Assoc. Prof. PhDr. Otto Cacka

Psychology Department

Faculty of Education, Masaryk University, Brno.

A personality strata conception

As A. R. Lurija mentioned a few years ago: "Psychology has not yet matured into a study of vital human personality. We have not yet managed to interpret a personality in such a way that each of its aspects would take the relevant position in the internal personality structure. Psychology as such is a matter of future and it is hard to predict how many decades we are away from it".

Familiar horizontal approaches to personality serve only to provide a list of partial elements of mental activity of the personality. Personality strata patterns treat more comprehensively the internal structure and coordination of these elements. There has already appeared a number of apparently conflicting instances of the dynamic cooperation approach.

The origin of these attempts can be traced back to the era of Plato and Aristotle and the contribution of the evolutionary historical building of celebrum is evident. Categories of the "internal" and "cortical" control stratum of the psyche are usually distinguished (Kraus 1926) in a similar way to behavioral strategies of instinct, emotion and reason (MacLean 1955, Kretschmer 1963), etc.

Many of these "vertically organised concepts" (Thiele 1940, Thomae 1951, Strunz 1943, Wellek 1956 et al) do not show many differences from the well-known studies of E. Rothacker and P. Lersch.

Rothacker, in his strata theory, presumed a certain "accumulation of strata" in the structure of the human psyche where the fresher and upper functional centres constantly control the old functional centres which persist.

A. The first functional circle represents "the internal stratum" IT (Esschicht). According to Rothacker this stratum is unconscious and represents the emotional personality centre.

B. As far as development is concerned the upper functional circle is then formed by the stratum of which the centre is I (Ichschicht) - as the most important control instance of peronality ensuring logically processed and self-defensive reactions.

Similarly to Rothacker, in Lersch°s phenomenological concept of personality strata patterns (1938, 1962) there exist two strata.

A. The core is formed by organic conditions and by processes beyond the control of the conscious I (temporal emotional frame of mind, self-confidence, immediate and impulsive response to instigations etc).

B. Identification and behaviour towards oneself and one°s environment is the subject of the conscious self-control of I. Significantly, Zurcher (1977) distinguished 4 modes of I:

1. physical I - biologically restricted physical features (sex, age, figure etc.).

2. social I - social features determined from the outside (status, role, group identity etc.)

3. subjective I - such as personal abilities, qualities, tastes achieved by independent choice and evaluation ("I am a happy chap, I like good music")

4. extensive I - suprapersonal values and abstract ideas ("I is a living being", "I is a grain of sand on the beach of time").

Eysenck°s scheme (1967) also represents a systematic approach to the ramification of features and reactions into four levels:

1. Specific reactions, 2. Fixed performances, 3. Personality features, 4. Personality types.

I. Development: the "upper" stratum simultaneously both embraces and prevails over the "lower" stratum.

II. Conduction: the idea of superiority and subordination of particular strata.

As far as Fig I is concerned there is reasonable agreement among theorists. The classification from the lower to upper stratum is usually arranged from areas of essential personal qualities and mental performance that are independent of self-apprehension but closely connected with human biological existence. The upper strata represent areas of the global conscious integration of personal life.

Conversely there is no such agreement on Fig II: some concepts presume the predominance of reason and conscious motives over "primitive impulses and deviations"; on the other hand several concepts suggest the servant role of the "upper" functions in relation to essential processes. Recent familiar phenomena prove both aspects in normal practice as well as in pathology.

Actually it is not simply one-way personality conduction concerning the dynamism of mental activity of the personality. Actual progress is always locally determined by the proportion of incentives and impulses and includes readiness of upper control mechanisms which are the factors of subject vs. object interaction as a part of a never-ending feedback system. The perspectives of upper strata (including the supreme one) are not merely the operational influence on lower strata. The lower strata also control the upper strata by feedback and this contributes to their more or less operative modification.

In researching an ideal concept for the mental activity of the personality it is necessary to apply not only a horizontal approach, but also vertical organization.

Such classification has not been appropriated by any multivariational methodology concept. For this reason but also for didactical reasons we recommend following (within the horizontal organization) consistently in all strata of the traditional three-dimensional approach to mental activity (rationally-cognitive, imaginatively-emotional, of-action-of-realization) within the whole of the horizontal organization.

Then, the relevant degree of performance of "actio" corresponds to the attained degrees of "ratio" and "imaginatio" in all strata. Both from the point of view of common as well of essential aspects it has proved to be good practically as well as instructively to structure the mental activity into four strata connected by sequence and development.

Levels of qualitatively different outputs of control mechanisms of mental activity of the personality have been introduced. Starting at the level of elementary processes participating in direct contact with reality since the early stages of development - these processes are the subject of primarily psychologically oriented psychologists (e.g. performances in the area of sense, perception, concentration, immediate memory, vivid and verbal thinking, experiencing, as well as of need and intention).

This proceeds through more complex acquired mental formations (learned both at school and in society), which concerns social and educational psychology in particular (knowledge, ability, attitude, role, etc).

Then it continues on to gradually more individualized and I-bound functions of self-control that are the core of personality psychology (self-apprehension, self-confidence, self-projection, self-evaluation, self-actualisation, self-fulfilment).

The top stratum represents self-overreaching and self-cultivating outputs and performances of the personality (culture, compact world view, high-principled decision-making and creation, emotively-imaginative functions, subjective awareness of world order, wisdom, ideals, ideas, values, character, life°s work) in which there already occurs "an advance towards the optimum possible understanding of the mere principle of humanity" (Frankl, 1994).

Not only the perspective of evolutionary succession is touched upon but also differences in determination (biological, social or personal), unequal depth and scope of penetration into real circumstances (from reflection of individual qualities to a global picture of the world), different complexity of formations (immediate feelings, acquired attitudes, own self-projection up to wisdom of life, different spectrum of descent on the rest of mental activity of the personality (from orientational up to integrational). This naturally results in the differentiation of methods for the description of such processes (from natural-historical to more subjective methods, from behaviorism to humanist psychology) etc.

Such a concept of personality strata is not only an "evolutionary scale", but individual strata represent different levels of mental activity organization at the same time. People may differ according to the stratum in which the focus of their personality control mechanism is - relatively temporarily - established. From the point of concept represented, the mental development is not only an outcome of regular genotype-fenotype interaction, but also an autocultivated shift of personality control mechanism significance: from biologically, socially, personally beyond personally oriented aspects.

Personality is then a more or less matured and cultivated SUBJECT that fulfils its own "tendency to live and to invest its life with a sense of being worthwhile".

Source:

ČAČKA, O. : PSYCHOLOGY OF PERSONALITY MENTAL ACTIVITY STRATA AND THEIR AUTODIAGNOSIS. DOPLŇEK Publishing House, BRNO, 2003, 400 p. ISBN 80-7239-107-0