lPersonality is one of the most studied constructs in Psychology. However, to this day we do not have a clear and widely accepted definition. Not to mention “personality disorders”, because if we fail to adequately define what personality is, we will even less be able to say when it is healthy and when it is pathological. Even so, there are attempts, very good attempts, that on the way to reaching a more complete understanding of the pathological processes of personality, provide us with guides and guidelines to work in the clinic with the much feared “personality disorders.”
The first approaches to the study of personality date back to Ancient Greece with the Greek doctor Hippocrates, who proposed a vision based on four great temperaments. Since then, the term has gone through many vicissitudes until, towards the middle of the last century, the well-known psychologist proposed a fairly accepted scientific definition: “…personality is a dynamic organization, within the person, of psychosocial systems that create their patterns.” characteristics of behavior, thought and feeling….”
Current personality research is strongly guided by an approach known as lexical tradition. Along these lines, the basic and most important hypothesis maintains that natural languages, over thousands of years, have created a very broad set of words to describe people; Therefore, if we take the trouble to capture those words and put together an exhaustive list, we will be able to have a good set of qualifiers to describe the personality. The method appears to have been successful when combined with a statistical procedure called factor analysis, which makes it possible to find the common denominators underlying sets of adjectives that describe people. Thus, we have come to have five major personality factors, namely: neuroticism, extroversion, opening, agreement and conscientiousness. In turn, these five major domains contain 6 facets, thus giving a hierarchical model of personality that can be characterized based on 5 major domains and 30 facets, a total of 35 scores.
The great success of the “Five Factors” model has been to find a set of traits that are replicated over and over again in different cultures with different languages.
One of the great supports for this model took place when the same personality structure was replicated in different languages and different cultures; which makes us think that beyond the differences in ways of living and acting, we are approaching a universal structure of human personality; a basic set of traits that all human beings would have but in different quantities and combinations. That is to say, the human personality would consist of a basic structure of dimensions, this would be universal, regardless of the place of birth, upbringing, the way of life of our first years, the language we speak at birth or the one we later learned through education. formal education; Beyond all individual contingencies, we can always describe personality in these five great factors and their six facets; What will vary, and what will finally give us the individuality of each personality, is the amount of each one of them. Thus, individual differences lie in the amount of each trait that each person possesses.
Now, what is a trait? It constitutes a central concept in personality psychology, long before the introduction of the five-factor model. A trait is a human quality in the way of thinking, feeling or doing, on which people differ, this quality being stable in each individual for long periods of time and in a wide range of situations. A trait is, for example, the degree of sociability of a person. Thus, we all have the trait, we all have the trait of sociability (we are “torn”, it is said in the language of the terrain), but in different amounts we are all more or less sociable, it is a structural mark on which people We differentiate based on quantity. But those who have a high trait of sociability will manifest it in many situations and for long periods of time; It is not something that will depend on the specific context in which it is.
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Precisely, the great success of the “Five Factors” model has been to find a set of traits that are replicated over and over again in different cultures with different languages.
When is personality healthy and when is it pathological?
Well, like most contemporary scientific psychological models, that of the “Big Five” is subsidiary to an evolutionary vision. Thus, it is understood that the different personality traits, their quantities and possible combinations, are adaptations to evolutionarily relevant problems that our primitive ancestors faced in the archaic environment. Also, as happens in symptomatic disorders, what was once adaptive may not be so today.
Thus, for example, a high level of impulsivity and aggressiveness could be an evolutionary advantage in a primitive environment, where survival depended heavily on the ability to physically defend oneself from violent attacks by “the others”, those who were different and different from one another. “we”. These values today are strongly repudiated by contemporary society. Let’s look at an even more controversial example. The abduction, rape and sexual slavery of women by the warlike and most aggressive peoples was a relatively common practice until the creation of modern states; From an evolutionary point of view it was an effective reproduction strategy whose end, at least as a systematic method, came less than a thousand years ago; span that represents an eye blink in evolutionary terms.
Thus, many characteristics of those people who aggressively raped their victims were passed on to subsequent generations and today we see them in disorders such as borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder or paranoid. It may not make us feel very good to think that some distant great-great-grandfather sexually abused our distant great-great-grandmother, but this is a fact; Many of us who today repudiate such a practice are the descendants. Our values have changed, but our biology has not. And if the family is not chosen… even less the ancestors…
Thus, the definition of pathological personality cannot ignore the evolutionary bed from which we come, but neither should it only refer to that; At the end of the day, it seems clear that the definition of health (especially mental health) always ends up containing social elements specific to the culture that defines it.
The combination of neuroticism high with a high level of extroversion It is characteristic of antisocial personality disorder and all its concomitant symptoms
One of the most promising attempts has been to relate personality pathology to extreme, very extreme, levels of some traits. In this sense, the first candidate is the neuroticism. By its very nature, it is considered the most favorable environment for the germination of psychopathology in general and personality in particular. Empirical studies have strongly supported this hypothesis. Regarding the other domains and facets, the picture is less clear. An attempt has been made to relate with what other very high or very low domain the neuroticism as to give different personality disorders. This path has borne some fruit, although it is definitely far from offering a broad panorama. Thus, for example, the combination of neuroticism high with a high level of extroversion It is characteristic of antisocial personality disorder and all its concomitant symptoms, substance abuse, unrestrained spending of money and waste of all resources. The conscientiousness very high is prototypical of obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. An extremely low level of Agreement is typical of paranoid disorder.
The definition of pathological personality cannot ignore the evolutionary bed from which we come, but neither should it only refer to that.
One of the most outstanding contributions to the discussion about the demarcation of the field of psychopathology comes from the concept of “harmful dysfunction” proposed by Wakefield. According to this approach, what defines psychopathology has two aspects: on the one hand, dysfunction, a scientific concept; on the other, the harmful side, marked by a social valuation. Thus, for example, a major depressive disorder meets the criterion of dysfunctionality, since it puts the body in a position to not execute behaviors for which it is simply designed. Depression also meets the criterion of harm, as it clearly threatens even your very survival. But all is not so simple.
First, in the medical-biological field it is relatively easy to affirm that there is a pathological process based on the idea that an organ or system stops fulfilling its function; Thus, if a kidney does not process fluids properly or the adrenal gland does not produce enough norepinephrine; We will say that there is a dysfunction. The problem with transferring this idea to the psychological field is that no one knows with certainty how many and what psychological functions a healthy brain should carry out and then, from there, conceptualize the dysfunction. In any case, the concept is very useful and, above all, promising as we achieve a more complete understanding of the map of healthy psychological functions.
No one knows with certainty how many and what psychological functions a brain should carry out.
On the other hand, we have already insisted on the idea that our brain executes functions that were adaptive thousands of years ago, but that are doubtfully adaptive today. What will we say in that case? If a person reacts by fainting at the sight of his own blood, we cannot say that such a characteristic is dysfunctional, since it has protected the species from bleeding to death in ancient times where coagulants, gauze and bandages did not exist. However, it is harmful and, in this sense, treatable as a clinical condition, only because it generates discomfort. That is to say, we are facing an evolutionarily adaptive function, not a dysfunction, but one that is harmful; We meet only the second criterion of conceptualization. Can we find the opposite case, that is, a dysfunction that is not harmful? Of course. In ancient times, a husband who was the victim of infidelity would have simply killed his partner, his lover and surely the children likely to have resulted from such a relationship; …