First Day: ‘What Does Psychoanalysis have to Contribute to the Understanding of Character?’

Character is a term in the public domain. It is not primarily a psychoanalytical term. In everyday usage it has three major meanings (in addition to alluding to the personages of literature). We use it to tag an idiosyncratic person, as ins ‘the most unforgettable character I ever met’, to acknowledge another's trustworthiness, e.g. ‘He has a fine character’, and to refer to the enduring aspects of personality, e.g. ‘What do you expect? That's his character1.’

Psychoanalysts find the term indispensable and use it frequently, observing two of the usages of the term more or less as does the man in the street. We have appropriated it also to describe a form of psychopathology, as well as to describe styles of personality organization that are distinctive but not necessarily pathological. I would like to consider first the two usages that analysts share with the man in the street, and then the special diagnostic sense, which we will see amounts to an elaboration of one of the popular usages.

Let us first consider character as the enduring aspect of personality. When the man in the street uses the term about an acquaintance, it generally implies that he has learned that he can expect nothing better