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In this Book Review Section, we present four books that each in their own way address the topic of personality and identity. We begin from the vertex of personality and character assessment. Virginia Brabender reviews Jed A. Yalof and Anthony D. Bram’s (eds) Psychoanalytic Assessment Applications for Different Settings. Next, we look at psychobiography in a book by James William Anderson, Psychobiography: In Search of the Inner Life, reviewed by Pratyusha Tummala-Narra. From here we move on to the life and work of Otto Rank, in Robert Kramer’s Otto Rank and the Creation of Modern Psychotherapy, reviewed by Karen Melikian. We end the Book Review section with a psychoanalytic examination of identity in On Being One’s Self: Clinical Explorations in Identity from John Steiner’s Workshop, edited by Sharon Numa, and reviewed by Karen Proner.
Virginia Brabender begins her review by tying the importance and relevance of Yalof and Bram’s book to a predicament often faced by students of personality assessment after graduating from their respective programs. These students of psychological assessment may find themselves in venues of practice far removed from the traditional locations of mental health service where their skills and abilities were sought and utilized. The multi-method approaches they learned “to characterize the building blocks of personality (for example, defenses, impulse control and affect modulation, sense of self, interpersonal relations, and conscience) and then to ascertain how those building blocks interact with stressors to produce symptoms” often go undervalued in favor of other data related to symptoms. The impression left on the new graduate trained in personality assessment could be that their previous training was not relevant.
This book, writes Brabender, “demonstrates