0.10 Biology and personality  (Page 21/22)

Finally, when Bruce Lee’s famous movie Enter the Dragon was first released in the United States, they cut one of the opening scenes in which he is tested by his master on his understanding of fundamental Buddhist/Daoist philosophy as it pertains to the martial arts. In the twenty-fifth anniversary special edition, Warner Brothers studios apparently decided that American audiences would now appreciate this dialogue, so they put the scene back into the movie (Clouse&Allin, 1998).

Personality Theory in Real Life: An Evolutionary Perspective on the

Development of Pathological Personality Patterns

In the Appendix, there is a brief presentation of Theodore Millon’s alternative classification scheme for personality disorders, as compared to the DSM-IV (Millon, 1996; Millon&Grossman, 2005). This perspective is based on Millon’s belief that personality disorders represent patterns of thought and behavior that are adaptive, albeit under abnormal conditions, and therefore have been selected for through the process of evolution. Millon believes that it is necessary for psychology to draw upon related fields of science in order to strengthen the entire discipline:

Much of psychology as a whole remains adrift, divorced from broader spheres of scientific knowledge, isolated from deeper and more fundamental, if not universal, principles…we have failed to draw on the rich possibilities that may be found in both historic and adjacent realms of scholarly pursuit. (pg. 333; Millon&Grossman, 2005)

Millon and Grossman acknowledge the contributions of sociobiology to our understanding of human behavior, and they offer a sociobiological perspective on personality. Personality, they argue, can be thought of as the distinctive style of adaptive functioning that an individual exhibits as they relate to their typical range of environments. Personality development is healthy when the individual encounters average or relatively normal environments and is effective in adapting to them. Personality disorders arise when the individual relies on maladaptive functioning that can be traced to psychic deficiencies, trait imbalances, or internal conflicts that occur when relating to their environment. In other words, when individuals adapt to abnormal environments (e.g., an abusive home), their personality style may then prove to be maladaptive in situations outside of their typical environment.

Millon proposes that every person, indeed every organism, must accomplish four basic goals, each of which has two polarities: they must exist (seek pleasure and avoid pain), they must adapt (respond actively or remain passive), they must reproduce (focus on self or focus on others), and they must deal with unexpected or abstract situations (rely on thinking or react to feelings). These four demands correspond to four neurodevelopmental stages: sensory attachment associated with life enhancement (seeking pleasure) or life preservation (avoiding pain), sensorimotor autonomy associated with modifying the environment (active) or accommodating to the environment (passive), pubertal genital identity associated with propagating oneself (self-oriented) or nurturing children (other-oriented), and finally intracortical integration associated with intellect (thinking-oriented) or emotion (feeling-oriented). It should be clear that these stages cover the range of development from birth to young adulthood. In contrast to theories that focus on critical points in development as key times when psychological problems occur: