THE PERSON AS A WHOLE
To regard a person 'as a whole' can mean many things. It cannot reasonably mean knowing everything about a person, but it must involve an adequate idea of the various levels of the human psyche, from the instinctual physical, through the mind and soul to the highest levels of consciousness and self-realisation. Further, any concept of the human whole must allow for a meaningful inter-relationship therein of the many 'parts' or aspects of the person's entire life. This must include both the facts and values of a person's life, how all kinds of feelings, thoughts, behaviour and relationships appear to that person. It must be capable of including a person's relation either to the perceived past and present or the anticipated future.
To grasp the essentials of the person we require again and again to start from something akin to a biographic understanding of the individual life and life-view and this must precede advance judgements, leading cues or generalisations like those derived from analytical theories. This does not exclude all generalising but it accents human understanding, which opens itself to learning about both the depths and the expansiveness of each person or subject, about which narrow generalisations are otherwise far too easily accepted.
The integrated and unitary (holistic) nature of human being itself is lost almost entirely to view by the over-dominance of the analytical approach in modern research, the individual being left unaided to make whatever overall picture he can of all this mass of disparate research fragments. Only when analysis is balanced by synthesis in understanding - reviewed in conscious reflection and by explicit, systematic means - can part and whole mutually fulfil each other in a science, which then itself becomes holistic.
Yet the main problem is the fragmentation of human experience that such analysis involves. The data is almost always relatively quite insignificant compared to the world of any person, which encompasses a great range of intricately inter-connected events, ideas, judgements, circumstances, values, hopes, problems, actions, reasons and so on, almost ad infinitum. But this human sphere is 'reduced' to a system of co-ordinates: 'reductionism' discovers sets of 'multi-variable factors' that are then supposed to indicate the causes of what we do, regardless of the personal reasons we may have. However intelligently gathered and accurately processed the data may be, it can simply not even approach the essential - and hence most important - character of persons because it reduces qualititative phenomena to quantity.Such 'reductionism', doubtless increases the amount of information available about many sides of experience and, though it is essential to the study of physical nature, it can only have a secondary, supportive function in human studies. Studies in physiology and neurology or the conditions of our physical environment cannot penetrate the meaningful and formative essence of any person, the qualitative personal experience of being and living with purpose. All that is 'objective' about the human being - and can thus be studied by scientific method - arises with and from the body. The body, however important in itself, is still but an instrument of a person's consciousness - or the human spirit - and is not the being itself.
The development of a balanced personality, having sufficient autonomy, sound principles and the character to practice these principles in life, is the essence of personal integration. Integration is related to the word 'integrity', whose origin is in completeness and unity... in short, wholeness. The perfect 'human whole' is an ideal of perfect integrity for which anyone who wishes to develop far must aim. So integration also implies moral soundness, purity and virtue of character as exemplified in sincerity, consistency, accountability and honesty. Ultimately, the ideal of integrity is wholeness, and what has always been called holiness, saintliness or piety.The relative absence of character integration in a person is seen in the predominance of negative traits like duplicity, discrepancy of words and actions, falsity, untrustworthiness, violence. At the opposite pole from the perfectly integrated human personality is personality disintegration, exemplified by extreme (so-called) schizophrenic disorder. Yet all too often the phenomenon of integration is neglected, seldom studied at a broad and understandable rational level. The key connection between integrity as truthfulness and personality integration, for example, is overlooked. The same applies to all the positive personal qualities that go to make up what used to be regarded so highly as 'character' perhaps because these are simply no longer sufficiently understood or valued in the modern Western humanities as they have been developed on the background of physical science.
To know what integration involves and how it is attained requires personal and practical psychological insight. There are many factors to take into account and systematic research into this subject is in its infancy. What integration means in practical concrete terms will obvious vary with different people, the stages of their lives and the actual situations that confront them. The quality of 'personal integrity' is often so individual or so dependent on special circumstances as to be almost indefinable. Yet the general nature of integration can be outlined in understandable ways, at least as regards some fairly typical life situations, some problems commonly experienced, and some possible directions of personal growth.In trying to anticipate perfect integration we cannot overlook the ideal human condition of original sinless innocence and the consequent uninterrupted bliss of being, which is palpable in infants and is discernible in a very few persons of the highest spiritual achievement. This gives a key to the deepest meaning of integrity.
The thesis that the human being is developing towards realisation of a latent unity and wholeness of personality, on the model of a perfected 'ideal type', ought to be considered seriously and investigated as a counterweight to supplement its opposite thesis, the pessimistic 'animalistic' thesis that has been enshrined by the sciences since the incomplete and often misinterpreted theories of Darwinian biology and of Freudian pseudo-physicalism.Major assumptions such as these are seen as unwarranted by higher psychology, though they do serve as a basis for describing the more primitive phases of human evolution. These attempts at 'value-free' science in explaining the human condition 'strictly by analysis' from a physical-factual standpoint are however self-defeating in their failure to take into account their own underlying values and 'world-view' assumptions about who and what we are.
The first caution in studying individual persons is primarily to regard them precisely as such, that is, as 'non-divisible'. The principle of the undivided autonomy of any personal subject must be observed. A person is a subject, apart from being embodied and thus having objectivity. As such, a person is self-experiencing, by virtue of consciousness, which is individualised through the differing minds of each person.
Because each person is first and foremost a subject, their nature is not objectively evident to anyone, for it is firstly inner and only thereafter expressed in outward ways through word and act etc. This calls for great consideration and perspicacity when trying to understand their persons. The task is to subtract one's own judgements and inferences in so far as these do not stem directly from one's relations with the person concerned. Even so, long acquaintance with a person does not itself guarantee an understanding of them, though it is a prerequisite. The breadth of contact with a person and the depth of understanding vary and depend on many qualities, from intuition to compassion, experience to frankness. We must therefore systematically avoid the temptation to 'carry over' typifications or inferences from previous experience in the form of premature pre-judgements or prejudices. This tendency is counteracted by the discipline of writing accurate descriptions of observations as a case study, using verbatim material where relevant and preferably having these checked by independent observers.
Any categorisation of personality type or the like usually depends for its intelligibility upon the purpose of making it. To apply it willy-nilly outside such a context, as it if were an absolute, is a typical confusion found in much psychology. It is a great mistake to assume any fixed, natural categories of the human psyche. Everyone is changing or developing and, historically, new and unique kinds of personality keep on evolving. So comparisons aiming at general human types or psychological functions should always be seen on the background of the specific applications for which they are intended. Otherwise they can become fixated as false scientific generalities, treated as if independent of the personal, cultural and other conditions in which they arose. This danger, inherent to all classification, is what be called 'misplaced objectivisation' or 'ontologisation': the tendency to fixate categories as if they were once-and-for-all 'objectively-determined' forms of being (ontos).
With the battery of psychological tests available today (eg. Binet's IQ, Rorschach and many another) one seeks the correct slot for the 'case' or 'instance' in question. Popular psychological literature shows widespread fixation on personality 'types'. The profession also abounds in people who, in assessing their personalities of their clients, apply classifications fairly uncritically by failing to consider serious social and other consequences of labelling a person thus.The tendency to define persons according to 'type' is quite a primitive kind of thinking, for it often causes them to see themselves - and be looked upon and even be treated by others - as unchanging and confined to their type.1 To approach persons in this way neglects our natural propensity for self-transformation and transcendence of given conditions, especially over time. Psychological 'type-casting' easily generates an alienated view of people and has subtle depersonalising influence both on the minds of psychologists their clients. The person, who is also always more or less an unique individual, is denied real personality.
The arbitrary nature of most characterologies becomes the more evident when we consider that each usually prescribes a very limited number of types, but seldom above 12 in all.2 The appeal such typologies have rests on their containing generalisations about aspects of personality which can prove valid when correctly applied and not used in a rigid fashion. It is crucial, however, to realise that no set of character types can cover all aspects of personality and that therefore they easily create illusory and foreshortened images of the individual. They are probably best used for self-reflection as guides and reminders, but not for any decisive classification of others in making practical decisions.
Types and classifications of many kinds are perhaps unavoidable in trying to understand the bewildering variety of forms that differ from culture to culture, society to society and person to person. Where such mutually-exclusive types are defined, they tend to be of a superficial character or of trivial interest. The philosopher Wittgenstein has illustrated this view very well in his Philosophical Investigations. He demonstrates how, rather than there being distinct and separate types, there are usually only what he calls 'family resemblances' between things (and persons). These are similarities and shared characteristics but not predominant types, for there are always many individual differences and varying combinations of traits.
Once a person's character has become fairly well-defined it is not, despite all, entirely unreasonable to group people for some general purposes with the above qualifiers in mind. The groupings chosen will depend upon a number of circumstances of which the most decisive one is obviously the observable characteristics of a person: predominant characteristics of ego-development, character traits or other elements that go to make up the personality, not excluding distinguishing variations due to nation, culture, creed etc. Studies based on the central values dominating a man's behaviour are more pragmatic and fruitful than more theoretical typologies, which are less arbitrary and empirically-testable.
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