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Mardi Horowitz, known for his studies of personality growth or deformation, is viewing character through the lens of identity formation, be it ideally coherent and mature or impaired if traumatically impacted.
Thus he is providing the practicing clinician with a guide to clinical therapeutic problems and ways to approach them therapeutically. Three chapters on the psychological learning of self-coherence survey the internal developmental process and the central formative social experiences with the major family. They are followed by a chapter on social learning and identity formation, with a focus on the wider social-cultural surroundings. A chapter on biological schematization introduces us to brain networking and connectivity. A survey of varying personality functioning from a psychotherapeutic standpoint is followed by chapters on a sense of identity and self-esteem and identity change during mourning and loss.
Chapter 3 lists questions the author wishes to address. Why do people retain lapses of accurate knowledge about themselves? Why are such views often compartmentalized? Why do people fail to develop a more continuous harmonizing self-concept? Why do some disturbed persons have frequent irrational projections or introjections? How can a person avoid entering into an intense negative self-state?
A solid, well-defined identity is described as a product of complex combinations of social reflections, conscious emotional and conceptual thinking, and unconscious processes that activate various, unconsciously stored sets of information. Biological disposition and social contacts will shape meanings that are learned over the course of a lifetime. Freud and Bion, among others, emphasized how childhood trauma and loss may impair identity formation and secure attachments.
The author provides us with what he calls a “modern theory” to explain identity disturbances. His term, “person schema,” refers to an enduring and slowly changing psychological structure of the charact