The Genealogy of Personality Psychology — Why Personality Became So Important

Abstract

Background. Personality psychology in academia reached its peak in Western psychology in the 1960s and 1970s. Its history usually starts with Freud and ends up with the Big Five. Yet its roots go much deeper, and can be traced back to the early use of the term “psychology” primarily among Protestant scholastics in the late sixteenth century. This was related to the Christian Reformation, which highlighted the sacrament of penance and emphasized self-examination of the true believer. The background for this study is to bring in a historical perspective on personality. Max Weber, for example, demonstrated that this led to a morality of faithfulness to one’s deeds. This duty, he says, explains the prosperity of the Protestants in Europe and the US in the seventeenth century. Michel Foucault showed in the first volume of The History of Sexuality how the sacrament of penance led to a certain interest in human nature and sexuality. Human nature was at the core of the very early use of psychology.