Aggressive Personality Type The interests of the Aggressive Personality Type include (Oldham, pg. 344): being the boss . moving to positions of leadership assuming command undertaking huge responsibilities weilding power competing with confidence never backing away from a fight Main Interests of the Aggressive Personality Type 1. being able to dominate and command others, and exercise power 2. being a part of a traditional power structure 3. being self-disciplined; being able to impose discipline on others 4. accomplishing objectives 5. reaching goals 6. being active and adventurous; being physically assertive and competitive in sports 7. getting people to do what you want them to do Characteristic Traits and Behaviors Dr. John M. Oldham has defined the Aggressive personality style. The following six characteristic traits and behaviors are listed in his The New Personality Self-Portrait. 1. Command. Aggressive individuals take charge. They are comfortable with power, authority, and responsibility. 2. Hierarchy. They operate best within a traditional power structure where everyone knows his or her place and the lines of authority are clear. 3. Tight ship. They are highly disciplined and impose rules of order that they expect others in their charge to follow. 4. Expedience. Aggressive men and women are highly goal-directed. They take a practical, pragmatic approach to accomplishing their objectives. They do what is necessary to get the job done. 5. Guts. They are neither squeamish nor fainthearted. They can function well and bravely in difficult and dangerous situations without being distracted by fear or horror. 6. The rough-and-tumble. Aggressive people like action and adventure. They are physically assertive and often participate in or enjoy playing competitive sports, especially contact sports. The Last Don by Mario Puzo - Random House Inc. | Books@Random. The Godfather: Screenplay by Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola Ebert's Great Movies: The Godfather The Godfather: a film review by James Kendrick Source: Oldham, John M., and Lois B. Morris. The New Personality Self-Portrait: Why You Think, Work, Love, and Act the Way You Do. Rev. ed. New York: Bantam, 1995. Idealized Image I did conceive of "character strengths and virtues" in a positive way as Martin Seligman does in his Positive Psychology, but now see them as images of perfection that inflate the idealized self theorized by Karen Horney. Character Strengths and Virtues (what the Sadistic type is proud of) sadistic men, who might happen to be sergeants like Croft or generals like Cummings. Men like these provide the motor power that drives the war-making machine; the others--the fools, the sentimentalists, the good, the honest, and the brave-are lashed ahead by these demoniac taskmasters. Norman Mailer on what it means to be macho - Guardian Unlimited Books. War is the subject that made Mailer; in 1945, aged 21, he was drafted to fight in the Philippines, and the novel he wrote on his return, The Naked and the Dead, catapulted him to disorienting celebrity. It is a pounding, unflinching study of men in war; of strength and sadism and masculine rivalry amid the colossal waste of conflict. It was also, according to the Sunday Times, a book that "no decent man could leave... lying about the house, or know without shame that his womenfolk were reading it." It was energetically obscene - even though, at the publisher's behest, it was full of "fugs" and "fugging" - and that was what made its heroes heroic, Mailer argued. "What none of the editorial writers ever mentioned," he later wrote, "is that the noble common man is as obscene as an old goat, and his obscenity was what saved him. The sanity... was in his humour; his humour was in his obscenity." The Beleaguered Individual III: A study of twentieth-century American war novels. Mario Puzo The Official Mario Puzo Library [via Google] [I]n most of Puzo's best-selling fiction, the story is dominated by strong male characters and vivid depictions of treachery, betrayal, and sadistic acts of violence that illustrate the excesses of ambition, wealth, and power beneath the placid surface of mainstream American society. -Contemporary Literary Criticism, 107:173. The "Character Strengths and Virtues" are attributes of the idealized self, or ego ideal. As "conditions of worth" they are idols. 1. Disposition to command, disposition to dominate, leadership, strength, powerfulness, authoritativeness, responsibleness. 2. Orderliness, conservatism. 3. Discipline, self-control, self-restraint, craftiness, shrewdness, benevolence, protectiveness, generosity, liberality. 4. Purposefulness, goal-directedness, expediency, practicality, pragmatism, disposition to achieve, disposition to accomplish, productiveness. 5. Bravery, fearlessness, fortitude, toughness. 6. Energy, activeness, aggressiveness, adventurousness, assertiveness, confidence, competitiveness. Top Strengths* "Leadership: Encouraging a group of which one is a member to get things done and at the same [time maintain] good relations within the group; organizing group activities and seeing that they happen" "Open-mindedness [judgment, critical thinking]: Thinking things through and examining them from all sides; Not jumping to conclusions; being able to change one's mind in light of evidence; weighing all evidence fairly" "Perspective [wisdom]: Being able to provide wise counsel to others; having ways of looking at the world that make sense to oneself and to other people" "Bravery [valor]: Not shrinking from threat, challenge, difficulty, or pain; speaking up for what is right even if there is opposition; acting on convictions even if unpopular; includes physical bravery but is not limited to it" Power is the intentional influence over the beliefs, emotions, and behaviors of people. Potential power is the capacity to do so, but kinetic power is the act of doing so. If you made Jimmy believe, feel, or do what you had wanted him to believe, feel, or do, or prevented him from what he had wanted to believe, feel, or do, you would have then have exercised power over him in that particular episode. One person exerts power over another to the degree that he is able to exact compliance as desired. No power is exhibited without an empowering response. The techniques of eliciting empowering responses of the kind and at the same time desired from targeted individuals constitute the craft of power. Weblogs R. G. H. Siu, The Craft of Power. bitchcakes! - Music reviews, movie reviews, cultural drift. Jilly Southern Appeal: The random musings of a Southern Federalist - ENTJ!!! "Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir" - Friedrich Nietzsche. I hypothesize that the personality theories of personality theorists best describe themselves and those of their own type. Bruno Bettelheim Bruno Bettelheim: Austrian-born American psychologist known for his work in treating and educating emotionally disturbed children. From Madness on the couch: blaming the victim in the heyday of psychoanalysis by Edward Dolnick: The whole idea behind the school was to take the lessons Bettelheim had learned from the concentration camps and invert them by substituting kindness for cruelty. "He turned it upside down when he started his school for disturbed children," explained Rudolf Ekstein, a psychoanalyst and one of Bettelheim's closest friends. "It was a protected, caring environment, the mirror opposite of the camps.' "I Physical discipline was the great taboo. "Punishment teaches a child that those who have power can force others to do their will," Bettelheim had written, "And when the child is old enough and able, he will try to use such force himself." He invoked Shakespeare: "They that have power to hurt and will do none... They rightly do inherit heaven's graces. " Still, there had been clues over the years that philosophy was one thing and practice another. In 1983, for example, an ex-student named Tom Lyons wrote a thinly disguised novel about the Orthogenic School (and dedicated it, "with gratitude and affection," to Bettelheim). In one representative scene, Lyons described an encounter between "Dr. V" (Bettelheim was known as Dr. B) and a boy named Ronny, who had hit a classmate during a game of dodgeball: