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.
It is always a great relief to be forced to undertake a task that one has been ingeniously evading for years. The present one, of clarifying my thoughts about the origins of personality structures is highly personal. However, in committing these to print there is also the hope that the ideas have not become so eccentric or strayed so far from their anchorage in the tradition in which one grew, as to be of little or no interest to others. My own tradition has been medicine, child psychiatry, American and British psycho-analysis, and finally that particular line of development associated with Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion. When one's teachers have gone there is only their internalised representation to keep one within the bounds of a living tradition, but narcissism being as subtly invasive as it is, one can never be quite sure.
The problem in hand is at the phenomenological level and is, I believe, of great clinical importance. If it is stated in terms we know best, the consulting room, it would go something like this: how is one to distinguish those items of behaviour which are meaningful manifestations of the thinking personality from those which are instinctual or learned social adaptive manoeuvres? Is that too vague and general? Let me try again: how is one to distinguish phenomena in our patients and ourselves which are the consequences of emotional experiences which have been subjected to symbol formation, thought, judgment, decision, and possibly transformation into language, from others which are habitual, automatic, unintentional? Of course this is no clearer but it does expand the vocabulary and allow for a wider investigation of the meaning I am pursuing. For convenience I arrange them in two families, thus:
thinking, personality, emotional experience, symbol formation, judgment, decision, transformation, language;
behaviour, instinct, learned social response, habit, automatic response, unintentional behaviour.
Let us leave the problem aside for the time bein