Kurt Cobain

If we want to know what a word means, we should see how the word is used (Wittgenstein, 1953), and "personality" is certainly no exception. According to Hans Eysenck, "personality is the more or less stable and enduring organization of a person character, temperament, intellect and physique, which determines his unique adjustment to his or her environment". The study of personality focuses not only on psychological processes but on the relations among them. Understanding how these processes interact to form an integrated whole often involves more than understanding them separately. People function as organized wholes, and it is in the light of such organization that we must understand them (Magnusson, 1999). The scientific challenge is to sort through all the complexity and to identify meaningful relationships among psychological processes that can form the basis of a theory of personality that is scientifically sound and socially useful.

The main purpose of this essay is to explain the characteristics of a person and how these characteristics are organized in relation to one another, the determinants – genetic, environmental forces or social learning – that contribute to a person's development, and most important: the motivational aspects for the individual's behaviour. In order to reach this purpose, two of the main personality theories will be applied to give a psychological interpretation of Kurt Cobain, the lead singer, guitarist and primary songwriter of the grunge band Nirvana.

Kurt Donald Cobain was born on February 20, 1967 in Aberdeen, Washington, within a Christian family. When he was seven years old, his parents got divorced, fact that changed his personality dramatically, becoming defiant and withdrawn. After a year living with his mother and her new partner, Kurt, who witnessed the domestic violence inflicted upon her, decided to move with his father; but it wasn't until