Where does our experience, our abilities and capabilities, our “know”, “can”, “want” come from? Our experience has only four sources:
- The biological organism and its innate experience;
- Learning through associational reflexes;
- Man has learned himself;
- Man was taught by other people.
In accordance with different understandings of personality, different researchers saw differently how personality is formed from these sources.
For a long time there have been disputes about what is more important for the formation of personality: the biological nature of a person or the social environment surrounding him, human culture. The psychology of the Soviet period, represented primarily by the Vygodsky school, proceeded from the priority of the socio-cultural environment. L.S. Vygodsky believed that the social environment is not just one of the factors, but the main source of personality development. The child develops in tandem with adults, assimilating culture through them: tools and signs, skills and knowledge. Accordingly, according to Vygodsky, in order to study the consciousness of a person, one does not need to peer into this consciousness, one simply needs to understand and explore what has been invested in a person. Everything inside is the outside turned inside. Thinking does not develop itself, but is formed from outside. The zone of proximal development is determined by the art of the adult and the framework of the natural maturation of the child’s organism.
A striking exponent of the opposite point of view was humanistic psychology, primarily represented by Carl Rogers. According to Rogers, the biological nature of man is characterized by a tendency to growth and development, just as in the seed of a plant there is a tendency to growth and development. In human biology there is an orientation towards positivity, constructiveness, maturity and socialization. For Carl Rogers, everything that a person needs for development is in his body, little is needed from society, in fact, just do not interfere and support. As for the metaphor of the seed from which development unfolds, then, according to Rogers, a person has only one seed.
The term «personality formation» has a double meaning: 1) «personality formation» as its development, its process and result; 2) «formation of personality» as its purposeful education (if I may say so, «shaping», «molding», «designing», «molding», etc.). See →
In this article, the formation of a personality is considered as the acquisition of personality traits (forms) by a child, and the acquisition of a real form by a personality. Different specialists see this process in their own way.
Within the framework of the behavioral and role approach, the formation of a personality, the achievement of social maturity by it can be represented as the development of certain personal and social roles by it. See →
In the activity approach, it is believed that the formation of personality occurs through its double birth. In the first birth, immediate motives begin to obey social norms, in the second, a person (adolescent) begins to realize and subjugate his own motives. Already not only motives control him, but he can also control his motives. See →
The development of a child is determined not only by his soul and his body. The development of the child is determined by those adults who are next to him.
A child does not grow in an airless space, and with any of its soil and with any of its seeds, attentive gardeners take care of its soil (well, they can take care of it), changing its composition. Attentive gardeners have the opportunity to plant crop seeds in the soil in time, and even if they are overgrown with burdock, weed the soil.
Personality formation is always a process shared between a child and an adult. The smaller the role of a cultured adult, the greater the role of the body. The stronger the cultural, educative influence of an adult, the greater the influence of the soul — at first the soul of an adult, and then, when it saturates the soil of a child, this is already the influence of the soul of the child himself.
The first sprouts of personality are the stubbornness of the baby “I myself”, the next steps are the upholding of independence by a teenager and the development of independence in youth, later growing up, and all the way the development of mind and will.
Will
The formation of personality occurs through the development of the will and is expressed through the development of the will. One helps the other. See →
Maternal love and the formation of personality
Both in the near-psychological environment and in the psychological community itself, there is often a conviction that without maternal love a full-fledged personality cannot be formed. There is no such data in scientifically oriented psychology. On the contrary, it is easy to give the opposite data, when a child grew up without a mother or without maternal love, but grew up into a developed, full-fledged person. See →