c. Character in Freud's thinking versus the concept used in this book

Lets start with two quotes. First from Moore and Fine (1990) published by the America Psychoanalytic Association (the underlining is mine to draw attention to the salient issue).

[Character is] The enduring, patterned functioning of an individual. As perceived by others, it is the person's habitual way of thinking, feeling, and acting. Understood psychodynamically, character is the person's habitual mode of reconciling intrapsychic conflicts. Character stands beside, but may be differentiated from, other terms for global aspects of personality, such as identity, self, and ego.

A person's character is made up of an integrated constellation of character traits, each a complex admixture of drive derivatives, defenses, and superego components. Character traits, like neurotic symptoms, are compromise formations. But character traits are more stable than symptoms, are better able to bind anxiety, and are experienced more as part of one's self (ego-syntonic). Character traits can be thought of as behavioral patterns that develop over time as the result of an attempt at resolution of intrapsychic conflict. Character is most closely related to the concept of an individual's defensive style.

And now a quote from a recognized reference by Laplanche & Pontalis (1967/1973, pp. 67-8)

The mechanisms most usually invoked to account for the formation of character are sublimation and reaction-formations. The latter 'avoid secondary repressions by making a "once-and-for-all", definitive change of the personality'. In so far as it is the reaction-formations which predominate, the character itself may appear as an essentially defensive formation intended to protect the individual against the emergence of symptoms as well as against the instinctual threat.

From the descriptive standpoint, character defense is to be distinguished from the symptom particularly by its relative integration into the ego: there is a failure to recognize the pathological aspect of the character-trait; rationalization and a defence originally directed against a specific threat is generalized into a pattern of behavior. It is possible to see such mechanisms as so many characteristics of the obsessional structure, in which case character neurosis would mean, first and foremost, a particularly common form of obsessional neurosis typified by a predominance of the mechanism of reaction-formation and by the discrete or sporadic nature of its symptoms.

There are two things to notice from the above two discussions of character. First, in traditional Freudian theory the formation of character involves (in fact is the result of) the application of defense mechanisms (compromise formation, sublimation, and reaction formation). All of these defense mechanisms are in the table of defenses at the end of the chapter. However, in passing, I would also point out that in neither discussion is repression mentioned as formative.

Second, the impetus to develop the character is the presence of "drive derivative" and "instinctual threats." Since Freud's theory is a drive theory, it follows coherently from there that the character would evolve as a means for dealing with the drives and the threats that arise from these drives (the oedipal conflict is one such instinctual threat).

The theory of character used in this book and upon which I shall shortly elaborate (see below: ON THE FORMATION OF CHARACTER) is one derived from the concept of coping and from a recognition of the primitive nature of the child's brain. In short, character develops out of the child's attempt to conceptualize the data of his little environment. In that attempt he makes a host of errors, unknown to himself or to his parents, which errors in turn become the foundation of his character.

I wrote, page 370, that "Character is the basic statement a person makes (unrecognized) about himself, the world and the relationship between the two." There are four issues raised by that statement of character: (1) unrecognized basic statement, (2) about himself, (3) about the world, and (4) about the relationship between the two.

3. Unrecognized Basic Statement

The first approximately two months of life are a stage that the researcher and theorist, Margaret Mahler (1962/1979) calls the autistic period. During this period the infant is not yet aware that it is separate from the mother. No 'I' has yet developed, the world is simply an 'it.'

During the next four months the child is in what Mahler (1967/1975) termed the symbiotic phase. The infant deals with itself and the mother as a symbiotic pair, neither can exist without the other. They are in omnipotent union.

It is only at the age of six months that the child begins to recognize that it is separate from the mother. That there is an I and an It. This phase, starting at six months and lasting until 36 months, Mahler, Pine, and Bergman (1975) termed separation-individuation with four sub-phases.

There is a reason why I am bringing in this issue. For the present just keep in mind that the child will pass through four phases of development (ending at three years of age) and that these four phases, taken as a whole, are termed separation-individuation. Placing the beginning of a sense of "I" at six months of age as Mahler and colleagues do may be a bit optimistic. The baby's brainwaves do not display the characteristic adult pattern until the age of nine months.

Footnote 56. The neo-Freudian, Harry Stack Sullivan (1953; see also: Mullahy, 1952) also draws particular attention to this period as does Melanie Klein (1961/1975, 1932/1975; see also: Grosskurth, 1986).

Footnote 57. Personal communication from Dr. Edward Gibbs, the father of modern electroencephalography.

That fact gains significance in that prior to that degree of neural organization of the brain (that is, prior to the age of nine months) it is not possible to have long-term storage of memory.

But the lack of memory, as such, does not mean that the infant can't be affected by its surroundings. The baby's brain is maturing and some circuits (called: neural pathways) are being strengthened by the development of new synaptic connections (called: facilitation) while other connections are decaying because of the death of brain cells and synapses.

Thus, for example, the amygdala, which is the main brain organ mediating fear (LeDoux, 2002), is growing, maturing, and developing. If the infant is exposed to many fearful events those circuits in the amygdala will be potentiated. The child, by the process of maturation (a combination of nature and nurture [Ridley, 2003]) can develop a life-long sensitivity to fear and/or anxiety. This hypothetical child can subsequently display high startle reactions, shyness, caution in its play, unwillingness to undertake new activities, high ambient anxiety levels; and subsequently health problems as a result of a constantly high level of cortisol.

But none of that is character, it is temperament. Just as we have to distinguish between emotion and mood, so we must distinguish between character and temperament. Temperament is either a genetic predisposition or a pre-conceptual modeling of the brain. Temperament is permanent and unchangeable, character is acquired and changeable.

Footnote 58. The appearance of stranger anxiety, also called nine month anxiety, provides evidence for the growing recognition that the baby and the mother are separate and that the mother is a single unique big thing (i.e. adult). Obviously choosing nine months, even if it is coincident with an adult pattern of brain waves, is not totally correct. Maturation is a process and so any end point (here, nine month) means that the process started at some earlier stage but it was not apparent.

By the time the child has passed about the 18-month mark, the child can begin to form permanent memories and has rudimentary cognitive skill. By this time primitive, yet intelligible, language skills are developing. The presence of beginning language skills indicates the maturation of the brain that allows for the beginning of the process of conceptualization.

During the period of nine months to 24 months there is the first of several explosions of cognitive abilities. By the time the second year has passed, the child is now well into what Mahler and her colleagues termed the separation-individuation process. Motoric skills allow the child to master the first phase of separation-individuation, the distancing sub-phase and also begin into the second sub-phase, the practicing sub-phase. Further, motoric skills allow the full emergence of aggression as expressed in biting and hitting.

Now, this is important. What started out as suckling develops into biting. What started out as nearly random motor movements is now fully coordinated in confident walking and confident manipulation of physical objects.

The child, by 24 months, enters what is commonly referred to as "the terrible twos." The ability to say "no" to instructions and invitations is clearly indicative of the maturation and presence of a sense of 'I' or ego. While the child by 24 months can form some permanent memories, the ability to recall these memories is limited (i.e. by five or six years of age it is rare that the child can recall anything prior to his third birthday).

Footnote 59. In Mahler, Pine and Bergman's (1975) account of the development of borderline psycopathology the sub-phases of practicing and rapprochement are critical periods.

Footnote 60. Cognitive psychology draws a clear line between memory storage and memory recall. We all learned things in early school which we can no longer recall. That we once knew these things speaks to memory storage. That we can no longer remember them speaks to memory recall. It is exactly the same thing as when you put something away but can't now recall where you put it. It is stored somewhere (memory) but where (recall). It is the same process we are all familiar with when we know someone or some word but can't, at the moment, recall the name or word. Later, it comes to us and we say "Oh, now I remember ....," but it is not really remembering it is recalling. The memory was there all the time, we just could not recall it at the moment.

Being in the distancing sub-phase of separation-individuation, the child is able to and does form permanent but primitive concepts about himself and about the world (as manifest by the parent(s)). The content of these concepts is critical. They begin the formation of the character. Let me provide an example that I use when I am teaching parents about how to relate to their child.

All children, as they learn to walk, climb stairs, etc. will have many occasions to fall and bump their head. The child will cry from the pain. An issue of character formation arises at that time (not in a one-off experience, but in the general response of the parent). The child has personal knowledge of the extent of the pain. What the child does not know, and what it looks to the parent to tell it, is "is this pain important" or "is this pain not important?" If the parent responds in an exaggerated manner to the trivial bump on the head, the child is told by experience and observation that (1) pain is an important variable in life and (2) he is fragile. In just that one kind of response (to the bump on the head) the parent is communicating something about who I (the child) am (fragile) and what the world is (pain, more broadly, illness, is important).

This is a basic statement about self and world, but it is not conceptualized in this clear adult-like form; it is simple learning in the same context as the child is learning language. That is, it simply becomes part of the fabric of the child's being in the same sense that his native language does. In a sense, it is associational learning.

if pain -> attracts people

if pain -> important

That is but one example of the process of forming basic statements, but statements that, as specific concepts, are unrecognized.

The child during the first three to four years of age is a learning machine. Not only does language explode in both vocabulary and syntax, but so does its understanding of itself and the world. Pre-verbal concepts like "am I competent" or "can I function on my own" or "do my likes and dislikes make a difference" are all forming (along with a host of like pre-verbal concepts).