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Heading: Principles There are five principles of personology. The first principle is that personality is rooted in the brain. Cerebral physiology governs all aspects of personality. The second principle is tension reduction. People act to reduce physiological and psychological tension to gain satisfaction. We do not strive to be tension-free because a tension-free existence is a source of distress. We need excitement, activity and movement. The ideal state of human nature involves always having tension to reduce. The third principle is that an individual's personality continues to develop over time and is influenced by all of the events that occur over a person’s lifetime. The fourth principle is that personality is not fixed and it can change and progress. Finally, the fifth principle is that every person is unique, however there are similarities among all people.

Heading: Environmental press According to Murray, environmental press is the push of the situation. These are directional forces on a person that arises from other people and events in the environment. It is an effect that can be exerted in a positive or negative direction from one subject to another. It often comes in form of either a threat for harm or a chance of benefit. An example is a student seeing his friends get good grades in school. This might be a press that inspires that student to work harder for better grades. With age and experience, an individual learns and remembers ways to react to similar environmental presses.

Heading: Psychoanalytic orientation Murray’s theory of personality has a psychoanalytic orientation. The chief business and aim of personology is the reconstruction of the individual's past life experiences in order to explain their present behavior. To study personality, Murray used free association and dream analysis to bring unconscious material to light. He developed the Thematic Apperception Test. In this test, the subject produces fantasies in response to pictures, which he is asked to regard as if they were illustrations in a story. Through the test, the dynamic case history becomes possible. The leading concepts include: need or instinct, press, thema, libidinal drives and their stages of development, abnormal adjustment as a result of fixation at a stage of development, ego-defense mechanisms and symptoms as an expression of failure to adjust adequately, complexes, and the conception of personality as a Biography Gesalt. The past plays a highly significant role in shaping personality.