Esteemed colleagues, dear students, welcome to the second year of personality theory. And this year we will focus on various dimensions of personality and how personality is related to identity, personal identity, if at all.

As we said last year, those of you who are not too old to remember, last year we said that there is a confusion between personality and identity and that the two concepts are actually in flux.

What we are going to do this year is we are going to analyze various dimensions and aspects and we are going to do it using examples of mental health disorders and or behaviors and or mental health functions, such as memory.

But before we go into all this, we need to take a kind of time travel trip back in memory lane to the very beginning of psychology.

Psychology as a discipline is very old. We have writings by the ancient Greeks 2500 or 2600 years ago where they tried to analyze human psychology. Of course, they didn’t use the word psychology, but it was psychology all the same.

Modern psychology, so-called scientific psychology, started in the middle of the 19th century and it started largely with two camps competing on the soul of psychology.

The first one was the descriptive camp. Let’s call it the literary camp, the almost artistic camp.

And that would be, for example, William James in the United States.

This camp of psychologists, this group of psychologists, believe that psychology is a description of human nature, not very different to literature, only a lot more systematic and methodical. They believe that psychology is actually a form of taxonomy, of classification and categorization.

Don’t forget that only 100 years before, Carl Linus classified and categorized all the living species, plants and animals. So classification was a big deal. Making lists of functions, mental functions, behaviors, how people interact with each other was the heyday.

So if you read William James’ Masterpieces, a series of books he has written about psychology, you will see that it’s actually a series of observations about humans in their natural habitat and about human nature.

But at the very same time, the continent far away, Europe, there was a group of German scientists, German of course, who tried to make psychology, to convert psychology, to transform it into an accurate, exact science.

So they set up laboratories replete with all kinds of beacons and laboratories that looked a lot like chemistry laboratories or physics laboratories. And laboratories, their laboratories had electrical equipment. It all looked very scientific.

And what they said is that we should transform psychology into a science of measurement. They tried to measure things. They tried to quantify.

So at the same time, we had two camps, the qualitative, literary, descriptive, observational psychology, on the one hand, and the experimental science-like, measurement-oriented psychology on the other, mainly in Germany.

The person who brought everything together, the two strands, was essentially Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud lived in Vienna. Vienna was under this fear of influence of Germany. He actually met many of the German psychologists. He collaborated with a few of them. He adopted a lot of their thinking.

And his initial writings, his first writings about hysteria and so on, are very scientific. By training, Sigmund Freud was not a psychologist. He was a neurologist.

So he was a medical doctor. And as a medical doctor, he was used to measuring things. He was used to testing things. He was used to experimentation.

But on the other hand, he was a well-read person, steeped in archaeology. He had a huge archaeological collection, a collection of archaeological artifacts. He read a lot of literature. He studied religion in depth.

So he brought together the two strands. He combined experimental observational psychology with literary artistic psychology.

And he wrote a few of the biggest masterpieces of human literature in the early 20th century in Vienna.

But Freud made one serious mistake. And this mistake is with us to this very day.

Freud observed only people with mental health problems.

Freud never worked with healthy people. He never went out to observe healthy people. He never interacted with healthy people.

Freud as a medical doctor and later as a psychologist in a way, the founder of psychoanalysis, Freud was used to and described and wrote only about mentally ill people.

But based on his experience with mentally problematic people, he generalized the theory of human psychology.

But the fact is, well, at least in some countries, majority of the population is healthy, normal. Majority of the population are not like the clients and patients of Sigmund Freud.

And taking the information that he got from his patients and declaring that this information applies to healthy and normal people is a methodological mistake.

You cannot generalize from a highly specific population into the general population. We know it today.

And yet, everyone who came after Freud, with the exception of the behaviorist, everyone who came after Freud, repeated exactly the same thing. They observed unusual, unconventional, pathological, extreme situations. They observed unusual, mentally ill, mentally problematic, mentally disordered people.

And then they took this information and they generalized it.

They said, well, this is how people think. This is how people emote. This is how people work. And this is how people interact with each other.

Right? Wrong. This is how people with mental health problems do all these things, not healthy and normal people.

So what can we say about so-called healthy and normal people?

First of all, as you remember from the previous year, normality or normalcy is an ideal. There is no such a person. There is no we never find, we will never come across a normal person or a healthy person. It’s kind of an ideal.

We compare people to this ideal and then we grade them. We say, well, if you are 80% of this ideal, you’re normal and healthy. If you are 30% of this ideal, then something’s wrong with you.

So taking into account that normalcy, the concept of normalcy is an idealistic generalization that has no place in reality.

Taking this into account, still we can say that the concept of personality and the concept of normal personality and the fact that abnormal personality, all these three interconnected concepts crucially rely on a few dubious tenets, a few problematic assumptions and many things we ignore.

We ignore by choice and sometimes we ignore by cognitive bias because we are human beings and we tend to ignore such things even in day to day life and also in science and definitely in psychology, which is not exactly a science.

So what I want to do in this first lecture is to discuss five dimensions of personality and identity.

Most of these dimensions are acknowledged in the scholarly literature. However, they’re acknowledged as a footnote. They are tackled up hazardously in passing as though they are not very important.

But actually I think they are absolutely critical and crucial.

And if we review all the so-called knowledge of psychology that we have, we may discover that most of it is either wrong or should be revised dramatically in view of these five dimensions.

So let us start.

The first dimension of course is in which culture, in which society, which type of society do we live?

Some societies are individualistic. Some societies are collectivist. Some societies are consensual. They aspire to consensus. Some societies are conflictive. They rely on conflict and adversary relations. Some societies are hierarchical. They are patriarchal. They are authority driven. Some societies are egalitarian.

So societies have their own so-called personality. Societies, cultures and civilizations have typical dimensions which characterize them.

And as individuals, we try to conform to these dimensions. We try in other words to fit in. We try to belong.

It is a very bad feeling when you are an outcast, when you’re ostracized, when you’re criticized, when you’re excommunicated.

Society has very powerful tools at its disposal to manipulate us, to control us, to force us to behave in certain ways.

In extreme cases, society denies our freedom. It puts us in prison.

So society also has a monopoly on violence, a monopoly on aggression, a monopoly on power, that it uses in order to make us comply with its demands, explicit demands like law, and implicit demands like the nature of society.

So as I said, Japan, which is a collectivist society, has very little to do with the United States, which is an individual society. And the United States, which is a conflict oriented society, adversarial society, you see it in American courts, the United States has very little to do with China, which is a consensus driven society, a society where everyone tries to live in harmony and compromise.

Some societies are narcissistic, and other societies in different periods in history have been utterly psychopathic. For example, Nazi Germany.

We cannot separate the science of personality. We cannot create a theory of individual personality.

We ignoring the culture in society in which the individual lives.

When Freud wrote his masterpieces, which later gave birth to the movement of psychoanalysis and then psychoanalytic psychology, when Freud wrote these masterpieces, he did exactly this. He ignored his culture, his society, his environment, his ecosystem and his milieu. He ignored the fact that, for example, sexuality was heavily suppressed during the Victorian era. He ignored, to a large extent, other societies and cultures, except rarely in some of his writings like Totem and Taboo.

So Freud and later psychologists, actually I would say the vast majority of psychologists, pretend that individuals are atoms, that they live in isolation, that you can take an individual and analyze that individual’s character, identity, personality, conduct, emotions, cognitions, thoughts and interpersonal relationships in isolation from his background, family, neighborhood, community, friends, ethos, society and culture.

The truth is you cannot.

And throughout this lecture, I will give you examples of mental health problems and how different cultures cope with them.

For example, consider Czar. Czar, C-Z-A-R, is the name given in Africa, big parts of Africa, for example, Ethiopia. Czar is the name given to what we in the West would call psychotic disorder. People with Czar in Africa, they see demons. They hear voices. They have hallucinations. Many of them become violent.

So Czar is what we would have called in Western civilization demon possession.

You see, to this very day, the Catholic Church recognizes the possibility of a possession by the devil, a possession by a demon. To this very day, there is a school at the Vatican which teaches priests how to exercise demons.

We also movies of demon possession and demon exorcism.

But what is demon possession? Demon possession is the name we used to give to psychotic disorder. It is simply a language element.

In religion, we call it demon possession. In psychology, we call it psychotic disorder. It’s a language.

The phenomena are the same. The etiology to this very day, the reason people have psychotic disorders, the etiology is debatable to this very day. Religion would tell you that demon possession or psychotic disorder is a result of an invasion by a demon. Your body, your mind is invaded by a demon.

So psychology will tell you different stories that are equally implausible by the way. And psychiatry will tell you that psychotic disorder is a result of a biochemical imbalance in the brain.

But to this very day, there are no conclusive studies. And to this very day, there is a massive philosophical confusion in the ranks of psychiatry.

Because it is true that when you have a psychotic disorder, you have a biochemical disorder as well. It’s true that when you are psychotic, when you hear voices, when you see visions, when you are instructed to kill your children, when you lose control, it’s true that when all this happens, something goes on in your brain, different neurotransmitters, different biochemicals, different electrical activity, different flow of blood. It’s all true. We see it in functional magnetic resonance imaging. So it’s all true.

The only problem is what causes what? Does the psychosis cause these changes in the brain? Or do the changes in the brain cause the psychosis?

In other words, are we talking about a correlation between two events, one psychic and one physiological? Or are we talking about causation, the event in the brain caused the psychosis? Or the psychosis caused the events in the brain?

No one has answers to these questions.

Therefore, the psychiatric medicalised explanation of psychosis is as dubious and problematic as the religious explanation and as the psychological explanation.

Or to cut a long story short, we have no explanation.

But what I’m trying to tell you is that Tsar, for example, possession in Somalia, in Ethiopia, and in other African countries in Egypt, in Iran, demon possession is not considered a pathology at all. People are possessed by demons on a regular basis. It’s part of life. Everyone is possessed by a demon at one stage or another, especially women, by the way, but also men.

On the very contrary, men with demon possession have access to privileged knowledge. Some of them are considered prophets. So here is a mental health pathology that is considered a part of normality, considered normal, even healthy, even privileged in many, many societies with billions of people.

So even the definition of pathology depends crucially on how we view normality and how we view normality depends crucially on our current phase in our culture and civilisation.

Because if you go back to Europe, 400 years, 300 years, demon possession would still be considered a part of normal life. Witches were persecuted and executed only 300 years ago in Europe and in North America. Culture and society then accepted certain mental health disorders as an inevitable part of human life.

Today we are living in the age of enlightenment, most of us at least. Today we don’t believe in demons, we don’t believe in devils, we don’t believe in witches, except if we are married to one.

So today we would not use this language to describe this phenomena. We would use the language of psychology because psychology is enlightened, psychology is scientific.

You see, psychology is being taught in your university, witchcraft is not. To learn witchcraft you have to find Harry Potter. To learn psychology you just have to watch this video.

I am teaching psychology in a university and I am teaching it as a science because culture and civilization is telling us that it’s okay, is telling us this is the correct language.

But is it? We don’t know.

Consider for example the Taijin Kyofusho, I hope I said it half correctly, Taijin Kyofusho in Japan is the fear, the phobia of being repulsive to others. People who have Taijin Kyofusho believe that their body, they smell their body odor, parts of their body, their hands, their face are repulsive to other people. They are convinced that they disgust other people, that other people are disgusted when they smell them or look at them.

In the West we would classify this as a mental disturbance, as a mental problem. We would subject the person with such a phobia to talk therapy. We would give such a person medication, usually antidepressants. We would consider this Taijin Kyofusho, a body image disorder.

There is a whole class of mental health disorders and they’re called body image disorders.

If I think I’m too fat, if I think I’m too thin, if I think I’m repulsive, if I think my smell is horrible, if I think that my emotions are exaggerated, if I think that I displease or embarrass or that I’m offensive just by existing, that would be a form of body image disorder.

And all of you heard of eating disorders. Why do we have eating disorders? Why do we have anorexia? Why do we have bulimia?

We have these disorders because we have a wrong image of our body.

For example, if I think I’m too fat, then I will develop anorexia. I will try not to eat. I will try to control my eating and thereby reduce my weight, even if I am thin to the point of medical danger.

But in Japan, Taijin Kyofusho, this body image disorder is considered commendable. A person with this disorder is considered sensitive to the needs of others, empathic, considerate and compassionate.

The Japanese encourage this. They teach their children and they teach each other that you should be very concerned about the way you look, about your body smell, body odor, about how you move, your motions and what you say and so on.

So they adopted a body image disorder as a tool to regulate social interactions to make life more pleasant for everyone involved.