Don’t Tell Me I’m Nice. I Know I’m Not.

(Let’s go to Gordon Allport.)

You may describe a person you know using so and so adjectives. You may have used around 5 to 10 adjectives in describing your friend, colleague, or parent… These adjectives are a person’s central dispositions or the “5 to 10 most outstanding characteristics around which a person’s life focuses.” These adjectives give an overall summary of a person’s personality. If you want to more comprehensively describe the person, then you may just use secondary dispositions or those traits that “are not central to the personality yet occur with some regularity…”. You must know the person really well if you are able to describe him using secondary dispositions, even more so if you can distinguish between his central and secondary dispositions.

The person may say that the adjectives you used to describe him are not accurate. Or he may say that they are true, yet they don’t really matter to him… You describe him as being dependent and needy, but he doesn’t care. Those things don’t define him. What’s more important to him are the traits which he considers part of his proprium.

The proprium include “behaviors and characteristics that people regard as warm, central, and important in their lives.” These traits are crucial in defining a person’s identity and provide foundations to which a person makes his choices and creates his goals. Relating this to Carl Jung’s archetypes, the proprium may or may not include traits in the persona, and may or may not include traits in the person’s shadow. As long as people consider them crucial in defining who they are, these characteristics and behaviors will belong to one’s proprium.

This is another explanation why we can’t seem to pinpoint other people’s true personality. There are some traits which they do not consider important in their lives. These traits may be observed regularly, but the person may not give any thought to them.