Pathways for the Growth of Personality

Organism and environment are not two separate things, each having its own character in its own right, which come together with as little essential inter-relation as a sieve and a shovelful of pebbles thrown on to it. The fundamental characteristics of the organism are time-extended properties, which can be envisaged as a set of alternative pathways of development …

For most of the present century the model of personality development most favoured has regarded a personality as progressing through a series of stages on a single track towards maturity. The various forms of disturbed personality are then attributed to an arrest having occurred at one or another of these stages. Such an arrest, it is thought, can be either more or less complete. Most often, it is supposed, it is only a partial arrest. In such an instance development is conceived as continuing in an apparently fairly satisfactory way except that, in conditions of stress, it is liable to breakdown, in which case the personality is thought to regress to whatever stage in development the partial arrest, or fixation, is deemed to have occurred at. In some of the best-known theoretical systems based on that model, for example that of Abraham (1924), each form of personality disorder, of neurosis and of psychosis is held to be traceable to some measure of fixation that has occurred at one or another particular phase of development. It is from this model that application of the terms mature and immature to healthy and disturbed personalities, respectively, derives (see Chapter 14).

A theoretical system more recently outlined by Anna Freud (1965), although more elaborate than Abraham's, none the less retains the same essential features: individual differences are still measured in terms of the degrees of progression, fixation, and regression that are thought to be shown. The main new