50 Psychology Classics (19 page)

Psychology matters, Erikson was saying, because history is essentially the acting out of individual psychologies.

Born in Frankfurt in 1902, Erik was cared for by his mother alone until her marriage to Theodor Homberger, his pediatrician. The family moved to Karlsruhe in southern Germany, where Erik's three sisters were born. After school he traveled around Europe for a year before enrolling in art school. He taught art for a while in Vienna, where he met his wife Joan Serson, his lifelong collaborator. In 1927 he began studying psychoanalysis at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute, working under Anna Freud (see p. 104) and specializing in child psychology
.

In 1933, Erik moved to the United States, and changed his name to Erikson. He taught for three years at Harvard Medical School and also became Boston's first child analyst. At Harvard he was strongly influenced by his friendships with anthropologists Ruth Benedict, Gregory Bateson, and Margaret Mead. He later had positions at Yale University, the Menninger Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Palo Alto, California, and the Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco. Erikson's well-known studies of the Lakota and Yurok Native American peoples were made while he was at the University of California at Berkeley. After leaving Berkeley he worked in private practice for many years before returning to Harvard
.

Erikson's breakthrough work was
Childhood and Society
(1950), a wide-ranging study of individuals and cultures that won the Pulitzer prize and America's National Book Award. Other books include
Identity: Youth and Crisis
(1968),
Gandhi's Truth
(1970), and
The Life Cycle Completed
(1985). Erikson died in 1994
.

“Personality is determined to a large extent by a person's genes; he is what the accidental arrangement of his parents' genes produced, and while environment can do something to redress the balance, its influence is severely limited. Personality is in the same boat as intelligence; for both, the genetic influence is overwhelmingly strong, and the role of environment in most cases is reduced to effecting slight changes and perhaps a kind of cover-up.”

In a nutshell

All personalities can be measured according to two or three basic biologically determined dimensions.

In a similar vein
Isabel Briggs Myers
Gifts Differing
(p 46)
Ivan Pavlov
Conditioned Reflexes
(p 210)
Steven Pinker
The Blank Slate
(p 228)

Eysenck was one of the twentieth century's most controversial and prolific psychologists. In a career spanning five decades, 50 books, and more than 900 journal articles, he shed new light on a number of areas. Born in Germany, his opposition to the Nazi party during the 1930s led to his fleeing to Britain. At the time of his death in 1997, he was the most-cited researcher in psychology.

Dimensions of Personality
was Eysenck's first book, and has a dry, academic style. However, in grounding for the first time in science the concept of introversion/extraversion, it laid the foundation for 50 years' work in the field of personality difference.

Though Eysenck acknowledged the ancient Greek division of people into the four temperaments of sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, and melancholy, and was obviously in debt to Carl Jung's distinction between introverts and extraverts, he was also adamant that any study of personality differences had to be objective and statistically based.
Dimensions of Personality
was grounded in a method of research, factor analysis, which enabled Eysenck to draw conclusions about personality differences from large amounts of survey data. He had worked at the Mill Hill Emergency Hospital in wartime London, and used several hundred war-weary soldiers as his sample. The men were asked a battery of questions about their habitual reactions to certain situations and they gave themselves ratings. The collated answers led Eysenck to confidently place a person according to two broad dimensions or “supertraits” of extraversion/introversion and neuroticism.

Eysenck believed that these supertraits were genetically determined and were manifested in our physiology, specifically the brain and nervous system. In this he was inspired by Ivan Pavlov. The source of extraversion or introversion was in the varying levels of excitability of the brain; the driver of the neurotic dimension was an aspect of the nervous system that handled emotional responses to events.

Later, Eysenck added another dimension, psychoticism. Though it could indicate mental instability, more commonly a person's placement within this
dimension was an indicator of how much they were likely to be rebellious against the system or wild and reckless. Unlike the extraversion/introversion dimension, which measures sociability, psychoticism measures the extent to which someone is a socialized being living according to conventions, or in the extreme an antisocial psychotic or sociopath.

Together, the three dimensions of psychoticism–extraversion–neuroticism became known as the PEN model. Characteristics included:

The extravert's brain is the opposite of what we would expect; it is
less
excitable than the introvert's.

Because there is less going on inside, extraverts naturally seek outside stimulation and contact with others to really feel alive.

Extraverts have a more even-handed approach to events, with less anguish about how they are personally perceived.

Extraverts are also generally lively and optimistic, but can be restless risk takers and unreliable.

The introvert's brain is more excitable, making them more vulnerable to moods and having intense inner lives.

As a result of this inner sensory overload, as a form of self-protection they naturally avoid too much social interaction, which they find mentally taxing. Or, because they have such a rich inner life, they simply do not need a lot of social interaction.

Because they seem to experience things more intensely, introverts have a deeper and more anguished response to life.

They are generally more reserved and serious, pessimistic, and can have issues with self-esteem and guilt.