In many modern sciences, the term "personification" is widely used. This word has Latin roots and a simple, concise and understandable interpretation. However, the scope of its application is quite extensive and covers not only linguistics, but also philosophy, psychology, sociology and even mythology.
General concept
So let's start over. Personification is a term that is used to denote the property of consciousness to endow inanimate objects with qualities that can only be inherent in a person. In other words, this is anthropopathism, in which various natural phenomena, animals, plants and even characters of fictional worlds are presented as inspired individuals who have intelligence, memory and spiritual properties that are inherent only to people. Therefore, most likely, personification is a concept that is most often found in myths and fairy tales, in fiction and science fiction films.
Etymology of the word
Before we consider the use of this term in variousbranches of science and art, let's get acquainted with its nature of origin. Personification is a word that has Latin roots. In the first place is persona - "face" or "personality", and in the second - facere, which translates as "to do" or "to personify". Together, these two words formed a term that received an accurate scientific explanation during the existence of the Roman Empire. They called all those phenomena, images of titans and gods, as well as magical animals that could talk, think and sympathize. Such characters were found in the myths of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as in stories that, unfortunately, have not survived to this day.
Personification: examples in literature
We have already established that in the myths of the ancient era, this technique was very widespread. Over time, it firmly entrenched itself in world literature, and European, Eastern and Russian poets and writers began to use it. For example, let's take one folk song:
And grief, grief, mourning!
And grief girded with a bast, The feet are tangled with bast.
In the poetry of the author of the Silver Age Alexander Blok, we also meet this technique:
She lay down in her bedchamber
Her nurse is silence…
In the prose literature of famous authors, the method of personification is encountered literally at every turn. Starting with Andersen's fairy tales, where fish can "chat" with mermaids, and tin soldiers know how to grieve, ending with quite realisticthe works of Maxim Gorky, who "laughed the sea", and Mikhail Lermontov, who told us what "Clouds of Heaven" feel.
Personifications in psychology
An area in which the term is also widely used is psychology. Its meaning here, however, is somewhat different, but the principle remains the same. So, personification here is called images and pictures in a person’s head, which are formed in him from the moment of birth. Due to them, he sees the world through his individual prism and perceives certain phenomena in a certain way. For the first time, this term was introduced into psychology by the scientist Harry Sullivan, who believed that personality develops not only in infancy and adolescence, but throughout his life.
Three types of personality personification
Sullivan divided the period of personality formation into three stages: mother, "I" and idol. At the first stage, a newborn child mainly contacts his mother, and two images are gradually formed in his mind - “bad mother” and “good mother”. The first image is related to the fact that the nurse may not bring the desired benefit to the baby, for example, give him a dummy. The second image is fixed due to constant care and care. The child grows up and begins to make his first contacts with society, identifying himself in it. This is how he develops the consciousness of his own "I". Later, an already mature person passes into the stage of personification of the idol. Often this is the endowment of the people around him.qualities that they don't really have. In other words, this is a self-deception in which many of our contemporaries live.
Sociology
In this area, the principle of personification has been widely used for a long time to explain many points. For example, the actions of certain people or their groups are usually combined into something that could explain what is happening. Examples of sociological personification are forms of government in various states, political views (left, right, centric), various forms of ideology, and much more. As a rule, in each of these systems there is a leader - one person, or a party - a group of people. They bear full responsibility for what is happening. In other words, they become the personification of all those events that emerged as a result of the actions of a much larger number of people. In the event of an unsuccessful outcome of events, the ruling elites often succumb to persecution.
