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Robbins, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a faculty member of the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, tells us that
I set as my task in writing this book to attempt a broad conception of personality, defined as the study of subjective identity, meaning, and value. In my judgement, psychoanalysis is the most comprehensive and powerful model of personality available to accomplish this; yet it is also profoundly limited by being a linear monistic theory based on a modal
Page 430personality. (p. 76)
By monism Robbins means “the conviction of the explanatory sufficiency of a single system” (p. 37), of a universally and eternally valid model; “modal” refers to a system's normative, standards-setting function; and “linear” refers to monistic systems' premise that personality can be represented “in terms of normality and deviance on a linear quantitative scale” (p. 48). Robbins wants to identify and correct those “basic postulates of psychoanalytic theory that are responsible for its monistic limitations with regard to the intracultural diversity of personality” (p. 171).
For the analyses entailed in his project Robbins identifies a number of basic dyads or polarities: monism and pluralism; single-tiered and hierarchically ordered theories; self-centrism and sociocentrism (referring to the degree to which the focus is, or is not, on clearly differentiated individuals); and, materialism (neurobiology, constitution) and environmentalism or culturalism. Much of the book is devoted to presenting literature reviews of a variety of subject areas relevant to personality theory (e.g., gender; the concept of “person;” the influence of the theoretician's own personality on his/her personality theory) and then investigating these topics, employing his polarities. Ultimately, he is led to a modular, multilevel, multidimensional, hierarchically organized model based loosely and metaphorical