A personality model for dominance and submission

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I have had a conviction which has been growing for a long time that dominance and submission are fundamental human traits, which everyone has to some degree or other. I used to believe that sadism and masochism were the primary traits, but I now suspect that these are more like tools or strategies - sadism being a tool for achieving dominance and masochism a strategy for handling submission.

How pleasing then to discover a psychological model of personality that has dominance and submission at it's core. I'm talking about the Interpersonal Circumplex model, originally proposed by the infamous Timothy Leary of psychedelic drugs fame. Leary's model defines personality in terms of two axes - love/hate on the horizontal, and dominance/submission on the vertical. All other personality types are represented as points on a circle centred on these axes (i.e. as mixtures of these fundamental traits).

I haven't yet studied this model enough to fully understand it, but one obvious implication is that dominance and submission are at the very core of who we are. If we ignore these traits, whether in therapy or in life, they will be active nevertheless, as they are fundamental (according to this model). How much better then to be fully aware of them, to name them, and to openly discuss them?

If dominance and submission are primary drives or instincts, and our biological make-up uses feelings of pleasure to reward us when we follow our instincts, then surely sadism is biology's way of implementing the instinct to dominate, and masochism becomes it's way of encouraging us to be submissive.

So why feel guilty about them?

Comments

  1. Anonymous13 April 2007 at 22:11

    I believe this is definitely worth pursuing as a line of research and thought. I have not heard of Leary's theory before, but will definitely check it out.

    ReplyDelete

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