Either one defines “personality” and “individuality” in terms of their possibilities within the established form of civilization, in which case their realization is for the vast majority tantamount to successful adjustment. Or one defines them in terms of their transcending content, including their socially denied potentialities beyond (and beneath) their actual existence; in this case, their realization would imply transgression, beyond the established form of civilization, to radically new modes of “personality” and “individuality” incompatible with the prevailing ones. Today, this would mean “curing” the patient to become a rebel or (which is saying the same thing) a martyr.
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“Critique of Neo-Freudian Revisionism”Herbert Marcuse
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I must avert here once again to my view of the opposition that exists between individuality and personality, notwithstanding the fact that the one demands the other. Individuality is, if I may so express it, the container or thing which contains, personality the content or thing contained, or I might say that my personality is in a certain sense my comprehension, that which I comprehend or embrace within myself — which is in a certain way the whole Universe — and that my individuality is my extension; the one my infinite, the other my finite.
Miguel de Unamuno
In man, personality is usually defined with reference to self-consciousness rather than to individuality; but the power of reflection and self-knowledge is linked up, in our type of personality at least, with the new flight of individuality — conscious memory seems necessarily to imply a vast increase of independence, so that it is all one whether we define the possessor of personality as a self-conscious individual, or as an individual whose individuality is more extensive both in space and time than the material substance of his body.
Personality, as we know it, is free compared with the individuality of the lower animals; but it is still weighted down with the body. There may be personalities which have not merely transcended substance, but are rid of it altogether: in all ages the theologian and the mystic have told of such "disembodied spirits," postulated by the one, felt by the other, and now the psychical investigator with his automatic writing and his cross-correspondences is seeking to give us rigorous demonstration of them. If such exist, they crown Life's progress...Julian Huxley
In the actual duration of his life, the individual ranges from the bacterium's hour to the the big tree's five thousand years. Man in this again stands at the pinnacle of individuality — not in mere length of days, but in having found a means to perpetuate a part of himself in spite of death.
By speech first, but far more by writing, man has been able to put something of himself beyond death. In tradition and in books an integral part of the individual persists, for it can influence the minds and actions of other people in different places and at different times: a row of black marks on a page can move a man to tears, though the bones of him that wrote it are long ago crumbled to dust. In truth, the whole progress of civilization is based upon this power. Once more the upward progress of terrestrial life towards individuality has found apparently insurmountable obstacles, gross material difficulties before it, but once more through consciousness it finds wings, and, laughing at matter, flies over lightly where it could not climb.
To such an individuality, one that can thus transcend the limits of its substance, the name Personality is commonly given. Man alone possesses true personality, though there is as it were an aspiration towards it visible among the higher vertebrates, stirring their placid automatism with airs of consciousness.Julian Huxley
Mixture of assimilation to earlier schemas and adaptation to the actual conditions of the situation is what defines motor intelligence. But — and this is where rules come into existence — as soon as a balance is established between adaptation and assimilation, the course of conduct adopted becomes crystallized and ritualized. New schemas are even established which the child looks for and retains with care, as though they were obligatory or charged with efficacy.
Jean Piaget
The operation itself is the social act that enabled the patient to come to terms with the immutability of his Jewish body. No matter what is done, the body will reveal itself to be that of a Jew. This crushing realization drives the patient beyond medicine for therapy. He eventually breaks with his racial-religious identity and converts to Catholicism, the ultimate form of passing in Catholic Vienna. Aesthetic surgery did not cure the patient of his Jewishness, it only masked it. Baptism became the answer….
Sander Gilman
Marcuse, Herbert
Margaret, Princess
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