Character and Self-Experience: Working with Obsessive-Compulsive, Depressive-Masochistic, Narcissistic, and Other Character Styles

Character and Self-Experience provides an original and innovative approach to understanding human character in terms of the phenomenology of self-experience. Lawrence Josephs reviews the psychoanalytic theory of character structure from Freud to Klein to Kohut, and proposes an integrative model of the organization of the self. This structural model of the self is then applied to describing and developing vivid character portraitures of major personality styles. Using extensive case examples, Josephs presents evocative narratives of obsessive-compulsive, hysteric, depressive-masochistic, narcissistic, paranoid, schizoid, and antisocial character styles and articulates implications for their treatment. In contrast with previous attempts to highlight theoretical differences to prove one approach superior, this book acknowledges that each theoretical orientation provides an important focus and perspective, and aims to advance a unified theory integrating the multiple views into a coherent whole.