Profiles of Personality

Profiles of Personality offers a refreshingly different approach to learning personality. Designed to serve as a primary or supplementary textbook for courses on personality theory, Profiles of Personality gently guides the reader to go beyond learning about the theories of personality to encouraging critical thought about them. Drawing on many years of teaching experience, DeRobertis writes in an accessible, engaging manner that keeps the reader engaged. The second edition of this text has been expanded and updated with over 100 pages of new content.

Personality textbooks come in two forms, each with their own style of organizing content. They will either be organized in terms of historical affiliation (e.g., Freud and those theories that are historically affiliated with Freud, etc.) or they will offer a series of disparate research foci. Both approaches make it difficult for students to attain a coherent, synoptic grasp of the subject matter. Profiles of Personality offers an alternative. It presents personality theories on the basis of a meta-narrative that guides the student through an unfolding story of personality and personal becoming. The meta-narrative of the text reflects the whole person emphasis that gave rise to the study of personality in the first place. As Walter Mischel once noted, the study of personality was intended to become the meta-discipline for integrating the findings and general principles of psychology as a whole as they speak to the person as a whole.

In contrast to the most contemporary texts take a more restrictive approach, the current text returns to the macro-integrative orientation of those early 20th Century personality theorists who helped to bring about the emerging humanistic revolution in psychology. The macro-integrative orientation has always been guided by the deeply held belief that the personality psychologist should not conflate objectivity with the objectification of the person or the personality. The aim of the approach is to be theoretically open, inclusive, and capable of speaking to the fullness of human existence, its drama, far beyond the aims of adaptation to given biosocial conditions. Macro-integrative investigations target the full range of human experience, from highly conflicted forms of pathology to highly self-transcendent forms of personal fulfillment.

Beginning with the contributions of the micro-integrative tradition, Profiles of Personality moves progressively deeper into the world of macro-integrative theorizing, increasingly exposing the role of paradox in the differential-integrative process of personality formation. Highlights of this new edition include brief discussions of gerotranscendence, gender, and education, additions to the analysis of narrative, and an expanded section on multiculturalism and the ecopsychological culture of place.

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What People Are Saying About Profiles of Personality (2nd edition)

Profiles of Personality is the one of the most thoughtfully organized and rhetorically compelling personality textbooks available. Returning to personality as a study of (whole) persons, it foregrounds integration of theoretical approaches towards an unfolding understanding of life as lived, in keeping with the most important tenet of humanistic psychology. Coverage of the theories is clear and informed, blending the best of old and new ideas.  The text’s clear structure and engaging narrative make it highly valuable for face-to-face discussion and online learning environments alike. It will help students grasp difficult concepts in personality psychology, engage critical thinking, and develop lifelong tools for self-understanding and more insightful interactions with others.

            Lisa M. Osbeck, PhD
Professor of Psychology, University of West Georgia
Past-President, APA Division 1 (Society for General Psychology)


In light of new discoveries in neuroscience, the plasticity of the brain confirms a view of the human personality as fluid and dynamic. Most theories of personality are stuck in old views of the brain and human nature, but Eugene DeRobertis gives us a holistic and dynamic perspective on personality that is congruent with these new discoveries. In this book, his passion for the wonder and mystery of the human personality comes through, as does his clearly stated desire to convey that passion to an emerging generation of psychology students and practitioners.

Ilene A. Serlin, PhD, founder and director of Union Street Health Associates and the Arts Medicine Program at California Pacific MedicalCenter, editor of Whole Person Healthcare (3 volumes)


This is an excellent book. It is scholarly yet written in a highly interesting and accessible style. It is the kind of book that I can recommend to my students and colleagues.

David N. Elkins, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Graduate School of Education and Psychology, Pepperdine University, author of Humanistic Psychology: A Clinical Manifesto


This is a delightful introduction to personality theories through the lens of humanistic psychology. I am sure you will enjoy it as much as I do.

Louise Sundararajan, PhD
Fellow of APA and past president of Society for Humanistic Psychology (Division 32, APA)

Profiles of Personality (2nd Edition) is available in ebook format at:

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Profiles of Personality (2nd edition) is available in audiobook format at:

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Publication Date: June 14, 2021
Pages: 290
ISBN (Hardcover): 978-1-939686-97-8
ISBN (Paperback): 978-1-939686-74-9
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-939686-75-6

Eugene M. DeRobertis is a Professor of Psychology at Brookdale College in New Jersey and a Lecturer at Rutgers University-Newark. He holds a PhD in psychology from Duquesne University. Dr. DeRobertis has been teaching at the college level since 1996. Prior to committing himself to teaching full-time, he worked as a developmentally-oriented psychotherapist, an academic counselor, and an addictions counselor. Dr. DeRobertis has published multiple peer-reviewed works in the areas of phenomenological psychology, existential-humanistic psychology, psychological theory, and child psychology. He is the author of Humanizing Child Developmental Theory: A Holistic Approach (2008), The Whole Child: Selected Papers on Existential-Humanistic Child Psychology (2012), Existential-Phenomenological Psychology: A Brief Introduction (2012), and The Phenomenology of Learning and Becoming: Enthusiasm, Creativity, and Self-Development (2017). His personal interests include the history of rock and roll, horror in film, and American automobiles of the 1960s.

Acknowledgments
Preface

Chapter 1: Introduction

Part I: Micro-Intergenerational Theorizing: From Illusion to Adaptation

Chapter 2 Watson and Skinner: Personality as an Aggregate of Conditioned Responses
Chapter 3 Freudian Orthodoxy and the Psychosexual Personality
Chapter 4 Personality as a Reflection of Inherited (Common) Traits
Chapter 5 Rotter, Bandura, and Mischel: The Cognitive-Regulatory Personality

Part II Incipient Macro- Integrational Theorizing

Chapter 6 George Kelly: Personality as a Personal Construction System
Chapter 7 Erik Erikson: The Ego and the Psychosocial Personality

Part III Macro-Integrational Theorizing: The Paradoxical Process of Becoming

Chapter 8 William Stern and Gordon Allport: The Personal Personality System
Chapter 9 Alfred Adler: The Interpersonally Creative Personality
Chapter 10 Karen Horney and Carl Rogers: The Realizing-Actualizing Personality
Chapter 11 Abraham Maslow and Viktor Frankl: The Transcending-Actualizing Personality

Part IV Macro-Integrational Theorizing: Spanning the Horizons of Irreducible Relationality

Chapter 12 Carl Jung: The Ancestrally Nested Transcending Personality
Chapter 13 Personality as Multiculturally and Ecologically Nested
Chapter 14 Erich Fromm: The Politically and Economically Nested Biophilic Personality
Chapter 15 Rollo May: The Narratively Nested Destining Personality

Epilogue
References
Index

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