Wholeness as a fundamental category in describing the nature of personality

Abstract

The concept of wholeness, which is one of the main concepts in the description of personality, is discussed. In psychology, wholeness is considered as a characteristic of personality and as a requirement for its study. In traditional approaches to understanding wholeness, it is described through the relative constancy of personality substructures, interconnected, or, in dynamic approaches, through the development of wholeness based on the connection of existing structures with the emergence of new formations. Violation of the principle of integrity in research studying individual components of personality became one of the main reasons for the crisis in personality psychology of the twentieth century. Difficulties in studying the wholeness of personality are associated, among other things, with differences in its interpretations, with the polysemy and uncertainty of the concepts that describe it, which is demonstrated by the results of the analysis of the conceptual field in scientific discourse. It is proposed to consider wholeness as a fundamental category in the description of personality, along with the categories of variability and stability. Wholeness is understood as an integral characteristic that works at different levels of the functional organization of the individual, which correlate with the contexts of the individual’s life. In accordance with the developed processual approach, integrity is a dynamic formation, the balance of which is ensured by the balance of the processes of change and stability; the content of the conjugate action of these processes is the “completion” of the stability of the individual due to the changes that occur.

Keywords:

wholeness, integration, conceptual description, fundamental category, processual approach