Personality Change Within and Outside Psychoanalysis

To what extent is personality changed as an outcome of psychoanalytic therapy? Unfortunately, there is no convincing body of scientific evidence on this obviously crucial question. Our ignorance is partly a function of the relative paucity and naiveté of the available research on psychotherapy outcome, but also reflects the inherent difficulty in defining operationally the concepts “personality” and “change.” Things get even “curiouser” when we stand our question on its head and wonder to what extent personality can change without psychotherapeutic intervention. In this paper, we discuss these two related questions and explore some practical and theoretical obstacles to understanding when and how change occurs both within and outside psychotherapy. Fortunately, we can, for the most part, avoid the excruciatingly difficult problems of defining and classifying personality since these are to be covered in other presentations. Our conclusion, admittedly based on opinion rather than evidence, is that personality probably does change as an outcome of successful psychotherapy, but that personality change also occurs in a variety of other circumstances.

One might expect our question to be answered with some confidence and solid data. Although Freud first focused on symptom