioning of our minds.

            According to Freud, our minds are comprised of three individual parts: the ego, the id, and the superego. The id “is all the inherited, instinctive, primitive aspects” of our personality that is largely unconscious, deriving from our biological states which constantly seek out satiation in our environments (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 163). Our superego is our value system that we inherent from our parents and our greater society as a whole (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 166). It is our ego that is always caught in the middle of the id and the superego, always trying to maintain a proper balance between “the desires of the id and the constraints of the external world” in the form of our own superego (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 165). This constant need to balance the unconscious yet ever present demands of the id and the superego can cause much stress if a person is unable to develop a healthy ego which is able to satisfy these demands.  

            Our unconscious mind is also comprised of instincts that drive us toward our survival as found in the life, or Eros instincts, and our death, or Thanatos instincts (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 170). Our life instincts comprise our drives toward “survival, reproduction, and pleasure”, while our death instincts exist as a unconscious drive toward a “return to nothingness” perhaps forming in the pursuit of self-destructive acts and risky behaviors (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 170). These life and death instincts play a largely unseen yet important influence on our lifestyles as well as the people that our egos are attracted to and reciprocated by.   

           As we go through life our ego must learn methods to balance our unconscious yet powerful drives and impulses against the need to satisfy the need to please our social environment. Not all of our unconscious yet ever present drives can be satiated all of the time which results in the need to either “displace” or “sublimate” our desires (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 172). Displacement is “a change in how energy is used or the object toward which it’s used”, or how we direct our feelings which may be uncomfortable for us to express in one instance with one person, is now channeled towards an another instance where it is comfortable for us to vent, or express these feelings (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 172). Sublimation on the other hand, is shifting the feelings which cause us discomfort away from “socially unacceptable” actions to those that are “acceptable or even praiseworthy” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 172). Depending upon our individual personalities and how functional we tend to be in learning how to express ourselves, our behaviors can leads us toward actions of displacement or sublimation.

            Our ego and the understanding for the need for its healthy development is crucial if we are to be successful in our social interactions and attain the quality of life that we feel we deserve. Carver and Scheier (2008) state that our “ego identity is the consciously experienced sense of self. It derives from transactions with social reality. A person’s ego identity changes constantly in response to events in the social world” (p. 244). This ongoing and continuous sense of self in our ever changing environment necessitates that we become as educated as we can in the development of our egos.

            A person’s ego goes through several stages in a typical lifetime and it is critical to a healthy sense of self that we are able to evolve and adapt through theses stages. Erickson identifies eight different “psychosocial stages” of which each has its own crisis “that dominates each stage” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 245). The first stage is of infancy, and its crisis is the sense of trust, or believing in a predicable world of relationships (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 245). The second stage is early childhood, and its crisis concerns “creating a sense of autonomy in actions versus shame and doubt” and “being able to act independently” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 245). The third stage is of preschool and its crisis is a “desire to exert influence” and “power” in one’s environment (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 246). The fourth stage is called school age and its crisis is gaining “the sense that one can do things that are valued by others” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 246). The fifth stage is called adolescence and its corresponding crisis is of developing a “consolidated identity” or a “direction in the sense of self” (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 248). The sixth stage is known as young adulthood and its crisis involves learning to develop intimate relations with others (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 248). The seventh stage is labeled adulthood and its crisis involves centers around “generativity” or creating something that outlives the person whether it is a child or a work of art (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 250). The eighth and final stage is called old age, and its crisis involves having a positive outlook on the sense of satisfaction one has attained while looking back on the accomplishments and failures one has made in their lifetime (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 251). It is only by successfully navigating each crisis at each stage that a person is able to move on to the next, and by the successful navigation of these stages that the ego develops to its highest potential. Recognizing that the ego is the most crucial aspect of our lives and that it’s development is an ongoing process, we then need to search out the methods to improve and attain our highest level of functioning.

            There are three different ways among many that one can improve one’s ego reality in one’s environment: classical conditioning, instrumental conditioning, and observational learning.

            Classical conditioning involves associating a response to an already existing association between a stimulus and the corresponding reflex, to the introduction of a new stimulus to activate this same reflex (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 266). The most famous example of this type of conditioning is seen in the experiments of Ivan Pavlov, who trained dogs to salivate to the sound of a bell. In a person’s lifetime there are various stimulations from our environments that cause conditioned reflexes within us that result in actions that may very well be unconscious. For example, we may learn to fear being in the dark if we are conditioned as children to believe in monsters that hide under beds and in closets. As we grow and learn that monsters do not exist but we may still keep our fear of the dark into adulthood. It is by examining our unconscious behaviors that we come to understand why our behavior continues as it does. Once we discover our negative behaviors are attached to conditioned stimulus, we can then use “counterconditioning” to assign “a new response that is incompatible” with our fear of the dark (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 506).

            Instrumental conditioning, or operant conditioning, is a process by which a pattern of behavior of a subject is continued if a positive outcome of the behavior results, while a negative outcome of the behavior is likely to result in its diminishment from the subject’s cycle of behavior (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 270). Unlike classical conditioning which only requires a reaction towards some stimuli, instrumental conditioning is dependent upon the active behavior of the individual (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 270). Instrumental conditioning is essentially reinforcing “desired behaviors and punishing undesired behaviors” or using a system of rewards or punishment to modify behavior (Myers, 2005, p. 509). The most common example of this therapy is when parents reward their children for good behavior and punish them for misbehavior. Although this form of therapy depends on outside reinforcement to shape one’s behavior, a person with enough determination and self-control can perhaps learn to observe their behaviors and determine for themselves their own rewards or punishment to the measure by which one hope to attain their desired potential.  

            Observational conditioning is a process by which a subject watches another subject perform a desired action, then the first subject learns to “acquire the ability to repeat” this desired behavior (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 301). This form of therapy allows a person to accrue “huge amounts of information quickly” by “paying attention to the model” and retain the desired observed behavior by “imaginal coding” or mental picturing, and “verbal coding” or mental description of the observed behavior (Carver & Scheier, 2008, p. 301). This form of therapy allows us to modify our behavior by finding those with the skills and knowledge that we desire, and then learn to copy what they do to attain this same desired levels of skill and knowledge. We become only as successful as the successful people we choose to emulate.

The lack of a formation of a healthy ego identity will likely result in a dysfunctional cycle that continues throughout our lifetimes unless we learn the structures of our ego and how to organize it within our relationships and in our greater social environment. Myers (2005) states individuals “finding their favorable self-esteem” or ego, “threatened, people often react by putting others down, sometimes with violence” which can manifest in either physical or verbal expression (p. 64). The ego of many people is a fragile and unshaped thing, reacting to random events that occur in the circumstances of our lives that come and go. Perhaps by studying the ego, and how it functions, one can learn to comfortably occupy the line between what is good for ourselves, and what is good for our environments.

 References

           

Carver, C. S. & Scheier, M.F. (2008). Perspectives on Personality, 6th ed.   Boston, MA:   Pearson

Myers, David G. (2005). Social Psychology, 8^th ed. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Myers, David G. (2002). Exploring Psychology, 5^th ed. New York, NY: Worth       Publishers.