Philosophical Assumptions Underlying Theories of Personality

Recently, I heard a paper which attempted to demonstrate that narcissistic investment is a defense against separation anxiety. The avowed purpose of doing so was to integrate Freudian theory with that of object relations. Before commenting further, let us examine the philosophical assumptions underlying these two theories.

For years philosophers have speculated as to the nature of the self. Traditional philosophy limits the self essentially to a thinking, knowing, reflective self. It is a self disassociated from a person acting with other people. It is regarded as pure subject for whom the world is object. It is an egocentric self, withdrawn from participation with others in the life of the world.

John Macmurray, a modern philosopher, disagrees sharply with these traditional notions of the self. In his Gifford lectures, he expounds his concept of the self as agent, as acting with other people. Knowledge, and the knowing self, come to be only through activities which have practical, not theoretical objectives. Furthermore, the self is not an isolated individual, but a person; and for Macmurray personal existence is constituted by the relations of persons, by mutuality. Psychology, if it is to establish itself, must, according to Macmurray, “think of itself as a science of human behavior,” not as a science of mind, consciousness, or the subjective. “Human behavior” he says, “is comprehensible only in terms of a dynamic social reference; the isolated purely individual self is a fiction.” He rejects the traditional dichotomy between subjective and objective. He also rejects the traditional individualism of philosophy when he thinks not in terms of I alone but in terms of “you and I”.

Underlying Freudian theory are the traditional philosophical assumptions of the self as knower, and as pure individual. On the other hand, object relation theories of Fairbairn and Sullivan, developed quite independently of one another, are based on