The hypostatic model of personality is a view asserting that humans present themselves in many different aspects or hypostases, depending on the internal and external realities they relate to, including different approaches to the study of personality. It is both a dimensional model and an aspect theory, in the sense of the concept of plurality. The model falls into the category of complex, biopsychosocial approaches to personality.
The term hypostasis can cover a wide range of personality-related entities usually known as type, stage, trait, system, approach.Tapu 2001, p. 15 The history of the concept can be traced back to Peirce's hypostatic abstraction, or personification of traits. Different authors have described various dimensions of the self (or selves), personality dimensions and subpersonalities.Rowan 1990, p. 8 Contemporary studies link different aspects of personality to specific biological, social, and environmental factors.
The work on subpersonalities was integrated into a hypostatic model.Tapu 2001 The model describes personality aspects and dimensions, as well as intra- and interpersonal relations. Not the person whole and alone, nor the relationship, but the relation between parts of person(s) is held as a central element that promotes both personal and social organization and disorganization. Personality is viewed as both an agency and a construction, along with its development and psychopathology, as the model is accompanied by specific methods of assessment and therapy, addressing each of the personality dimensions. The hypostatic relations of the human mind also imply the existence of a hypostatic model of consciousness, representing the contents of consciousness as an identity of various aspects, different only with respect to each other, but tending to coincide in a certain aspect of their consideration.
Overview
The hypostatic model of personality is a way of viewing the many sides of a person's character. The model states that a person can behave and appear to others in many ways, depending on how that person is, but also on how that person is viewed by the others (scientists included). It also states that people are not one-sided, but are a little bit of everything. For example, today someone can be mean, and tomorrow they can be good. How people are and present themselves at one moment or another also depends on their biological state, and the situation or environment (the people and things around them). For example, sometimes the most cowardly person may become the greatest hero, if they are called to save someone's life.
In order to be improved, all these "sides" of a person have first to be scientifically assessed.
Historical background
Origins and terminology
The concept of hypostasis as the shared existence of spiritual and corporal entities has been used in a number of religious and intellectual settings. The word hypostasis means underlying state or underlying substance, and is the fundamental reality that supports all else.
The Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus writes about three hypostases: Soul, Intellect (nous) and the One.
The Christian view of the Trinity is often described as a view of one God existing in three distinct hypostases.
In the Kabbalah, the ten sephirot are the hypostases of God, capable of being known, as opposed to his absolute essence, which is inaccessible to knowledge.
Charles Sanders Peirce introduced the concept of hypostatic abstraction, which is a formal operation that takes an element of information, such as might be expressed in a proposition of the form "X is Y", and conceives its information to consist in the relation between a subject and another subject, such as expressed in a proposition of the form "X has Y-ness".Peirce, Charles Sanders (1931). "The Simplest Mathematics". in Collected Papers, CP 3., Harvard University Press, p. 437. .
Hypostatic ethics has been described as the study of values in themselves, with all their relations, as agents and/or influencers of cognition and behavior.
In linguistics, Leonard Bloomfield introduced the concept of hypostasisFought, John G. (1999). Leonard Bloomfield: Critical Assessments of Leading Linguists. Volume 1, Taylor & Francis, p. 307. . to describe the personification of an object or state in sentences as I'm tired of your buts and ifs.
Aaron Rosanoff's theory of personality distinguishes seven dimensions (normal, hysteroid, manic, depressive, autistic, paranoid, and epileptoid), which can be epistatic or hypostatic dimensions, the manifestation of the latter being concealed or inhibited by the former.
Variants and evolution: selves and dimensions In the philosophy of mind, double-aspect theory is the view that the mental and the physical are two aspects of the same substance.
In his Principles of Psychology,James 2001, pp. 43-84 William James describes four aspects of the self: Material self (the body and the person's closest possessions and relatives, including the family); Social self (the being-for-others); Spiritual self (the person's inner and subjective being, their psychic faculties and dispositions, taken concretely); The "pure" ego (the bare principle of personal unity).
Cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser later described five "selves": Ecological self, as directly perceived with respect to the immediate physical environment; Interpersonal self, also directly perceived, established by specific emotional communication; Extended self, based on memory and anticipation; Private self (our private conscious experiences); Conceptual self, a system of socially-based assumptions and theories about human nature in general and ourselves in particular.
Carl Rogers distinguishes between the real self (the person as they are), and the ideal self (the person as the world told them they ought to be). Incongruence between these selves leads to feelings of anxiety.
Facet theory asserts that social-behavioral concepts are multivariate, and therefore they could be better described in terms of their "facets" and dimensions rather than as undifferentiated wholes; this can also be done using multidimensional scaling.Kruskal, J. B., and Wish, M. (1978). Multidimensional Scaling. Sage University Paper series on Quantitative Application in the Social Sciences, 07-011. Beverly Hills and London: Sage Publications.
Hans Eysenck's three factor model of personality contains the independent dimensions of extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism; these different dimensions are caused by the properties of the brain, which themselves are the result of genetic factors.
The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory uses ten clinical scales measuring dimensions whose development and correlations in an individual determine their pathological tendencies.
The Big Five model describes five personality dimensions that affect the whole behavior, with each dimension having several facets. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders used an axial (dimensional) and categorical system of diagnosis. DSM-IV takes into account five dimensions: mental state, global personality, physical condition, environment, and global functioning of the person.American Psychiatric Association (2000). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR). American Psychiatric Association, p. 27. .
Towards a contemporary integration Differentiation between various mental states and behavior patterns on the basis of their relation with brain and social environment became commonplace in contemporary psychology and sociology.Rosenberg, Seymour (1997). "Multiplicity of selves". in Ashmore, Richard D., Jussim Lee J. (editors) Self and identity: fundamental issues. Volume 1 of Rutgers series on self and social identity, Oxford University Press US, p. 23. .Carter 2008
On the biopsychological side, functional MRI studies have shown that different behavioral and mental activities involve specific patterns of brain activation, corresponding to psychological states. C. Robert Cloninger defines three independent dimensions of personality, which are related to heritable variation in patterns of response to specific types of environmental stimuli; variation in each dimension is strongly correlated with activity in a specific central monoaminergic pathway: Novelty seeking, with frequent exploratory activity and intense excitement in response to novel stimuli, and with low basal dopaminergic activity; Harm avoidance, with intense responses to aversive stimuli and a tendency to learn to avoid punishment, novelty, and non-reward passively, and with high serotonergic activity; Reward dependence, with intense responses to reward and succorance and a tendency to learn to maintain rewarded behavior, and with low basal noradrenergic activity. These neurobiological dimensions interact to give rise to integrated patterns of differential responses to punishment, reward, and novelty.
On the social-environmental side, role theory defines the role as a set of connected behaviors, rights and obligations as conceptualized by actors in a social situation. Thus, roles can be: Cultural roles: roles given by culture (e.g. priest); Social differentiation: e.g. teacher, taxi driver; Situation-specific roles: e.g. eyewitness; Bio-sociological roles: e.g. as human in a natural system; Gender roles: as a man, woman, mother, father, etc.
Intersectionality is a methodology of studying "the relationships among multiple dimensions and modalities of social relationships and subject formations".
Roberto Assagioli uses the term "subpersonalities" for the social roles the person plays in different groups, roles that are mere "characters" played by the person, being different from their central inner Self.
As a core idea of his transactional analysis, Eric Berne asserts that there are at least three "persons" in each of us, calling them our "ego states": the Child (the emotional in us), the Adult (the rational in us), and the Parent (the authoritarian in us).Berne 1979
As functioning as a “society of mind”,Minsky 1985 the self is populated by a multiplicity of “self-positions” that have the possibility to entertain dialogical relationships with each other.
Internal Family Systems Model combines systems thinking with the view that mind is made up of relatively discrete subpersonalities each with its own viewpoint and qualities.Schwartz 1997
Description hAt a metatheoretical level, the hypostatic model argues that persons have several kinds of aspects, including, but not limited to:Tapu 2001, pp. 13-14 Adaptive aspects, pertaining to the internal organization of the person and the way they adapt to environments, including through actions and relations; Constitutive aspects – the ways in which personality is constituted within its relations with the organism and the external world; Temporal aspects, which represent the totality of forms that the person takes along the time line, short or long – including actions, states of consciousness, and developmental stages; Referential aspects, which are the ways the person is perceived by themself or by the others (including personality scientists and theorists); Integrative aspects – various combinations of the previous, which can be (or have been) the object of numerous research projects in psychology and related fields.
Organization of personality
Many schools of psychotherapy see subpersonalities as relatively enduring psychological structures or entities that influence how a person feels, perceives, behaves, and sees themself.Fall, Miner Holden, Marquis 2004, p. 444