Personality as a System of Action

This chapter develops some of the categories and hypotheses presented there in order to lay the groundwork for showing systematic relationships of the patterns of value-orientation and the organization of objects to the components of motivation (which are the allocative foci of personality systems). It analyzes certain aspects of the interrelation of this system with the social system in which the actor lives. The chapter is concerned with the relation between the motivation of action and the orientation of action; we shall start out by defining carefully the important terms, chiefly the term motivation itself. Motivation (or motives) in this last sense may be conceived as denoting certain more or less innate systems of orientations involving cognition of and cathectic attachment to certain means and goal objects and certain more or less implicit and unconscious "plans" of action aimed at the acquisition of cathected relationships to goal objects

Personality · Physics · Psychology · Psychology of Development and Education · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications · Scientific Research and Philosophical Inquiry · Social Psychology