How Character Is Formed

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

How is character formed? Depth psychoanalytic psychology

The formation of character, in addition to genetic prerequisites, has the prerequisites for anamnesis (features of individual development). What factors influence character formation?

1. Fixations at different stages of development, psychotrauma (established from a diagnostic interview and in the course of therapy).

2. Analysis of the mechanisms of psychological defense (how the individual copes with anxiety). 3. Education.

Relationships with significant people. Correct upbringing, based on the classical theory of Freud's drives, consists in balancing the parent between satisfying the child's needs, to create an atmosphere of safety and pleasure, and acceptable frustration, so that the child learns in doses to replace the pleasure principle “I want everything at once” with the reality principle “satisfaction of some desires problematic and some are worth the wait."

Freud considered the omission of parents either in excessive satisfaction, which deprived the child of the opportunity to develop, or in excessive restrictions, which led to the child's premature collision with a reality that he was not yet ready to withstand.

For example, if an adult has a depressed personality, then he or she was either neglected or overly indulged at about one and a half years of age (oral phase). In the case of obsessive-compulsive symptoms, it was considered that the problem arose between one and a half and three years (anal phase). If, at the age of three to five, the child was rejected or seduced by a parent, then hysterical personality traits are formed.

Later, Eric Erikson expanded the stages of formation of Freud's psychosexual development and explained the formed character traits in terms of the unfinished task of age.

For example, he described the oral phase as the stage of complete dependence, during which basic trust is formed. If basic trust has not been formed sufficiently, then anxiety and weak resistance to stress will be present in the character. The anal phase was viewed as a phase of achieving autonomy and, as a consequence of improper upbringing, the formation of shyness and indecision. The Oedipus phase is seen as the formation of efficiency in society. Formation of such character traits as a sense of guilt with initiative and the desire to be recognized and effective. As well as successful gender-role identification.

Karen Horney, Melanie Klein and others have shown the influence of the inner circle on the formation of character. More precisely, the influence of how the relationship developed between the baby and his mother, then between father and mother, father and child.

For example, how the child was weaned, how he was potty trained, whether he was seduced or rejected during the oedipal phase is considered to be an important factor in influencing character formation. How these features are reflected in the structure of the psyche.

Id is the term Freud used to refer to a part of the psyche containing primitive desires, impulses, irrational aspirations, fear + desire combinations and fantasies. She only seeks immediate gratification and is completely selfish. Functions on the principle of pleasure. She is illogical, has no idea about time, morality, restrictions, as well as the fact that opposites cannot coexist. Freud called this primitive level of knowledge, which manifests itself in the language of dreams, jokes and hallucinations, the primary process of thinking.

The ego is a set of functions that allow one to adapt to the demands of life, finding ways to control the aspirations of the id. The ego develops continuously throughout life. The ego functions according to the reality principle and is a secondary thought process. It mediates between the demands of the id and the constraints of reality and ethics. It has both conscious and unconscious aspects.

Conscious is what most people refer to as their own self or I

The unconscious aspect includes the processes of psychological defenses: repression, substitution, rationalization, sublimation, etc. Everyone develops defensive ego reactions that could be adaptive in childhood, but turn out to be maladaptive outside family relationships, in adulthood, in other situations. The conscious part of the ego is observing, rationalizing, explaining, protecting. This so-called observing ego is able to comment on an emotional state and it is with it that a therapeutic alliance is formed in psychotherapy.

The therapist and patient explore the unconscious part of the ego - defense mechanisms and emotional responses. In therapy, ego power develops, which is reflected in the personality's ability to perceive reality, even when it is extremely unpleasant, without resorting to immature primitive non-adaptive defenses: denial, projections, splitting, idealization, depreciation. The patient learns to consciously use mature psychological defenses (repression, substitution, rationalization and sublimation). In other words, a person who responds to any stress in a way that is familiar to him, say, a projection, is not so psychologically safe, in comparison with a person who consciously uses various psychological defenses.

Almighty Control Freud introduced the concept of superego, which observes what is happening mainly from the point of view of morality. The superego approves of us when we do our best and criticizes when we are below our standards. Freud believed that the superego is formed during the Oedipal period through identification with parental values, as well as in the infant's primitive ideas about what is good and what is bad. The superego also has a conscious and an unconscious part.

The conscious superego can judge its own act as bad or good

The unconscious superego characterizes the entire personality as good or bad when evaluating a particular act. So, the main function of the ego is to protect against anxiety arising from the powerful instinctual desires of the id, causing anxiety manifestations of reality, as well as the feeling of guilt emanating from the demands of the superego. How is intrapsychic tension manifested in external reality? Outwardly, internal tension manifests itself in the form of mental defenses, depending on the level of personality development - mature or primitive.

It should be noted that the use of both primitive and mature defense mechanisms are not signs of psychopathology.

Freud considered psychopathology as a state when defense mechanisms do not work, when anxiety does not decrease, despite the usual means of dealing with it, when behavior masking anxiety is self-destructive.

And if there is no formed conscious part of the ego?

In the practice of psychoanalysis, analysts were faced with the fact that not all patients have an observing ego, i.e. part of the conscious rational ego. It manifests itself in the course of therapy as a productive reaction of the patient to the interpretation of the psychotherapist. But not all patients are able to perceive and accept interpretations and interventions of a psychotherapist. At least at the beginning of therapy.

Melanie Klein's writings, in which she described working with children, help us in working with patients whom Freud once described as too disturbed to work in a psychoanalytic manner. Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, Gary Sullivan and others talked about the greater importance of such factors as attention, care, warmth, tenderness, affection towards the baby in the formation of character in comparison with the simple desire to satisfy instincts.

In the formation of the ego, the emotional component of the relationship is important. In therapy, this component is developed when working with transference and countertransference. Transference and countertransference analyzes allow the therapist to experience the patient's interpersonal relationships.

The patient most often does not realize that his relationship can be influenced by states of mental fusion with another personality in himself, which was introjected by him at a very young age. In other words, the therapist, using and analyzing his feelings and experiences during the session, can determine the patient's feelings in relation to the significant person (mother, father, brother, sister, grandmother, etc.) or the feelings of the significant person in relation to the patient … When, using interventions, the therapist is able to convey this information to the patient, it becomes possible for the patient to separate, within his psyche, his own self from other intrapsychic objects introjected in childhood. Thus, there is a formation of the observing ego and its isolation from the unconscious part.

Reasons for the absence of the conscious part of the ego

The child's transition from a symbiotic attitude (infancy) to a more complex Oedipal phase goes through the struggle "I versus you." The Oedipus phase is viewed by modern psychoanalysts not only as psychosexual, but also as a transition from childish egocentrism to understanding the fact that he exists, but there are still other people who are in a relationship with each other. And what happens between them may have nothing to do with the child himself. With him I am. Since that time, we already consider it as a structure that has different states. And in connection with the state of the ego, the patient can demonstrate this or that position, behavior, character, depending on the position of what significant person he is now in. In the role of what kind of internal object (introject). Treatment is more successful if it is possible to find out which significant adult from the patient's childhood is activated at the moment.

The fact that the patient does not separate his own self from internal objects can manifest itself in his outwardly contradictory behavior. The therapist helps, through the analysis of his feelings and emotions, to highlight the patient's introjects that influenced the child and continue to live in the adult personality, and from which the patient is not sufficiently separated.

Analytical therapy assumes that every time we come into contact, in addition to the verbal level, we realize the contact that was in infancy between the infant and his mother.

Reasons for the absence of the conscious part of the ego

We return to the phenomenon in therapy, when there are no introjects in the intrapsychic space, there is emptiness inside. Such people need someone who will always be there, whose presence makes it possible to feel oneself. Like in a mirror. As if he is a very small child. Heinz Kohut formulated a theory of his own self and, among other processes, singled out a normal healthy need in the development process - idealization, and further disappointment in the object. The process of growing up of such patients took place without objects that could be idealized and then painlessly de-idealized. Such patients are vitally dependent on the constant presence of another in their life. And it is this real other who will be: either raised by the patient on a pedestal, then overthrown by devaluation. These patients are quite difficult to treat, but understanding the origins of their behavior is compassionate. There is no reliable strong superego in the psyche of these patients. They have no inner support. Their relationship will be built in the following way - either I am good, but then you are bad, or you are good, then I am nothing. On this basis, character can be seen as predictable patterns of behavior, repeating the actions of early objects or the unconscious desire to make others behave like objects of early childhood.