THEORIES OF PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT
It will be remembered that Freud’s search for signs of the traumatic
situation led him to uncover the contemporaneous functioning of all
sorts of unconscious motivations in both the diseased and the healthy
personality. The quest led him farther. Freud felt impelled to set
up a schematic representation of the typical genetic development of
the human personality. This grew out of the comparative study of very
thoroughly analyzed cases and was rooted in empirical observation.
Freud has always kept close to his data; and no matter how far his
imagination soared, actual clinical experience was the starting-place
and the landing-field for the flight.
The energy of a developed personality can be treated as dispersed in
three directions: in the affirmative expression of socialized impulses,
in unsocialized impulses, and in the maintenance of resistance charges
against unsocialized impulses. The original forms of energy expression
which are available to the infant are in many ways incompatible with
the demands of human intercourse. The infant must surrender many
primitive forms of gratification, if he is to be loved, and to avoid
discomfort and pain. He must build up a self which represents the
demands of society. The surrounding adults coerce and wheedle him
into taking their commands for his own laws. The conscience is the
introjected environment which imposes limitations upon the antisocial
impulses. As the infant and child grows, he avoids conflicts with the
environment by removing the locus of the conflict within himself, and
plays nurse, mother, and father to himself. He learns to control his
own excretions and to chasten his own murderous rages. He achieves
individuality of emphasis by accepting the socialization of his major
impulses.
But this incorporation of the requirements of the social order into
the personality does not proceed smoothly, nor does it abolish the
primitive psychological structures which have been developed and
apparently discarded at each step of the way toward adulthood. Much
of the energy of the personality is spent in blocking the entry of
the unadjusted impulses of the self into consciousness and into
overt expression. Careful scrutiny of individual behavior over a
twenty-four-hour period strikingly shows the extent to which the
personality is controlled by very elementary psychological structures.
Moments of fatigue, moments of deprivation, moments of irresponsible
reverie, all betray the presence of tendencies which are unassimilated
to the world of adult reality.
Freud began to build up his conception of personality development
by the gradual universalization of phenomena which he encountered
in actual clinical work, and which he first described in relatively
modest and restricted terms. He began his original psychological
contributions by stressing the rôle of sexuality in the etiology of
certain neuroses. He found that all sorts of pathological conditions
and developmental abnormalities were apparently due to some shortcoming
in sexual integration. This emphasis upon sexual adjustment as a
necessary prerequisite of healthy adulthood met with so much opposition
that Freud’s energies were taken up with defending and elaborating his
position. Now the sexual function is essentially a species function
and stresses the biological uniformities of man at the expense of
individuality. A topic like “personality development” requires a
comprehensive theory of individuality, and this Freud did not develop
until the split with Adler, who insisted upon the rôle of a drive
toward individualization and who denied that the much neglected “ego
instincts” of Freud were enough to support a comprehensive theory.
The story of Freud’s neurosis-sexuality-personality theories begins
with his earliest independent psychological contributions. Many
clinicians before Freud had been abundantly impressed by the frequency
with which sexual troubles seemed to beget “nervous” troubles. In
his hypnotic work, Freud was especially struck by the frequency with
which specifically sexual episodes were involved in the pathogenic
experiences. Freud now proceeded to generalize about the sexual element
in neurosis, and announced that neurosis was a function of deviated
sexual life.
Freud armed in defense of his generalization with two new weapons. The
first was his experience in letting his patients talk it out and in
treating most of their productions as symbolic of something else. He
acquired facility in interpreting what other people took literally as
being a disguised representation of something else. So, when Freud was
confronted with cases which were not manifestly sexual, he felt able to
treat the non-sexual elements as symbolic representations of sexuality
and to justify himself by claiming that his more intensive research
procedure supplied him with the sustaining facts. Needless to say,
those who had not themselves experienced the shift in standpoint which
Freud had achieved were alienated by his seeming arbitrariness.
Freud’s second reliance was on an inclusive theory of sexuality.
Undaunted by the ridicule heaped upon his sexual theory of the
neurosis, he carried the war into enemy territory by extending the
whole concept of sexuality backward from puberty through the life of
the growing child to infancy.
At first glance this might appear to be a cheap, dialectical trick to
confound his critics by telling them that “sex” meant all the things
they had called by other names. Freud’s _Three Contributions to Sexual
Theory_ was saved from being a rhetorical quibble by the virtuosity of
his imagination and by the apparent definiteness of the connections
which he traced between the various features of childhood development
and the patterns of healthy and perverse adult sexuality. Careful
analysis of biologically efficacious intercourse shows that it is a
complex integration of many acts. It involves a partner of the opposite
sex. Its essential feature is an increasing tension until the point of
explosive release, followed by perfect relaxation. The male must be
sadistic enough to run the risk of hurting the female by injecting the
penis in the vagina. The participants must be willing to indulge in
all sorts of preliminary play for the sake of heightening the critical
tension, involving tongue, lips, nipples, and all the erogenous zones
of the body.
Comparing the details of this completed pattern of the unambiguously
sexual act with the earlier activities of the infant and child, Freud
drew a host of analogies. Children indulge in play in sexual postures,
exhibit their sexual parts to one another, and take pleasure in sexual
peeping; but Freud carried his analysis of the sexuality of children
much farther. Child specialists had often remarked that the nursing
male child frequently exhibits the phenomenon of an erect penis and a
desire to suckle for some time after hunger contractions cease. The
general pattern of the sequence hunger-nursing-peaceful relaxation
follows the characteristic curve of the sexual act. Freud suggested
that inspection of the nursing pattern reveals that the pleasure
derived by the child goes far beyond immediate biological necessities.
This excess gratification Freud treats as a primitive outcropping of
the sexual instinct, which need not be supposed to appear suddenly
with the maturation of the glandular apparatus, but may be thought of
as growing like the usual biological process by integrating partial
components into one complex synthesis.
Sexual differentiation arises gradually, for at first distinctions of
sex are not recognized by the child. The human animal is bisexual,
a concept which Freud took over with some reservations from Wilhelm
Fliess. Distinctions are achieved within the world of family
experience. The child is attracted sexually toward the parent of
the opposite sex but is too weak to compete for the loved object.
Thus the father, who is too mighty to be killed and put out of the
way, is copied by the son, who seeks to absorb his power into his
own personality. The repression of the father-hostility, mother-love
sentiments produces the Oedipus complex. The child achieves a
socialized self by playing the rôle of the father in relation to his
own impulses. The “latency period” arises from four to six, according
to Freud, when the early sexual struggle against the father is given
up. The fear of the father (the “castration complex”) leads to the
passing of the Oedipus phase of growth.
Now Freud specified a variety of difficulties which arise whenever
there is failure to achieve successful integration of the partial
components of the sexual instinct. He connected homosexuality,
psychological frigidity and impotence, exhibitionism, sadism,
masochism, voyeurism, and a variety of other abnormalities with
definite failures in integration. Sometimes the individual becomes
obsessed by ideas which have a disguised sexual meaning, and sometimes
he indulges in physical symptoms which possess a similar unconscious
significance. The first is an obsessional neurosis, and the second is
hysteria.
The stress which Freud laid upon the sexuality of the child, and upon
socialization by intimidation, broke with revolutionary violence in a
culture which swaddled its infants in sentimentality. The child of the
poets was like this:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory we do come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
--William Wordsworth
The child of the Freudians was like this:
The child, at one time or another in its life, is, in a sense,
auto-erotic, narcissistic, exhibitionistic, inclined to play the
rôle of “Jack the Peeper,” incestuous, patricidal, or matricidal,
homosexual, fetichistic, masochistic and sadistic [G. V. Hamilton,
_An Introduction to Objective Psychopathology_, p. 301].
As early as 1898 Freud had begun to elaborate the idea that sexuality
begins at birth. But as late as 1900, when the _Interpretation of
Dreams_ appeared, he wrote in a footnote that “childhood knows
nothing, as yet, of sexual desire.” With the elaboration of his sexual
theory, Freud became less preoccupied in defending himself against his
psychiatric colleagues than in perfecting defenses against his friends.
Freud began to build up a circle in 1903. Of the original group,
Alfred Adler and Wilhelm Stekel were the two who were destined to
achieve the most subsequent attention. By 1906 Ferenczi of Budapest and
the Zürich contingent--the eminent Bleuler and his assistants--became
cordial and interested. In 1908 a conference was held at Salzburg, and
in 1909 G. Stanley Hall invited Freud to lecture at Clark University.
In 1910 an international society was organized at Nuremberg, and the
institutionalization of the psychoanalytic trend was well launched.
The first cleavage came about when Freud and Adler finally broke in
1911. In and out of season Adler stressed the “masculine protest,” the
drive of the human being to master every situation in which he finds
himself. The individual specializes in overcoming his short stature,
his enuresis, his ugliness, and his other defects; his principal drive
is to differentiate himself rather than to perform his species function.
Adler represented several other currents of dissent from Freud. Freud
had felt compelled to stress the antisocial drives of human nature,
and Adler held a less Hobbesian view. The “social-feeling” component
of human nature was accorded a place in the Adlerian system; and when
the “socially useful” norms of individual adjustment were violated by
the individual, “inferiority feelings” ensued. Therapy consisted in
bringing this interpretation home to the maladapted person, leading him
to relinquish his socially useless means of mastery and to allow his
“social feelings” to express themselves more freely. Adler’s therapy
showed that he represented a pedagogical-ethical reaction against
Freud’s denial of the training function of the scientific analyst.
Freud said repeatedly that the business of the analyst is to expose
the patient to himself, and to leave it to the patient to work out
his particular modes of adaptation to reality. Adler wants to give the
patient a general scheme of thinking and to let him have some practice
in indulging the “social feelings” of his nature.
Adler likewise represented a protest against the complexities of
Freud’s style of thought. The distinction can be drawn best, perhaps,
by saying that Freud proceeded from symptoms to meanings, and from
meanings to other meanings, and from other meanings to conditions.
The analysis consists in uncovering lifelong chains of meaning
attached to particular objects. Janet never achieved this process,
and Adler short-circuited it. Adler begins with the symptom and
proceeds as directly as possible to the condition. His books abound in
succinct characterizations of cases, and “symbolic” material is at a
minimum. Employing his orienting principle, he directs attention to a
sympathetic reconstruction of the social relationships of the patient
and selects those problems which the individual has tried to master
by antisocial or personally crippling devices. The “common-sense”
simplicity of Adler’s observations commends his doctrines in circles
which are repelled by the alien terminology and the elaborate
interpretative machinery of Freud.
Under the perpetual hammering of Adler, Freud undertook to expand upon
his sketchy theory of the ego. At first Freud was inclined to say
that Adler had nothing to add because he had himself spoken of the
ego instincts as well as the sexual instincts. Such a solution was
hardly satisfying, and the self did not find a suitable resting-place
in Freud’s theoretical system until the rôle of narcissism (love of
the self) was taken up and set forth at length. This “saved” the
sexual theory, and it made the analysis of ego processes a problem of
major interest to psychoanalysis. Stress was laid upon the fact that
when the individual’s libido flows outward toward objects, and when
obstacles or deprivations are imposed upon this outward reaching, the
libido turns back upon the self. This excessive libidinization of the
self rendered subsequent adjustment to reality very difficult, and
many personality deformations and formations are traceable to this
developmental warp.
The break between Freud and Jung in 1913 had less immediate importance
for personality theory than the previous schism. Like Adler, Jung
undertook to subordinate the rôle of sexuality; but Jung accomplished
his purpose, less by postulating concurrent ego-instincts than by
invoking an inclusive energy concept which would embrace sexuality,
ego-drives, and many other accessory manifestations. Jung, paralleling
Adler again, came to the rescue of human nature, postulating a moral
trend in the unconscious. And Jung, like Adler, frankly advises and
trains his patients. Jung’s two distinctive lines of innovation were
concerned with dream interpretations and ethnological applications.
Jung expanded dream interpretations for the sake of laying bare the
“racial unconscious.” Using saga material and dream material, Jung
undertook to deflate the claims of sexuality and to demonstrate the
limited applicability of the Oedipus idea.
Freud was assailed at a vital spot and rallied to defend himself in
_Totem and Taboo_. He scored a point over Jung, who had relied on saga
material, by drawing heavily on the ethnological summaries of Frazer in
the _Golden Bough_ to justify the universality of the Oedipus complex.
This was Freud’s first contribution to systematic social theory, and
will come up for consideration in that connection. From the standpoint
of personality theory, perhaps the most valuable passages are those
which describe the infant’s overvaluation of thought--the “omnipotence
of thought,” as it was phrased by a patient.
Some years later Jung, now on his own for some time, devised his
classification of personality types and vastly increased popular and
technical interest in the subject. This in turn has stimulated the
group around Freud to develop a formal psychoanalytic characterology.
In this task they were assisted by some early communications of Freud,
wherein he took note of some of the character types met with in his
practice. This literature will be referred to in connection with the
case histories which are to be discussed immediately.
The other schisms between Freud and his pupils (involving Stekel and
Rank) have been less significant for personality theory thus far,
although Rank’s sociological interests may germinate now that he is
away from the immediate presence of the master.
Freud, who had obstinately clung to the phraseology of sex, rejecting
every proposal for an overmastering set of terms which would carry less
restricted connotations, executed a brilliant maneuver in 1926 and
proposed to regard human activity as manifestations of two principles,
the life and the death instincts. Life consists in accumulation and the
release of tension; and, generalizing this phenomenon, we have the life
and death drives.[29]
Suppose we put aside further exposition of the analytical personality
theories, and in the light of these conceptions set up a general
formula which describes the developmental history of the political man.
The most general formula would employ three terms. The first component,
_p_, stands for the private motives of the individual as they are
nurtured and organized in relation to the family constellation and the
early self. We shall have occasion to see that primitive psychological
structures continue to function within the personality long after the
epochs of infancy and childhood have been chronologically left behind.
The prominence of hate in politics suggests that we may find that the
most important private motive is a repressed and powerful hatred of
authority, a hatred which has come to partial expression and repression
in relation to the father, at least in patrilineal society, where the
male combines the function of biological progenitor and sociological
father.
The second term, _d_, in such a formula describes the displacement of
private motives from family objects to public objects. The repressed
father-hatred may be turned against kings or capitalists, which
are social objects playing a rôle before and within the community.
Harmonious relations with the father of the family may actually depend
upon the successful deflection of hatred from private to public objects.
The third symbol, _r_, signifies the rationalization of the
displacement in terms of public interests. The merciless exploitation
of the toolless proletariat by the capitalists may be the rational
justification of the attitude taken up by the individual toward
capitalism.
The most general formula which expresses the developmental facts about
the fully developed political man reads thus:
_p_ } _d_ } _r_ = _P_,
where _p_ equals private motives; _d_ equals displacement
onto a public object; _r_ equals rationalization in terms of public
interest; _P_ equals the political man; and } equals transformed into.
The _p_ is shared by the political man with every human being.
Differentiation rises first in the displacement of affects on to public
objects, and in the molding of the life in such a way as to give an
opportunity for the expression of these affects. The non-political
man may feel himself aggrieved against a brother and against every
fellow-worker with whom he comes in contact. His mind may be taken
up with personal fantasies of love or hate for specific people, and
his ideological world (his attitudes toward the state, the church,
the destiny of man) may be very poorly elaborated. He is a fly in the
meshes of his immediate environment, and his struggles are fought in
terms of the world of face-to-face reality. When such a man displaces
his affects upon a person who happens to be a public object, this does
not make him a political man. Impulsively killing a king who happens
to insult one’s sister does not make a politician of the regicide;
there must be a secondary elaboration of the displacement in terms of
general interest. It is the rationalization which finally transmutes
the operation from the plane of private to the plane of public acts.
Indeed, the private motives may be entirely lost from the consciousness
of the political man, and he may succeed in achieving a high degree of
objective validation for his point of view. In the “ideal” case this
has gone so far that the private motives which led to the original
commitment are of feeble current importance.
Upon what does the displacement and the rationalization depend? No
doubt the general answer is that the selection of certain public
objects depends upon the “historical” accident of the patterns offered
by the personal environment of the individual at critical phases
of growth. It is safe to predict that more politicians rise from
families with political traditions than without them. But this very
broad conclusion requires no technique of intensive investigation of
individual instances to support it. If the psychopathological approach
to the individual is worth the trouble, it must disclose a variety of
relatively novel circumstances which dispose individuals to adopt,
reject, or modify the patterns of act and phrase which are offered in
the environment. Provisionally, we may assume that the puberty phase of
biological growth, which coincides with increasing social demands, may
be the period in which the attitudes toward the invisible environment
most rapidly crystallize.
The details may be more hopefully dealt with if somewhat homogeneous
groups of politicians are investigated for the purpose of bringing out
significant differences in their developmental history. The agitators
are the first to whom special attention will be paid.