The title of this book is different than might be expected. In addressing the issues that I will discuss here, most people, and most psychologists and psychoanalysts, tend to speak of a “search for one’s identity”. But — as will become apparent from the examples that appear in this book — when people try so hard (often for an entire lifetime) to discover who they are, they are searching for their “personality”, which is a word that implies characteristics and qualities far greater than the more static word “identity” does Too often, because of family and societal pressure, people have settled for a personality which dissatisfies and discomforts them, or sometimes disgusts or frightens them. “Settled” implies a conscious choice, which may not seem to many of them as appropriate because it feels to them that their dissatisfying personality or the dissatisfactions of aspects of their personality were imposed upon them (and in this they are in a sense correct). Regardless, it is the only personality they know, the one that fits them like a physical coat that cannot be removed, that has become part of them. But in my work, over thirty years, as a psychotherapist and a psychoanalyst — of both children and adults — I have discovered that people often struggle against themselves to throw the coat off, to remove the accompanying mask, to find a better fit or to rescue a personality that has all but disappeared beneath the years and the defensive layers.
Amid the drives and the early developmental stages, the vicissitudes and traumas that a psychoanalyst explores and that take place for each of us as we mature, our individual attempts to find out whom we can become, encompass a truly mighty effort. It is that effort I explore here.
I will try to present this exploration in a way that is different. More often than not, when we read a psychological or psychoanalytic text, the conclusions are presented to us as a fait accompli; the process whereby the therapist or psychoanalyst got to his conclusions is not generally explored in depth. And as a consequence, the dynamic sense of discovery that went into the final formulations often is lost. Here, I attempt to reveal that process, because in and of itself that process can be noteworthy and exciting. Hopefully, doing so will more clearly show how I think and what I feel, so that you may experience the sense of adventure that I have enjoyed as part of reaching these conclusions.
For this reason, the first chapter here, to which the book owes its title “The Anatomy of a Psychotic Experience” presents an experience of my own, which then led to the realization decades afterward of the extent to which the search for one’s personality applied to my patients as well, almost none of whom had a full-blown psychotic experience, but who struggled in ways one might describe as neurotic or traumatized or obsessive or paranoid to find their personalities. Each story that I have to tell here (including some that appeared in individual journal articles before I had a sense of how common this struggle appeared to be) I introduce by discussing how the “search for one’s personality” pervades the psychodynamic work that took place in treatment.
Of course, there is no way in which the search for one’s personality occurs in a vacuum. Not only is it most obviously influenced by parental figures and loved figures during one’s early and adolescent development (and into adulthood) ; it is influenced by the culture in which one lives. That culture applies tremendous press on how one fashions oneself, what one wants to be or become. And as culture is not monolithic, regardless of the particular culture, often one is faced with inescapable dilemmas, that touch particularly upon gender, that is upon what kind of man or woman one wants to be. And so, I explore in a number of the chapters, how culture, in its various manifestations and in the myths that pervade it, determines one’s personality.