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.
In this critique of the psychoanalytic conception of “character,” the author raises several objections about the traditional definitions; most notably, that they embody a certain circularity, insofar as character has been said to reflect an individual's “manner of …. defenses, object relationships and adaptive functioning in general,” all of which, in another breath, have been said to be affected by character. In the author's reformulation, character is redefined in action language, where the emphasis is on what the (whole) person does, on what conflicting wishes he is choosing among, etc. Schafer is at pains to avoid the classical but confusing reifications (ego, id …), in which the unitary person is pictured as somehow inhabited by —and tossed this way and that by — an unhappy assemblage of anthropomorphized “structures.” The author posits that it makes better sense to define a person via his “actions” (here, including wishes, feelings, as well as actual behavior); “character,” then, relates to someone's “typical way of constructing realistic and unrealistic situations and of viewing himself and others in these situations.” Character also includes typical ways of behaving emotionally, as well as the person's set of typical perspectives concerning past, present and future. Action language demands that we see the analysand's participation in all of his actions, including the action — so frequently encountered in the early phases of the analysis — of disclaiming certain ideas, feelings, or actions (e.g., “I did such and such because my feelings overcame me” — where “my feelings” are suddenly exteriorized as some foreign agency).
Although character has classically been seen as ego-syntonic, Schafer stresses that if this were true to an absolute degree, character would be impregnable