Early Influences on Development and Disorders of Personality

Each person has patterns of motivation and reaction which underlie his thinking, feeling, and behavior. These fall into two general categories: the mature and the infantile. The mature pattern results from the variable success of an innate thrust of development toward the attainment of full realization of the individual's potential, toward being a productive, responsible spouse, parent, friend, and citizen. (Probably this is the law of nature so long suspected of underlying human moral law.) This outcome is fatefully influenced by the childhood pattern which can facilitate it and enhance it, or can impair and warp it. The characteristic childhood pattern for every individual, healthy or warped, depends decisively upon the habitual attitudes, feelings, and actions toward the child by those primarily responsible for him. The warped childhood pattern threatens the security, stimulates the fight-flight reaction, and is the core of all psychopathology. It may be called the 'pathodynamics' to distinguish it from the total psychodynamics, the interplay of all of the forces in the personality.

The above concepts and hypotheses should be examined rigorously and in greater detail to determine what requires further analysis, what needs more lucid clarification, what can be clinically established. Some additional clues may be gained from related behavioral sciences, by analogy from anthropology or by extrapolation from animal psychology.