Personality

PERSONALITY (Lat. persona). The concept "personality" belongs to those concepts which throughout the history of human thought have caused the greatest diversity in definitions. Both the scope and content of this concept in the interpretation of each philosopher, psychologist, or sociologist turned out to be extremely varied. Among the many reasons for this diversity, special importance was acquired by the circumstance that the problem of the psychological properties of man was invariably the arena of a very sharp ideological struggle of class forces. From the recognition of certain properties for the human psyche depended one or another justification of religious dogmas, legal norms, social institutions, etc. Precisely for this reason, in the field of the doctrine of personality, the "partisanship" of researchers dealing with this problem was most evident. Moreover, the problem is complicated by the peculiar manifestation of personality processes. It is precisely personality that manifests itself not only in acts of behavior but also in the form of various psychological experiences. The presence of the latter constantly gave idealists occasion to search for some spiritual basis for it, fundamentally different from both bodily processes and the processes of the objective reality surrounding us. History of the problem. For an extremely long time, systematic consideration of the question of personality was the domain of philosophers and theologons alone. In the era of insufficient development of social sciences and natural sciences and in accordance with the socio-economic conditions of those times, they arrived at one or another assertions about personality purely by speculative means; hence the extreme arbitrariness of their constructions. Thus, Descartes asserts that even the "spirit of the infant has ideas about god, about itself, about all those truths which are known in themselves". Theologians also prove in every way that an inalienable property of personality is its striving for "knowledge of god", "for communion with god", and try, referring to the peculiarities of personality, to create for themselves the most complete picture of the properties of the absolute spirit. In particular, Hegel depicts the properties of the absolute spirit, the dialectic of its self-development, constantly appealing to the dialectic of human thinking. He sees in it a reflection of the laws of development of world reason, one of the highest incarnations of which is the human soul. All these features of the past periods of the doctrine of personality have far from merely archival interest. First of all, they are to one degree or another inherent in a number of modern theories of personality, as is evident from the works of W. Stern (William Stern). Stern considers the immanently inherent primary teleological principle as the basis of personality. By the presence in itself of precisely this principle, personality differs in a principled way from a dead "thing" (Sache). And since Stern does not overlook that besides man a number of formations, especially social ones, are in the process of development, he also considers these formations, i.e. family, nation, race, etc., as carriers of the same immanent-teleological principle. Stern considers the "divine personality of the world" (Gottliche Allperson) as the culmination of this system, in whose recognition he sees, in his own words, the mainstay of his doctrine of personality. What was taking place in the field of theology in those times is characteristic in the modern period for a number of sociological systems of an idealistic type. Personality, especially the personality of leaders, is assigned a decisive role in historical events. Material conditions of social life play a secondary role from this point of view, appearing merely as a limitation of the sovereign human will, which is thus presented as the cause of all the diversity of socio-historical forms. And again, similar to what took place in theology, these constructions are achieved at the cost of arbitrarily endowing personality with a number of properties corresponding to the class ideals of the given researcher. Thus, ideologists of the large bourgeoisie emphasize as supposedly immanent properties of personality its striving for power, for possession, as well as extremely individualistic forms of its consciousness (cf. Nietzsche). Arguing from these supposedly natural properties of personality and extolling them as the most valuable social phenomenon, they try to ideologically justify and perpetuate the institution of property, competition, etc. Similarly, petty-bourgeois sociologists, in substantiation of their reformist projects, attribute to personality such properties as the supposedly eternal striving for truth and justice. Ludwig Feuerbach was the first in the history of new philosophy to pose the question of personality materialistically, opposing its theological and mystical interpretation, for recognition of the psyche as a function of the whole organism, and of its concrete content as a product of the effect of objective reality on the human nervous system. However, in this question he was not consistent, i.e. a dialectical materialist, since on the one hand he remained alien to a concrete-historical approach to personality, and on the other hand he left in the shade the moment of labor, practically-sensory activity, so important for personality as a subject of human history. The founders of Marxism fundamentally provided a truly scientific resolution of the problem of personality both in theory and in practice, not only thanks to the materialistic dialectic and historical materialism created and developed by them, but also because they made a number of indications directly relating to this problem. However, one of the current tasks of Marxists-Leninists on the front of ideology and scientific research is the systematic development of the heritage of Marx-Engels-Lenin as applied to the problem of personality, combining this development with the study of the enormous factual material and the tasks of the practice of socialist construction. Development and structure of personality. One of the main theoretical roots of the helplessness of bourgeois researchers of personality to do anything fruitful in the field of personality is the metaphysical, alien to the idea of actual development method of considering the problem. Their usual method is to take as an object of analysis a fully formed personality of a representative of some epoch, nationality or social stratum (most often of the same to which they themselves belong) and, abstracting from the socio-historical process that led to the formation of this type of personality in all its concreteness and social conditioning, to speculate about the psychological peculiarities and psychological structure of this type. At best, they admit the moment of development in the form of the formation of personality only in the process of its individual life, and even in this case social laws are taken into account to a minimal degree, as something secondary and little influential. It is precisely by this speculative way that, for example, Klages comes to his distinction between "material" (i.e. intellectual peculiarities) and temperament, from which supposedly character is formed, or to the proposition that the type of temperament is determined by the ratio of internal drives and volitional inhibitions. The same path leads Hoffmann to the compilation of an artificial list of inclinations supposedly inherent in every personality in one proportion or another, a list in which in reality are found taken from everyday life designations of the most common qualities of the modern petty-bourgeois philistine: drive for seizure, self-preservation, self-assertion, pride, ambition, lust for power, self-submission, self-discipline, etc. It is not surprising that with such an approach the main formal signs of a formed personality - its ideology, ability for goal-setting practical activity, logical thinking, character, etc., - turn out to be a manifestation of some immaterial substance (as for example in W. Stern) or are mechanically derived from the biological dispositions of the individual. The reactionary essence and bourgeois nature of such theories and the methodology underlying them is obvious. Exposing the falsity of such theories and methods, Marxism at the same time brings the study of personality onto the truly scientific path. In his work "Labor as a factor in the evolution from ape to man" Engels not only gives the only correct formulation of the problem of the emergence of "man as man", treating this problem as socio-historical, but also specifically reveals the real foundations of the formation of the specific peculiarities of human behavior. The main of these foundations is labor. In the period of transition from ape to man, the matter is not yet about labor in the proper sense of the word, but about the biological prerequisites of labor in the form of complex manual operations characteristic, for example, of chimpanzees, which build themselves canopies for protection from bad weather or use sticks to obtain fruits (cf. experiments and observations of Koehler). The actual "process of labor begins only with the manufacture of tools". However, even the germs of the socially-labor process acquire exceptional significance not only for the appearance of new functional psychological peculiarities, but also for the occurrence of profound changes in the organism of man-like beings and first of all in the anatomy-physiology of its nervous system.

In this process, labor affects the development of the human organism and behavior not only directly but also through a series of mediating factors, such as the requirements imposed on primitive man by primitive forms of society, changes in the food used, and so on. On the basis of labor, the characteristic human specialization of the hand took place in anatomical and functional relations, with all the resulting physiological correlations in the rest of the organism (upright walking, peculiarities of metabolism associated with peculiarities of human nutrition); the physiological prerequisites for human speech arose (the speech apparatus with its peculiar central nervous and peripheral adaptations); and the development of the brain, ultimately connected with the same social-labor process, meant the development of both the sense organs and 'an increasingly clear consciousness, the ability to abstraction and to inference.' The connection between the social-labor process and the psycho-physiology of people is by no means one-sided. Labor in its specifically human form is a purposeful, rational activity that changes along with changes in human needs and goals, as well as with the growth of knowledge about nature and society. Consequently, the very emergence of labor presupposes the existence of certain psycho-physiological peculiarities, the origin of which in turn shows that we are dealing with a complex dialectical interaction in which even at the dawn of development labor activity played a leading role (as it did later). In the period of human origin, i.e., in the period when herd existence had not yet been replaced by genuine social life with its inherent social regularities, the need for labor activity (arising from the relationship between external conditions of existence and the existing psycho-physiological peculiarities of human ancestors) adapted the behavior of the 'pre-human' mainly through the laws of biological evolution. The underdevelopment of social life and the associated absence, at least, of written speech excluded the possibility of social forms of enrichment of human activity. The ontogenetic changes of an individual almost left to himself were too disproportionate to the demands of reality. Rejecting teleological and mechanistic theories of evolution and relying on Darwin's theory, it should be assumed that the aforementioned necessity acted on the 'pre-human' mainly by natural selection and, of course, over vast periods of time. The result of this influence was changes that were inherited and personality successively fixed in the gene pool of humanizing animals. Thus, in the pre-human period (perhaps also at the dawn of the subsequent period), everything that biologically distinguishes man from his animal ancestors was formed in particular, the human brain with its powerful and extremely differentiated cortex and complex neurodynamics. But the achievement of precisely such a level of psycho-physiological _<development along with the emergence of genuinely human society created the basis for a completely different way of mastering nature and social relations. No longer through the long formation of hereditary biological adaptations are labor techniques, vital for mastering nature, perfected, but by the development of 'artificial organs of man'—tools of labor. And since on the other hand the development of tools of labor is a social process proceeding differently under the conditions of different socio-economic formations, the development of man is determined by the laws of social life. This by no means means that the biological moment in man loses all significance. Not to mention that biological processes are the substrate of socio-historical changes in the human organism and behavior—all social development of man would be impossible if man had not in prehistoric times reached a high level of biological development, if in particular he had not become the owner of a nervous system exceptional in the complexity of its structure and functioning. Such a biological organization opens the widest road for the extraordinary complication and diversity of forms of human behavior that arise on the basis of social development. And conversely, the latter is so effective for each individual person who has entered social life precisely because the necessary prerequisites exist in the level of biological organization characteristic of homo sapiens. It is also true that in relation to an individual person, his biological peculiarities imprint a certain stamp of individual uniqueness on the formal side of his behavior (certain traits of individual temperament, character), and knowledge of these peculiarities and the way of their change and use in the interests of certain social tasks is by no means indifferent to medicine, psychotechnology, and pedagogy. And yet it is the social regularities that determine the development of human behavior, leading this development with all the wealth and specificity of its historical forms. The social environment cannot be mechanically opposed to man as a supposedly biological being by nature. The social environment is not something external to man, the subject of history, who changes nature and society in forms determined by the peculiarities of the same social environment. Likewise, there is nothing more erroneous than to think that the internal factor in the development of the individual, his 'self-movement' with its inherent contradictions is exhausted by biological regularities. In reality, the social environment penetrates 'inside' man, becomes his essence in the sense that it transforms biological processes and in this transformed form makes them develop along the line of creatively resolving the tasks set by the same social life. In people of different historical epochs and different social classes, not only the forms of their behavior differ, but also the physiological side of behavior—the type of nervous-muscular work, the degree of development and the specific weight of cortical processes in the overall activity of the nervous system. In particular, the activity of the sense organs in man is 'humanized' and moreover in different forms corresponding to the level of socio-historical development. 'The eye became the human eye, just as its object became the social, human object, created by man for man,' says Marx. 'It is clear that the human eye sees differently than the crude inhuman eye, that the human ear hears differently than the crude ear—and so on... The formation of the five senses is a product of world history.'—Before the Marxist psychoneurologists stands in all its breadth the principal task—to study the psycho-physiology of man as 'humanized,' and therefore socially transformed and historically variable. Specifying the question of the determining influence of the social environment on man, it is necessary to reveal with all acuteness the significance for man of the class character of this environment in a class society. Smoothing over this moment under the pretext of a 'broader coverage' of the given historical situation is fraught with gross theoretical and practical (including political)¹ errors. Class affiliation determines such important aspects of the psyche (political views, attitude toward labor, cultural level, everyday behavior, etc.) that it cannot but be given primary importance in resolving the main educational, medical, and psychotechnical tasks. In light of the above propositions, the question of the structure of P. must also be studied. Both the individual moments of this structure and their relationships are extremely variable historically; if psyche as a property of highly organized matter has no basis to be considered an exclusive possession of man, the case with consciousness is different. Being a stage in the complication of psyche, consciousness arises on the basis of social relations that have reached at least a minimal degree of development. 'Thus consciousness is initially a historical product and remains so as long as people exist at all. Consciousness is of course first of all consciousness of the immediate sensory environment and consciousness of a limited connection with other persons and things outside the individual who is beginning to be conscious of himself. This beginning has as much an animal character as the social life at this stage; it is purely herd consciousness;

P."

"806 persons differ from a sheep only in that consciousness replaces instinct for them, or that their instinct has a conscious character" (Marx, "The German Ideology"). Only in the process of further socio-historical development and on its basis does consciousness become saturated with ever new content and differentiate itself from the sphere of direct impulses with which it was originally inseparably fused. In particular, on the basis of the emerging division of labor, there arises also the awareness of oneself as a Personality, distinct from other individuals. Consciousness to an increasing extent begins to play the role of the leading factor in the structure of Personality. Every success in the struggle for mastery over nature or the processes of social life either presupposes or has as its result the strengthening of this role. However, this position correctly characterizes only the general tendency of psychological development on the basis of the development of sociality. For in concrete historical conditions and with respect to certain strata of class society there is a distortion of this tendency. Heavy capitalist exploitation, expressed in the extreme length of the working day, in the monotony of narrowly specialized labor processes, in the political oppression of the working class, and in the systematic creation of obstacles to its cultural growth, leads for the time being to the degradation of the role of consciousness in the structure of Personality. Meanwhile, the victory of the working class, the broad socialist offensive against capitalist elements, and the development of socialist forms of labor go hand in hand with the powerful flourishing of proletarian ideology and the emergence in the builder of socialism of a historically new structure of Personality, which from the psychological side is particularly characterized by the unprecedented strengthening of the role of conscious processes in the overall system of the psyche. This unprecedented process in human history, neither in content nor in form nor in the massiveness of its dissemination, requires thorough study, in particular from Marxist psycho-neurologists, a study which is inevitably linked with the fundamental reconstruction of the psycho-neurological field of knowledge and with a decisive struggle against idealism, mechanism, and pseudo-Marxist distortions in psycho-neurology. The results of such a study will have enormous significance for the practice of Soviet psychotechnology, pedagogy, and public health. Any of the most influential bourgeois theories of Personality is in sharp contradiction with the basic conditions of the task mentioned. This applies to the theory of W. Stern, which derives the development of Personality not from social development but from the activity of a mystically-idealist principle inherent in it, just as it does to the teaching of Kraus, which considers vegetative-endocrine processes not as the necessary biological prerequisite for the activity of Personality, but as the very essence of the latter. This emphasized biologism in the approach to the problem of Personality is in Kraus an expression of his vitalistic understanding of life processes, permeated, according to Kraus, with the mysticism of vegetative strivings (Vegetative Strömungen). The teaching of Freud (S. Freud) must also be mentioned in this connection not only because it too falls into mysticism when considering the biological origins of the drives of Personality (cf. Freud's work "Beyond the Pleasure Principle"), but also because this theory metaphysically limits the possibilities of consciousness not by this or that level of social development, but by biological obstacles coming from the "depths" of Personality, from its unconscious sphere. Freud's teaching has a particularly close relation to the question of another important moment in the psychological structure of Personality, the sphere of drives; needs, impulses, and interests—everything that is directly connected with deep emotional experiences. The social conditioning of these emotional formations is no less obvious than the similar conditioning of the content and forms of consciousness. Only on the basis of social development do the needs, strivings, and interests of man acquire their infinite variety. It is just as obvious that these formations have a class character. In the development of an individual Personality, they do not appear immediately and are apparently ontogenetically connected with their distant sources in the primitive drives of childhood. But from this latter circumstance it by no means follows that in the further development of Personality the emotional formations bear the stamp of their past connection with primitive drives. Only a dual biologism in the approach to the problem of Personality leads to assertions of the opposite kind and forces one to seek at all costs what is supposedly a deep similarity between primitive drives and the formed emotional attitudes of adult Personality. It is precisely along the line of such biologism that Freud proceeds, reducing the development of Personality to the process of the so-called "sublimation," or transformation of the sexual drive. At least two fundamental errors discredit this theory. The basis of the development of emotional formations in their specific content is social, not individual development; only by entering into socio-economic life does man become the possessor of these formations. On the other hand, sublimation by no means means, according to Freud, a genuine change in the essence of libido. According to Freud, whatever the strivings and needs of Personality, they retain their libidinous essence, and their transformation means only the process of their purely external masking. In satisfying any of his strivings, Personality supposedly satisfies libido, the central and most essential place of which in the psyche Freud tries to mystically derive from specially invented original tendencies of "all living things." The strivings and impulses of the psyche change in their development not only in content but also in form. It is they, so to speak, that become intellectualized, acquiring a conscious character and borrowing from the intellect the plasticity and mobility characteristic of this "apparatus" of logical thinking. But this kind of change is again, on the one hand, the result of the social activity of the individual, and on the other hand, the discovery of new possibilities in the life of the individual for social influence on the development of Personality. However, if with respect to the formal features of Personality one cannot fail to take into account their biological component (in its subordinate and transformed form), then with the content of the psyche and the behavior of Personality the matter is fundamentally different. The content of psychic activity, and above all the views of man, which represent the subjective expression of certain class ideologies, are entirely determined by the conditions of the social activity of the individual as a member of one of the classes of the given socio-economic formation. These views in turn direct the behavior of man and make him a conscious participant in the class struggle, in the course of which his consciousness, if he belongs to the revolutionary class, rises to ever higher stages. In particularly sharp contradiction with these positions is the teaching of Spranger, who tries to derive the content of consciousness and a number of ideological attitudes of Personality from mystically immanent tendencies inherent in its very nature. Kretschmer, operating with biological considerations unlike Spranger, comes in essence to the same false position: from the schizothymic constitution of the psyche he derives the idealist views of Personality, fanaticism, and despotic inclinations. The processes of consciousness, the morphological substrate of which is predominantly the cerebral cortex, are closely connected with emotional processes. The latter, along with cortical localization, also have subcortical localization—the center of vegetative regulation within organic processes. Such is the anatomo-physiological connection, through the medium of which the profound influence of the most socially determined and at the same time most essential aspects of Personality on the life activity of the human organism as a whole is realized. The significance of higher psychophysiological processes for the life activity of the human organism is so frequently revealed in the practice of the medical worker and has received such theoretical justification that only representatives of extreme mechanism in medicine fundamentally ignore the importance of taking into account the peculiarities of Personality for the purposes of prevention and treatment. That is why the slogan "take into account the personality of the patient," taken in such a general form, is for the present time not only empty but also highly ambiguous, since under this slogan reactionary teachings about the mystical essence of health and disease, about the futility of exact science, about medicine as a pure art, etc., are flourishing in the atmosphere of the crisis of capitalism—teachings that penetrate in disguised form even into the USSR."

The essence of the matter as applied to the problem of Personality is to, on the basis of Marxist-Leninist teaching about man and a clear awareness of the tasks of Soviet healthcare during the period of the proletarian dictatorship and the advanced socialist offensive, study the Personality of the builders of socialism served by Soviet medicine in all their concrete-historical and class specificity, in their development, in their socio-economic conditioning, and to apply the results of this study to all varieties of preventive and therapeutic activities. To struggle for the elevation of proletarian class consciousness, for a socialist attitude toward labor, against the religious fog, against petty-bourgeois split-mindedness, political disorientation, etc.--this means for the Soviet physician not only to assist socialist construction and thereby develop the fundamental basis for the health improvement of the working people, but also to stimulate in them themselves, in their psychophysiology, the maximum possible forces of resistance to pathogenic factors, to mobilize the maximum of compensatory processes in cases of irreparable defect, etc. In particular, psychotherapy as a special type of medical intervention must be radically rebuilt on the indicated bases. (Pathology of Personality--see Psychopathology).