You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Schilder bases his thesis—that the personablity is a unit—upon the principles and implications of psycho-analysis, although his formulation differs from the formulations accepted by analysts. Proceeding from the accepted concept of the unbroken chain of psychic causation he claims also that an inner connection of meaning and intent constitutes the real essence of personality and denies the existence of a mechanical connection between experiences that is termed association, thus allying himself with the Wuerzburg school. Freud's formulation of the Ego, with its synthetic function, leads up to this concept that the inner unity of all the psychic processes of an individual constitutes the total personality. Ego, Super-ego and Id are different sides of this unit, different qualities of which appear under different conditions. Character, distinguished from total personality, is a temporary stabilization of various tendencies and qualities at certain developmental levels, and does not represent the deeper inner unity—or personality—which is plastic. A practical question of character study is how far the individual is bound to its rigid forms and how far it is able to go back to the deeper sources of personality which make possible a real adaptation to reality.