Career Choice: The Dynamics of Self-Expression

Some people need to know even during their latency years what they want to do in life. Others make their vocational decisions in later decades. Most choices of a career, however, are made during the later part of adolescence or in young adulthood. The psychodynamic factors going into these choices have rarely been studied systematically, although the psychotherapeutic or psychoanalytic treatment of young adults would seem to present an ideal group of subjects for such an investigation. One may speculate whether the scarcity of such studies is owing to the observation often made that little relevant material seems to emerge during psychoanalytic treatments or dynamic psychotherapies or whether this phenomenon represents an artifact introduced by the selective nonattention of therapists. Or perhaps, these apparent omissions express our common preoccupation with pathology together with a concomitant neglect of the dynamic factors that codetermine the more or less nonpathological behaviors such as choices of career or mate. It seemed to us useful, therefore, to bring together some material from various sources in an attempt to throw more light on the dynamic factors in these decision-making processes. For psychoanalytic