Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change

This is an important point, because a desire to remain “authentic” is one reason people may balk at the idea of changing themselves—either through personality change or otherwise. That began to change with Enlightenment scholars like Gottfried Leibniz, who in the early 1700s speculated that people have subliminal thoughts—he called them petites perceptions—that motivate their behavior. He says his desire to change was prompted by a narcissistic urge to overcome psychopathy, one of the more difficult personality patterns to escape. This was what personality change looked like, in the end: fits and starts, with the goal being for the starts to outnumber the fits.