To speak of personality as an object of politics is to tread on dangerous ground; the issue of totalitarianism is very close. Authoritarian regimes of all persuasions in the twentieth century have made sustained attempts to mould the upbringing and outlooks of their citizens. Liberal critics of ‘totalitarianism’ such as Hannah Arendt have their most […]

The historicity of personality has been recognized in social theory mainly by constructing historical typologies of character. A particular character type is supposed to be dominant at one period of history and then is swept aside in favour of a new type in a new epoch. The classic sequence is David Riesman’s ‘tradition- directed’, ‘inner-directed’ […]

Personality, Society and Life History Chapters 8 and 9 have described how structures of gender relations enter into personal life and shape personalities. The fact is clear, but how to understand it is more difficult. ‘Enter into’ is a metaphor, and we might ask just what is being ‘entered’. Has personality some distinctive substance, as […]

It has long been objected that Freud’s theory results in too mechanical a view of personality and too limited a view of human possibility. Adler was one of the first to raise these points, though he did not take them far. Much more radical was the critique developed by Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness […]

Freud wrote voluminously on sexuality and gender. My purpose here is not to give a summary or a history of his ideas and those of his followers, but to explore the contribution they make to a social theory of gender. Accordingly I will start not with the Oedipus complex and Freud’s discussions of femininity and […]

In both academic social science and the popular literature on gender in the last two decades the commonest approach has been through concepts of social moulding or ‘socialization’. Schematically, the main argument runs like this. The new-born child has a biological sex but no social gender. As it grows older society provides a string of […]

Gender Formation and Psychoanalysis How are the structures of personal life discussed in the last chapter formed? There are two main approaches to this question that are compatible with a social analysis of gender. Socialization theory treats gender formation as. jthe acquisition and internalization of social^ norms_. It stresses continuity between social context and personality, […]

The central argument can be put in a few paragraphs. There is an ordering of versions of femininity and masculinity at the level of the whole society, in some ways analogous to the patterns of face-to-face relationship within institutions. The possibilities of variation, of course, are vastly greater. The sheer complexity of relationships involving millions […]

To this point I have discussed the production of sexual character as if each milieu were independent of all others. It is time to bring into the analysis the structures that interrelate milieux (chapter 6) and their historical composition into a gender order for the society as a whole (chapter 7). To start with the […]

Scalar models of personality have often stemmed from theories of personality ‘types’. Extraversion-introversion scales and the famous ‘F scale’ of authoritarianism both derive from such typologies, devised by Jung and the Frankfurt school respectively. M/F scales similarly derive from unitary models of sexual character, in effect ‘dimensionalizing’ them by adding a range of possibilities in […]