CHAPTER V. Theories of Personality Development

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.

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.