Leary Circumplex

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The Leary Circumplex or Leary Circle, now more generally known as the Interpersonal Circumplex, is defined, by Larsen and Buss in Personality Psychology: Domains of Knowledge about Human Nature^[1], as "a two-dimensional representation of personality organized around two major axis".

During the twentieth century, there were a number of efforts by personality psychologists to create comprehensive taxonomies to describe the most important and fundamental traits of human nature. Developed in 1957 by Timothy Leary, who would later become famous for his controversial LSD experiments at Harvard, the circumplex is a circular continuum of personality formed from the intersection of two base axis: Power and Love. The opposing sides of the power axis are dominance and submission, while the opposing sides of the love axis are love and hate.

Leary argued that all other dimensions of personality can be viewed as a blending of these two axis. For example, a person who is stubborn and inflexible in their personal relationships might graph her personality somewhere on the arc between dominance and love. However, a person who exhibits passive aggressive tendencies might find herself best described on the arc between submission and hate. The main idea of the Leary Circumplex is that each and every human trait can be mapped as a vector coordinate within this circle.

Furthermore, the Leary Circumplex also represents a kind of bull's eye of healthy psychological adjustment. Theoretically speaking, the most well adjusted person of the planet could have their personality mapped at the exact center of the circumplex, right at the intersection of the two axis, while individuals exhibiting extremes in personality would be located on the circumference of the circle.

The Leary Circumplex offers three major benefits as a taxonomy. It offers a map of interpersonal traits within a geometric circle. It allows for comparison of different traits within the system. It provides a scale of healthy and unhealthy expressions of each trait.