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This book is a labor of love. It also connotes a love of labor in that it contains 496 references, copiously cited through the 15 chapters of the book. Culled from many different sources, the majority of which are not psychoanalytic, they serve the purposes of the author in refuting assumptions or presumptions about a definitive or final statement of the concept of “personality,” while leading to an appeal for a less dogmatic but more compendious approach to “conceiving of personality,” the very heuristic title of the book, as it develops from the author's arguments.
Let me state at the outset that by and large, I like the spirit and the mood of this book. Robbins refers to it as a “personal odyssey.” And well he might. There is little that is stale or sterile in his representations. Any propositions that are taken to task become subject to argument because of unwarranted claims to completeness and universality rather than for their intent or interest. What is voiced is not petty annoyance but the right to skepticism in the light of experience. Classic and evolutionary psychoanalytic theory has long held to dealing with pronouncements that are necessary and sufficient. The candid curiosity displayed throughout the book suggests an open-ended contemplation of the necessity for a concept of personality as an essence to be sought, identified, and captured, a compelling search for some though a will-o'-the-wisp for others. In that regard, I sensed an implicit arguing of the author with his own task. On the other hand, his erudite examination of the psychoanalytic contribution to concepts of personality leaves no doubt as to the limits of its sufficiency. In an attempt to seek a remedy or to offer an alternative, Robbins embarks on a painstaking critical review of ideologized postulates and of unacknowledged deficiencies.
Beginning with “the conundrum of whether personality can conceive of itself,” he mentions the “fiction” that personality theorists can be neutral observe