Golubkov's Language Personality Theory

Golubkov's theory approaches the issues of personality commonalities vs personality differences by examining phenomenology of "primitive" (pre-theoretical) psychological concepts as revealed in natural language. In this way, he hopes to go beyond the bare statistical typologies such as 16PF, PEN, and B5 and move towards a deeper understanding of personality. He suggests that all theories -- formal and naïve -- have at their root eight aspects of personality:

Action

Perception

Need

Emotion

Speech

Thought

Intention

Evaluation

Golubkov suggests that these eight can be organized in several ways. First, they can be grouped into four pairs, for which he suggests the traditional terms of "perennial philosophy:" psyche, body, mind, and soul.

Psyche (action and perception): "complex processes of the total organism's relection and interaction with the environment which are based upon neural processes but cannot be reduced to them."

Body (need and emotion): "the whole physical structure of a man or animal, the living matter with its needs."

Mind (speech and thought): "the intellectual, reasonable, or spiritual nature of people, which is manifested through words and the notions behind them."

Soul (intention and evaluation): "the moral nature of a person, his/her feelings, intentions and wishes."

They can also be organized in terms of three dimensions (cognitive, affective, and conative) as in the following chart:

cognitive		affective
		subjective		objective
	social	*soul*		*mind*
		intention	evaluation	speech	thought
	natural	*body*		*psyche*
		need	emotion	action	perception
		intrapersonal	interpersonal		intrapersonal
		conative

He defines the three dimensions so:

Cognitive: "the ability to use semiotic systems."

Affective: "the ability to adapt to reality."

Conative: "the ability to coordinate the internal and external planes of behavior."

I believe that Golubkov is onto something that will have great value in our movement towards a theory of personality that is satisfying to both the clinical and scientific communities!

Source: Golubkov, Sergey V. (2002). The Language Personality Theory: An Integrative Approach to Personality on the Basis of its Language Phenomenology. Social Behavior and Personality, 30 (6), 571-578.