Tag Archives: person

What is a psychological person?

Maybe more aptly: who are they?

The psychological person is so necessarily by their being embedded in society among other, conscious agents.

As both conscious and societal, the psychological person has the following attributes:

They have a mind.
They engage in behaviors.
They have a distinct personality.
They respond to situations.
They experience.
They sense and perceive.
They think, feel, and motivate.
They pay attention.
They recall and foresee.
They learn.

What might this mean for the person who may not have a personality or general life situation? What if they don’t think, feel, or motivate? Surely, they must experience as a conscious being. Further, personhood has been granted according to societal status over the centuries. Societal, conscious personage is a keenly biosocial label. (If someone ceases to be alive medically, they are no longer technically a “person”.)

The psychological person is biosocial! Another way to say this is that people are biopsychosocial. Some may be more or less psychological than others in certain respects…

Existential-humanistic psychology

Existential-humanistic (E-H) psychology is the study of human existence.

Psychology in general is the science of mental processes (mind) and behavior.

Thus, E-H psychology enlarged is the science of mind and behavior within human existence.

But what is human existence with no mind? Mind is a necessary feature; for without it, we’d have no room to consider human existence to begin with.

Behavior may be said to pervade all levels of reality. In physics, we speak of the behavior of particles. Social science considers the situational behavior of persons as human beings.

Mind and behavior are thus part-and-parcel of human existence. Our science of the former two topics must serve to bolster our understanding–and, ultimately, experience–of the latter.

As minded human persons who behave situationally, how do we experience our existence?

Personalism

What is “personalism”?

Last December’s series on existential humanism stated the concept of person to be a subset of human.

What does an ideology of persons–personalism–look like?

People may be said to be:

Physical – People’s bodies are composed of matter. Further, people interact with other physical objects.
Biological – People breathe, eat, and drink; and a great many of them fornicate and reproduce.
Temporal – People are born, they live, and they die; they experience time.
Cultural – People are embedded in cultures characterized by unique but shared ways of being.
Social – People participate in societies consisting of concrete relations between themselves and others.
Economic – People are agents who trade goods and services with one another in marketplaces.
Technological – People invent and utilize tools to perform tasks they were previously unable or less able to accomplish.
Artistic – People express themselves through the creation of original works such as paintings and songs.
Intellectual – People aim to comprehend reality and achieve accurate understandings of it.
Moral – People have unique and shared ideas of wrong versus right action.
Spiritual – People seek enlightenment, wisdom, and contact with the divine or supernatural via practices such as meditation and prayer.
Religious – People worship what they deem as sacred (e.g., God or Gods) through rituals and organized communion.
Political – People negotiate and have interests that are in line or at odds with those of others.
Athletic – Whether for fitness or organized play, people exercise their bodies and minds.
Professional – People work toward particular goals, including money and satisfaction.
Recreational – People enjoy leisurely activities such as taking walks and attending parties.
Linguistic – People communicate via representational symbol systems characterized by semantics, syntax, and pragmatics.
Psychological – People have minds and engage in behaviors. More specifically, they think, feel, are motivated, have personalities, interact with situations, sense, perceive, experience.

For the full source paper discussing the above list, visit: https://psyarxiv.com/fnjte/