The Time Unity of Personality

This concept, an extension of Karen Horney theory, utilizes principles similar to the self-correcting processes occurring spontaneously between people. It is suggested that its application might shorten psychotherapy, at least with some types of patients.

In the past, though change toward health at times was attributed to other factors,1, 2 psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy remained mostly insight-oriented. In Freudian formulation, a change is produced when the previously repressed infantile personality becomes accessible by being experienced in terms of emotions based on secondary thinking.3 Being thus confronted with reality, this archaic personality—which so far resisted change in the timeless unconscious—is forced to give up the dominance which it exerted until now via the repetition compulsion.

Freud's conceptualization of neurotic pathology can thus be seen as a fixation of the personality in the time level of the past. Influential as this formula was, in view of the importance of the multiplier effect of pathology that begins during the formative years of life, dissatisfaction with its limitations was expressed as early as 1929. Sterba,4 by researching the therapeutic relationship taking place in the present, hereby extended the inquiry into the dynamics of interpersonal relationships in that time level. Sterba's “reasonable ego” was followed by Zetzel's “therapeutic alliance,”5 Greenson's “working alliance,”6 and Stone's “mature transference.”7 The non-Freudians conceptualized the arising of pathology in the time level of the present. A few of the many examples among these contributions include H. S. Sullivan's theory of interpersonal relations8, 9 and Horney's early work.10

The only complete conceptualization of another reparative effort, however,