Conceiving of Personality

The quest to comprehend the essence of human nature is as old as the capacity for reflective thought. In this provocative book, Dr. Michael Robbins proposes a new approach that draws upon psychoanalysis but is shaped by awareness of the limits that the particular circumstances of historical epoch, Western culture, male gender, and modal population from which psychoanalysis was derived impose on its modernist claims to being a universal theory. Dr. Robbins addresses these limitations from the perspective of philosophy of science, focusing on the paradigm shift from logical positivism, which seeks to reduce complexity and diversity to its presumptive causal building blocks, to the postmodern emphasis on pluralism and on relativistic, contextual, evanescent knowledge. He examines the implications of this shift for the disciplines that study human nature-neuroscience, psychoanalysis, gender studies, anthropology, and sociology. After considering whether typical personality has changed over historical time and studying the cross-cultural diversity of human nature, the relationship of gender to personality, the spectrum of personality variability within Western culture, and the relationship of the contextual embeddedness of the conceiver to his or her theory, he proposes a dialectical conception of personality based on systems and chaos theories that respects its multiple guises and circumstantial richness of content without abandoning the quest for universal principles of organization and development.

The rise of atheism in the modern world is a religious phenomenon unprecedented in history, both in the number of its adherents and in the security of its cultural establishment. How did so revolutionary a conviction as this arise? What can theological reflection learn from this massive shift in religious consciousness?

In this book, Michael J. Buckley investigates the origins and development of modern atheism and argues convincingly that its impetus lies paradoxically in the very attempts to counter it. Although modern atheism finds its initial exponents in Denis Diderot and Paul d’Holbach in the eighteenth century, their works bring to completion a dialectical process that reaches back to the theologians and philosophers of an earlier period.  During the seventeenth century, theologians such as Leonard Lessius and Marin Mersenne determined that in order to defend the existence of god, religious apologetics must become philosophy, surrendering as its primary warrant any intrinsically religious experience or evidence. The most influential philosophers of the period, René Descartes and Isaac Newton, and the theologians who followed them accepted this settlement, and the new sciences were enlisted to provide the foundation for religion.

Almost no one suspected the profound contradictions that this process entailed and that would eventually resolve themselves through the negation of god.  In transferring to other areas of human experience and inquiry its fundamental responsibility to deal with the existence of god, religion dialectically generated its own denial.  The origins and extraordinary power of modern atheism lie with this progressive self-alienation of religion itself.

The quest to comprehend the essence of human nature is as old as the capacity for reflective thought. In this provocative book, Dr. Michael Robbins proposes a new approach that draws upon psychoanalysis but is shaped by awareness of the limits that the particular circumstances of historical epoch, Western culture, male gender, and modal population from which psychoanalysis was derived imposed on its modernist claims to being a universal theory. Dr. Robbins addresses these limitations from the perspective of philosophy of science, focusing on the paradigm shift from logical positivism to the postmodern emphasis on pluralism and on relativistic, contextual, evanescent knowledge. He examines the implications of this shift for neuroscience, psychoanalysis, gender studies, anthropology, and sociology. After considering whether typical personality has changed over time, he studies the cross-cultural diversity of human nature, the relationship of gender to personality, the spectrum of personality variability within Western culture, and the relationship of the contextual embeddedness of the conceiver to his or her theory. He then proposes a dialectical conception of personality based on systems and chaos theories that respects its multiple guises and circumstantial richness of content without abandoning the quest for universal principles. Contents 7 Preface 9 CHAPTER 1 Introduction 15 CHAPTER 2 Can We Conceive of Ourselves? Three Instances of Theoretical Conversion 24 CHAPTER 3 A Brief History of Conceptions of the Person 41 CHAPTER 4 Monistic Thinking and Modal Constructs 51 CHAPTER 5 Constitution-Bound: The Neurobiological Basis of Personality 66 CHAPTER 6 Ethnocentrism: Culture, Local Knowledge, and Universal Truth 76 CHAPTER 7 Psychoanalysis as an Indigenous Psychology 90 CHAPTER 8 Indigenous Psychologies of the East and West: Psychoanalysis and Buddhism 105 CHAPTER 9 Gender, Personality, and Culture 114 CHAPTER 10 Psychoanalytic Monism and Intracultural Diversity 129 CHAPTER 11 How Models Become Movements: The Ideological Dimension 147 CHAPTER 12 Summary of the Monism-Pluralism Debate 154 CHAPTER 13 Systems in Transformation: A Model for the Dialectic between Discovery and Creation 159 CHAPTER 14 Modeling the Dialectic between Discovery and Creation 168 CHAPTER 15 Conceiving of Personality: The Warp and the Woof 183 References 189 Index 211 As part of the quest to comprehend the essence of human nature, this work proposes an approach that draws on psychoanalysis but is shaped by awareness of the limits that the particular circumstances of the origins of psychoanalysis impose on its claims to be a universal theory.