THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 35:175--181 (1975)

THE STRUCTURE OF PERSONALITY*

Bernard Robbins

In this one paper, I can hope to give no more than a very brief and rather general survey of what I conceive a personality to be and how it functions in our society in general. The diff iculty is that when we speak of a personality we are actually referring to the sum total of a person's actions, reactions, and attitudes toward himself and others. In effect, what will be discussed here is a person's relationship with himself and his relationship with others. Because these two relationships complement and supple- ment each other, one can easily perceive how an adequate discussion of them would have to consist of many, many papers, rather than just one.

Because much of what motivates a person's feelings toward himself and others are drives and impulses of which he is completely unconscious (except under special circum- stances and with the employment of special diagnostic treatment, in particular, psychoanalysis) my discussion will center around those convictions of which the person is not aware. Although we see these attitudes reflected in the behavior and activity of the person, personality as such is for the most part determined by quite unconscious factors.

When I speak of the sum total of a person's attitudes toward himself and others, I am not speaking of a literal addition of these trends. For example, a personality does not consist of a need for power plus a need for love plus greed plus inquisitiveness plus a need for approval. A personality consists of the constant play and interplay of ideas, the constant reinforcing of ideas, the constant opposition and contradiction of ideas-in short, the incessant motion, rather than the simple addition, of many factors. A general metaphor for this is the pyramid formed by acrobats in which four or five persons appear to be held up by a single person on the bottom. The simple addition of man on top of man does not by itself make the pyramid possible; certain constant movements and reinforcements on the part of each individual are necessary to keep the pyramid intact.

*Lecture delivered in 1944 under the auspices of the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, by Bernard Robbins, M.D., deceased in 1959. This paper and another were dis- covered among the Association's files, and a decision was made to publish them. "The Need to Dominate" appeared in Vol. 35, No. I. Ed.:

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A personality structure has much the same kind of pyramidal structure. We have various attitudes, feelings, and needs, whether sound or unsound, which are in dynamic equilibrium with each other, constantly opposing each other, constantly reinforcing each other, and constantly changing. The way the equilibrium is maintained depends not only on the attitudes, feelings, and needs, but also on particular external situations. A person has to contend with a series of changes in equilibrium within himself while at the same time making serious efforts - sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes inadequate, and sometimes compromising - to establish an equilibrium between him- self as a total structure and the outside world. By the outside world I mean other people. Human beings generally have little difficulty adjusting to mythical or natural, physical disturbances arising within themselves, but have great difficulty maintaining an equilibrium with other people. My own understanding of psychiatry is that it has to do not so much with mental or psychological illness but with disturbances in inter- personal relationships.

In order to get some idea of the things involved in a personality structure and the ways in which they interact, let us look at two case histories. The first is that of ayoung woman whose first visit to me was preceded by an interesting telephone conversation. The mother phoned me to ask if she could come to see me with her child to discuss her child's problem. I asked her whether the problem was her own or the child's, and she said it was the child's. I told her that I see only one patient at a time but that she could come in and discuss the child's case. She said she could not see why they both could not come in at the same time. I then asked the age of the girl and was told she was twenty. I asked the mother if her daughter was incapacitated and she said she was not. I said that, under the circumstances, perhaps it would be just as well if I saw the girl alone and found out what was on her mind. The mother was rather irritated and re- sentful and insisted that even if the daughter did come alone, perhaps she could come later on and discuss the situation with me. Although I had not yet seen either woman, the phone call had given me an idea of what I would be dealing with. I had already formed an impression in my mind of the mother as a vain woman who liked to have her own way and who must be rather dominating in her attitude toward her daughter. The fact that the daughter had permitted her mother to arrange the appointment also told me something, because in this day and age twenty-year-olds are able to handle such situations themselves.

When the girl came in to tell me her story, I almost immediately got the impression that she was extremely intelligent and extremely unhappy. She was a university student. What was she unhappy about? Nothing more than what she had been unhappy about during the past five or ten years - that she was subject to periods of depression and that she sometimes found it extremely difficult to make up her mind. She was getting good grades at school but was majoring in something that did not particularly interest her. She told me that her real interests were music and art (I later learned that she had artistic potential) and that she was not satisfied with the way her life was going. She tended to be profoundly impressed with other people, particularly people who were assertive and could state things directly. She said she regarded her own opinions as as valuable as anyone else's, but that she shrank into the background in most social situa-

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tions. She was developing some resentment toward those people who seemed to take the limelight, and at the same time she had a grudging admiration for them.

When I questioned her about her home situation she became rather defensive, but she admitted that her parents had not been happy for some fifteen or twenty years and that they frequently argued in her presence. She assumed a somewhat protective attitude toward both of them. She said she had never wanted for male companions, that she always had a number of boy friends. Yet as soon a's she became seriously in- terested in any of them, either her mother or her father would begin to denigrate him. The denigration was always coupled with the statement that her life was her own and that she would have to make up her own mind, but that they might know what was best for her.

Her immediate problem revolved around the question of whether or not she should marry the man with whom she had been keeping company. He was due to get a fur- lough from the army within the next few days and insisted that they marry then. She said she was not at all sure if she was ready to get married or if she really loved him. A rather domineering sort of man, he had claimed that he would go AWOL and remain in Manhattan until she married him, and that whatever problems they now had would be resolved after the marriage. She felt she was being affected by forces beyond her con- trol, both internal and external, and that though part of her would like to simply give in to him, she couldn't help but wonder i f she would be marrying out of genuine affection or merely as an escape from home.

What does all this tell us about the girl's personality structure? We can assume that she was profoundly dependent upon the opinions of others. I do not use the word "dependent" here as the simple need of one person for another, for we are all inter- dependent on one another for our very existence. What I mean is that this girl could form no judgments or values of her own and that she could make no decisions of her own. In effect, she did not even know her own feelings. When I said this to her she asked me if I was absolutely certain. I said of course I wasn't certain, that these were the conclusions I had drawn in a short interview and that I never know anyone well enough to make a flat statement about them. At this she became both relieved and up- set, saying it was essential to her that someone tell her something that he could say was absolutely right. We can see her profound need to rely on others and, more than that, to actually draw her own personality from them. She could not make decisions, have ideas or thoughts unless they are reflections of another's ideas, thoughts, or feelings. She also had a tendency to overvalue others and underestimate herself. She believed she had little ambition, and said she wanted nothing more than a home and children. There is no need for a person to be ambitious. Yet her lack of ambition struck her as pathological because it differed from the attitude of other girls she knew, all of whom had personal ambitions. From these various attitudes about herself we get a picture of someone who does not know her own mind. Yet each particular attitude could not exist without the existence of the other attitudes. They are constantly playing in with each other and depending on each other to build up the personality structure.

In my opinion the factor that in large part determines the mainstay of a personality is the person's regard for himself, or his self-esteem. What does a person really think of

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himself? It is probably one of the most diff icult things to determine. What we are usually confronted with is not what he really is but what he thinks he is or what he would like to be. A person is unaware of what he really is as a person. In the above case of the young woman, we see a person who needs love and approval and who has to rely on other people to make decisions. She was extremely intelligent but had developed an interdependent existence. She was what she thought she should be according to the expectations of her parents and other insignificant figures in her environment. Yet she derived a certain satisfaction from regarding herself as a kind of martyr, as a person who would take it. This gave her a sense of security and individuality.

A personality is disturbed whenever there is a threat to self-esteem. Symptoms will be introduced by any series of circumstances or changes within the person that tend to threaten certain pictures of himself, certain illusions he has erected about himself, and certain values upon which his feelings of self-esteem depend. The following case history is an illustration of this process.

A young man who had been under treatment for some time came in and reported that he had a profound sense of failure. He said he was very depressed and bewildered and could not figure out what had happened. He was married and his wife was away on vacation. There was a girl in his office for whom he had developed some fondness. They made a date to go canoeing to a picnic grounds. It was an extremely hot day and when they were in the canoe the girl asked him if he would be embarassed if she re- moved her blouse. He said not at all and she slipped it off. Later, when they were on the picnic grounds, he made certain advances which she emphatically rejected, making it clear to him that she was not interested in any sex play.

He had a profound depression and sense of failure because of this rejection. He had assumed that her removal of the blouse was an invitation for him to go ahead. The fact that she did not respond to his advances made him sure that there was something wrong with his approach. He had always been quite successful in getting anything he had gone after and could not deal with a failure. He had the kind of personality that says there are no limits to what I can do, that the world is my oyster. Because in his opinion he could not fail he could not cope with failure.

The girl's version of the story is interesting because it presents a different kind of personality. She apparently had an enormous amount of self-assurance. She was success- ful and extremely happy in her marriage. At the time of this incident her husband was in the army. People generally liked her and recognized her intelligence. She was accepted at face value and she herself had no questions about what she wanted. She was not particularly disturbed about the incident, but was a little puzzled that he had made the advances in the first place. She neglected to tell me that she had removed her blouse. She said that she and the young man had a mutual understanding that they were good friends. She had assumed that he had simply invited her on a picnic and could not understand why he should think differently. The only things that really bothered her at all was that he had gone into a long explanation about how he had been in love with her for years. When I told her about the blouse, She expressed surprise. She felt it was just a bad situation; there was no thought in her mind that she may have contributed something to it. She felt no sense of shame about disturbing him. What

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bothered her, i f anything, was that her sense of self-assurance - that people accept her at face value, that she could get away with anything - had been disturbed. She felt the whole incident had been misinterpreted. She was convinced that none of her actions could have any ill effect on others, that she practiced nothing but kindness and goodwill.

I think that what I have said so far should give a general idea about what the struc- ture of personality is, what factors keep it going, and what factors disturb it.

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Do you think so-called personality trends are attributable to ideological conceptions of social relations? First of all, I take exception to your use of "so-called." The question really involves two things: how a personality gets that way and how it stays that way. I cannot give another lecture on that. I think a personality as such develops from real things. What makes an individual is that from birth he is associated with and aware of other human beings. A human being born on a desert island not inhabited by other human beings may develop into something, but he will not develop into a human being. Personality trends come from material conditions existing in childhood and from other signifi- cant conditions in the environment. Personality trends do not develop from ideas that one's parents have, although these ideas are in themselves profoundly important. We must learn that the ideas we have actually de- velop out of certain real conditions. A personality develops out of human relations as such.

If the second female patient you mentioned is so well adjusted, i f she is so successful in both her personal life and her vocation, why did she need you? In addition, why must she probe her activities? After all, only the man was disturbed, and he did not blame her. As a matter of fact, she did not come to me for treatment. She was a psychiatrist who wanted to learn how to become an analyst. Otherwise, there was no need for treatment; she did not have any real disturbances. Her attitude was merely that she was not able to understand the young man's advances. This feeling did not rest entirely upon the fact that her life history had been successful, but also upon certain attitudes she had built around herself. If any of these had been broken, then perhaps she would have developed some disturbances.

What was the unconscious motivation of the young lady who removed her blouse? I don't know. Although there might appear to be sexual motivation I doubt very much whether there was any. This was an activity which she had carried on for years in camps and was more an expression of "1 can do pretty much what I please. If I want to take my blouse off, I will do so," rather than having any implication of sex in itself. It is always dangerous

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to take one thing and try to explain it or at tr ibute it to a single unconscious motivation. Things mean different things to different personalities. You have to consider each thing in the terms of the personality with which you

are dealing.

What different at t i tude could the girl have taken at the time to maintain her own integrity and yet not disturb the boy? That is a very good question. It is exactly the question she asked me. All I could say, and all I can say now, is that she could have maintained her integrity if she had not been oblivious to the fact that certain of her actions have effects on other people. Instead of acting according to what she felt, she should have reflected on the effects her actions could have upon others.

Would you class our constant exposure to fairy tales, in which we identify ourselves as the princess or as Prince Charming, as desirable or as undesirable in its effect on our personalities, especially as it builds up in us a false picture of what we ought to expect of ourselves? It depends entirely upon the kind of person who is reading the fairy tale. To one it means one thing and to another something else. Fairy tales do not play a significant part in building up various pictures of what we ex- pect of ourselves. People develop out of their particular relationships with their parents, friends, and neighbors. I doubt whether fairy tales in them- selves are particularly significant in the development of certain undesirable

trends.

Were not all the traits outlined in the first patient rather similar? Might there not have been some traits in violent opposition? Quite right. There are many other traits quite opposite to those I discussed.

Was some part of the young man's disturbance due to the fact that certain moral forces embodied by conscience protested, whereas they would have

been latent if he had been successful? I am not sure that he was disturbed by the moral issue involved. I do not doubt the profound importance of having certain moral values, but in this instance what was disturbing the young man was not a sense of shame. Shame iS an expression or reaction to an ideal that we have. If we violate something that we regard as valuable, we will feel ashamed. There are many things that we think are shame. This boy did not feel shame. What he felt was a sense of failure. What was disturbing him was his own image of him- self as a person who should be able to successfully execute every activity.

I do not know if he would have been disturbed by other factors if he had been successful, or if he would then have developed a sense of shame.

In your own words, why did you say to the first young woman that you could not exactly say what was true in her particular case? Why the apparent indecision? There was no apparent indecision. There was no uncertainty in my com-

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ments to the girl. Actually, what I told her was the truth, which is what I tell all my patients. I particularly do so in the cases of those, who tend to have the need to totally rely on one's statements. The doctor is never in a position to say this is so and this is not so. Whether I think something is so or not depends only upon the material the patient himself supplies. When I told the young woman my opinion of her case, I said I thought it was the truth. In this instance, it happened that my opinion was confirmed by later developments. I told her not to rely on my opinion because it would be either confirmed or denied by her. Because in the long run it could be confirmed or denied only by her, there was no indecision on my part.