Introduction1

My interest in the topic of character change in analysis was aroused when the widow of Dr. Samuel Atkin showed me his paper, “A Clinical Investigation into the Nature of Character,” presented as part of a

panel at the December 1957 meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, nearly 40 years ago (Panel, 1958). In this paper Dr. Atkin discussed three case histories emphasizing the patients' character and the degrees by which they had changed during analytic treatment (Panel, 1958). I had hoped to use this paper as a jumping off point for our panel, but unfortunately issues of confidentiality prevented me from following this route. However, the reading of Dr. Atkin's paper did emphasize for me the degree to which analysis has changed in the last four decades, so radically and yet so gradually that the dramatic nature of the differences might now escape us.

Since our Society has not had a program devoted to the concept of character for many years, it seemed timely to organize some meetings around it. Does a concept first introduced by Freud in 1908 still have explanatory value in our current clinical work, or is it best relegated to the psychoanalytic junkyard along with such terms as adhesiveness of libido and psychical inertia?

Edward Glover in his inimitable fashion and mordant style had this to say about character in his now little known work Freud or Jung? (1956): “Character, which is essentially the active organized cortex of the psyche, is a precipitate of compromises effected between the unconscious mind and its environmental influences” (p. 90). And, a bit later, he added: “one of the arts of character is to conceal character” (p. 91).

In these two sentences Glover identified the two aspects of character most valuable for the analyst interested in uncovering deeper layers of the personality and its