You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The concept of character is becoming more and more central in psychoanalytic theory. This is due in part to the increased interest in the processes, structure and function of the ego. Character, a term pertaining to the habitual modes of operation of the ego, has shared the increased theoretical emphasis directed toward the ego. A second, more direct, reason for the interest in character is the observation that the complaints of patients seeking psychotherapy in the past few decades seem to differ from the descriptions in the psychoanalytic literature of twenty-five and fifty years ago. Fenichel5 has described this change as follows:
In the classical neuroses an integrated personality was suddenly disturbed by inadequate actions or impulses. In modern neuroses, however, it is not a question of dealing with a hitherto uniform personality that is merely disturbed by some immediate event but, rather, with one that is patently torn or malformed, or, at any rate, so involved in the illness that there is no borderline between “personality” and “symptom.” Instead of clearcut neurotics, more and more persons with less defined disorders are seen…. The formula, “in a neurosis that which has been warded off breaks through in an ego-alien form” is no longer valid, since the form often is not ego alien, the elaboration of the defense sometimes being more manifest than its failure.
A great many of our patients come to us with problems in living—discontent in marriage or on the job, a feeling of dissatisfaction with