Character, Dyadic Enactments, and the Need for Symbiosis

Freud's revision of psychoanalytic theory in the 1920's—the change from the topographic model enunciated in “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900) to the structural one of “The Ego and the Id” (1923) and from motivational postulates based entirely on instinctual drives to the acknowledgment of the power of the compulsion to repeat—led to a corresponding shift of the focus of psychoanalytic attention from exclusive study of processes in the psychological depths to that of adaptation in the broader sense (see Hartmann, 1939). The concept bridging these two realms of discourse was that of character (cf. Reich, 1930). In the psychoanalytic sense, this is understood as a set of structured mental dispositions that mediate the individual's transactions with his environment, most particularly with the world of his living objects. Hence, character pathology straddles the dividing line between the intrapsychic frame of reference and that of interpersonal relationships: it refers simultaneously to maladaptive psychological structures and to the overt behaviors produced by their activation.

It is frequently true that such a choice of alternative viewpoints leads to seemingly irreconcilable differences among groups of psychoanalysts (see Gedo, 1986). The unfortunate tendency to