Personality

Personality is a pattern of responses rather than a set of traits, and what generates it is which will is in charge. Responses to anima attraction and repulsion are the raw material, and the governing variable is conscious against emotional control over will, so personalities can be said to change when one or the other becomes dominant. Marsh's evidence is the ordinary observation that they visibly do. Personalities can be altered by environmental substances, and the shift is obvious when drugs, illness or other conditions allow the emotional will to dominate in a person who otherwise has strong conscious control. That is treated as revealing what personality is rather than as an exception to it. The consequence for the underlying substrate is one she draws explicitly. Some aspects of personality are not connected to memories or conscious thought, which are confined to the body, so those aspects must be connected to the wider self and to life, which places personality partly outside the body. Her use of the term is therefore descriptive rather than diagnostic, and the framework is consistently hostile to the diagnostic version. Antisocial personality disorder, defined as a person who disregards the rights of others, is largely typical of an endoself or of a person whose dominant endogroup differs from the diagnosing institution's, which makes the diagnosis a report on a mismatch as often as on a person.

Trait psychology dominates the field, with the five factor model measuring stable dispositions found to be substantially heritable and reasonably consistent across the lifespan. Situationism, following Mischel, argued that behaviour varies more by context than trait accounts predict, and the resulting interactionist consensus holds that both matter. Personality disorders are diagnosed by persistent maladaptive patterns, a category criticized from within psychiatry for cultural and institutional bias. Marsh's account sits with the situationists and goes further, since making personality a pattern of responses governed by which will dominates means it changes with conditions rather than merely expressing itself differently in them.