The Psychoanalytic Concept of Character1

Helen Tartakoff, who chaired the panel, introduced it with a historical review, specifying the contributions of Freud, and their expansion by Jones, Abraham and Ferenczi, and later Anna Freud and Hartmann. She indicated that the original psychoanalytic concept of the basic role of man's instinctual drives and their vicissitudes in character formation has not been outmoded nor substantially revised. However, we have widened our understanding and now appreciate the part played in personality by inborn characteristic ego factors, their early emergence along with instinctual factors, from an "undifferentiated matrix, " the development of both ego and id under the influence of early object relations and their subsequent development in terms of maturation, again under the impact of sociocultural influences. Tartakoff emphasized the fact that these more recent contributions have broadened the psychoanalytic concept of character far beyond its initial framework, i.e., the theory of the neuroses. In concluding her introductory remarks, she sounded the keynote of the panel by stating that the variety of case histories to which we have access in psychoanalytic laboratories now includes not only neuroses and neurotic characters but also any number of so-called normal personalities. As a result, she indicated that we now stand in a position to make substantial new contributions. She added that, in so far as we pursue this goal, we must become more aware than we were in the past of the manifold factors which enter into character formation. Complex genetic and dynamic factors are involved whether the conflicts be solved by reality-adjusted, well-integrated behavior leading to apparent normality or, in contrast, whether a neurotic compromise results, producing overt symptomatology or a character neurosis.

Samuel Atkin then read the first prepared presentation, "A Clinical Investigation into the Nature of Character, " emphasizing both at the beginning of his paper as well as a