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Psychoanalysis has established the fact that a character structure is part of each individual. This structure develops historically and crystallizes in adulthood as a way of relating to the world. The particular shape of the individual's character or personality does not only give a very unique configuration to the person, but it also colors the perceptions of the world and the responses to everyday life and events. Freud first hinted at a typology of personality when he discussed sublimation in the ‘Three Essays” (1905). According to Freud, libido was a determinant of personality as it was more or less successfully deployed through developmental stages. Libidinal displacements, although universal in their sequence, would leave their personal mark in the individual's personality according to whatever amount of indulgence or frustration took place at each sequential stage. Fixations or regressions onto a stage as well as successful passage to a next level, were determined by either optimal or defective stimulation, frustration, and/or trauma. Thus a deviation from the norm during the oral stage, for example, would have certain consequences which could not only determine oral character features, but could also lead to sublimations and/or psychopathology of an oral type.
Freud's thoughts on personality are interspersed in his numerous writings, and perhaps best known are his works on the obsessional character and obsessional neurosis (Freud, 1908), including the famous case of the Rat Man (1909). There is, however, a remarkable short paper published relatively late in Freud's career and entitled “Libidinal Types” (1931), where he struggles with the issue of the “infinite variety” of individualities and the “legitimate need” to group characterological types for scientific purposes. He postulates three libidinal types which seem remarkably similar to the Horneyan types used for the purposes of this paper. These are the “erotic,” for whom love is uppermost; the “obsessiona