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John Suler, Ph.D. Rider University Copyright Notice


Personality Types in Cyberspace


How do different personality types react to cyberspace? Compulsive people may be drawn to computers and cyberspace out of a need to control and manipulate their environment. Schizoid people may enjoy the lack of intimacy resulting from anonymity. Narcissistic people may use the access to a numerous relationships as a means to gain an admiring audience. Dissociatives may experience the anonymity and identity flexibility of cyberspace as a vehicle for expressing/avoiding the various facets of their personality. Understanding how well-known personality types behave in cyberspace will clarify the social-psychological aspects of cyberspace relationships and groups, as well as such phenomena as computer/cyberspace addictions, flaming, and cybersex.

Many theoretical approaches could be useful for studying how various personality types behave in cyberspace, but none could be more powerful or versatile than psychoanalytic theory. Cyberspace is a psychological extension of the individual's intrapsychic world. It is a space where text-only communication stimulates the processes of projection, acting out, and transference. Therefore, a theory that specializes in understanding the intrapsychic world and those processes is essential. Psychoanalysis fits that bill perfectly.

Nancy McWilliams' book Psychoanalytic Diagnosis (Guilford Press, 1994) is probably one of the best, if not THE best book around that summarizes and integrates the various psychoanalytic concepts about major personality types. For each of these types, McWilliams explores the characteristic affects, temperment, developmental organization, defenses, adaptive processes, object relations, and transference/countertransference phenomena. The personality styles discussed are:

  • psychopathic (antisocial)
  • narcissistic
  • schizoid
  • paranoid
  • depressive and manic (impulsive)
  • masochistic (self-defeating)
  • obsessive and compulsive
  • hysterical (histrionic)
  • dissociative
One highly productive area of research would be to explore how these personality types behave online, how they subjectively experience cyberspace, how they shape the online experience for others, and the pathological as well as potentially salutary aspects of their online activities. Some interesting hypotheses to explore might include the following:

 
  • Do schizoids tend to be lurkers?
  • Do manics impulsively launch off email without proofreading and later regret it.
  • Are hackers antisocial personalities?
  • Do narcissistic people produce long blocks of unbroken paragraphs in their posts to newsgroups and in their email?
  • Do people with dissociative personalities tend to isolate their cyberspace life from their f2f lives, and do they tend to experiment more with creating imaginative online identities?
  • Are compulsives generally drawn to computers & cyberspace for the control it gives them over their relationships.

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