Group items tagged

Why are we all so different? Here is a toolkit for finding out what people are really like IN THE 4th century BC, the Greek philosopher Theophrastus, Aristotle's student and successor, wrote a book about personality. The project was motivated by his interest in what he considered a very puzzling question: "Why it has come about that, albeit the whole of Greece lies in the same clime, and all Greeks have a like upbringing, we have not the same constitution of character?" Not knowing how to get at the answer, Theophrastus decided to instead focus on categorising those seemingly mysterious differences in personality. The result was a book of descriptions of personality types to which he assigned names such as The Suspicious, The Fearful and The Proud. The book made such an impression that it was passed down through the ages, and is still available online today as The Characters of Theophrastus. The two big questions about personality that so interested Theophrastus are the same ones we ask ourselves about the people we know: why do we have different personalities? And what is the best way to describe them? In the past few decades, researchers have been gradually answering these questions, and in my new book, Making Sense of People: Decoding the mysteries of personality, I take a look at some of these answers. When it comes to the origins of personality, we have learned a lot. We now know that personality traits are greatly influenced by the interactions between the set of gene variants that we happen to have been born with and the social environment we happen to grow up in. The gene variants that a person inherits favour certain behavioural tendencies, such as assertiveness or cautiousness, while their environmental circumstances influence the forms these innate behavioural tendencies take. The ongoing dialogue between the person's genome and environment gradually establishes the enduring ways of thinking and feeling that are the building blocks of personality. This de

This paper was presented at the Alfred Hitchcock conference For the Love of Fear convened by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, held from 31 March to 2 April 2000. * * * Hermia: Methinks I see these things with parted eye, When everything seems double… Demetrius: Are you sure That we are awake? It seems to me That yet we sleep, we dream. A Midsummer Night's Dream, IV, ii, 192-197. Just about everything about Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) seems double, not least the film's critical reputation. On the one hand, Andrew Britton, not a man to equivocate, declares that "one can make no claim forSpellbound as an achieved work of art," citing, among its shortcomings, "the discrepancy between surface and implication, the grotesque uncertainty of tone (especially noticeable in the wildly clashing conventions of the acting) and the frequent banality of the script" (83). Many, even among Hitchcock's admirers, would agree.Spellbound is, in fact, not spellbinding, not one of Hitchcock's masterworks, not a Rear Window (1954) nor aVertigo (1958). On the other hand, though, it is, as Marshall Deutelbaum and Leland Poague point out, the first of Hitchcock's films in which "questions of visualization and displacement, of guilt conjured up and denied - questions which will eventually inform such films as Rear Window and Vertigo - become overt subject matter"