The hypostatic model of personality is a view asserting that humans present themselves in many different aspects or hypostases, depending on the internal and external realities they relate to, including different approaches to the study of personality. It is both a dimensional model and an aspect theory, in the sense of the concept of multiplicity. The model falls into the category of complex, biopsychosocial approaches to personality.
The term hypostasis can cover a wide range of personality-related entities usually known as type, stage, trait, system, approach. The history of the concept can be traced back to Peirce's hypostatic abstraction, or personification of traits. Different authors have described various dimensions of the self (or selves), personality dimensions and subpersonalities. Contemporary studies link different aspects of personality to specific biological, social, and environmental factors.
The work on subpersonalities was integrated into a hypostatic model. The model describes personality aspects and dimensions, as well as intra- and interpersonal relations. Not the person whole and alone, nor the relationship, but the relation between parts of person(s) is held as a central element that promotes both personal and social organization and disorganization. Personality is viewed as both an agency and a construction, along with its development and psychopathology, as the model is accompanied by specific methods of assessment and therapy, addressing each of the personality dimensions. The hypostatic relations of the human mind also imply the existence of a hypostatic model of consciousness, representing the contents of consciousness as an identity of various aspects, different only with respect to each other, but tending to coincide in a certain aspect of their consideration.
Overview
The hypostatic model of personality is a way of viewing the many sides of a person's character. The model states that a person can behave and appear to others in many ways, depending on how that person is, but also on how that person is viewed by the others (scientists included). It also states that people are not one-sided, but are a little bit of everything. For example, today someone can be mean, and tomorrow they can be good. How people are and present themselves at one moment or another also depends on their biological state, and the situation or environment (the people and things around them). For example, sometimes the most cowardly person may become the greatest hero, if they are called to save someone's life.
In order to be improved, all these "sides" of a person have first to be scientifically assessed.
Historical background
Origins and terminology
The concept of hypostasis as the shared existence of spiritual and corporal entities has been used in a number of religious and intellectual settings. The word hypostasis means underlying state or underlying substance, and is the fundamental reality that supports all else.
The Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus writes about three hypostases: Soul, Intellect (nous) and the One.
The Christian view of the Trinity is often described as a view of one God existing in three distinct hypostases.
In the Kabbalah, the ten sephirot are the hypostases of God, capable of being known, as opposed to his absolute essence, which is inaccessible to knowledge.
Charles Sanders Peirce introduced the concept of hypostatic abstraction, which is a formal operation that takes an element of information, such as might be expressed in a proposition of the form "X is Y", and conceives its information to consist in the relation between a subject and another subject, such as expressed in a proposition of the form "X has Y-ness".
Hypostatic ethics has been described as the study of values in themselves, with all their relations, as agents and/or influencers of cognition and behavior.
In linguistics, Leonard Bloomfield introduced the concept of hypostasis to describe the personification of an object or state in sentences as I'm tired of your buts and ifs.
Aaron Rosanoff's theory of personality distinguishes seven dimensions (normal, hysteroid, manic, depressive, autistic, paranoid, and epileptoid), which can be epistatic or hypostatic dimensions, the manifestation of the latter being concealed or inhibited by the former.
Variants and evolution: selves and dimensions
In the philosophy of mind, double-aspect theory is the view that the mental and the physical are two aspects of the same substance.