The Future of Personality Theory: a Processual Approach

Abstract

The perpetual discussion of approaches and principles in the study of personality has been one of the notable trends of development of psychological science over many decades. The structural approach, based on the delineation of a person’s traits and characteristics, made an important contribution to various branches of psychology, but now the scientific community has recognized the limitations of a structural understanding of personality. Its inadequacy becomes particularly obvious in today’s conditions, when fundamental changes pose a challenge to man’s ability to respond flexibly to changing conditions of everyday existence, as well as to larger-scale changes. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is obvious that there is a need for new ways to understand and describe the personality: Scholars are calling for study of the dynamic personality, of the personality as an open system. At the foundational level, modern personality psychology should incorporate classical ideas about its structure; secondly, it should consider personality in the context of the individual’s lifetime; and – at the highest level – it should describe personality as the subject of Being. We submit our own description of personality psychology’s problem field.