Genes are influential in personality, but they don’t strictly determine personality. For example, babies arrive with distinctive temperaments that appear to correlate with their adult personalities. Because the temperaments emerge before they have very much interaction with the world, they are believed to be expressions of genetic loading. But experience can shape adult personality as well so genes don’t provide a blueprint from which adult personality can be predicted.

This is an area of substantial controversy. Many clinicians have been well-trained to make plausible inferences from the patterns that show up when people find images or tell stories in response to vague stimuli. Practitioners have great confidence that the tests can be used to produce valuable insights into the human condition. However, many scientists suggest that the scientific data on validity and reliability of the tests just don’t warrant the confidence that clinicians express. However, clinicians are reluctant to abandon a technique that has proven helpful in clinical contexts.

Many of Freud’s ideas simply have not withstood the test of time. However, we have to be careful not to condemn all of Freud’s ideas because some of them are no longer credible. Freud is a good example of how our thinking is an expression of the cultural context in which we live. His theories, which seem so hostile to women according to contemporary standards, merely reflect the attitudes of Victorian culture which had relegated women to an inferior status. If you accept the cultural premise of women’s inferiority, then Freud’s theories are a rather tidy explanation to support that reality. If you reject the idea that women are inferior, Freud can seem like a madman. He still made major contributions to our understanding and continues to be a source of influence about how we think about human behavior.

Personality psychologists have found strong empirical support for the reliability of these five dimensions of personality (openness, agreeabless, neuroticism, etc.). Although we can describe personality in many more ways than five, these are the five that appear to hold up across research projects both in this country and other parts of the world.