Childhood Experience and Personal Destiny: A Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis PDF
Preview Childhood Experience and Personal Destiny: A Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis
Childhood Experience and Personal Destiny CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCE AND PERSONAL DESTINY A PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY OF NEUROSIS By WILLIAM v. SILVERBERG, M.D. Clinical Professor 01 Psychiatry New York Medical College 1952 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC ISBN 978-3-662-38950-8 ISBN 978-3-662-39901-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-662-39901-9 Copyright 1952 Springer Science+Business Media New York Originally published by Springer Publishing Company, Inc. in 1952. Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1s t edition 1952 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED T 0 the memo,y 0/ ISABEL BEAUMONT FISHER, honored colleague and loved friend, this uolume is affectionately dedicated. Contents Preface .................................................. IX Introduction Tbe need for a theory of personality ......................... . I Toward a theory of personality and neurosis . . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . .. . 9 II The areas of early experience ..... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 37 III Tbe first experiential area: Problems of orality and deprivation 51 IV The second experiential area: Problems of discipline ..................................... 102 V The third experiential area: Problems of rivalry and genitality 153 VI Psychotherapeutic aims .................................... 239 Bibliography ............................................. 271 Index ................................................... 277 Preface THE THESIS PRESENTED IN THESE PAGES is that mental illness originates in the adaptations made to trau- matic experiences in early life, and that in its details the illness bears the impress of those experiences and the child's reactions to them. The period covered by "early life" is that from birth to the age of six or thereabouts. I do not intend to imply that experi- ences occurring after this period are not traumatic or are without effect upon the formation of personality. But I believe that the experiences of early life are highly formative, for good or ill, and that they contain most of the qualitative variations of human ex- perience in general. Experience in later life, traumatic or other- wise, mainly reaffirms or contradicts the experiences of earlier life. However, it is manifestly absurd to suppose that susceptibil- ity to external influence terminates at the age of six years and to maintain that after that time the personality cannot do other- wise than carry out repetitiously and mechanically its al ready formed patterns of adaptation and behavior. If this were true, how could it be hoped that any process of psychotherapy might be effective in ameliorating mental illness? Or how could it be accounted for that, as sometimes happens, adult life-experience without benefit of psychotherapy produces alterations of per- sonality, both favorable and unfavorable? Experience in the first six years of life generates a complex pattern of adaptative poten- tialities which are at the disposal of the later personality. Any one IX x PREFACE such potentiality or any grouping of them may be more or less utilized or more or less inhibited in meeting or in creating the situations of life in later years. It is in view of this that it seems reasonable to dose the books, as it were, in more or less tentative fashion at the age of six years. While acknowledging that personality may, perhaps even in large part, be determined by inherited constitutional factors, we are constrained to recognize that all attempts hitherto to establish the existence and nature of such factors have met with complete failure and have produced not a shred of convincing evidence. In these circumstances we are bound to emphasize-possibly, overemphasize-the significance of environmental factors in the formation of personality. We can be confident that work along these lines will never be wholly vitiated by the discovery of con- stitutional factors; the only effect of such discovery would be an altered view of the relative importance of experiential factors. Now they occupy the whole stage; then they might have to share the stage with other performers. My professional and personal debts in the writing of this volume must now be acknowledged. Every writer of such works as this owes an incalculable debt to Freud, which, in my own case, will be acknowledged in extenso in the Introduction and in detail at many points in the text. Of a similar nature, though indeed not so vast, is my debt to Harry Stack Sullivan, whose inßuence on my thinking will likewise be acknowledged and expounded more fully elsewhere. Clarence P. Oberndorf, Franz Alexander, Sandor Rado, and Clara Thompson, having participated in my psychiatrie and psychoanalytic training, all have my deep gratitude and my full awareness of the personal debt I owe them, in addition to the professional one. In the preparation of this book I have received invaluable assistance from Doctor Lilly Ottenheimer: she showed me that it had to be written, read with enormous patience and fortitude the various chapters as I wrote them, and made numerous sug- gestions for their improvement. Ruth Steele took over the diffi- cult task of typing from a hand-written script, often almost PREFACE XI indecipherable by reason of numerous corrections and after- thoughts, and performed it with utmost skill and devotion. Mr. Harry EIlis, who edited the manuscript, carried out his task with consummate skill and tact, and it is a pleasure thus to record my appreciation of his labors. Many others have contributed to this book. Acknowledgment to some of them is made in footnotes throughout the text. What I have learned from patients, from students-both in and out of class-from acquaintances and from mere passers-by is considerable in amount, but I could not begin to state it in detail and in many instances this would scarcely be desired by them. Many of them will not even know that I intend to include them in this blanket acknowledgment, but all of them, known and unknown, knowing and unknowing, I regard with feelings of warmth and gratefulness. I wish to acknowledge gratefully various suggestions made by Drs. Bemard Glueck and Frances S. Arkin. Finally, I want to express deep appreciation of the intelli- gent cooperation of Mr. Bemhard J. Springer, my publisher, whdse help has freed me from much drudgery and whose compe- tent wisdom was always generously at my disposal. WILLIAM V. SILVERBERG, M.D. New York, N. Y. April 1952 Childhoocl Experience and Personal Destiny
The list of books you might like
