Interpersonal Processes, Cognition, and the Analysis of Character

POST-FREUDIAN PSYCHOANALYSIS IMPLIED a shift from a psychology of drives in which meaning was seen as appetitive and motivations were defined as functions of drives, to a psychology of self and character in which meaning is experiential and both motives and intentionality derive from meaning and the organization of experience. In previous communications, I argued that this shift implicated cognition, conceived as experiential knowing, as the core phenomenon of mental life rather than as an epiphenomenal derivative of drives as envisioned by classical theory. This paper will outline my views on character and self as derivatives of cognition, which I view as the central organizing factor in mental life. In essence, the notion of character or personality represents the general theory of cognition and its organization, while the self can be seen as a special instance of cognitive organization involving the transformation of experience into subjective meaning.

The post-Freudian revisionists of the 1940's, in my opinion, were re-confronting an early problem in psychoanalytic theory development. While this problem had been addressed by others before them and is still being addressed by current revisionists, the post-Freudians offered a more radical solution than had many others who preceded them or who followed them. Freud, in his early work, saw meaning as being derived from actual experience. He interpreted the symptoms of his "hysterical" patients as symbolic expressions of repressed memories of actual childhood seductions. When, later, he discovered that these seductions existed only in the imaginations of these patients, he replaced his original theory with that of the libido theory. Sexual thoughts and wishes created the fantasies, and the sexual drive itself was implicated as the source of meaning of the symptoms.

By this shift, Freud was able to maintain his interest in the sexuality