Thursday, March 22, 2007

Introduction
Anyone can be recognized by his/her identity, but our recognition of someone is often not complete so that his/her actual whole-identity is not known. For example, a wife had been married with her husband for almost 20 years, but she did not fully know his husband yet. Suddenly, in their 20th year of marriage she was shocked after finding out the true identity of his husband. The whole identity of a man is usually is known as personality (syahshiyyah). Personality of a man as a thinking-and-feeling creature can be developed by means of various forms of education. In other words, one's life experiences highly influence his or her personality.

Personality
One's personality is built from his temperament and characters. Temperament is mode of one's response to various stimuli coming from his environments and himself. One's temperament closely relates to his biopsychology conditions, so that it can hardly change and is neutral to good/bad judgements. Meanwhile, character closely relates to good/bad judgments of one’s behavior based on parameters held by the society. Character is formed during one’s life experience, so that it can change. Temperament has no ethical implication, meanwhile character is always be an object of ethical judgment. One can have a temperament that is in contradiction with his character.

A person can have a bad temperament while his/her character is good. If his temperament is at work, he tends to act negatively. Later he will regret it and ashamed of what he had done, although this bad temperament tends to reappear. Furthermore, a person who has a bad character but has a good temperament is usually able to hide his bad character from others. The worst is a bad-character person who also has a bad temperament.

Permanent characters will form a personality. According to Freud, man’s personality consists of three pillars, which are Id, Ego, and Super Ego, or animal, intellectual, and moral elements. Behavior, in Freud’s opinion, is an interaction among the three pillars. Freud concludes, however, that human is a Homo Volens, a creature who has wishes and that his behaviors are controlled by wishes hidden in his subconscious mind. This conclusion underestimates man’s dignity.