Personality clash
A personality clash occurs when two (or more) people find themselves in conflict not over a particular issue or incident, but due to a fundamental incompatibility in their personalities, their approaches to things, or their style of life.[1]
A personality clash may occur in work-related, school-related, family-related, or social situations.
Types[edit]
Carl Jung saw the polarity of extraversion and introversion as a major potential cause of personality conflicts in everyday life,[2] as well as underlying many past intellectual and philosophical disputes.[3]
He also opposed thinking and feeling types, intuitive and sensation types, as potential sources of misunderstanding between people;[4] while other typologies can and have been developed since.[5]
In therapy[edit]
Sigmund Freud thought a harmonious match of therapist and patient was essential for psychotherapy; but subsequent experience has demonstrated that success can follow even where there is an underlying personality clash.[9]
Neville Symington indeed saw a patient's willingness to proceed with therapy, despite her dislike of him, as a positive sign of health, and as a beginning repudiation of her narcissism.[10]
Remedies[edit]
Some suggest that the only answer to a personality clash is the folk remedy of distancing - reducing contact with the clashing personality involved.[11] Other recommendations are to focus on the positives in the other person, and to examine one's own psychodynamics for clues as to why one is finding them so difficult[12] - perhaps due to a projection of some unacknowledged part of one's own personality.[13]
Howard Gardner saw a major part of what he called interpersonal intelligence as the ability to mediate and resolve such personality clashes from the outside.[14]