George Bush: Nurture and Nature - Essay Example

As a young boy, he was wise-cracking and strong-willed. This is due to his upbringing. He comes from a clan that is well-regarded in society. His constant companions were boys who belonged to politically-influential families and the elite in society. He was carefree, one time he was caught painting a mustache on his face while in Music class. But he was a leader, President of his class, and involved a lot in extra-curricular activities.

Sometimes though, he was a problem to his mother because of some reports from school. As a college senior, Bush became a member of the secretive Skull and Bones, one of the oldest secret student societies in the United States whose past members included prominent personalities. He was described as extremely gregarious, but a notoriously poor dresser, made many friends, bridging the growing divide between the public school graduates who were entering Yale and the "preppies." He became the president of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity and enjoyed parties, drinking, watching and playing football, and dating.

He was booked on a misdemeanor charge for being part of a prank that involved stealing a Christmas wreath for the frat house. Theories of Personality Freud's theory of personality - the Oedipal complex - works in this stage of the case study. The identification with the father is crucial in the development of the boy - the young Bush had incorporated the moral values and ideals of his president's father and has identified himself to him, thus he struggled and worked hard to become president himself.

As opposed to Freud's theory is the social learning theory which originated from the behavioral writings of Ivan Pavlov, John B. Watson, and B.F. Skinner. According to this theory, the process of learning is of central importance to personality development. Social learning theorists believe that people are influenced by the situations they are in. Bush was much influenced by the situation he was in. He was a student leader - president of a class - and was involved in activities that would make him a leader and a prominent figure in American politics.

This means that his personality was learned from school and the environment. The social learning view of personality is vastly different from that of the psychoanalysis of Freud. Freud's concept of psychoanalysis focused on the unconscious mind, or the developmental states that are of primary importance to psychoanalysis. But social learning theorists focus their study on development in learning. Personality is something that is learned, or, the total of all the ways that people learned to act, think and feel.

It is called social learning because the process is learned from other people. Personality is no more than learned behavior and the way to understand personality is simply to understand the processes of learning. To social learning theorists, the key concepts in the study of personality are not the id, ego, and superego, as espoused by Freud, but classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and modeling.