NTERPERSQ
FUNCTIONAL THEOR ...D METHODOLOGY FOR PERSONflnTY EVALUATION
%-
X
Timothy Leary
Interpersonal Diagnosis
of
Personality
A Functional Theory and Methodology for Personality Evaluation
TIMOTHY LEARY
DIRECTOR OF PSYCHOLOGY RESEARCH
KAISER FOUNDATION HOSPITAL
OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA
Resource Publications
An imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers 199 West 8th Avenue • Eugene OR 97401
Resource Publications
A division of Wipf and Stock Publishers
199W8th Ave, Suites
Eugene, OR 97401
Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality
A Functional Theory and Methodology for Personality Evaluation
By Leary, Timothy
Copyright© 195 7 by Leary, Timothy
ISBN: 1-59244-776-7
Publication date 7/30/2004
Previously published by John Wiley & Sons, 1957
To Marianne Leary
Preface
This book is concerned with interpersonal behavior, primarily as ex- pressed and observed in the psychotherapeutic setting. Its value lies in its emphasis on the complexity and variety of human nature and on the objectivity and clarity of the empirical procedures it sets forth for multilevel diagnosis. The research on which it reports was made possible by grants from the United States Public Health Service and the Kaiser Foundation.
The interpersonal factors of personality are those conscious or unconscious processes which people use to deal with others and to assess others and themselves in relation to others. The aim of the inter- personal machinery of personality is to ward off anxiety and preserve self-esteem. One of the major results of these operations is to create the social environment in which each person lives.
Everyone tends to make his own interpersonal world. Neurosis or maladjustment involves the limiting of one's interpersonal appara- tus and the compulsive use of certain inflexible, inappropriate inter- personal operations which bring about results that are painful, unsatis- factory, or different from one's conscious goals. Adjustment is char- acterized by an understanding of one's personahty structure, by the development of mechanisms flexible enough to deal with a variety of environmental pressures, and by the management of one's behavioral equipment in such a way as to avoid situations where the mechanisms will be ineffective or damaged.
Any statement about human nature, however, is restricted in meaning unless the level of behavior to which it refers is made clear. The first step must be a definition of levels and an ordering of data in terms of levels. The aim of the research work described in this book has been to develop a multilevel model of personality and to present a series of complex techniques for measuring interpersonal expressions at these different levels of personality. A conceptual and empirical method for converting observations of interpersonal behavior is set forth. The reader will encounter new theories about the effect of interpersonal behavior, the meaning of fantasy expressions, the social language of symptoms, and the nature and functional meaning of con- flict. These theories and systematic procedures constitute the Inter-
vi PREFACE
personal System of Peisonality, developed by the Kaiser Foundation Psychology Research Project.
The approach employed might be called a dynarmc behaviorism. There are two dynamic attributes. The first refers to the impact one person has or makes in interaction with others; the second refers to the interaction of psychological pressures among the different levels of personality. The behavioristic attributes of the system derive from the procedure of viewing every response of the subject (overt, verbal, symbolic) as a unit of behavior which is classified by objective methods and automatically sorted into the appropriate level of per- sonality. The patterns and clusters of thousands of these responses, sorted into different levels, are then converted by mathematical tech- niques into indices and into a multilevel diagnostic code summary. These are then related to clinical events or prognoses. In the develop- ment of the interpersonal system more than 5,000 cases (psychiatric, medical, and normal controls) have been studied and diagnosed.
In addition to describing and validating the process of interper- sonal diagnosis in the psychiatric clinic, this volume demonstrates how these theories and methods may be applied in four other practical set- tings— in the psychiatric hospital, in psychosomatic medicine, in industrial management, and in group therapy.
This book should be interpreted in the light of its environmental and professional contexts. It is the product of clinical psychologists working in a psychiatric setting, and practical answers have been required of the interpersonal system at each stage of its development. This gives the book its functional cast. As to its implications for the profession of psychology, in my own mind at least, a new concept of the "clinical psychologist-as-diagnostician" has emerged. In the Introduction, I have detailed the genesis of the research which has resulted in the book, and have set forth the contributions of the many people who have helped to bring it to fruition.
Timothy Leary
Berkeley, California October, 1956
Contents
Introduction
Part I
Some Basic Assumptions About Personality Theory
CHAPTER PAGE
1. Interpersonal Dimension OF Personality 3
2. Adjustment-iMaladjustment Factors in Personality Theory 17
3. Systematizing the Complexity of Personality . . .33
4. Empirical Principles in Personality Research ... 45
5. Functional Theory of Personality 50
6. General Survey of the Interpersonal and
Variability Systems 59
Part II
The Interpersonal Dimension of Personality: Variables, Levels, and Diagnostic Categories
Introduction 90
7. The Level of Public Communication:
The Interpersonal Reflex 91
8. The Level of Conscious Communication:
The Interpersonal Trait 132
9. The Level of Private Perception:
The Interpersonal Symbol 154
10. The Level of THE Unexpressed: Significant Omissions . . 192
11. The Level of Values: The Ego Ideal 200
12. A System of Interpersonal Diagnosis 207
vii
CONTENTS Part III
The Variability Dimension of Personality: Theory and Variables
Introduction 240
13. The Indices OF Variability .241
Part IV Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality
14. Theory of Multilevel Diagnosis 265
15. Adjustment Through Rebellion: The Distrustful
Personality 269
16. Adjustment Through Self-Effacement:
The Masochistic Personality 282
17. Adjustment Through Docility: The Dependent
Personality 292
18. Adjustment Through Cooperation:
The Overconventional Personality 303
19. Adjustment Through Responsibility:
The Hypernormal Personality 315
20. Adjustment Through Power: The Autocratic
Personality 323
21. Adjustment Through Competition: The Narcissistic
Personality 332
22. Adjustment Through Aggression: The Sadistic Personality 341
Part V Some Applications of the Interpersonal System
Introduction 352
23. Interpersonal Diagnosis of Hospitalized Psychotics . .354
24. Interpersonal Diagnosis in Medical Practice:
Psychosomatic Personality Types 373
25. Analysis of Group Dynamics in an Industrial
Management Group 403
26. Predicting and Measuring Interpersonal Dynamics in
Group Psychotherapy 426
CONTENTS ix
PAGE
Appendices
1. Illustrations of the Measurement of Interpersonal
Behavior at Level I 439
2. The Interpersonal Adjective Check List . . . .455
3. The Administration, Scoring, and Validation of the
Level III-TAT 464
4. The Interpersonal Diagnostic Report 480
5. Norms, Conversion Tables, and Weighted Scores Used in
Interpersonal Diagnosis 493
Index of Names 501
Index of Subjects 503
Figures
1. Continuum of the Sixteen Interpersonal V^ariables .... 65
2. Interpersonal Behavior in Psychotherapy 68
3. Change in Behavior in Therapy 70
4. Seven Generic Areas of Personality 85
5. Interpersonal Interactions in Group Therapy 95
6. Categorization of Check-List Items 135
7. Illustrative Self-Diagnosis 138
8. Conscious Description of Father 139
9. Conscious Description of Mother 140
10. Conscious Description of Self and Family Members .... 141
11. Patient's Description of Therapist 142
12. Therapist's Description of Patient 144
13. Pattern of Familial Relations 146-47
14. Variation in Depth of Measures 151
15. Diagnosis of Walter Mitty 174
16. Profile of TAT Scores 176
17. Conscious and "Preconscious" Profiles 178
18. Conflict Between Power and Weakness 179
19. Facade of Power and Responsibility 180
20. Facade of Weakness and Docility 180
21. Rigidly Conventional Profiles 183
22. Depth Continuum of Personality Levels 187
23. Rigid Avoidance of Rebelliousness 194
24. Consistent Omission of Rebellious Themes 196
25. Docile Subject Idealizes Strength 204
16. Summary Scores for Overconventional Patient 218
27. Diagnosis of Facade Behavior 219
28. Illustration of Interpersonal Diagnosis 222-23
29. Diagnosis of Level III Behavior 224
30. Illustration of Multilevel Diagnosis 226-27
31. Generic Variability Indices 250
32. Calculation of Discrepancy Values 258
33. Behavior of Ten Samples at Level I 380
xi
xii FIGURES
FIGURE PAGE
34. Behavior of Ten Samples at Level II 382
35. Behavior of Ten Samples at Level III 384
36. Multilevel Mean Scores of Normal Controls 387
37. Multilevel Mean Scores of Ulcer Patients 388
38. Multilevel Mean Scores of Hypertensive Patients 390
39. Multilevel Mean Scores of Obese Women 392
40. Overtly Neurotic Dermatitis Patients 394
41. Self-inflicted Dermatitis Patients 395
42. Unanxious Dermatitis Patients 397
43. Psychiatric Clinic Sample 398
44. Multilevel Mean Scores of "Neurotics" 399
45. Multilevel Mean Scores of "Psychotics" 401
46. Self-Descriptions of Four Executives 406
47. Self-Deception Indices of Four Executives 407
48. Group Dynamics Booklet 411-17
49. Perceptions by General Manager 418
50. Consensual Diagnosis of General Manager 420
51. Perceptions by Production Manager 421
52. Consensual Diagnosis of Production Manager 422
53. Perceptions by Personnel Manager 423
54. Consensual Diagnosis of Personnel Manager 424
55. Predictions of Interpersonal Roles 429
56. Measurements of Interpersonal Roles 430
57. Diagram of Five Measures of Personality 432-33
58. Two Contrasting MMPI Profiles 442
59. The Level I Diagnosis 444
60. Summaries of Interpersonal Behavior 452
61. The Diagnostic Booklet 482-88
62. Multilevel Profile Before and After Psychotherapy . . . .491
Tables
TABLE PAGE
1. Operational Definition of Five Levels of Personality . . . .81
2. Percentage of Diagnostic Types (Level I-M) 129
3. Percentage of Diagnostic Types (Level II-C) 152
4. Illustrative Classification of Interpersonal Behavior at the Symbolic
or Projective Level 170
5. Percentage of Diagnostic Types (Level III-T) 190
6. Three Elements of Diagnosis of Personality: Classification,
Profiles, and Report 214
7. The Adaptive and Maladaptive Interpersonal Diagnostic Types . . 220
8. Median Interpersonal Self-Description Score for Six MMPI
Clinical Groups 231
9. Operational Redefinition of Psychiatric Categories in Terms of
Interpersonal Operations 233
10. Informal Listing of the Twelve Generic Variability Indices . . .252
11. Operational Definition of Forty-eight Indices of Variation . . 254-56
12. Key to Numbers and Letters Employed in Coding Variability Indices 256
13. Horizontal (Lov) and Vertical (Dom) Values for Each Octant . . 260
14. All Possible Discrepancies Around the Pair \-l and Their Magnitudes 260
15. Illustration of the Grouping of All Possible Discrepancies Involving
the Diagnostic Codes 1 and / 261
16. Percentage of Rebellious-Distrustful Personalities (Level I-M) . . 280
17. Percentage of Rebellious-Distrustful Personalities (Level II-C) . .281
18. Percentage of Self-Effacing-Masochistic Personalities (Level I-M) . 290
19. Percentage of Self-Effacing-Masochistic Personalities (Level II-C) . 291
20. Percentage of Docile-Dependent Personalities (Level I-M) . . . 299
21. Percentage of Docile-Dependent Personalities (Level II-C) . . 300
22. Percentage of Cooperative-Overconventional Personalities
(Level I-M) 312
23. Percentage of Cooperative-Overconventional Personalities
(Level II-C) 313
24. Percentage of Responsible-Hypernormal Personalities (Level I-M) . 321
25. Percentage of Responsible-Hypernormal Personalities (Level II-C) . 322
26. Percentage of Managerial-Autocratic Personalities (Level I-M) . .330
xiii
^j^ TABLES
TABLE ^^^^
27. Percentage of Managerial- Autocratic Personalities (Level II-C) . 331
28. Percentage of Competitive-Narcissistic Personalities (Level I-M) . 338
29. Percentage of Competitive-Narcissistic Personalities (Level II-C) . 340
30. Percentage of Aggressive-Sadistic Personalities (Level I-M) . . 349
31. Percentage of Aggressive-Sadistic Personalities (Level II-C) . .350
32. Level I Diagnoses Assigned to 148 Patients in the Three
Psychotic Samples 356
33. Level II-C Diagnosis of 46 Patients in the Three Psychotic Samples . 357
34. Level III-T Diagnosis of 38 Patients in the Three Psychotic Samples 358
35. The Significance of Differences Among Ten Symptomatic Groups
at Level I-M 381
36. The Significance of Differences Among Ten Symptomatic Groups
at the Level of Conscious Self-Description (Level II-C) . . 383
37. The Significance of Differences Among Ten Symptomatic Groups
at the Level of "Preconscious" Expression (Level Ill-T [Hero]) . 385
38. Illustrative Calculation of MMPI Indices for Measuring Symptomatic
Behavior (Level I-M) 443
39. Illustration of the Calculations for Determining the Level I Profile for
a "Neurotic" Patient, SN 453
40. Interpersonal Check List, Form 4, Words Arranged by Octant and
Intensity 456-57
41. Test-Retest Correlations, Form IIIa, by Octant and Sixteenth . . 461
42. Average Intervariable Correlation as a Function of Their Separation
Around the Circle 462
43. ICL Means and Standard Deviations for Psychiatric Outpatients . . 463
44. Guide to Assigning Interpersonal Ratings to Ten TAT Stories
(Level III-T) 466
45. Molar Rating Sheet 471
46. Means and Sigmas of Normative Group for Level III-T Hero and
"Other" 472
47. Chi-Square Relating the Kind of Initial Discrepancy on Dominance-
Submission Between Conscious Self-Diagnosis and TAT Diagnosis to the Kind of Change in Self-Diagnosis of Dominance-Submission on Pre-Post Tests for 23 Psychotherapy Patients .... 474
48. Chi-Square ... for 40 Discussion Group Controls .... 475
49. Chi-Square ... for Combined Samples of 23 Psychotherapy Patients
and 40 Obesity Patients 475
50. Chi-Square Relating the Kind of Initial Discrepancy on Love-Hostility
Between Conscious Self-Diagnosis and TAT Diagnosis to the Kind of Change in Self-Diagnosis of Love-Hostility on Pre-Post Tests for 23 Psychotherapy Patients 476
TABLES
XV
TABLE PAGE
51. Chi-Square ... for 40 Discussion Group Controls .... 476
52. Chi-Square ... for Combined Samples of 23 Psychotherapy Patients
and 40 Obesity Patients 477
53. Chi-Square Relating the Amount of Discrepancy Between Conscious
Self-Diagnosis and TAT Diagnosis to Amount of Temporal Change
in Self-Diagnosis for 81 Discussion Group Controls .... 478
54. Norms for Converting Raw Scores (Dom and Lov) to Standard
Scores at Level I-M 494
55. Norms for Converting Raw Scores (Dom and Lov) to Standard
Scores at Level II-C 495
56. Norms for Converting Raw Scores (Dom and Lov) to Standard
Scores at Level III-TAT (Hero) 496
57. Norms for Converting Raw Scores (Dom and Lov) to Standard
Scores at Level III-TAT (Other) 497
58. Weighted Scores for Measuring Discrepancy Between Two Diag-
nostic Codes Indicating Kind and Amount of Difference Between Levels or Tests, and for Comparing Codes Where One Is of Extreme and the Other of Moderate Intensity .... 498-99
Introduction
In the past, the complexity of personality data, particularly as it is observed in the clinical setting, has led to a relative neglect of em- pirical studies and to an emphasis on anecdotal, speculative accounts. Where objective investigations have been undertaken, they have tended to be analyses which employed a single testing instrument. This is a result of the sociological development of the testing psy- chologist's role.
The original and basic aim of the Kaiser Foundation Psychology Research was (and still is) the study of "process in psychotherapy." The first steps in this direction involved the construction of a sys- tematic way of viewing personality structure before therapy. This model system is necessary to predict what will happen in therapy and to measure change in structure during and after therapy. This book presents such a system and some of its diagnostic and prognostic features.
The United States Public Health Service supported the research project by a series of six annual grants, from 1950 to 1954, under the directorship of Hubert S. Coffey and Dr. Saxton T. Pope, Jr., and from 1954 to 1956 under the direction of Timothy Leary. In addition to serving as the first director, Hubert Coffey has been chief advisor since the first days of the project. Dr. Pope provided research facilities and clinical wisdom, and was of signal help in developing the concept of variability indices, discussed in Chapter 13.
The Kaiser Foundation contributed substantially to the research during the years 1950-1954, and from November 1954 assumed major support of the core project. Dr. Harvey Powelson became the director of the research project in 1951. He has given clinical advice, theoretical counsel, and administrative support throughout the dura- tion of the research.
In its development, the interpersonal system of personality has been influenced by many collaborating psychologists and psychiatrists. It is impossible, in a cooperative, creative enterprise of this scope to accord specific credit for all contributions, and the following acknowl- edgments indicate only the major indebtedness. Those whose names are listed below should not, however, be held accountable for any
^^••- INTRODUCTION
weaknesses in the theoretical design. Full responsibility for the present version of the system is assumed by the author.
The basic notion of the interpersonal classification system (the circle) was developed in 1948-1949 by Hubert Coffey, Mervin Freed- man, Timothy Leary, and Abel Ossorio. The same group was respon- sible for the original tripartite definition of levels. The psychotherapy groups which provided the original data for classification of inter- personal reflexes were organized with the help and sponsorship of J. Raymond Cope, of the Unitarian Church of Berkeley.
Dr. Mary Sarvis, Kaiser Foundation Psychiatric Clinic, lent her diagnostic and therapeutic knowledge to the research group with un- sparing generosity.
Mervin Freedman was a major participant in every stage of theo- retical and methodological development from 1948 to 1953. His thoughtful, analytic approach provided balance and good sense.
Rolfe LaForge is responsible for the successful aspects of the statistical and methodological work. From 1950 to 1954, he directed the testing program, the IBM research, the check-list studies, and served as statistical consultant.
Martin Levine, Blanche Sweet, Herbert Naboisek, and Ellen Philipsborn Tessman made theoretical contributions and aided in the processing of data.
Jean Walker McFarlane was an original sponsor and advisor of the research project and contributed continuous editorial and practical assistance.
Arthur Kobler of the Pinel Foundation Hospital, Seattle, has em- ployed the diagnostic system in his studies of psychotic patients. The combination of his empirical help and theoretical counsel has strengthened this book in several areas.
Bernard Apfelbaum collaborated in the early stages of the oscilla- tion-variability theory. He also provided ratings of interpersonal behavior, as did Wanda Bronson, Albert Shapiro, and Marvin Spanner.
Frank Barron has served since 1950 as official and unofficial con- sultant to the research project. He helped design the original test battery and provided valuable editorial and methodological assistance. Psychotherapy groups studied by the research project were in charge of Dr. Jean Neighbor, Mary Darby Rauch, Shirley Hecht, Mervin Freedman, Stephen Rauch, Abel Ossorio, Dr. Harvey Powel- son, Robert Suczek, Hubert Coffey, Patrick SuUivan, and Richard V. Wolton. Richard Wolton also lent his assistance in the collection of data and in manuscript preparation.
INTRODUCTION xlx
A most important aspect of the interpersonal system is that the test administration, scoring, and rating of tests — as well as the deter- mination of the multilevel diagnoses and the indices of conflict — are accomplished by highly trained technicians who are not professional psychologists. The technical staff responsible for the multilevel diagnoses of the 5,000 cases on which this book is based, includes Anne Apfelbaum, Elizabeth Asher, Mary della-Cioppa, Roberta Held, Charlotte Kaufmann, Joan Harvey LaForge, Helen Lane, and Bar- bara Lennon NichoUs. Gloria Best Martin was Research Administra- tor for the years 1950-1952.
The countless administrative decisions necessary to maintain the day-to-day operations of the research project have been handled with competence by Miss Helen Lane. She has had final executive respon- sibility for data collection, office management, and manuscript preparation.
I
Some Basic Assumptions About Personality Theory
Interpersonal Dimension of Personality
The twentieth century may well find historical status as the epoch in which man began to study himself as a scientific phenomenon. This development, inaugurated mainly by Sigmund Freud around the year 1900, has brought about an impressive growth in the so-called human- ist disciplines — psychiatry, psychology, anthropology, sociology. The hour is yet too early to begin writing the chronicles of our time, but certain trends, now clearly evident, allow tentative predictions.
The study of human nature appears, at this mid-century point, to be shifting from an emphasis on the individual to an emphasis on the individual-in-relation-to-others. During the last fifty years the sub- ject matter of psychiatry, for example, has moved away from case history and symptomatic labels and proceeded in the direction of social interaction analysis and psychocukural phenomena. The physi- calistic therapies, such as electro-shock and neurosurgery, seem to have worked with little theoretical justification against these scientific currents of the time.^
As late as twenty years ago the psychiatric literature was saturated with concepts that were oriented towards the nonsocial aspects of per- sonality— man in relation to his instinctual past (Freud), his racial past (Jung). The psychological laboratories at the same time buzzed with experiments on achievement, intelligence, temperament, and learning processes of the individual animal or human being.
Today, theoretical events have taken a different turn. Man is viewed as a uniquely social being, always involved in crucial inter- actions with his family members, his contemporaries, his predecessors, and his society. All these factors are seen as influencing and being in- fluenced by the individual. The new direction is marked by a series of new conceptual guide posts from communication theory, cultural anthropology, and neop<;ychoanalysis. We possess a new bibliography
* The research on neuropsychological relations accomplished at Tulane University under the direction of Robert G. Heath is a notable exception to this generalization.
4 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
of guide books pointing out the approaching scientific horizons and relating them to the past.
There is one concept which finds such wide and repeated expression in the current literature that it has taken on the debatable character of a motto. This is the term interpersonal relations. Introduced by the American psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan, it has become so popular that, at times, it appears destined to join those ill-fated concepts rendered meaningless by the frequency and pious generality of their usage.
The interpersonal theory is clearly a product of the converging theoretical trends of the time. It has many important implications for all the humanistic disciplines.
This book and the research which it summarizes take as a starting point the interpersonal dimension of personality. We shall trace in the following chapters a theory, a measurement methodology, and a psychological diagnostic system based primarily on interpersonal be- havior. It seems appropriate, therefore, to take as the first question for consideration the definition of the basic term, interpersonal.
What Is Interpersonal Behavior?
Behavior which is related overtly, consciously, ethically, or sym- bolically to another human being (real, collective, or imagined) is interpersonal. This is a short but complex definition. Most of the succeeding pages will be devoted to its elaboration.
Let us consider some examples of human behavior in the light of this definition. The report from a reliable observer "George insulted his father" is clearly interpersonal. It tells how George related to his father, what he did to his father. The finding "George says he is a friendly person" comes from a different observation point, the sub- ject's self-description, but is still clearly interpersonal. It tells how George perceives his motives toward other people. Also interpersonal is the inference made on the basis of dream or fantasy material "George dreams that his mother is protecting him." This refers to a fantasied relationship between the subject and another person. These descrip- tions of different aspects of the subject's behavior, which we call protocol statements, are the basic data on which we build a science of personality. They describe, at three different levels of observation, the subject's interpersonal relations.
Another dimension of personality is reflected in the statements "George acts impulsively," "George says he is not depressed," "George dreams of hatboxes." These descriptions are taken from the same three levels of observation — the outsider's report, self-report, and dreams — but they are not directly interpersonal. Impulsivity, opti-
INTERPERSONAL DIMENSION OF PERSONALITY 5
mism, and a symbolic concern with containers have figured in certain personality theories and have some importance in the understanding of personality. Such descriptions are noninterpersonal because they do not refer to the subject's relationship to other people. They may be, and probably are, indirectly interpersonal. If we investigate further we might learn that George acts impulsively to impress others with his strength, that he says he is not depressed to prove that he does not need psychotherapy, and that he has a vague childhood memory of his mother bringing him lunch in a hatbox. The non- interpersonal thus becomes interpersonal; the personal characteristics take on a social meaning and reflect his relationships with others.
We shall subsequently see that much of the conceptualization in psychology and the nomenclature of psychiatry has been noninterper- sonal. Terms such as depressed, impulsive, and inhibited, for example, refer to characteristics that possess maximum meaning when their inter- personal purpose is added. From the restricted and partisan inter- personal point of view, the functional value of such a popular diag- nostic phrase as "the patient acts depressed" is really not very great until we add, overtly or implicitly, the social implication. We make such a phrase more meaningful when we designate the interpersonal context or the interpersonal impact of the action — "to get the psy- chiatrist's sympathy" or "to show his parents how badly he feels they have treated him."
Psychologists or psychiatrists who employ interpersonal concepts are generally characterized by an obsessive attention to the social im- plications of the subject's performance. They tend to view themselves as engaged in a complex relationship with the subject (or patient) and are particularly concerned with the social pressure which the subject is generating — the impression he is attempting to make upon them.
The interpersonal psychologist generally carries away from an interview or a testing session a diagnosis centering not on the patient's intelligence or his symptoms, but rather on the social machinery which the patient put into action during the session. In most clinical situa- tions a numerical IQ index is of limited functional value. The clinician working from the interpersonal viewpoint would be more likely to stress not the patient's IQ, but the fact that "the patient acts in a wise manner and attempts to create the impression of intelligence," or, in another case, "the patient presents a fa9ade of docile simplicity, acts as though he were uninformed and eager-to-be-taught."
SoTne Noninterpersonal Systems of Psychology
The interpersonal system presented in this book addresses itself to a narrow, limited slice of human behavior. There are many other facets
6 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
of human activity which have attracted the interest and energy of psychologists. In the Kaiser Foundation research we omit or ignore about nine-tenths of these activities and concentrate rather single- mindedly on one dimension — the interpersonal. We have restricted our theory to social behavior because we believe this to be the area of psychology which is most crucial and functionally important to human happiness and human survival. Our reasons for making this assertion will be detailed in a later section.
In restricting our studies to one source of data we fail to take into account hundreds of important variables which characterize the individual. Height, weight, age, appearance, and motoric patterns are all factors which have some value in predicting behavior. All the physiological aspects of the individual are left out of our system.
Sociological factors also contribute to the understanding of per- sonality and carry clear-cut interpersonal implications. We have been unable, so far, to include these factors in our investigations.
Moreover, we have found it necessary to omit most of the variables which have had the highest priority for most psychologists — intelli- gence, interest patterns, political and culmral attitudes, and the variables of sensation and perception.
Academic and experimental psychology has traditionally focused on the noninterpersonal aspects of behavior. Psychophysical experi- ments, learning theories, and intelligence and aptitude studies have monopolized the majority of the chapters in psychological texts. These areas are left completely untreated in the system of personality presented in this book.
We are concerned, therefore, with a limited sector of the wide circle of human behavior. We concentrate simply on the way in which the individual deals with others — his actions, thoughts, fantasies, and values as they relate to others. In addition to restricting our atten- tion to interpersonal activity, there is a further qualification. We can- not hope to include the entire range of the individual's social behavior, but will apply most of our energies to the task of understanding and predicting the subject's interpersonal behavior in one specific environ- mental context — his relationship to a psychiatric clinic.
Some Interpersonal Theories of Personality
We have seen that in the last twenty years the cultural and social factors of human nature have become the object of widespread scien- tific attention. Sociologists and anthropologists have been actively applying psychiatric concepts to their data with mixed results. Entire primitive societies have been diagnosed as paranoid, or typed in terms of the ways in which they feed their young.
INTERPERSONAL DIMENSION OF PERSONALITY 7
At the same time, on the other side of the professional fence, several psychiatrists have assimilated the cultural into their thinking. Major revisions of orthodox Freudian concepts have developed. Three of the most successful of these personaHty theorists, Horney, Fromm, and Sullivan, have rejected the instinct theory and developed socially oriented structures of their own. A fourth, Erik H. Erikson, has con- structed an impressive system integrating social phenomena into the Freudian libido theory.
Karen Horney began publishing in 1937 a series of important books in which she has developed a characterological approach to person- ality. She has described her dissatisfaction with the instinct theory and her own conceptual solutions in great detail. In her earliest work she contended that "neuroses are brought about by cultural factors" — which, more specifically, meant that neuroses are generated by dis- turbances in human relationships.
In the years before I wrote The Neurotic Personality I pursued another line of research that followed logically from the earlier hypothesis. It revolved around the question as to what the driving forces are in neuroses. Freud had been the first to point out that these were compulsive drives. He regarded these drives as instinctual in nature, aimed at satisfaction and intolerance of frustration. Consequently he believed that they were not confined to neuroses per se but operated in all human beings. If, however, neuroses were an out- growth of disturbed human relationships, this postulation could not possibly be valid. The concepts I arrived at on this score were, briefly, these. Compulsive drives are specifically neurotic; they are born of feelings of isolation, helpless- ness, fear, and hostility, and represent ways of coping with the world despite these feelings; they aim primarily not at satisfaction but at safety; their compul- sive character is due to the anxiety lurking behind them. Two of these drives- neurotic cravings for affection and for power— stood out at first in clear relief and were presented in detail in The Neurotic Personality. (4, p. 11)
Later books presented increasingly sophisticated attempts to de- lineate the neurotic character structure. Homey has listed many types, trends, and conflicting attitudes to this end. All of these constructs concern the individual's reactions to others. At the time of her death, Horney's systematizing efforts were far from completed. The shifts in her flexible development have created the appearance of a brilliant disorganization. An over-all survey of her publications, however, reveals an internal consistency and a steady progress towards increas- ingly complex organizing principles.
Erich Fromm, like Horney, places the causative factor of neurosis in the family, which is seen as the basic "agency" of enculturation. Suppressive or hostile parents create the destructive feelings of power- lessness and isolation. Human relations and not instinctual pressure thus create personality. "Man's nature, his passions, and anxieties are a
8 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
cultural product; as a matter of fact man himself is the most important creation and achievement of the continuous human effort, the record of which we call history." (3, p. 11)
Fromm's theories of character are based on the ways in which the individual "relates" to his world. He has listed four neurotic mech- anisms for "escaping" insecurity (masochism, sadism, destructiveness, and automaton conformity) and five character types (receptive, hoarding, marketing, exploitive, and productive). All of these are directly interpersonal. Fromm's major concern and greatest contribu- tion lies not in the area of systematization, but rather in the philosophic backgrounds he has provided for the study of personality. The nine- teenth century mechanistic pessimism of Freud, clearly inadequate for a science of human nature, has received a thoughtful, gentle, and imag- inative revision by Erich Fromm.
Harry Stack Sullivan's most dramatic accomplishment was the assertion, which I believe he has demonstrated, that "psychiatry is the study of processes that involve or go on between people. The field of psychiatry is the field of interpersonal relations under any and all circumstances in which these relationships exist." (5, pp. 4-5) Sul- livan's most valuable achievement is his demonstration of the "fabu- lously more complicated" nature of interpersonal actions and percep- tions, and the introduction of observational methods and attitudes for making "objective contact with another individual."
The research and the theories presented in this book are based on the writings of Sullivan, and are in some sense an attempt to extend them. Although Sullivan's subtle and complex ideas do not summarize readily, a brief survey is in order.
The motive force of personality, for Sullivan as for Horney and Fromm, is the avoidance of anxiety. Anxiety, for all three, is an inter- personal phenomenon. For Horney it involves the feelings of help- lessness and danger; for Fromm, isolation and weakness; for Sullivan, loss of self-esteem. Anxiety is interpersonal because it is rooted in the dreaded expectation of derogation and rejection by others (or by one- self) . The human being is rarely or never free from some interpersonal tension; what he does or thinks is generally related to the estimation of others. For this reason the motivating principle of behavior is more accurately seen as "anxiety reduction" — the avoidance of the greater nnxiety and the selection of the lesser anxiety. This is an important point to note, because, as we shall see when we deal with interpersonal reflexes, it helps explain some of the paradoxical self-punitive behaviors by means of which individuals appear to make themselves unhappy.
Personality is, according to Sullivan, the "relatively enduring pat- tern of recurring interpersonal situations which characterize a human
INTERPERSONAL DIMENSION OF PERSONALITY 9
life." To understand a person is to have knowledge of the inter- personal techniques that he employs to avoid or minimize anxiety and of the consistent pattern of relationships that he integrates as a result of these techniques.
It is important to note that interpersonal behavior refers to private perceptions, conscious reports, symbolic and unwitting expressions, as well as to overt actions.
Another crucial difference between Sullivan's conceptions and the Freudian is worth comment. According to the orthodox Freudian, that which is warded off from consciousness is the instinctual impulse or its disturbing derivatives. According to Sullivan, those things which are selectively kept from awareness are interpersonal processes, or potentialities, or interpersonal feelings which are anxiety-arousing.
The self-dynamism is created by anxiety, being the system of anxiety-diminishing behavior characteristic of the developing indi- vidual. SulUvan has distinguished three modes of experience which have important implications: the prototaxic, undifferentiated, un- verbalized experiences of early infancy; the parataxic, which includes private, unwitting personifications of the self or eidetic others; and the syntaxic. The latter mode is defined by the "extent that observa- tion, analysis, and the eduction of relations is subjected to consensual validation 'with others.' . . ." Consensual validation, a concept with rich empirical meaning, is the "degree of approximate agreement with a significant other person or persons which permits fairly exact com- munication by speech or otherwise, and the drawing of generally useful inferences about the action and thought of the other." (6, p. 177) When two people in an interaction situation are consensually agreed on the basic premises upon which the relationship rests, and when they concur in their pertinent perceptions of self and each other, then they are communicating in the syntaxic mode. This kind of honesty between persons is not a common phenomenon. Its experi- ence can be unbearably painful due to the anxiety it evokes.
The discussion so far has carried us with hazardous speed and brevity through those conceptions of Harry Stack Sullivan which are most appropriate to the purposes of this volume. We leave without any description a host of strikingly original theories — on interview tactics, on obsessional and schizophrenic states, on the six epochs of personality development, on dissociative and selective inattention, to name a few.
The weakest links in Sullivan's strong conceptual chain are the systematic. His publications up to the present (including posthumous volumes) have broken new theoretical ground that has not been sown or harvested. He presents an approach but not a methodology. He
,o BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
convincingly buries the much-berated remains of descriptive, Kraepe- linian, and negatively-value-toned psychiatry, but provides no sub- stitute classification system. The carefully worked-out categories he presented — experience modes, developmental epochs, self-dynamisms — are far from the minimum required for a science of personality.
Sullivan provides an attitude (humility) and an approach (par- ticipant observation), but not a methodology for the science to which he was dedicated. His formal notational structure is disappointingly disorganized and incomplete.
The Theories of Erik H. Erikson
In the preceding section we have considered the contributions of three personality theorists who have abandoned the libido conception and espoused a social or interpersonal point of view. Horney, Fromm, and Sullivan do not deny the importance of sexual and biological factors. Sullivan, for example, divides human performance into two categories based on the "end states" or goals which are involved. The first involves "satisfactions," by which Sullivan denotes bodily activ- ities. The second end state is "security," which refers to the inter- personal or cultural responses. Having paid his respects to the biologi- cal facet of human behavior, Sullivan went on to focus almost exclusively on security operations and the social dimension of behavior.
In contrast to the antilibido theorists mentioned above, there is a fourth social system of personality which attempts to develop ego, cultural, and interpersonal conceptions within the basic framework of the Freudian psychosexual theory. This is the work of Erik H. Erikson. (1)
Erikson includes in his systematic writings three personality proc- esses, the somatic, the ego, and the societal. He demonstrates (by means of a brilliant marshaling of clinical material) that a human event cannot be understood unless the relativity of these three factors is grasped.
We study individual human crises by becoming therapeutically involved in them. In doing so, we find that the three processes mentioned are three aspects of one process— i.e., human life, both words being equally emphasized. Somatic tension, individual anxiety, and group panic, then, are only different ways in which human anxiety presents itself to different methods of investigation. . . . As we review each relevant item in a given case, we cannot escape the convic- tion that the meaning of an item which may be "located" in one of the three processes is co-determined by its meaning in the other two. An item in one process gains relevance by giving significance to and receiving significance from Items in the others. Gradually, I hope, we may find better words for this relativity in human existence— &s we shall tentatively call what we wish to demonstrate. (1, p. 33)
INTERPERSONAL DIMENSION OF PERSONALITY 1 1
Erikson has made the most sophisticated and successful attempt to integrate historical, sociological, anthropological, and biological data into a personality system. He takes for his model of individual char- acter structure the Freudian psychosexual theory to which he has added an interpersonal terminology. His commitment to the biology of the libido theory is stated quite directly. "It will seem to some that I am abandoning this point of view [i.e., the importance of interper- sonal regulation patterns] as I now proceed to review the whole field of what Freud called pregenital stages and erotogenic zones in child- hood and attempt to build a bridge from clinical experience to observa- tions on societies. For I will again speak of biologically given poten- tialities which develop with the child's organism. I do not think that psychoanalysis can remain a workable system of inquiry without its basic biological formulations, much as they may need reconsidera- tion." (l,p. 65)
Erikson has expanded and "socialized" the Freudian timetable of psychosexual adjustment by means of two ingenious systematic devices — his conceptions of zones, modes, and modalities and his theory of the eight stages of man's psychological development.
Erikson focuses on three major zones of psychosexual activity — oral, anal, and genital. He then defines five modes of approach or basic interpersonal vectors which can be expressed by any organ zone. These are incorporative 1 (sucking), incorporative 2 (biting), reten- tive, eliminative, and mtrusive. A matrix of the combination of zones and modes provides a neat device for classifying the fixations, regres- sions, and sequences of normal development.
An even more original conversion of Freudian developmental theory to interpersonal language is accomplished by Erikson by means of his eight stages of human emotional growth. This is a "list of ego qualities — criteria by which the individual demonstrates that his ego, at a given stage, is strong enough to integrate the timetable of the organism with the structure of social institutions." Erikson holds that the individual at each sequential stage of life meets a nuclear conflict, the solution for which "is based on the integration of the earlier ones."
The eight nuclear conflicts according to Erikson are:
Stage of Life Cycle Nuclear Conflict
Oral Sensory Trust vs. Mistrust
Muscular— Anal Autonomy vs. Shame, Doubt
Locomotor— Genital Initiative vs. Guilt
Latency Industry vs. Inferiority
Puberty and Adolescence Identity vs. Role Diffusion
Young Adulthood Intimacy vs. Isolation
Adulthood Generativity vs. Stagnation
Maturity Integrity vs. Disgust, Despair
12 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
Erikson's commitment to an interpersonal and cultural point of view stands out clearly in this list of ego qualities. The extraordinary- power and significance of Erikson's work is this: he has developed a social conception of human nature which certainly equals in com- plexity those of Fromm and Horney — and he has done it within the broad framework of the Freudian libido theory. He seems to have succeeded in his attempt to build a bridge between psychosexual theory and social behavior, and has additionally erected a system which is eminently heuristic.
There is therefore considerable justification for considering Erikson as the first major psychoanalytic systematist since Freud. He has, it must be noted, surpassed Sullivan on his own home ground by pre- senting a developmental timetable which lists sixteen interpersonal resolutions. This provides us with an impressive list of interpersonal variables lacking in the writings of the less systematic Sullivan.
The interpersonal system of personality to be presented in this book has leaned heavily upon the conceptions of Erik H. Erikson. Our classification of interpersonal behavior bears the unmistakable mark of Erikson's theory. We have been able to utilize only a fragment of his system. This is because Erikson's writings range deep and wide — deep into childhood and wide into society. Our own purpose and efforts are much more restricted since we have attempted simply to develop an objective, functional system for predicting the behavior of adult patients in the psychiatric clinic.
Interpersonal Behavior Defines the Most Important Dimension of Personality
In the preceding sections we have presented a definition of inter- personal behavior and have compared several approaches to human nature in the light of their social orientations. The assertion was made that the interpersonal can from this point of view be considered the most crucial and functionally important dimension of personality.
First, from the broader theoretical frame of reference, interpersonal behavior is crucial to the survival of the human being. From a second (and much more parochial) point of view, interpersonal behavior is the aspect of personality that is most functionally relevant to the clinician. Some justification for the first of these assertions will be discussed in the next section. The usefulness of an interpersonal theory in clinical practice will be considered in Chapter 5.
Interpersonal Behavior and Biological Survival
From the standpoint of human survival, social role and social ad- justment comprise the most important dimension of personality. This
INTERPERSONAL DIMENSION OF PERSONALITY i 3
is because of the unique biological and cultural aspects of human devel- opment and maturity.
One of the major differences between man and the other animal species is his long and helpless infancy. Depending on the complexity of the culture, it takes from 12 to 25 years for a human being to attain developmental maturity. This long period of childhood and adoles- cence involves a dependence on other human beings for nourishment, shelter, and security. Many animal species, on the contrary, are ready to undertake complete responsibility for their own survival at birth, or shortly thereafter. In these cases instinctual methods of locomotion, food collection, and self-protection take over immediately. Rigidly built-in patterns of response are vital to their early self-sufficiency. Automatic physiological responses are the key to life for these infra- human organisms.
The case of man is quite different. The human infant has limited physical capacity and few automatic behavior sequences for dealing directly with the physical environment. From the moment of birth, survival depends on the adequacy of interpersonal relationships. The water, warmth, and milk upon which the infant's life depends come from others. These primitive, basic transactions which the neonate carries on with others are, we are told, not rigidly fixed patterns. A variety of early parental response exists, and this is matched by a varia- tion in neonate behavior. Several experts in this field (Sullivan, Klein, Erikson, Ribble, Spitz) have claimed that the roots of personality are to be found in the earliest mother-child interactions. This claim is not surprising when we recall that a raw, intense, basic anxiety (concerned with the maintenance of life itself) may be felt by the neonate. And this anxiety is dealt with (partially or completely, carelessly or lov- ingly, calmly or nervously) by the mothering-one. The earliest kind of survival anxiety is, therefore, handled by interpersonal, social responses.
From the standpoint of physiology the human infant is not much different from any young mammal. From the standpoint of per- sonahty psychology, however, the human being at birth is an extraor- dinarily plastic, germinal nucleus with infinite potentialities for eventual differentiation. It might be said that any neonate is a potential president, priest, poet, or psychotic. PersonaUty psychology is con- cerned with the events and behaviors which determine the emotional and social development of the individual. The most important factors which account for the wide varieties of behavior characteristic of the human being are the interpersonal security operations which he develops and the social relationships (real and fantasied) which he integrates with others.
14 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
We have pointed to the crucial influence of the earliest social trans- actions between mother and child — crucial because of the survival anxiety involved and because of the complete dependence of the infant.
As the child grows, the primacy of interpersonal relationships does not lessen greatly. A seven-year-old child has developed many motoric patterns for self-protection, but on the hypothetical desert island or in any societal context we cannot credit him with survival self- sufficiency.
The human being maintains existence by virtue of the long period of parental protection during which he assimilates the complicated cultural wisdom necessary for survival. This process of slow, and often painful, learning is intensely interpersonal.
Even at maturity survival rests upon successful interpersonal pat- terns. The mutual dependence of mankind is inevitable. Whether we exist in a primitive tribe, a dictatorship, or an industrial democracy, the key to human life lies in the adequacy of social interaction. Even the rare test case of a hermit falls within the limits of this generaliza- tion, since this adjustment technique always involves intense and often bitter "withdrawal" from others, and is one pattern of interpersonal reactivity. The extent to which we autoniatically and implicitly demonstrate patterns of cooperation and submission to social demands — even in the most democratic society — is quite striking. Failure to do so invites such real or fantasied threats to life that we automatically commit ourselves in countless ways to the interpersonal pressure of parents, societies, and contemporaries.
Anxiety Motivates Interpersonal Behavior
The preceding section is intended to justify the statement that inter- personal behavior has a basic survival function. The fear of inter- personal disaster is rooted in a fear of destruction or abandonment. The organism has hundreds of physiological functions by which de- struction is warded off and life preserved. The individual develops, in addition, numerous emotional responses which, in their origins, are concerned with survival. .
The psychological expression of the survival drive of evolution theory is anxiety. Primal anxiety is the fear of abandonment.^ As the child begins to develop, this becomes a fear of rejection and social disapproval. Mankind's social interdependence means that extreme
* In the first version of this manuscript this sentence read, "Primal anxiety is the fear of death." The revision vi^as made at the suggestion of Harvey Powelson, M.D., who pointed out that death is a sophisticated, complex concept which an infant or young child has not mastered.
INTERPERSONAL DIMENSION OF PERSONALITY
15
derogation on the part of crucial others can lead to destruction. The behaviors by which the child avoids derogation are called security operations. They assure him of the approval and social security which reduce his anxiety.
As the individual develops, further complications ensue. Self- esteem becomes a factor which is equal to, or greater than, the overt esteem of others.^
The role of anxiety in the development of human personality is central, and it is intricate beyond our understanding. Although rooted genetically in the fear of death, anxiety (i.e., the fear of disapproval) is clearly stronger in the case of the adult than the fear of death. There are countless examples of human beings choosing to face and accept destruction rather than face anxiety and the loss of self-esteem. Suicide is one of many such examples.
Another complication which must be considered in understanding the effects of anxiety involves the multilevel organization of behaviors for warding off anxiety. A large percentage of any population, for example, develops security operations which entail overt self-efface- ment, self-derogation, and the provocation of actual contempt and disapproval from others. These overt self-derogations, which seem to contradict our theory of anxiety, can be understood by means of a multilevel analysis. They are inevitably related to private feelings of uniqueness or secret consolations. They serve to protect inner feelings of pride and self-enhancement.
This book and the system of personality which it describes is con- cerned with a multilevel investigation of human security operations. We have taken as our task the definition, classification, and measure- ment of interpersonal behavior (at several levels). We view the inter- personal behavior of an individual as the machinery by means of which he wards off anxiety and maintains a multilevel balance of self- enhancement.
The conceptual model of personality which we are developing exposes one area of human behavior to study. This is the interpersonal dimension. The theoretical system is based on one assumption about the motivation of emotional behavior. This has been formalized as follows:
First working principle: Personality is the multilevel pattern of interpersonal responses (overt, conscious, or private) expressed by the individual. Interpersonal behavior is aimed at reducing anxiety. All
^The complexity of the processes of identification and introj action make this com- parison redundant and probably meaningless. There is good reason to believe that self- esteem is usually or always based on values which are taken from others. Thus self- esteem can be considered an indirect form of approval of crucial others.
1 6 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
the social, emotional, interpersonal activities of an individual can be understood as attempts to avoid anxiety or to establish and maintain self-esteem.
References
1. Erikson, E. H. Childhood and society. New York: Norton, 1950.
2. Fenichel, O. Psychoanalytic theory of neurosis. New York: Norton, 1945.
3. Fromm, E. Escape from freedom. New York: Rinehan, 1947.
4. HoRNEY, Karen. Our inner conflicts. New York: Norton, 1945.
5. Sullivan, H. S. Conceptions of modem psychiatry. Washington, D.C.: The Wil- liam Alanson White Psychiatric Foundation, 1947.
6. SuLUVAN, H. S. Multidisciplined coordination of interpersonal data. In S. S Sargent and Marian W. Smith (eds.). Culture and personality. New York: Viking Fund, 1949.
Adjustment-Maladjustment Factors in Personality Theory
It is the theme of this chapter that personality theories should hold for adjustive and maladjustive behaviors, that normality and abnormality should be defined as different points on the same measurement con- tinuum, and that the conceptual terminology of personality should therefore include the entire adjustive range of human activity. Few theories do this. Most are oriented toward abnormal or neurotic behaviors. Most diagnostic systems have few terms for conceptualiz- ing adaptive behavior, which is described in vague generalities or in terms of the absence of pathology.
This is an unfortunate state of affairs. It reflects an undeliberate but significant depreciation of human nature. In addition, this pathol- ogy error tends to distort our theories of personality by placing a disproportionate emphasis on certain limited types of maladjustment,
A science of malfunction cannot precede a science of function. Therapeutic tactics can break new ground, but scientific and theoretic progress depends upon the development of the principles of normal adjustment. The fact that psychiatric theories of personality have been based on clinical experiences has led to some curiously one-sided conceptualizations. Psychiatry, however, cannot be wholly blamed for these restrictions, which, as we shall see, spring from a marked asymmetry in the ethical evaluations of varying interpersonal themes in our Western culture.
Before approaching the definitions of adjustment-maladjustment we shall review psychiatry's overemphasis on the abnormal, and we shall consider some causes and implications of this pathology error.
Psychiatric Theories Are Oriented Towards Pathology
A history of man's conception of his own nature has yet to be written. When our systematic knowledge of human expressive be-
'7
1 8 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
havior is more advanced, it will be possible to study the literary and historical documents of the past, and to determine the expressed and implied views of personality that determined the behavior of our ancestors. One tentative generalization — basic to the theory of this book — may be helpful in surveying the changing conceptions of human nature. This concerns the Locus of Responsibility for human behavior. There seems to be a consistent tendency in the development of psychological knowledge to move the causative factor of human behavior from external to internal forces. This is clearly reflected in the changes in the theoretical explanations of abnormal or maladjus- tive behavior.
We are told that success or failure appeared, to the ancients, to be controlled by the immutable and mysterious powers of nature. Sun, seed, and storm were fearful forces — completely inexplicable. Man's survival responses appeared by comparison quite meaningless. The shift of causative principles to anthropomorphic gods made human behavior somewhat more important. The notion that man can move the gods by propitiation, obedience, or defiance considerably human- izes the causative sequence.
This conception which lasted from the Greek civilization through to the nineteenth century (and which still is maintained by a large majority of individuals living today) defines personality aberration as a religious phenomenon. Maladjustment is a mark of omnipotent inter- vention, generally indicating a sinful nature. The maladjusted person is isolated, overtly punished, or covertly rejected. The error is man's and the power is the god's.
The theories of descriptive psychiatry which emphasized constitu- tional morbidity, although they had the ring of scientific objectivity, were still very crude conceptions. They were abysmally inferior to the insights of the artistic geniuses who preceded them by several centuries. Shakespeare, for example, progressed much further from the Greek mythology than the average hospital psychiatrist of the early 1900's. On the other hand, in the strictest sense of dramatic motivation, Oedipus was a morbidly predisposed type — since no choice is given him at any point to reverse his awful destiny. This type of psychological explanation is quite congenial to pre-Freudian psychiatry. Change a few mythological terms and Oedipus is an acceptable case history from the textbook of the nineteenth century alienist. When we compare this predestined helplessness with the self-imposed conflicts of Shakespeare's characters the descriptive psychiatrist comes off badly. Although Elizabethan theories of human destiny involved chance and fortuitous influences (the wheel of fate), still the reader is impressed by the implication that the poet's heroes
ADJUSTMENT-MALADJUSTMENT FACTORS 19
court their tragic ends because of their own greed, ambition, indeci- sion, and shallowness. The causative agency has moved from the ex- ternal and immovable force to the partial responsibility of the hero for his own self-created destiny.
The notion that human nature and the individual's fate are deter- mined by his own (conscious or unconscious) decisions and solutions is brilliantly illustrated by Marcel Proust. In Remembrance of Things Past he describes how his hero deliberately trains and provokes his parents to accept him as a neurotic child. In the following episode he literally creates his own maladjustment and develops the weak and asocial role he is to maintain in his future life. His parents agree, " 'It is his nerves . . .' . And thus for the first time my unhappiness was regarded no longer as a fault for which I must be punished, but as an involuntary evil which has been officially recognized, a nervous condition for which I was in no way responsible: I had the consola- tion that I need no longer mingle apprehensive scruples with the bit- terness of my tears; I could weep henceforth without sin."
The narrator recognizes, however, that his neurosis is not "involun- tary," but rather a purposive, victorious interpersonal maneuver. He has unconsciously selected nervousness as a security operation. The narrator then goes on to say, "I ought then to be happy; I was not. It struck me that my mother had just made a first concession which must have been painful to her, that it was a first step down from the ideal she had formed for me, and that for the first time she, with all her courage, had to confess herself beaten. It struck me that if I had just scored a victory it was over her; that I had succeeded, as sickness or sorrow or age might have succeeded, in relaxing her will, in altering her judgment; that this evening opened a new era, must remain a black date in the calendar." (4, p. 49)
Freudian Theory of Normality
With the Freudian theory, psychology begins to catch up with the intuitions of literature. Man's character, his responses and solu- tions to the overwhelming conflicts of life are brought into focus. While man has a choice of reactions which bring relative amounts of temporary security, the balance, according to Freud, is still on the side of the native, instinctual endowment. The doctrine of instincts em- phasizes the inevitable pressure of drives external to the ego. In early psychoanalytic theory it is libidinal drive that is basic, inborn, con- stant, and, in the final sense, victorious. The adaptive forces are acquired, inconstant, variable, and, in the final sense, secondary. In fact, the ego functions, defense mechanisms, and character traits were sometimes interpreted as neurotic solutions.
20 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
By building his logical notational structure on the "id" instincts, Freud was making a formal decision, and not an empirical discovery. Impressed by the new insights he obtained into the antisocial impulses, it was natural for Freud to base his theory on that aspect of human motivation. It is generally accepted that later developments in psycho- analysis have reversed this trend, and have placed more emphasis on the ego, studying its structure, function, and the multiplex variety of its processes. But it is also commonly known that early psychoanalytic terminology tends to lack terms for describing adjustive behavior and normal processes. The conceptual contributions of Erikson have competently filled in this gap in the psychoanalytic nosology.
The psychoanalytic theory of personality, which is by far the most complete and complex theory, is based on the statistically narrow, neurotic extreme of the general population in two or three Occidental countries. As we shall see subsequently, there is good evidence to suggest that early psychiatric and psychoanalytic theory was based on less than one half of the range of this maladjustive extreme, and that perhaps 50 per cent of neurotic solutions remained largely un- defined.
The curious phenomenon of a massive theoretical structure erected on an emaciated sample of subjects is, I believe, due to two basic factors, one logical and one empirical. Freud's formal choice in em- phasizing the destructive strivings is historically comprehensible, and no detraction from his creative genius.
The empirical factor, as I have suggested, refers to the narrow range of individuals whose neurosis is such as to lead them to submit to the singular and rather implausible process of psychoanalysis (cf. Chapter 12).
Jung's Emphasis on Adaptive Behavior
The Jungian school of analytic psychology produced several im- portant revisions of Freudian concepts. Most of its unique contribu- tions are refinements and extensions of Freudian theory. To the extent that any cognitive issue was involved, we can say that the Zurich group split off from Vienna when Jung rejected the narrow sexual interpretation of libidinal energy. By broadening the meaning of this basic impulse, Jung and his followers have made it general and vague, and thus relegated it to a secondary theoretical position. This indirect shelving of the libido theory can be taken as an unpremeditated, but vital, aspect of the Jungian position. Other revisions pertinent to this discussion include theories of functions, neurosis, and unconscious motivation.
ADJUSTMENT-MALADJUSTMENT FACTORS 2i
The Jungian functions — extroversion, intuition, thinking, etc. — are seen as important, but not necessarily negative, psychological mech- anisms. They are pathological only when rigidly misused or when completely repressed. For the most part, when a Jungian diagnostician calls the subject "introverted" he is not making a value judgment; he implies only that this is an important way in which the patient handles experience and its conflicts, and it may or may not be necessary to modify its use.
It follows, then, that the Jungians do not see character distortions as pathological fixations or regressions to inevitable infantile stages. They describe neurosis as a partial solution to life's dilemmas — a construc- tive mobilizing of "psychic" resources against real or imagined threats. They might say of the neurotic pattern, "This is a good try, perhaps the best you could do under those circumstances. Now let's see what the results of these solutions have been and what other possibilities for resolution we can discover."
This approach has much to recommend it. It is very congenial to the current medical conception which defines disease, not as an un- fortunate falling ill, but as a complicated interaction between one net- work of adaptive responses and another network of threatening events.
Another, and perhaps the greatest, advantage of the Jungian system is the conception of unconscious motivations as valuable, undiscovered potentials of the self, rather than as destructive impulses. Bateson has appraised the Jungian viewpoint as more consistent with the prin- ciples of communication theory. He points out that
the Freudian ambition to substitute ego for id or to include the id within the scope of the ego, sounds to Jungians like advocating manipulative and conscious control of the foreign body. In reply to this they would urge merely the acceptance— even the joyful acceptance— of the fact that the foreign body though always and inevitably unconscious is really a part of the self and the self a part of it— the collective unconscious being imagined to be in some sense greater than the self. (5, p. 264)
With this background it becomes clear that the Jungian theory, although based on and indebted to the work of Freud, has made certain advances toward a balanced conception of normahty-abnormality factors. Shifting the stress from infantile strivings to the selecting and adapting functions of response helps to free psychology from fatalistic themes which have limited man's view of human nature from Sophocles' time through Freud's.
Jungian theories have contributed, often indirectly, to four promis- ing notions. First they bring us closer to the development of a normality-abnormality continuum, which makes neurosis not a quali-
22 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
tatively different phenomenon. They help us see the interaction be- tween biological-cultural pressures and the adaptive-maladaptive responses of the individual. They emphasize the "circular or reticu- late" equilibrium of different levels of personality rather than the one-sided organization for warding off unconscious motivations. Finally, they are, perhaps, the first to introduce the far-reaching idea that unconscious or repressed motives can be positive, constructive potentials, and are not necessarily negative.
Many of these doctrines were only implicit in Jung's writings, and credit for their informal, undramatic development must be assigned to certain American analytic psychiatrists, in particular, Joseph Wheel- wright and Joseph Henderson.
Homey and Fromm on Normality
This general tendency to focus upon adjustive behavior has been given articulate expression by psychiatric systemists who have em- phasized the cultural dimension of personality. When Horney and Fromm substitute cultural factors for instinctual pressure in the causative formula, they bring about drastic revision in attitudes toward mental health and disease. In the first place, the sexual and aggressive instincts — defined by Freud as universal, immutable, and antisocial — tend to taint all men with a new form of original sin. The culture concept is much more flexible. It gives man, or sohie men, a halfway chance because of the wide variation in social environments and cultural pressures.
Thus the diagnostician's causative questions become: "What were the set of biological, familial, social, and cultural pressures which this patient faced, and what was the particular network of responses by which he dealt with them?" The issue of normality-abnormality takes on new meaning in this context. A survey of the publications of Fromm or Horney will reveal the extent to which these authors are concerned with the individual's attempts to solve his conflicts. We have in the previous chapter cited a partial list of some dozen mech- anisms, escapes, and trends described by these two theorists. Over and over again they emphasize the response of the patient to the en- vironment, and his interactions with it. Their interest in pathology is always hnked to the underlying notion that neurosis is acquired by and through the individual's reactions to social stress, and the sub- sidiary idea that it can be "cured" by shifting one's reactions to stress in the future.
Basic and implicit to the theories of both is the theme that mal- adjustment is different in degree, and not in kind, from the so-called norm. Fromm states this clearly,
ADJUSTMENT-MALADJUSTMENT FACTORS 23
The phenomena which we observe in the neurotic person are in principle not different from those we find in the normal. They are only more accentuated, clear-cut, and frequently more accessible to the awareness of the neurotic person than they are in the normal who is not aware of any personal problem which warrants study. (1, p. 17)
Sullivan and the Concept of Normality
Within the framework of a brief historical review we have been selecting several themes which comprise the message of this chapter. These include the qualitative similarity of normality-abnormality, the locus of responsibility assigned to the individual's behavior, rather than to fatalistic forces, and the necessity to take into account the multi- level nature of human potentialities. These concepts, which are im- plicit in the development of psychoanalytic theory during the last fifty years, appear over and over again in the writings of Sullivan. This theorist, we recall, holds that the self is formed through the child's sensitivity to approval and disapproval. If we accept this notion that personality is determined by interpersonal anxiety we have closed the qualitative gap between normal and abnormal. ''Everything that can be found in mental disorder can be found in anyone, but the accent, the prominence, the misuse, of that which is found in the mental patient, is more or less characteristic." (3, p. 77) With this re- mark SuUivan advances the concept of the continuity of normal and abnormal human behavior which developed from the orig- inal Jungian protest. Listing neurotic and normal behavior along a relativistic continuum is a humanistic trend, which results in changing techniques in psychotherapy. Moreover, it lends itself more directly to scientific procedures, since probability laws become considerably more feasible. The pathology error in psychiatric thinking led to theorems that were based on neurotic behavior, and which had little to say about normal functioning. By concentrating on the processes of adaptation in their successful and unsuccessful forms the stage is set for many new personality systems which will hold for all human behavior.
Emphasis on Adaptive Responses Leads
to a Neutral Conceptio?i of Human Nature
To insist that psychology focus on man's executive, adaptive reac- tions— in their adjustive flexibility as well as their maladjustive extreme — is not to argue for a bright-eyed optimistic view of the human situation. In many ways it is much kinder to inform a fellow human being that his misery or failure is due to divine direction, inherited disposition, or biological destiny. We remember that Sophocles, while plunging Oedipus into the depth of despair, never forced him to express man's most poignant lament, "I could have done
J . BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
differently." His fate was always in the hands of the gods. The responsibility for human destiny is thereby transferred to external forces. This view relieves man of the obligation to effect change, which is assigned to omnipotent powers among whom later generations have included the physician. This is probably the easiest and most comfortable conception of human nature.
When we interpret adjustment in terms of the individual's own responses, rigid solutions, and escape mechanisms, we present our fellow-sufferers with an ambiguous gift. Two rather staggering im- plications accompany this conception. Neither are particularly optim- istic. The first is, "You must accept the blame or credit for your present situation; you, and not your rejecting parents, your race, your instinctual heritage, your drunken husband, but your own pat- tern of repetitive and self-limiting responses created it." To this grim frankness we must add the corollary, "To you, therefore, is given the power to change your situation. . . . it is impossible and unnecessary to change your childhood, the society in which you live, your skin color, your biological make-up, or your spouse — what is required is a change in your inaccurate perceptions and rigid reactions."
When we replace immutable external forces with self-determinism, we invite the individual to accept a most lonely and frightening power which, as Fromm has pointed out, none of us are well trained to assume. This is, of course, neither an optimistic nor a pessimistic point of view, being rather the neutral realistic statement of the reciprocal principles of social interaction and self-determination.
Symptom and Character
The changing approaches to personality just described have re- sulted in an additional clarifying abstraction which is very pertinent to the conception of neurosis. This is the distinction between symptom and character.
As used in this context, the term character refers to the personality — the durable, multiple-level pattern of interpersonal tendencies or- ganized into stable or unstable equilibria. This complex organization of perception and action is a logical notational structure by which we conceptualize the anxiety-reducing operations of the individual. It is the theoretical and linguistic device by which we summarize our knowledge of a human being. The character structure, as the sum total of an individual's interpersonal behavior, is the psychologist's shorthand for the social human being.
A symptom, as succinctly defined by Masserman (2, p. 298), is any "overt manifestation of a disease or behavior disorder." It is one aspect of the unified network of variables that make up personality.
ADJUSTMENT-MALADJUSTMENT FACTORS 25
and an important aspect in that it indicates an imbalance or malfunc- tion in the character structure. A symptom not only tells us that something is distorted in the personality, but in the nature of its specificity often suggests what kind of a distortion exists. Regardless of how centrally painful psychiatric symptoms may be to the patient or to his intimates, their meaning, function, and treatment must be viewed as one set of factors related to many others in the personality organization.
To illustrate the distinction between symptom and character, let us pose the question, what do we mean by neurosis? Psychiatric text- books define neurosis in terms of repetitive, anxiety-driven behavior based on internal conflict, and manifesting certain symptomatic ex- pressions. This is a broad, inclusive, dictionary-type definition, and a pretty good one. It emphasizes not only the external appearance of neurosis — the symptoms — but also the underlying character distor- tions. Unhappily when the nonanalytic psychiatrist takes off his Sunday-best terminology and lists his workday operating diagnostic concepts, this nice balance is lost. Most, if not all, of the commonly used psychiatric categories — schizoid, depressive, psychopathic, psy- chosomatic— are symptom-oriented. They are based on certain ex- ternal signs of unsuccessful adaption. In practice, an individual is diagnosed as neurotic if he manifests the so-called psychiatric symp- toms which are restricted to a certain range of social inefficiencies. Most patients come to the psychiatric clinic not expressing dissatis- faction with their character, but requesting relief from symptoms. The attention of the patient and most preanalytic therapists is naturally directed to the painful, and often terrifying external manifes- tations of psychiatric distress. This symptom orientation supplies another reason why psychiatry and the personality theories it has produced have taken on the negativistic, neurosis-bound cast which we have called the pathology error.
The attempt to develop personality theories in the atmosphere of the consulting room and clinic has resulted in still another interesting limitation. The second half of this compound fallacy is caused by the fact that (until the last decade), of all neurotic character types, only about one half came in any frequency to seek psychotherapeutic help. We can suspect that about 50 per cent of individuals with marked character distortions (i.e., one half of the diagnostic continuum) did not show up in large numbers in the nineteenth century psychiatric office because the very essence of their imbalance tended to push them away from dependence, self-revelation, and conforming cooperation.
The diagnostic chapters of this book will consider this interesting phenomenon in some detail. It is pertinent to the argument here to
26 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
point out that a large percentage of the maladjusted population has traditionally received little psychiatric attention. They were not studied because they did not come for psychiatric help. They did not seek therapeutic assistance because the core of their anxiety-reducing operations was a compulsive maintenance of povi^er, independence, competitiveness, or defiance — interpersonal techniques which pre- clude, under ordinary circumstances, the role of a psychiatric patient.
Working Principle II: Adjustive-Maladjustive Personality Variables
Thus, our personality theories have not only been lopsided in the direction of maladjusted rather than normal subjects, but also limited by overemphasis on a narrow fragment of the over-all neurotic popu- lation. We can now present the second principle upon which the interpersonal system is based.
Second working principle: The variables of a personality system should be designed to measure — on the same continuum — the normal, adjustive aspects of behavior as ivell as abnormal or pathological extremes.
In validating a system of personality, the procedures of data collec- tion should include samples of both adjusted and maladjusted subjects. Among the maladjusted there should be proportionate empirical attention to those subjects whose anxiety is lessened by rushing- into-a-psychiatric-clinic as well as those whose anxiety is dimin- ished by a rushing-away-from-the-interpersonal-implications-of-the- psychotherapeutic-situation.
By basing their conceptions on the human character structure, rather than on a fractional segment of symptoms, Erikson, Horney, Fromm, and Sullivan have doubled the range of personality types. We learn that many apparently successful and socially approved behavior extremes — the driving competitor, the overambitious leader, the over- popular hero — can be based on imbalanced and neurotic character structures. It is easy to add the corollary that many phenomena clas- sically considered deeply pathological — mild autistic withdrawals, moderate unconventionality, moderate depressed obsessiveness — are not severe imbalances but constructive, healthy, and perfectly ac- ceptable methods of warding off anxiety.
Effect of Cultural Values on Theories of Normality
Fromm speaks in this connection of the difference between per- sonal and social maladjustment. Social efficiency manifested by public esteem, high income, and feverish productivity may give the appear-
ADJUSTMENT-MALADJUSTMENT FACTORS 27
ance of healthy adjustment at the expense of disequilibrium and in- ternal distortion. Social inefficiency, defined in terms of low income, nonconformity, modest station, social introversion, and relaxed am- bition does not always indicate unhappiness or psychic disturbance. Poets have known this for some centuries.
The basic values of the American middle class, which insidiously permeate all of its members, exert their influence on contemporary psychiatric theories. It is very easy to identify normality with con- ventionality or optimistic, active, responsible independence; and neurosis with nonconformity or pessimistic, inactive sensitivity.
The definition of adjustment is thus complicated by the inevitable pressure of value systems: Is it more "normal" to express constructive, conjunctive, conventional affiUative feelings? Is it more "abnormal" to manifest distrustful, hostile, rebellious behavior?
The personality theorist need not base his definition on cultural values, but it is certainly necessary to take into account the social and ethical esteem which attaches to certain popular security operations.
There are two issues which must be faced — a quantitative and a qualitative consideration of adjustment.
Quantitative Definition of Adjustment
This book is presenting a system for diagnosing personality which strives to be objective and operational. This commits us to a quan- titative definition of maladjustment. We set up continua for measur- ing or classifying interpersonal behavior in terms of several indices. Normality-abnormality is defined in terms of these indices.
The first of these quantitative scales concerns consistent modera- tion versus intensity at any one level of behavior. The former is con- sidered adjustive, the second maladjustive.
The second categorization concerns flexibility versus rigidity at any one level of behavior. The former is considered adjustive, the latter maladjustive.
A third quantitative index of normality involves the stability or oscillation among different levels of personality. Extreme conflict (oscillation) among levels is viewed as maladjustive. So is extreme interlevel rigidity, i.e., the same interpersonal operations repeated at all levels. Stable or balanced interlevel patterns are seen as adjustive.
A fourth (and less clear-cut) definition of normality involves measurements of accuracy and appropriateness. If behavior is in- appropriate, if perceptions are inaccurate, then maladjustment is indicated.
The methodology and specific apphcation of these quantitative in- dices will be described in later sections of this book.
2 8 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
Qualitative Definition of Adjustment
A second approach to the definition of adjustment and maladjust- ment involves a qualitative assessment of behavior. Here we do not ask "how much?" or "how rigid?" or "how accurate?" but concen- trate on luhat kind of interpersonal behavior.
The qualitative definition of normality is inextricably rooted in value judgments and does not appear to be useful in developing an objective diagnostic system. The quantitative concept of adjustment is based on the notion of personal adjustment. How balanced, ac- curate, adaptable are the security operations? How successful are they in warding off anxiety? The qualitative concept is based on social adjustment — conformity to cultural stereotypes as to what is normal.
Let us grant that no human being is perfectly balanced, and that everyone has developed modes of dealing with anxiety which em- phasize certain interpersonal behaviors and minimize others. The qualitative question then becomes: Are there socially preferred kinds of security operations? Are there certain modes of response which are intrinsically better than others?
Is conventionality or loving trust, for example, intrinsically more adjusted than bitter rebellion?
There is no answer to these questions. This is a cultural, ethical issue. The neutral position of the scientist (which of course is an ideal and never an actuality) can be preserved by accepting explicitly quantitative definitions of adjustment and avoiding (as far as it is pos- sible) the qualitative.
By way of illustration, let us consider two patients, both of whom have intense underlying feelings of despair and a long history of deprivation and derogation. One patient reacts to these inner feelings and experiences by means of a rigid conventionality and conformity to duty. The second patient reacts to the same inner feelings and the same unhappy history by means of a rigid rebellion and bitter rejec- tion of conventional behavior.
Assuming the rigidity and intensity of the two security operations to be equal, is one more adjustive than the other? A quantitative definition would hold that there is no difference.
A qualitative definition might tend to consider one more normal than the other. Certainly, most cultural, ethical values would prefer the former conforming, cooperative operations and disapprove of the latter. But from the standpoint of the individual and his quest for se- curity it will be seen that both may achieve the same amount of self- esteem and suffer from the same amount of conflict. They may be equally successful in warding off anxiety.
ADJUSTMENT-MALADJUSTMENT FACTORS 29
Large and diverse samples of subjects studied by means of dis- ciplined, logical variable systems offer the best protection against one- sided success-oriented personality theories. The invaluable assistance of formal classification and notational structures in systematizing the data of human nature is one of the basic maxims of this book. The following chapter is devoted to this topic. The following example will serve to illustrate its usefulness in the context of the present discussion of social versus personal adjustment.
Illustration of the Impact of Cultural Values on Conceptions of Moral Character
In the process of developing a systematic list of interpersonal variables it is obvious that hostile and affectionate behaviors are among the commonly employed means of dealing with others. When we apply the principles of the normality-abnormality continuum, it fol- lows logically that we must have linguistic terms for describing inter- mediate points along the continuum between these two interpersonal motives. This is to say, we must measure the moderate-adaptive and the intense pathological extremes of each morive. Thus, in devising rating scales, diagnostic terms, test check lists and the like, it is formally required that we have signs or terms to reflect the adjustively hostile, the adjustively affectionate, the maladaptively hostile, and the mal- adaptively affectionate.
When the Kaiser Foundation psychology research project began to develop a system of interpersonal variables, a puzzling linguistic situation was uncovered. It became clear that the English language — whether that of the psychiatrist or that of the general public — has a marked imbalance in the number of terms which describe different interpersonal themes. There was no trouble in obtaining long columns of words describing the positive, socially adaptive expressions of friendliness, amiability, love, agreeability, etc. Nor was there difficulty in listing maladjustive, pathologically toned denotations of extreme hostility, hatred, opposition, rage, etc. It was, however, a tedious task to get three or four commonly used words for the concept of adjustive, socially approved hostility. Considerable dictionary, thesaurus, and literary research uncovered a few such words — frank, blunt, critical — but it appears that the English language, and the implicit folk con- ceptions of human nature that underly it, pay little attention to the theme of appropriate expression of disaffiliative interpersonal behavior.
Interpersonal check lists were given to large samples of diverse sub- jects in order to obtain a balanced variable system and to determine the expected frequency of social motivations attributed to self. The logic of the personality system and statistical simplicity demanded a balance
30 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
between hostile and friendly terms, but the one-sidedness of the inter- personal terminology and conceptualization of Anglo-American cul- ture made it necessary to employ such clumsy terms as righteous anger, not afraid to be critical, and the like, in order to express the theme of adaptive, appropriate hostility.
When we seek to find terms which express extreme, rigid mal- adjustive affectionate behavior, the problem becomes insoluble. There are no such simple words in the language. According to our linguistic forefathers, the human being cannot be too loving. The notion that one can be neurotically or compulsively affiliative is literally unthought of.
In this instance, the logical principles of the normality-abnormality continuum of interpersonal behavior and the discipline of a formal notational system lead to some interesting semantic, anthropological speculations and a further illustration of the one-sided clinical error.
What Is Adjustment?
In pointing out the limitations of classical psychiatry, and in advo- cating expanded symmetrical, logical principles for dealing with the normality-abnormaUty continuum, we have left untouched two vital questions: What is normality? What is neurosis? These are crucial issues because the theoretical position assumed on these questions is inextricably bound to the resulting conceptions of personality organi- zation, diagnosis, and therapeutic orientation.
Horney presents changing and developing definitions of neurosis in her different publications. In general, she appears to see normality as flexibility, optimal productivity, as well as a relative emancipation from anxiety and the conflicts which accompany it. Fromm stresses produc- tiveness, responsibility, mature affection, understanding, a rational handling of the authority relationship, and "freedom" from irrational dependence. Sullivan defines mental health as accurate, mutually re- warding interpersonal relationships. All of these authors are aware of the effect of the culture on our conception of normality. They point out that deviation from the norm must be viewed in the context of the social background. When Sullivan ties his most adequate mode of ex- perience— the syntaxic — to consensual validation he recognizes cul- tural relativity, and holds that a "great deal of most people's syntaxic experience is bound by the prescriptions and limitations of the culture . . ."
When we survey these criteria of normality, two thoughts may occur. First, they are all partially vahd, in the sense that they refer to aspects of adjustive functioning. Second, none of them is complete, systematic, or too well organized. Productivity, syntaxic function,
ADJUSTMENT-MALADJUSTMENT FACTORS 31
and achievement of one's potential are broad concepts, admirable foundations for a philosophy of human nature, but much too vague and general to be used as research and clinical variables.
From the standpoint of operational measurement, most definitions of normality are either too specific, and thus fragmentary, or too broad, and thus imprecise. This is because normality cannot be sys- tematically defined until a comprehensive system exists for organizing the multiplex data of human nature. Personality processes operate at many levels and in many forms. The nature of the definition of neurosis is always chained to the nature of the system of variables by w^hich the theorist classifies human behavior.
We shall obtain rigorous, logical, complex heuristic definitions of adjustment-maladjustment when we are given systematic multilevel definitions of human personality. Until then the conception of neurosis will reflect the level of personality to which the theorist is limited.
At this point in the discussion it is appropriate to introduce the theory of normality basic to the personality system presented in this book. To venture its definition at this early stage of the exposition is a hazardous proposition. Since a detailed description of personality organization has not been presented, a detailed definition of normality is premature. We shall be forced to employ undefined words, refer to undefined levels and their undescribed relationships. Fluent expres- sion of nonoperationally defined terms is the easiest trap that awaits the personality theorist. We shall, with these reservations, present a verbal description of normality, at the same time referring the reader ahead to the systematic and operationally defined categories which are to follow in Chapter 12.
Adjustment in terms of the over-all personality organization con- sists in flexible, balanced, appropriate, accurate interpersonal behavior. In terms of the subdivisions of personality — the levels of public inter- action, perception, and private symbolism — it consists of appropriate, accurate, and balanced interpersonal behavior respectively. When we re-examine this definition we shall see that each term has a rigorous quantitative meaning — referring to specific, operationally defined processes. In the broad scope, we call normality an equilibrium of all the levels of personality such that the necessary mild character distor- tions at some levels are moderately counterbalanced at other levels. A different subdefinition exists for each different level of personality. At the level of perception of self or others, accuracy or syntaxic agree- ment with consensual perception is a partial index of adjustment. At the level of overt interaction, the proportion of flexible interactions appropriate to the interpersonal stimulus becomes the index of adjust-
32 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
ment. At the level of indirect, fantasy expression, the breadth of symbolic themes and their balance and relationship to the other levels provides the ratio of adjustment/
The verbal definition of adjustment presented above rests upon one basic (philosophic) assumption: survival anxiety as the motivating force of interpersonal behavior. This premise shapes the resulting theory of normality. It also focuses on certain types of variables (interpersonal), and requires certain formal multilevel systems for relating these variables. The conception of adjustment-maladjust- ment presented in this section, therefore, does not stand as an isolated verbal entity. This will become clearer as we examine, in later chap- ters, the specific and, in the following chapter, the general principles of the system on which it is based.
' In Chapter 12 operational methods for classifying and diagnosing behavior will be presented. This conception of adjustment is based on the notions of moderation, bal- ance, and flexibility. In developing objective criteria for measuring these qualities we have found ourselves borrowing from certain historical antecedents and rejecting others. Moderation and the avoidance of extremes is, of course, the definition of adjustment sponsored by Aristotle. Flexibility and the avoidance of narrow, rigid forms of adjustment is the Renaissance ideal. The Christian conception of values views normality as a victor over man's intrinsic evil nature. This notion is reflected in the psychiatric theories of adjustment developed in the nineteentli century. It is a curious irony that empirical approaches to the definition of normality find their intellectual heritage in the Greek and Renaissance philosophies which are more distant in many other respects from the ethos of t%ventieth-century culture.
References
1. Fromm, E. Escape from freedom. New York: Rinehart, 1951.
2. Masserman, J. H. Principles of dynamic psychiatry. Philadelphia: Saunders, 1946.
3. MuLLAHY, p. The theories of Harry Stack Sullivan. In P. Mullahy (ed.). The Contributions of Harry Stack Sullivan. New York: Hermitage House, 1952.
4. Proust, M. Swann's way. Translated by C- K. Scott-MoncriefT. London: Chatto, 1922. Vol. 1.
5. RuEscH, J., and G. Bateson. Communication. New York: Norton, 1951.
Systematizing the Complexity of Personality
That segment of personality which we have selected to systematize centers on adjustive and maladjustive interpersonal behavior. Even when we narrow our field to the social dimension of personality, the systematic task remaining is terribly complicated. The diversity of interpersonal behavior covers a wide range. It includes all the things a subject does to others at all levels of personality — overtly, symboli- cally, and in private perceptions. When we add the parallel behaviors of others who do things to the subject we obtain a network of events that probably equals in complexity the data of the physical sciences. When we consider further the effects of culture, sex difference, and the peculiarly self-deceptive nature of emotional data, the enormity of the scientific task becomes clear.
In undertaking this complex mission, personality psychology can, fortunately, count on some conceptual assistance — new developments in the philosophy of science. In recent years considerable progress has been made by a group of logicians and positivist philosophers which is directly apphcable to the field of personality. The study of human nature can find guide posts in the general principles which guide the physical sciences.
The Basic Conceptual Unit of Personality
We shall begin by considering a preliminary question. When we study the interpersonal behavior of an individual, what is the basic datum on which we make our judgments? The first answer to this question might be that we employ a variety of behavioral cues: projec- tive personality tests, tales of woe from the interview, the angry tones of voice, dream texts, and the hke. These are, it is true, the events, but
33
34 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
they are not the basic data for the study of personality. How can we measure these written, oral, and physical expressions in such a way as to provide comparative conceptual material? It is possible, but rarely feasible, to capture these events by sound and movie equipment. Even then we must decide what to do with these unwieldy materials when we get them.
For many years researchers have been working within one or an- other of these areas of raw personality data, painfully building up com- plex devices for categorizing the different surface types of expression. Hundreds of systems for dealing with personality tests have been pub- lished. We have learned, to our horror, that it is possible to devise measurement scales for each facet of personahty expression. Thus, it is possible to have an elaborate continuum for rating each type of test, another for measuring the amount of sadness or depression expressed by the subject, another for classifying the nuances of tone of voice. None of these scales need any relationship to each other, and they leave unsolved the great paradox that personality must be considered as somewhat unified yet is expressed in a variety of ways.
Actually, a distressing amount of creative energy has gone into molecular, stimulus-bound research of this sort. One method of clas- sifying the responses to one test, the Rorschach ink blots, involves over sixty elaborate and tricky rating procedures. These variables have direct reference only to the ink blots themselves, and by circuitous and generally unvalidated intuition refer to a few aspects of general behavior. This is a single example of the unfortunate and common practice of chasing one aspect of raw personality data down a tortuous side alley.
We have several score of personality tests, each of which employs tedious methods for summarizing an extremely artificial and narrow range of expressive behavior. Most of these tests force the develop- ment of miniature personality theories which work for the tiny seg- ment of behavior that they tap. A test which uses sand and water as part of the stimulus items thus employs a theory which gives sand and water a prominent role in personality development.
The solution we have employed to deal with this unsatisfactory situation is to define as the basic data of personahty, not the expressive events, but the communications by the subject or by others about his interpersonal activity. The basic units of personality come from the protocol language by which the subject's interpersonal behavior is described.
When the subject smiles we attend to it, but the smile is not the datum which directly concerns us. Someone who is present in the situation, or observes it in cinematic form, has to make a protocol
THE COMPLEXITY OF PERSONALITY 35
statement about this movement of facial muscles before it becomes a datum of personality. We study not the actual behavior, but the language about it (including the subject's language about it).
This may sound, at first impression, like a restricting definition. But when we remember that we can obtain many descriptions of the same momentary event, it actually provides a systematic way of multiplying our knowledge. The smile, for example, might elicit many data sen- tences. The subject himself might describe his motive purpose at the moment as friendliness. The consensual report of many judges might agree in attributing friendly purpose to the smile. A suspicious relative, however, might judge it as smug or patronizing. A dependent relative might attribute tender sympathy. Thus, this facial gesture produces many protocol statements which provide interpersonal information about the subject's description of self and his social stimulus value to others.
The basic data of personality studied by the interpersonal system are the verbal protocol statements about interpersonal behavior, i.e., the language in which the subject or others describe his inter- personal interactions, perceptions, and symbols. The diverse molecular responses — tears, bodily movements, test reactions — are the raw ma- terials. From them we obtain the building blocks for the scientific study of personality. These are units of classification — terms such as depressed, angry, confident.
The Structure of Scientific Language
In the methodological aspects of the science, we use a wide variety of empirical techniques to obtam the raw data of personality. We utilize these direct observations by converting them into systematic protocol language. Scientific study of personality consists in a study of the systematic language by which we describe the many facets of behavior. These conceptual operations refer to the formal aspects of the science.
This important division of scientific procedures into empirical and formal propositions has developed out of the scientific philosophy of the twentieth century. Bertrand Russell and the Logical Positivists (Wittgenstein, Carnap, etc.) have helped to make the distinction be- tween the synthetic operational language, which refers to measurable events in the physical-social world, and the formal analytic procedures by which the language of science is organized.
These two distinct types of scientific communications were rede- fined and a third pragmatic function added by C. W. Morris. This American philosopher claimed that all scientific activity can be studied as forms of the language of science. The general science which studies
35 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
the entire field of scientific communication he calls semiotic. He defines three different functions of scientific behavior: ( 1 ) Semantics studies the relation of signs to objects and thus covers the empirical, experimental, and methodological aspects of science. (2) Syntactics is concerned with the relation of signs to signs, and involves the formal procedures of logic, syntax, and mathematics. (3) Pragmatics deals with the relation of signs to the users of signs. This branch of semiotic studies the functional and applied meaning of communicative behavior. Let us examine Morris' three functions in more detail.
(1) Every science has unique methods and variables for dealing with its specific data. These variables and their relationships are de- scribed in terms of language. Thus, despite the great variations in what scientists do with their various data, the net result always involves communication or sign behavior.
Certain general rules hold for all empirical investigations. Among these we include the need for unambiguous operational definitions of terms, and the need for public and repeatable measurements, pro- cedures, and the like. Morris calls these semantic rules since they gov- ern the relationship of signs to the empirical events. All sciences differ, but all must conform to the same standards of objectivity.
(2) These empirical propositions which are related to observable and testable facts are crucially different from the formal prepositional structures of a science. The latter comprise systems which regulate the relationship of signs or language units. They have no empirical reference. Such formal devices are indispensable because they deter- mine how the researcher organizes his factual language. Mathematics and the logical deductive systems employed by modem science do not depend upon empirical proof. They are, in this sense, complex sets of terms which are inflexibly related to each other according to pre- established, assumed rules. The arithmetical statement "two times five equals ten," for example, is a predetermined relationship based on our original definition of what each of the terms means. This sentence is therefore empty of factual meaning. The psychoanalytic statement "the ego wards off instinctual impulses," is similarly formal, depend- ing on the assumed relationship of ego and instinct. It has no empirical meaning.
(3) The pragmatic aspects of the language of personality delimit a broad and ramified field. They refer to the sociology of our psy- chological knowledge, its pohtics, its practical application in diagnosis and therapy. We have found it necessary to narrow the scope of the pragmatics of our system to the predictive function in the psychiatric clinic. We have selected the interpersonal framework because it ap- pears to be the most functional in terms of survival of the individual
THE COMPLEXITY OF PERSONALITY
37
and a critical prediction of clinical events. In due course we shall attempt to show that every variable and every diagnostic category presented in this book has been chosen to predict directly the crucial aspects of the subject's future behavior — particularly with the future therapist. Thus we equate the pragmatics of personality psy- chology with prediction. From the standpoint of psychiatric opera- tions— the orientation of this book — nothing is so important as to have probability knowledge of the patient's future pattern of inter- personal behavior. This interpretation of the pragmatics of person- ality is, of course, the narrow sector of the broad field outlined by Morris that is most pertinent to a clinical psychology.
With this threefold classification in mind, let us return to the dis- tinction between empirical and formal propositions. Since empirical statements are related to and are limited to observable events, and since formal statements are not, it is of critical importance to distinguish between the two types of propositions. Failure to do so leads to dan- gerous fallacies. These generally involve tautological formal state- ments which appear to be empirical assertions. The psychoanalytic phrase just quoted, for example, refers only to Freud's logical struc- ture of personality. It refers to the relationship between the language forms "ego" and "id" employed by Freud. The psychoanalytic lin- guistic system, which is the most ambitious yet developed in the field of personality, has restricted empirical reference. Those who employ Freud's verbal conventions often imply that they are making factual statements rather than logical tautologies. Cripphng confusions and meaningless communications will inevitably result if empirical and formal statements and pragmatic operations are not kept clearly distinct.
If they are kept distinct several benefits accrue. The most im- portant of these is the general ordering of scientific activity. From the chaotic complexity of personality data emerge three broad and dis- tinct sets of operations — the empirical-methodological, the formal- logical, and the practical applications. Personality study currently faces these three challenging tasks: to measure objectively and mean- ingfully, to relate the obtained variables systematically and logically, and to apply the resulting knowledge with known predictive accuracy. We shall accomplish these objectives most efficiently by working within the principles of contemporary unified science. The rules for empirical methods (reviewed in Chapter 4) will guide our approaches to the raw datum, and its conversion into rehable language units. The formal principles will assist us in organizing our linguistic units. The goal of pragmatic applicability will encourage us to relate our sys- tematic knowledge to external events and to functional issues. Seen
,8 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
in this light, personality psychology becomes part of a unified general science.
The purpose and outline of this book can now be restated in terms of these three categories. The remainder of this chapter presents some basic principles, some of which deal with a Logic of Personality. The two subsequent chapters survey the empirical and functional aspects of the field of personality. Chapter 6 and the two subsequent sections (Part II and Part III) return to the same issues, presenting objective methods for measuring interpersonal variables and formal notational systems for relating them. In parts IV and V the prag- matic themes assume priority as we apply the conceptual system to problems of interpersonal diagnosis in and out of the psychiatric clinic.
The Selection of Personality Variables
We began by noting the complexity of personality. From the philosophy of science we obtained three categories of scientific dis- course which help bring preliminary order to this diversity. This chapter goes on to present five working principles, which further assist in clarifying and systematizing the chaotic, fluid intricacy of human behavior.
The first issue concerns the variables, elements, or conceptual units to be employed in dealing with the enormously diverse range of protocol sentences which describe interpersonal behavior. Every personality theorist has faced the formal questions of how many ele- ments or variables of personality are to be employed and how they are related. The first impression one might receive from many pre- vious theorists is that personality structure is very uncomplicated. Scores of dichotomous variables have been offered as the basic dimen- sion of human behavior — schizothymic versus cyclothymic, intro- verted versus extroverted, etc. As many three-way classifications have been popularized — lean, fat, muscular; intropunitive, extropunitive, impunitive; and the like. Most of these narrow conceptual solutions have quickly collapsed when asked to carry the heavy load of human variety. A broad collection of variables is a necessary answer to the question of "how many?"
Another, more elaborate but ineffective, solution to the problem of basic elements is to employ one extremely broad, vague variable such as libidinal force or drive-towards-groivth. Motive concepts of this sort allow plenty of room for diversity but give no specific assistance to the empirical worker.
A broad set of simple and specific elements (that we have here held to be necessary) leads to another formal requirement. Several such
THE COMPLEXITY OF PERSONALITY 39
systems of variables have been developed by personality theorists. Many of the variables in these systems have tended to overiap each other, to overweight certain interpersonal behaviors, and to miss others. They have not been related to each other in a systematic order (i.e., on a continuum or scale). Henry Murray published (I), in 1938, an extensive list of human "needs" which has merited the considerable usage it has received. In a later publication, Murray has criticized his own eclectic collection of motive variables by proposing that social scientists "devote themselves more resolutely than they have so far, to the building of a comprehensive system of concepts which are defined not only operationally but in relation to each other." (2, p. 200) This demanding proposal, which we herewith include in our list of working principles, means that all variables should be related to each other along some kind of continuum. It means that each element should be located in fixed relationship to all others.
Collecting the strands we have been weaving so far in this book — interpersonal orientation, adjustment-maladjustment continuum, sim- plicity, specificity, systematic relatedness — we are ready to state an- other working principle which guides our approach to human personality.
Third working principle: Measurement of interpersonal behavior requires a broad collection of simple, specific variables which are sys- tematically related to each other, and which are applicable to the study of adjustive or maladjustive responses.
The Logic of Interaction
Another formal issue must now be met. Interpersonal behavior has been defined as the basic area of personahty. It is in the essence of interpersonal phenomena that they never exist in isolation, but always in interaction with real or imagined others. We must conceive the interpersonal activity of the subject as he sees it, expresses it, and symbolizes it. We must, in addition, include his perceptions and sym- bolic views of others, as well as the responses which he pulls or obtains from others. An interaction psychology which deals with the issues of what-people-do-to-each-other runs headlong into another nest of classic philosophic entanglements — the subject-object dichotomy. Here we need another principle to clarify important issues.
Fourth working principle: The interpersonal theory of per- sonality logically requires that, for each variable or variable system by which we measure the subject's behavior {at all levels of personality), we must include an equivalent set for measuring the behavior of each specified ''other'' with whom the subject interacts.
40 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
In interpersonal psychology the simplest proposition is a two-way proposition. The subject is always in observed, perceived, or imagined interaction with crucial "others." These "others" may or may not be real persons. Considerations of methodological economy always limit the number and extent of the interactions that we can study. There- fore, some "others" never get measured or placed on the summary charts.
The Multilevel Nature of Personality
We are engaged in this chapter in stating some working principles on which we shall base an adequate codification system for personality. The task of organizing personality data into logical categories reaches its climax when we face the problem of levels.
Recognition of the multidimensional aspect of human nature is a landmark in the development of personality theory. Freud's demon- stration of the importance of unconscious motivation was an epochal intellectual achievement. The single-minded view of man as a rational being was supplanted by a binocular or multiocular vision of human character. It has revolutionized our concepts of personality. It has demonstrated that human behavior is not a unified single process; it is not just what it appears on the surface, nor what it is consciously assumed by the actor to be. It is rather a shifting, conflicted, multi- faceted complex of motives, overt and covert.
The essence of modem personality psychology is its multidimen- sional character.
Commonsense notions about human nature tend to be unilevel. People tend to think that what they consciously believe and say about themselves is the entirety of their personality. They are often quite unaware of intense and pressing emotions which dominate and direct their behavior.
Experimental and academic psychology were untU recently com- pletely unilevel. The notion that what a subject reports is based on assumptions and motives which are not publicly stated came as a great surprise to the Behaviorists.
Most of the current research in the field of personality is still dis- tressingly unilevel in its conception and research design. The standard instruments of personality research, the rating scale, the check lists and the Q-sort, can be rendered quite ambiguous by the introduction of multilevel logic. A typical research technique is to present a psy- chological judge with a test protocol — let us say an MMPI profile or a Rorschach record — and to ask him to rate the patient on a list of variables, or to sort a list of descriptive phrases about the patient. Multilevel logic requires that this task be rejected as meaningless. The
THE COMPLEXITY OF PERSONALITY
41
questions are immediately raised: Should I rate how I predict he will behave, or how he will consciously see himself to be, or what I predict his underlying motives are? The simple, old-fashioned procedure of rating the subject thus breaks down into three or four rating ap- proaches, each of which may differ dramatically from the others at different levels.
Many generalizations about results in personality research are similarly crippled by a unilevel approach. This is particularly true in the case of psychiatric and psychosomatic studies. Statements to the effect that obese patients are dependent, neurodermatitis patients are guilty and ulcer patients are passive, are quite limited in meaning. They seem to disregard the essential and basic concept of modern per- sonality theory — that the human being is a complex, multilevel pattern of conflicting motives and behaviors. The importance of a multilevel approach to personality can now be formalized.
Fifth working principle: Any statement about personality must indicate the level of personality to which it refers.
This is the key concept upon which this book is based. It will be noted in the clinical and descriptive sections of this book that no refer- ence is made to behavior without the accompanying designation of the level from which it comes. Thus we say that ulcer patients are responsible and managerial — at the level of overt public behavior; that hypertensive patients are sweet and affiliative — in their conscious self- description; that dermatosis patients are masochistic — at the level of imaginative fantasy; etc.
The prudish (and often painful) circumlocution which this prin- ciple requires leads to a less graceful prose. It often puzzles and irritates the listener, who hopes to hear more definite statements about patients. In this connection we recall the staff meeting in which a psychosomatic research was being reported. An interested internist pressed for straightforward answers to his questions. "Are these patients passive and dependent?" The reply had to be cumbersome: "They are not at all passive at the two overt levels; they are sig- nificantly passive and dependent at the level of preconscious fantasy."
Diagnostic language in the same fashion becomes multiplied in complexity when a multilevel approach is employed. We no longer find it possible to rattle off a single diagnostic label. To the question, "Is this patient schizoid?" a diagnostician using the interpersonal sys- tem of personality would respond in three-layer terminology. A typical answer might be: "At the level of symptomatic behavior the patient is phobic; at the level of conscious self-description, hysteric; at the level of the preconscious, intensely schizoid."
42 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
We have discovered that it takes considerable patience and effort for psychologists to train themselves to think in multilevel terms. The behavioristic background of academic psychology apparently makes unilevel conceptions more congenial. Psychoanalysts, on the other hand, work comfortably and naturally in a multilevel idiom, although they are somewhat uneasy when their freedom to swoop from level to level is threatened by the limitations of operational definitions.
The Logic of Levels
The concept of multilevel behavior has immeasurably deepened our understanding of human nature. In addition to revising most of our psychological notions, it has broadened our interpretations of artistic, literary, and historical activity. Along with these intellectual boons, however, came a host of new problems and confusions. Much fal- lacious thinking has based itself on the conscious-unconscious dichot- omy. Formal systems for clarifying the illogical language of dynamic psychiatry seem to be needed. The next few decades will undoubtedly witness the introduction of many new systems of personality. Al- though the content of the theories may vary, it is hard to conceive of a personality theory (in this post-Freudian era) which does not deal with the problem of levels. It seems inevitable that systematic and logical rules must be developed for dealing with the multidimensional aspects of personaHty data. The following principles seem to be so axiomatic as to hold for all such personality theories.
Sixth working principle: The levels of personality employed in any theoretical system must be specifically listed and defined. Once the logical system of levels and relationships among levels is defined, it cannot be changed without revising all previous references to levels.
Illogical procedures will nullify the most brilliant concepts. Good logic, on the contrary, is one of the most powerful instruments we can use in forging a theory. The postulates just suggested for dealing with the problems of levels inevitably force an increase in theoretical pre- cision and scope. Listing and defining levels leads to improvements in empirical operations by clarifying the different sources of data con- tributing to each level of personality. This procedure has led us, for example, to the discovery that different probability laws hold for the different levels. Defining the formal relationships among the levels immediately reveals overlaps, tautologies, and previously undefined relationships of considerable theoretical promise. The conceptual issues of conflict, discrepancy, and motivating forces become sharp- ened. New conceptual entities become apparent. New research
THE COMPLEXITY OF PERSONALITY 43
hypotheses develop. Indicating and consistently maintaining the levels of the data allow language usage to become more public and precise. A final and perhaps most important advantage of notational systems is that good logic breeds better logic. Any formal system should re- veal its own limitations and restricting assumptions. This, in turn, helps to father new and improved generations of successors.
Multilevel Relatedness of Variables
This chapter has been concerned with organizing the complexity of behavior into orderly classifications. Four working principles have been presented. They refer to variable systems and the levels of be- havior at which the systems are employed. Before this discussion is concluded, one final principle must be discussed.
Seventh working principle: The same variable system should be employed to measure interpersonal behavior at all levels of personality.
This means that we shall use the same classificatory elements regard- less of the level of the data. Most dynamic or multilevel systems of personality do not follow this suggestion. They employ one classi- ficatory language for covert, underlying themes and another language for describing overt behavior.
There is a significant advantage in using the same variable system at all levels. It is possible to make direct comparisons between levels. It is possible to measure discrepancies, conflicts, or concordances among levels. These measurable indices of discrepancy, which we call indices of variability (some of which are like the traditional defense mech- anisms), are useful in several ways. They fill out our clinical picture of the personality by providing quantitative indices of the amount and kind of interlevel conflict. They are valuable indications of the inter- level organization of personality. They make possible objective re- search into such concepts as identification, repression, and idealization.
Summary
The themes of this chapter are the complexity of personality and the requirements for dealing with it systematically. The general strategy to be employed should now be clear. First, we set up a broad variable system of interrelated variables. We use this to classify the interpersonal behavior of the subject and his world at several levels of personality.
The essence of this approach is that we obtain thousands of single, specific, reliable molecular measurements. This makes for an objective system. We get at the complexity of personality by setting up the
44 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
system of levels, then studying and comparing a pattern of hundreds of scores at the different levels.
We do not employ clinical rating or intuitive judgments; although these are often broad, penetrating, and give a well-rounded picture of the personality, they are notoriously unreliable and unduplicable. For this reason we do not use professional psychological ratings at any point in the organizing of data. The procedure of automatically sorting thousands of reliable unilevel ratings into a standardized multi- level system allows us to pay some respect to the complexity of per- sonality without sacrifice of objectivity.
References
1. Murray, H. A. Explorations in personality: A clinical and experimental study of fifty men of college age. New York: Oxford, 1938.
2. Murray, H. A. Research planning: A few proposals. In S. S. Sargent and Marian W. Smith (eds.). Culture and personality. New York: Viking Fund, 1949.
Empirical Principles in Personality Research
In the preceding chapter it was asserted that logical procedures are required to order the data of any science. Prior to these formal opera- tions, however, comes the issue of collecting the data. This includes observing the raw events and performing some kind of discrimination or measurement. Empirical rules are required for this aspect of scien- tific activity. The interpersonal system of personality has attempted to follow three commonly accepted rules of scientific activity which can be formalized in a general working principle.
Eighth working principle: Measurements of interpersonal be- havior Tnust be public and verifiable operations; the variables must be capable of operational definition. Our conclusions about human nature cannot be presented as absolute facts but as probability state- ments.
Personality Variables Must Be Public and Verifiable
The first criterion of scientific activity insists that it must be public and verifiable. Any statement we make about the world of events must be subject to independent check. Its validity eventually rests on its confirmation by other scientists. While this social criterion of knowledge has engendered some qualifying controversy in the phi- losophy of the physical sciences, its employment in personality psy- chology at the present time is particularly necessary.
Psychology, more than any other modem discipline, has been hampered by the issue of "private" observation. Many respectable scholars have flatly rejected the public testability principle and have endorsed a discipline of introspection, intuition, and anarchic indi- viduality. Many brilliant clinicians still stick by the principle that the human being is a unique and rather sacred pattern of individuality
45
46 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
and that any attempt to find lawful generality is futile, insulting, and vaguely inhuman.
The patient-oriented approach of the practitioner is highly credit- able, and needs no defense. To the clinician, the only principle in- volved is the welfare of the patient. There is, however, another important aspect to this question. Our technical competence to serve a patient is limited to our generalized, probabilistic lawful knowledge of human nature. Good will and patient-oriented solicitousness are virtues, but they are not professional instruments. Many skillful clinicians overlook the fact that they carry around inside of themselves a complex set of unverbalized and often unconscious generalizations about human behavior, which they apply to cases. Their patients get the benefit of an unsystematized lawful wisdom. These principles are often uncommunicable, unorganized, unreachable, untestable. They produce nothing toward the broad social goal of a science of human nature.
The integrity and productivity of good clinicians, however, more than justifies their unilateral approach at this primitive stage in the field. They violate no scientific canons because they do not pose as scientists.
As soon as a clinician begins to lecture or write about principles of personality, however, he puts himself into the area of discourse that must be bound by the laws of scientific evidence. The first of these necessary conventions is that the events, the data, be open for inde- pendent verification by other scientists.
There is a necessary objection which holds that psychotherapy can- not be studied objectively because the crucial events — the interpreta- tion, the instant resistance of the patient, etc. — cannot be repeated. This comment is quite beside the point. The data of personality are communications about human behavior — descriptions of the subject by himself and by others. The reliability and verifiability of these can be established by means of the most basic recording or data-preserving devices. The attempt to derive generalizations about human-person- ality-in-therapy probably will involve the use of objective electric recordings of the therapy process.
With simple devices of this sort, it is possible to have any number of independent experts repeat and verify the most complex variable measurements. Without them psychotherapy becomes a wise but un- communicable art. WTien it becomes clear that the unit of per- sonality or interaction is the discriminatory element or variable, it also becomes quite feasible to obtain any number of equivalent repetitions of the variable by increasing the sample of subjects or of future obser- vations. While it is true that any raw personality expression is unique
EMPIRICAL PRINCIPLES
47
and unrepeatable, the basic variable units by means of which we clas- sify behavior are, by definition, general, recurrent, and verifiable.
Operational Definitions of Terms
A second and related aspect of scientific method which holds for personality psychology is that of operationism. This principle requires that terms be defined by the empirical operations which produce them. In the words of Bridgman, "We mean by any concept nothing more than a set of operations." The relationship between the terms we use and the empirical operations by which we discriminate them must be direct and openly expressed.
In philosophy, the healthy impact of the operational definition has been to sweep away many metaphysical pseudoempirical concepts for which no external reference existed. In psychology many terms which have had dubious speculative histories have taken on new objective significance as researchers have linked their meaning to the empirical procedures by which they were measured. In personality and psycho- analytic theory — fields where undefined or privately defined concepts flourish like jungle growth — much less operational redefinition has occurred.
There can be many operational definitions of the same concept. Each scientist may find it necessary to use different sets of data to define, for example, unconsciousness. One may use dreams. Another may employ fantasy stories, and another, slips of the tongue. As long as each worker clearly states the classificatory operations to which he relates his term there is no objection to the individual differences in approach. The rest of his colleagues are free to accept or reject his theories, but they cannot deny the empirical adequacy of his approach.
Now, this flexibility of the definition process is not cause for alarm, nor is it a sign of any peculiar looseness of the personality field. The vahdity and meaning of any scientific fact is never exact or final. It always depends, among other things, on the type and level of the measurement methods involved. Only metaphysics can claim the luxury of finality and complete unambiguity. As the philosophers of operationism have pointed out, there are many ways to measure dis- tance— a yardstick, a mileage indicator, a transit reading. Each of these can be valid in its own area of discourse. Many of them can be combined into the same classification. Many cannot, at this point. Similarly our illustrative operational definitions of unconsciousness are (to the extent that they are independently confirmed) all valid. Many of them may be combined. It might, perhaps, be determined that dreams and fantasy stories tap the same level of unconsciousness, and allow a broader combined definition of unconsciousness. Slips of the
48 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
tongue, possibly, might not be so related, and therefore would define another level of unconsciousness with its own particular lawful pre- dictiveness.
The concepts of operationism have added powerful synthetic tools to the scientific method. Operational definitions have a remarkable capacity for ridding the language of any discipline of broad, impres- sive, but empty, terms which have no empirical meaning. Applied to the terminology of psychiatry, operationism calls for the elimination or systematic redefinition of almost every current concept. Operation- ism's "radical implications for psychiatric theory and practice" have been programmatically cited by MuUahy. He believes that "there is no chance that psychiatry will ever be a truly scientific field of inquiry until, as a first step towards scientific progress, it adopts a language sufficiently precise that its practitioners as well as workers in allied and related fields can in various ways check and verify the correct- ness of statements made by one another." ( 1, p. 58)
The Probability Nature of Predictive Accuracy
There is a third empirical principle which has importance for per- sonality psychology. This has to do with the ultimate validity of em- pirical knowledge. It holds that there is no absolute or final truth, that scientific laws are never completely accurate, and that the only knowledge we can have of the empirical world is probable knowledge. The essence of scientific explanation is the known relative accuracy of predictions.
We tread here on the most ancient and hallowed ground of West- em philosophy — epistemological questions about the validity of knowledge. Within the last century statistical mathematics, post- Newtonian physics, and the operational logicians have produced con- verging solutions that are closely related to the needs and complexities of a functionalistic personality psychology.
The most accurate statement any scientist can make about the world of events is an indication of the probability of occurrence. The chances are, let us say, three to five that a certain patient will develop passive resistance to a male therapist. But the chances are also two to five that he will not. Or we might determine that two thirds of the patients with duodenal ulcers will deny feelings of passivity and weakness. Of the one third who do not, 80 per cent manifest another specific interpersonal behavior — most likely schizoid withdrawal. When we have accumulated thousands of probability figures of this sort, based on publicly managed variable systems and organized into multilevel conceptual systems, a scientific structure of personality facts will have been established. Predictive procedures of
EMPIRICAL PRINCIPLES
49
limited but known accuracy will be at hand. Moreover, the com- plexity and variety of human nature need never be threatened by the necessary oversimplifications of our predictive structures. There can be as many different systems as there are different dimensions of per- sonality or of facets to the interreacting environment. The system de- scribed in this book is one such conceptual apparatus. It is designed to make factual predictions about the interpersonal dimension of be- havior in the clinical situation. This is really a very narrow slice of the wide and varied expanse of human behavior. Other systems will continue to appear. New variables will be developed. Broader areas of human behavior will be encompassed and integrated. The essence of scientific activity is that new theories, new facts never push out the old. They add, they revise, they refine, they expand.
Thus we shall in later chapters present operational definitions of several psychiatric and personality variables and probability state- ments about their application. But no note of finality will be sounded. Future theorists will unquestionably present different and more effec- tive definitions of the same concepts — based on different operations and boasting, perhaps, higher probability relationships to functional criteria. To the extent that these varying approaches are objective — communicable and operationally grounded — the new findings will not disprove nor quarrel with the old. No scientific fact can be disproved. It can be reinterpreted, qualified by new relationships, amplified to fit new material. Scientific findings do not compete, debate, or attack each other. They add, expand, and collaborate to develop new hypotheses. This characteristic of the scientific method is particularly important in the study of human nature and has been often neglected.
Reference
%. MuLLAHY, P. The theories of H. S. Sullivan. In P. Mullahy (ed.). The contribu- tions of Harry Stack Sullivan. New York: Hermitage House, 1952.
Functional Theory of Personality
The preceding four chapters have presented a sequence of principles which serve as background to a science of human nature. This chapter discusses the functional purpose of scientific knovi^ledge in general and psychological knowledge in particular. In so doing it calls upon and offers some synthesis of the principles already presented. There is more speculation and value orientation than in the preceding chapter.
The Aims of General Science
The ultimate objective of scientific activity is to explain and pre- dict. To control, change, cure, and improve are worthy motives. These latter tasks fall, however, within the province of the applied professions — engineering, administration, medicine, psychiatry. The job of the scientist is to explain as accurately and as completely as possible the relationships among variables and to predict future events.
We explain any event by determining the probability relationships it has with other events. Increasing the temperature above a certain point is related to the boiling of water. Relationships of this sort in the macroscopic physical world have such regularity that extremely high predictability or exceptionless cause-effect sequences are gen- erally observed. The fields of atomic and subatomic physics and of human behavior involve such a multiplicity of interacting events that deterministic causal laws are not possible and probability statistics define the order of relationship. "The more rejecting the parents are, the higher expectation that the child will manifest a defensive sus- piciousness." Did the parents' rejection cause the child's distrust? It is much preferable to say that the two are correlated to a specific degree.
Probability laws allow us to make generalizations of known ac- curacy about the subject matter. Many established relationships among variables allow an increasingly higher order of generality. The breadth and sharpness of the explanatory process grow.
50
FUNCTIONAL THEORY OF PERSONALITY 5 1
But why do scientists attempt to explain natural and psychological events' What is the function of the generalized knowledge so ac- cumulated? These questions lead us to the other aim of scientific activity — prediction.
The purpose of scientific explanation is to predict functionally useful events of the future. This conception of the scientist's role (which is, by the way, an opinion rather than an axiom) is a human- istic one. It assigns his social function in response to social demands and sees him as a human being always stimulated by and limited to cultural pressures.
It is interesting to speculate that the human quest for knowledge has been strongly related to man's motivation to know the future. Knowledge of things to come has an enormous and obvious survival value. A major proportion of man's cognitive, philosophic activity is tied to his desire to anticipate correctly the future. Every religious interpretation has had to rest its dogma on a forecast about the nature of an afterlife. Much of its irrational and powerful appeal rests on this function. The interpersonal counterpart of these speculations might hold that ignorance is experienced as weakness, helplessness, and survivally dangerous. Knowledge is experienced as mastery and au- tonomy. It is survivally crucial in its function of forecasting the future.
The time-bound essence of human life requires that man anticipate the things to come with reasonable accuracy. Science as the broad branch of human activity entrusted with the development and classi- fication of knowledge accepts the function of prediction.
An activity often erroneously assigned to scientific activity is the function of control. Ideally there should be no reason why the ap- plication of pertinent knowledge to human problems should not be accomplished by the scientists who derive it. In actuality, the inter- personal behavior of human beings — particularly along the power axis — is so corruptible that there is good reason for the division of labor. Objective, effective scientific activity apparently suffers in direct pro- portion to the intensity of the interpersonal network involved.
It is, thus, the task of the applied disciplines to use the predictive facts accruing from science. This distinction is not an invidious one. The years of technical training involved in the service professions — medicine, engineering — is often as great as or greater than that of the scientist. The responsibilities undertaken are invariably larger. So are the salaries.
Neither is this distinction absolute. Most researchers employed by nonacademic institutions — whether industries or clinics — are generally forced to play a double role. They follow their scientific noses and
^2 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
are also led by them. This collaboration of the scientific with the applied is generally a fortunate one. Certainly for the problems of psychotherapy and personality change it is hard to see how much can be accomplished without complete clinical training as a minimum and considerable clinical practice as an optimum.
Functional Theory of Personality
To this point we have examined the functions of science in general. Turning to personality psychology we have seen the objective of this field to explain and predict interpersonal behavior.
Objective empirical methods provide innumerable probability rela- tionships among specific variables. Formal and theoretical structures suggest how these are to be further related. This procedure poses new hypothetical questions. These are tested by additional empirical facts. This reciprocal progression of finding and theory establishes an in- creasing number of factual clusters which themselves become related to higher level theories.
As understanding grows, the predictive power of the science be- comes more accurate and extensive. The functional importance of the field grows, usually encouraging new cycles of empirical activity.
The complexity of human nature is such that there are countless facets of behavioral data and an equal number of empirical problems. The conceptualization and terminology of the field clearly depend on which of these aspects of personality are studied. The psychologist who spends all of his time measuring and relating variables of energy level will generally develop terms and theories that have something to do with energy. Even when we define personality in terms of the interpersonal behaviors, a broad scope remains. Every individual has been in crucial interaction with others since the day of his birth, and his history of past relationships is rich. Concentrating on the present rather than the past, we see an enormously extensive network of inter- personal reactions. Relationships in the family situation, in the job situation, or in the social sphere all have some explanatory value. In attempting to predict, which facet of social behavior should be focused on? We might be able to predict the interpersonal consequences of a subject's marriage to this girl, of his election to that office in the Masonic Lodge, or of the selection of a certain program of psycho- therapy in the clinic. The relevance of the prediction clearly refers to the problem being posed or the questions being asked. Prognostic knowledge is generally of value to the extent that it is relevant to the human problems at issue. To go further, it is most functional when the variables and terminologies of explanation are directly related to, or
FUNCTIONAL THEORY OF PERSONALITY 53
even in terms of, the functionally important activities. For clinical psychiatry this means that the variable language should refer most directly to the interpersonal interactions that determine a successful or unsuccessful clinical relationship. This point brings us to the question of functional diagnosis and deserves further illustration.
Functional Diagnosis
Let us suppose that a psychotherapist comes to the predictive diag- nostician posing this narrowly defined hypothetical problem. "In my office there is a male adult patient with asthma; what predictive state- ments can you make?" By studying the accumulated generalizations at hand the diagnostician might make any number of predictions. He might report, "The chances are better than two to one that your patient is married." This interpersonal prediction could be based on testable evidence, but it has little relevance to the situation at hand and little functional meaning. The diagnostician might report, "The chances are better than two to one that any asthmatic condition is related to psychogenic factors and is therefore psychosomatic." This is a descriptive, nosological statement. It has some relevance in that the psychiatrist can continue his clinical procedures with better than average chance that a psychological problem is related. It certainly does not throw much further specific light on the problem.
A third possible answer might be, "Over 60 per cent of these patients during childhood show marked ambivalence toward the maternal figure and intense oedipal conflict with the father." This his- torical explanation is clearly more pertinent to the understanding of the patient. It might lead to extrapolating conjectures from the past to the future, and might assist in clarifying this patient's relationship to others including the future therapist.
A fourth illustrative forecast might state that "Over 6$ per cent of asthmatic patients tend to be compulsively orderly and punc- tual." This is a testable psychological statement relating to the present, but it is molecular and peripheral, and has limited practical meaning. It is not directly interpersonal. It refers to stylistic symptoms rather than crucial purposive direction.
None of these illustrative answers is adequately functional. They all can be true. They all might have some relationship to the per- sonality organization of the patient, but their bearing on the situation is not central. The pressure of the human problem at stake is not effectively met by these statements. In the clinical situation, a gen- eralized statement is most relevant to the extent that it predicts the future course of clinical progress. A diagnostic statement about a
54
BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
psychiatric patient is most functional to the extent that it forecasts interpersonal behavior pertinent to the therapeutic handling of his problem.
The patient cannot change his childhood experience, although it is very true that he can learn from it. The historical prediction is, thus, valuable, but not crucial. Nor is the patient's situation very dependent on diagnosing him psychosomatic. The diagnostic label is made by and is important to the clinician, and not to the patient. Changing this descriptive term would have very little effect on the symptom or the underlying character structure. Neither does the symptomatic molec- ular prediction about compulsive orderiiness have central importance. The punctuality and neatness are undoubtedly related to basic inter- personal motivations, but to focus on them diagnostically or thera- peutically would not be a recommended course of action. These stylistic "how" variables of personality take on their vital meaning when they are traced back to the interpersonal purposes which they serve. To change just the peripheral, noninterpersonal trait is not the essence of therapeutic improvement.
The most functional answer to the clinician's question might go like this, "Over 75 per cent of male asthmatic patients who come to a psychiatric clinic manifest autonomous and stubborn competitiveness with males of superior or equal status. Conscious awareness of this intense fear of weakness is generally followed by overt signs of severe anxiety and increased competitive behavior. The chances are three to two that these patients will interrupt therapy in autonomous resist- ance." This prediction serves to illustrate the issues of relevant predic- tion and functional diagnosis.^
A statement of this sort is preferable for several reasons. It is inter- personal. It relates to the future; not just to one expected event, but to a sequence of interaction (which is related to a conflict between levels of personality). It relates the expected interpersonal pattern to an estimate of treatability. The diagnostic concepts are expressed directly in terms of predictive behavior which has bearing on the future treat- ment relationship. The future therapist is told specifically how the patient might be expected to react to the therapist and to the treatment process. His attention is directed to the interpersonal responses which have so much to do with the success or failure of the therapy plan.
This last is an interesting sidelight of functional terminology. The predictive terms that a diagnostic system employs not only reflect its theoretical focus. They also exercise a subtle but marked effect on the subsequent use made of the information. If a theoretical system (and
* See Appendix D for an illustration of a personality report employing the inter- personal system to make a practical prediction about a patient's behavior in the clinic.
FUNCTIONAL THEORY OF PERSONALITY
55
the diagnostic terms it sponsors) emphasizes past events of the case history, it is likely that the following discussions will tend to em- phasize these areas. If the predictions in the hypothetical case employ the language of compulsivity, punctuality, and the like, the facets of behavior may be unduly attended to in the interviews that follow. Suggestibility and selectivity of content cues are the constant errors of psychotherapy. The less experienced or the less flexible the therapist, the more influence accruing to this indoctrinating effect of diagnostic terms.
In clinical practice we assess the functional value of a personality or psychiatric variable in terms of the predictive value for facilitating the future clinical relationship. Terms which have high predictive value (even if indirect) tend to remain in popular use. Terms which have little predictive "cash value" tend to disappear. Every psy- chiatric term possesses a cluster of prognostic nuances which influence the intake and therapeutic diagnosis. Most of these predictive at- tributes are vague, unproven, often implicit, but they carry a stagger- ing load of responsibility.
Schizophrenia, for example, brings to mind a host of prognostic associations, "not a good outpatient," "poor risk for brief therapy," "poor risk for psychoanalysis," "supportive or ego-strengthening methods favored," "long institutional treatment optimal," "generally slow prognosis," etc. These distillations of clinical wisdom are un- systematized, unverified probability statements about the future be- havior of schizophrenic patients. The original diagnosis is presumably based on other classes of variable cues. That is, the patient is originally diagnosed schizophrenic because of delusions, withdrawal, marked projections on or misperceptions of reality, and the like. Some psy- chiatrists hold that the best diagnostic sign indicating poor prognosis is the elicitation of hallucinatory material.
This type of informal cUnical folklore is a necessary and healthy development in an infant field. The criteria of prognostic value (how- ever vague the variable relationships) indicate that the discipline is struggling toward a predictive status. As this process occurs the usage of certain terms with lesser prognostic power begins to diminish. They maintain only descriptive and administrative popularity. Hebephrenic is such a term. Outside of some crude differentiations from the folk- lore of the shock ward there is little prognostic specificity which dis- tinguishes this term from, let us say, catatonic.
The most functionally important aspects of human behavior seem to be the interpersonal. To understand a human being is to have proba- bility evidence about his relationships with others (perceived, actual, or symbolic), about the durable interpersonal techniques by which he
$6
BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
wards off anxiety, and about the reciprocal responses these techniques pull from others. To make meaningful predictions about a human being is to translate our explanatory data into statements as to the expected interpersonal behaviors in specific functional situations.
Explanatory concepts which deal with instincts, body apertures, symptomatic manifestations, and peripheral stylistic traits have in- direct value to the extent that they can be related to interpersonal behaviors. It is not really of much use to a future therapist to predict that his patient will be punctual and not flick ashes on the rug.
It seems quite possible that within a few decades the slowly evolving laws of pragmatic usage will establish interpersonal concepts as a popular and useful diagnostic language. Two possibilities suggest themselves here — the first is that direct interpersonal terms will replace the disorganized nosology of present-day psychiatry; the second is that the current terms will be redefined in interpersonal terms. If the first alternative is accepted, terms such as psychopathic personality or schizoid personality would disappear in favor of specific systematic interpersonal labels. According to the second alternative, psychopathic personality would be redefined operationally in terms of the rebel- lious aggressive criteria, and schizoid personality would have as its basic diagnostic indices distrust and bitter withdrawal. This is another historical issue that time will settle.
The system described in this book employs the latter — more con- servative— solution for developing a functional, operationally defined language of personahty which will work for both adaptive adjustment and the psychiatric extremes.
Functional Co?icept of Personality
Two general postulates, which have been woven in as background for all of the discussions so far, hold that the functional core of human behavior is the interpersonal, and that personality concepts must be defined along adjustment continua which include both normal and abnormal reactions. When we approach the problem of a functional personality language with these two principles in mind, certain solu- tions seem to follow quite readily.
The first assumption clearly demands that the basic set of personal- ity variables be not symptomatic, erotogenic, or stylistic, but inter- personal. The second assumption suggests that each of these variables must have an intensity dimension such that its rigid, maladaptive ex- treme be as readily classified as its moderate adaptive aspect. The measurement categories all along this scale are still interpersonal — as we recall from the hostility continuum described in Chapter 2, where blunt, frank, appropriately critical were terms referring to the adaptive
FUNCTIONAL THEORY OF PERSONALITY 57
and sadistic, aggressive to the maladaptive end of the continuum. Now it is well known that the language of psychiatry deals almost ex- clusively with the pathological extreme of behavior. Thus we dis- cover that maladaptive extremities of the continuum for each generic interpersonal motivation are most closely related to and overlap the psychiatric. In the illustration of the hostility continuum just men- tioned, it will be noted that sadistic and aggressive have a much more psychiatric flavor than do blunt, frank, appropriately critical, and the like.
It seems to follow, then, that if we painstakingly study all the forms of interpersonal behavior in as many environmental situations as pos- sible, we shall obtain, after grouping and sifting, a finite number of discernible basic interpersonal motivations all of which must (ac- cording to the normality assumption) be placed on adaptive-mal- adaptive continua. For each pathological interpersonal pattern we ob- serve in the clinic there must be an adjustive aspect. And for each successful social maneuver we meet in the market place there must be a pathological extreme. The surprising linguistic imbalance which implies that an Anglo-Saxon cannot be too affectionate or adaptively disaffiliative has already been commented upon. The implications of this imbalance for systematic functional diagnosis will be developed in later chapters.
Since the neurotic interpersonal intensities tend to overlap some aspects of the noninterpersonal psychiatric categories, we have close to hand a solution for the problem of what to do with these latter less functional terms. The process of redefining them begins to take place automatically. Most of the popular diagnostic labels have vague, un- defined, but fairly effective functional power. They have interpersonal correlates. To be skeptical, realistic, and reserved is generally an adaptive interpersonal pattern. To be inflexibly distrustful and with- drawn is invariably maladjustive. Many psychiatrists would call it schizoid. Thus we see the possibilities of redefining the classical language of administrative psychiatry in interpersonal terms. This preserves the usefulness of the older terminology while sharpening its denotive power. On the other hand, from the standpoint of the interpersonal system we have added a new set of partially interpersonal terms to our linguistic structure which is broadened thereby. The ex- treme points of the scales now have a new set of descriptive terms which are unique to the professional specialists of the clinic but which relate to the broader system of general interpersonal psychology. An interpersonal notational system holds the promise of bridging the an- cient and logically intolerable gap between the science of personality and the practice of psychiatry.
j8 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
There will probably be many such reciprocal rapprochements in the next phases in the study of human nature. The scientist or systema- tist will do well, we suggest, to keep his general concepts from being swallowed up by the more exciting linguistics of the clinic. It is most valuable to stress the relationship between general concepts of per- sonality and the terminology of the practitioner. It is important, how- ever, to maintain the basic nature of the generic interpersonal systems.
If this is done, the possibilities of relating the general sciences of interpersonal behavior with other applied and pure disciplines in addi- tion to clinical psychiatry appear bright. There is, for example, good reason to feel that occupational adjustment is mainly determined by interpersonal factors. Whether the applied field is vocational counsel- ing or industrial management, the terminology of job classification is very likely to have interpersonal correlates, with, perhaps, even more overlap than psychiatric labels. These vocational "diagnostic" terms are most likely to be located near the adaptive and moderate end of the normality-abnormality continua — blunt, frank, realistic, amiable, etc. A similar cross-fertilization and functional application seems quite feasible. Wherever an applied discipline requires psychological (not physiological) answers to the problems it faces, an interpersonal psychology will generally be best equipped to make the most basic explanations and the most functional predictions.
Thp Working Principle of Functional Applicability
The functional orientation which has just been described can be summarized in the form of a guiding statement.
Ninth working principle: The system of personality should be designed to measure behavior in the functional context {avhich in this book is the psychiatric clinic). Its language, variables, and diagnostic categories should relate directly to the behavior expressed or to the practical decisions to be made in this functional situation. The system should yield predictions about interpersonal behavior to be expected in the psychiatric clinic.
General Survey of Interpersonal and Variability Systems
The preceding five chapters have presented a general, theoretical discussion of some of the basic requirements of an adequate science of personality.
By way of summary the nine working principles which have guided the Kaiser Foundation research in personality will now be reviewed before surveying the personality system.
Nme Working Principles for
the Interpersonal Theory of Personality
(1) Personality is the multilevel pattern of interpersonal responses (overt, conscious or private) expressed by the individual. Interpersonal behavior is aimed at reducing anxiety. All the social, emotional, inter- personal activities of an individual can be understood as attempts to avoid anxiety or to establish and maintain self-esteem.
(2) The variables of a personality system should be designed to meas- ure—on the same continuum— the normal or "adjustive" aspects of behavior as well as abnormal or pathological extremes.
( 3 ) Measurement of interpersonal behavior requires a broad collection of simple, specific variables which are systematically related to each other and which are applicable to the study of adjustive or maladjustive responses.
(4) For each variable or variable system by which we measure the subject's behavior (at all levels of personality) we must include an equiv- alent set for measuring the behavior of specified "others" with whom the subject interacts.
(5) Any statement about personality must indicate the level of per- sonality to which it refers.
(6) The levels of personality employed in any theoretical system must be specifically listed and defined. The formal relationships which exist among the levels must be outlined. Once the logical system of levels and
59
6o BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
relationships among levels is defined it cannot be changed without revising all previous references to levels.
(7) The same variable system should be employed to measure inter- personal behavior at all levels of personality,
(8) Our measurements of interpersonal behavior must be public and verifiable operations; the variables must be capable of operational defi- nition. Our conclusions about human nature cannot be presented as absolute facts but as probability statements.
(9) The system of personality should be designed to measure behavior in a functional context (e.g., the psychiatric clinic). Its language, variables, and diagnostic categories should relate directly to the behavior expressed or to the practical decisions to be made in this functional situation. The system, when used as a clinical instrument, should yield predictions about interpersonal behavior to be expected in the psychiatric clinic (e.g., in future psychotherapy).
In the next six chapters (which comprise the second section of the book) these postulates will be employed in an attempt to construct such a system. The nature of these requirements tends to determine and limit the resulting personality system. In this chapter the over-all organization of the personality system will be described in terms of (1) a schema for classifying interpersonal behavior and (2) a formal notational system for defining and relating the levels of personality. The subsequent chapters will focus respectively on five levels of per- sonality and the way in which they are combined and used for inter- personal diagnosis.
Before presenting the outline of the personality system, let us illus- trate by way of review the importance of formal theory for dealing with the levels of personality. Some remarks by the philosopher Reichenbach (on the value of symbolic logic) may be appropriate in this connection. He suggests that:
The introduction of a symbolic notation is important to logical procedure because "it has about the same significance as a good mathematical notation." Suppose you are given the problem: "If Peter were 5 years younger, he would be twice as old as Paul was when he was 6 years younger, and if Peter were 9 years older, he would be thrice as old as Paul, if Paul were 4 years younger." Try to solve it in the head by adding and subtracting and considering all the "if's," and you will soon arrive at a sort of dizziness as though you were riding on a merry-go-round. Then take a pen and paper, call Peter's age x and Paul's age y, write down the resulting equations and solve them the way you learned it in high school— and you will know what a notational technique is good for. There are similar problems in logic. (10, p. 219)
There are also similar problems in dynamic psychology. Consider this not atypical case report from a psychoanalytic journal. The author describes a multilevel pattern of the patient's emotions as fol- lows:
INTERPERSONAL AND VARIABILITY SYSTEMS 6i
While expressing aggression toward a male cousin, she thought once again that she smelled gas. At first by allusion to others, then by way of dreams, there emerged the fantasy that the analyst was feminine; then she admitted never having thought of her father as a man, but as a woman.
She wished she could dominate the analyst and others as she felt dominated at home. This aggressive urge was accompanied by increased feelings of guilt. At a time when she had unconscious conflicts about not paying for cancelled hours, and also had arranged for more advanced art lessons which would increase her abilities and prestige, she stuck two fingers into an electric fan, and was unable to work.
Seductive fantasies toward the analyst, as well as homosexual dreams and fantasies, and dreams of being gassed and raped emerged in connection with memories of compulsive masturbation in her childhood, causing vaginal dis- charge which she had had impulses to eat. After confessing her "dirty thoughts" she had a dream.
"She stood before a mirror admiring herself, dressed in a beautiful flowing white dress."
She said this dress made her look "effeminate" and then felt embarrassed at the use of the word. She felt that to be beautiful would serve two purposes: to make her sister and other girls feel inferior to her, and to control men. She had often thought mouth and vagina were equivalent.
After this dream she became cleaner, worked better, and began to earn her way both by art work and by working in a department store. Competitive strivings in regard to other patients, as well as her sister, came out more clearly in association to wishes to be dirty. (7, p. 79)
If the reader attempts to organize this series of conflicting events, to sort out the levels and the motives which belong to them, ambivalent, autistic, past, present, he may acquire a sort of vertigo similar to that mentioned by Reichenbach.
This analyst has combined at least four or five levels of behavior in this passage. He describes certain overt actions of the patient: "ex- pressing aggression," "arranged for art lessons," "stuck two fingers in a fan," "worked better," "began to earn her own way." All of these actions are public — and could be consensually validated by listeners or observers.
The analyst also mentions certain wishes, urges, or impulses which the patient reported: "to dominate the analyst," "to eat," "competitive striving." These impulses, consciously recognized but not acted out, must be kept systematically distinct from the above-mentioned overt actions.
Another level at which this patient operates is that of dream or fantasy: "that the analyst was feminine," "her father as ... a woman," "seductive fantasies" toward the analyst, as well as homo- sexual dreams and fantasies, and "dreams of being gassed and raped," etc. These autistic productions are clearly deeper or further from real- ity than the overt activities or the secret wishes previously summarized.
(5i BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
To these three levels we might also add the deeper unconscious conflicts and the conscious reports — both of which denote different orders of reality-contact and consciousness.
Free association protocols, case histories, and reports of therapeutic interaction comprise important sources of data upon which the science of personality must be built. In order to make reliable measurements, valid judgments, and meaningful analyses the multilevel jumble of motivations which so often characterizes personality descriptions must be organized into a systematic language.
In this chapter we will describe first a classificatory system for or- dering interpersonal behavior. Then we shall present a notational sys- tem— a crude mathematic or grammar of personality — which attempts to order the levels of behavior. We shall present the units or variables by which the behavior can be measured, and five levels at which they operate.
The classificatory system allows us to measure interpersonal be- havior at any of these five levels. The notational schema defines the levels and the fixed arithmetic relationships among these levels. It provides for the diagrammatic and numerical analysis of the personal- ity structure.
The Classification System: The Interpersonal Variables of Personality In beginning the long task of developing a personality system, the first assumption refers to the kind of behavior to be studied. We have defined this as the interpersonal core of personality. The initial step for the Kaiser Foundation research project was, therefore, to focus on this dimension of behavior. To this end a wide assortment of raw in- terpersonal data was assembled. Several scores of individuals — male and female, neurotic, psychosomatic, and normal — were brought into interpersonal relationships in small groups. Some of these were dis- cussion groups in a nonpsychiatric setting. Some were psychotherapy groups in an outpatient clinic. The hundreds of interactions of each subject were observed, recorded, and studied. Many other types of interpersonal behavior were obtained from the same subjects. Their verbal descriptions of self and others — present, past, and anticipated — as expressed in the groups or as summarized in autobiographies and psychological inventories were collected. Their dreams and fantasies were recorded. Their responses on batteries of projective tests were elicited. A rich but unwieldy collection of raw materials — in the form of wire recording spools, typed transcriptions, ratings, observers' re- ports, test indices, projective responses — piled up for each subject. In line with our first theoretical assumption, the interpersonal aspects
INTERPERSONAL AND VARIABILITY SYSTEMS 63
of the stimulus material were taken as the focus of attention. As the research team observed this undigested mass of protocol records ac- cumulating, the next research question occurred. How shall we analyze these data? It was clear that classiiicatory assistance was re- quired. This came in the form of the second working principle, which holds that the basic data of personality are not the raw responses but the units of protocol language by which the subject's interpersonal behavior can be summarized.
The selection of this language, as we have seen, has been a crucial aspect of all personality theories. What and how many are the con- ceptual units of social interaction? The third working principle en- ters at this point, stating that measurement of interpersonal behavior requires a broad collection of simple, specific variables which are applicable to the study of adjustive and maladjustive responses.
With these guiding principles in mind, the diverse data were studied to determine the optimal number of specific variables and their orderly relationship. As a first step the interactions of the subjects were studied by three independent judges who attempted a straightforward verbal description of the interpersonal activity. In rating the observed and recorded interactions, it was noticed that transitive verbs were the handiest words for describing what the subjects did to each other, e.g., insult, challenge, answer, help. In rating the content of the spoken or written descriptions of self-or-other, it was noted that adjectives were more often suitable. Here we were interested in the attributes, qualities, and traits which the subject assigned to himself and others. "I am friendly, helpful, strong; they are hostile, selfish, wise, helpful^ A clear relationship seemed to exist between these two types of inter- personal description, such that the adjectives seemed to express an interpersonal attribute or potentiality for action, while the verbs described the action directly. Three rather interesting notions began to develop out of this fact. First, the relationships between different expressions of personality can be directly related to each other by grammatical or linguistic procedures. That is, what you actually do in the social situation as described by a verb (e.g., help) can be re- lated to your description of yourself (as described by the attribute helpful) and to your description of your dream-self or fantasy-self (also attributive, helpful or perhaps unhelpful). These grammatical relationships became the key to a systematic consideration of the levels of personality, of which more later.
After extensive informal surveys of the many varieties of data, a list of several hundred terms for describing interpersonal behavior was assembled. The next task was to sort through the long lists of terms and to determine the generic interpersonal motives. Combining the
64 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
action verbs with the corresponding attributive adjectives cut down the list. Thus the adjective insulting was subsumed under its action category to insult. Next the intense and statistically rare terms were combined with the moderate and more frequent categories. For ex- ample, the themes of murder, attack, insult, etc., were included under the generic concept of hostile activities. The gradually developing lists of generic terms were then combined to eliminate overlaps and repetitions until a list of sixteen generic interpersonal motivations re- sulted. All of the original terms — which numbered several hundred — could be expressed as differentiated varieties of the sixteen basic inter- personal themes. In this manner the goal of breadth, specificity, and simplicity was approached.
The principle of systematic relatedness then determined the next task. This criterion demands that the variables be ordered along continua in such a way that fixed relationships exist between the ele- ments. The question here becomes: What and how many are the di- mensions along which the variables are to be scaled? In this instance, it became apparent that a two-dimensional grid was optimal for re- lating the variables at hand. We cannot doubt that more complex for- mal systems will eventually add new spatial dimensions to the organi- zation of personality. For the present, however, a two-dimensional space offers sufficient complexity for the data and more than a; suf- ficient complexity of methodological problems.
In surveying the list of more or less generic interpersonal trends, it became clear that they all had some reference to a power or affilia- tion factor. When dominance-submission was taken as the vertical axis and hostility-affection as the horizontal, all of the other generic inter- personal factors could be expressed as combinations of these four nodal points. The various types of nurturant behavior appeared to be blends of strong and affectionate orientations toward others. Dis- trustful behaviors seemed to blend hostility and weakness. Further experimentation and review of the raw data led to the conclusion that a circular two-dimensional continuum of sixteen generic variables rep- resented the optimal degree of refinement of interpersonal themes. Attempts at more specific systematization of interpersonal behavior by increasing the number of variables led to difficulties in establishing clear criteria for discrimination between neighboring variables. On the other hand, use of grosser units of discrimination, e.g., only the four nodal variables, resulted in neglect of important shadings of inter- personal intent.
The sixteen generic interpersonal themes are presented in Figure 1 . Each one has been assigned a code letter. Thus, Dominant behavior is classified under the letter A, Autonomous behavior under the letter
INTERPERSONAL AND VARIABILITY SYSTEMS 65
B, etc. Several suggestive terms are listed for each generic type of interpersonal purpose in Figure 1. Actually, there is an almost inex- haustible list of terms for each generic code letter. The many varieties of interpersonal behavior included under each category will become increasingly clear as we take up the ratings for the different levels.
,#^ \VSoc
DOMINATE BOSS, ORDER
PROVOKES >(\ OBEDIENCE/
<^^^'J'
<^A^
>^1
^^:^.
MANAGE, DIRECT, LEAD
<;°^. <%'■
i$i^\^i
^,^'^^ /,fti
^\ iL^ •*>.>*
Q
LiJ
Si
■-v.
\
/V i\^
^.
%
■Oft ■>>
MM'"'^°'
ONES DUTY, OBEV
^^
IrX \^^
^PtJ^/v / PROVOKES ' '^/Vv^-'-SL/leaoershipj
^^^r^::^^)'
^Cns ^Cr^'^'^OA, / SPINELESS \0^^o T\\>^1=. >^^ ^Oe^O'Vs'^^/ ACTIONS, y'^^oOS^O^^^^V^
c^^Cj'" sA . / SUBMIT \ cO^><;^^' -J/
la^-HASOCWm^
%^^^
Figure 1. Classificaiion of Interpersonal Behavior into Sixteen Mechanisms or Reflexes. Each of the sixteen interpersonal variables is illustrated by sample behaviors The inner circle presents illustrations of adaptive reflexes, e g., for the variable A, manage. The center ring indicates the type of behavior that this interpersonal reflex tends to "pull" from the other one. Thus we see that the person who uses the reflex A tends to provoke others to obedience, etc. These findings involve two-way inter- personal phenomena (what the subject does and what the "Other" does back) and are therefore less reliable than the other interpersonal codes presented in this figure. The next circle illustrates extreme or rigid reflexes, e.g., dominates. The perimeter of the circle is divided into eight general categories employed in interpersonal diagnosis. Fach category has a moderate (adaptive) and an extreme (pathological) intensity, e.g., Managerial-Autocratic.
66 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
By arranging a set of sixteen interpersonal variables along a con- tinuum, we have implied a systematic relationship among them. If we rate any behavior as C, we have defined it in terms of all the other variables since C is one unit away from (and therefore close to) D and B, while it is eight units (and therefore quite discrepant) from K. The second working principle, which requires a relatedness among var- iables, is thus met but it is next required to demonstrate that the hypo- thetical relationships of these variables is related to external events. Extensive vahdation of the circular continuum of sixteen interpersonal variables has demonstrated that it is satisfactorily congruent with em- pirical facts. (5) (8) While the units around the scale are not com- pletely equidistant, the arrangement is correctly ordered.
The selection and formal organization of variables made it possible to rate any interpersonal behavior in such a way that its relationship to all the other fifteen variables was explicit. The classificatory schema at this stage of the game was still far from complete. Only the most crude appraisals of any interpersonal behavior could be made because only the presence or absence of the theme could be indicated. For example, it was possible to say that distrust was present; but how much, how extreme, how inappropriate could not be measured until an intensity dimension was added.
In the most basic sense this involved making a "more or less than" judgment of the observed event. Is this behavior more distrustful than the other? The intensity dimension is quite fundamental to all human perceptions. Language and quantitative usages give us several tech- niques for expressing intensities: the comparative sequence stroni!;, stronger, strongest, the modifying function extremely, slightly, as well as the intensity hierarchy of different word meanings critical-angry- furious-enraged. Apart from these verbal expressions, the numerical estimation of intensity (along a 3-, 5-, or 7-point scale) is accepted and common. The intensity of interpersonal activity can be rated on a linear scale ranging from absence of the behavior to extreme over- reactivity. The number of differentiating points on the intensity scale can vary according to the specific purpose, but for most interpersonal responses, a 3- or 4-point graduation seems quite satisfactory.
Let us consider, by way of illustration, one interpersonal motivation as it is reflected in the intensity dimension. The power continuum (variable A) is conceived of as a linear scale ranging from too much to complete and inappropriate absence of dominance. When we con- struct an intensity scale for each of the sixteen interpersonal variables, we obtain a more differentiated form of the circular continuum which is illustrated in the concentric rings of Figure 1. The term dominate now takes on quite a precise meaning. It is defined as an expression of
INTERPERSONAL AND VARIABILITY SYSTEMS 67
power (A) which systematically relates it to the other fifteen inter- personal themes. It is further assigned an intensity loading which re- lates it to all other verbal terms for power as well as to every other classified word describing interpersonal interaction. In this way language of personality becomes much more exact and accessible. Every term in the English language which refers to interpersonal be- havior can, in this manner, be studied, redefined systematically, and calibrated. This is not to say that these terms as used in everyday life necessarily have the same meaning to the interpersonal scientist. The general public employs all kinds of words — force, power, effi- ciency, hostility — which have been operationally redefined by physi- cal or psychological scientists. The interpersonal diagnostician dealing with human communications has to keep clear the level of meaning of the words he deals with. Anger may denote one thing to an individual patient, another in terms of general usage, and a third in the precisely defined scientific discourse. In general, it seems best to keep the scien- tific meaning as close as possible to that of the general public of the culture being studied. The advantages of tying terminology to func- tional behavior rather than tying it to psychiatric usage have already been mentioned.
The two-dimensional representation of interpersonal space has many possibilities for summarizing behavior. First, it should be noted that we are rarely interested in classifying single, isolated events. In- variably we are concerned with sequences of interaction and patterns of hundreds of interpersonal expressions. The simplest and perhaps least useful way of summarizing interpersonal behavior is to plot the ratings, judgments, or units directly onto the circle. Suppose we re- cord and then rate the interpersonal purpose involved in everything a patient does to his analyst in the first twenty hours of therapy. This would produce (depending on the consistency and expressiveness of the patient) between 1,000 and 3,000 interpersonal units. Disregard- ing the intensity ratings, we thus obtain the total of all Dominance {A) ratings and the comparable totals for the other fifteen interpersonal themes. By calibrating the sixteen radii for numerical frequency, we can then strike off points indicating the reactions for each inter- personal variable. A graphic summary of the interpersonal behavior during twenty hours of therapy is thus obtained. In Figure 2 we see that the sample patient manifested docile, cooperative dependence toward the therapist, avoiding hostility and competitiveness. Pro- files based on other patients or upon this patient's behavior in the sub- sequent hours of treatment would allow direct, objective comparisons and the testing of hypotheses about interpersonal activity during psychotherapy.
68
BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
When enough cases have been studied to provide normative data, a second and highly profitable method of summarizing interpersonal be- havior is possible. There are many statistical techniques for treating each patient's scores in terms of the mean (i.e., the average) of his group. These allow us to determine one point which summarizes all
Figure 2. Diagrammatic Representation of Interpersonal In- teraction of a Patient During Twenty Hours of Psychotherapy. Radius of circle equals 1,000 interactions. This patient manifested 820 docile-dependent interpersonal actions {JK octant) and 260 confident-narcissistic actions {BC octant).
of the interpersonal behavior in any behavioral sequence in terms of its distance and direction from the center of the circle. The latter is taken as the mean, i.e., the central tendency of the interpersonal be- havior of the population studied. One method for obtaining this summary point has been described as follows:
The Interpersonal System as described so far leaves us wide latitude with respect to the formal (algebraic) properties which are to be attributed to the 16 variables. We may in fact vary the formal relationships to suit the particular context so long as we do not violate the rough intuitive specification of a circular arrangement. For example, we might think of the system as a purely ordinal array about which one specified only that categories adjacent to a given one resemble it more than do non-adjacent categories. Or we might consider the circle to be a two-dimensional array in ordinary Euclidian space, in which case conventional trigonometric and analytic formulas relate the 16 variables. After some experimentation, this latter approach was tentatively selected. Each circle was conceived to be a set of eight vectors or points in a two-dimensional space. We selected the center of gravit)^ or vector mean of these points as a measure of central tendency.
A vector in two-dimensional space may be represented numerically by the magnitude of its components in two arbitrarily selected directions. We chose AP and LAI as reference directions, giving the designations Dom and Lov
INTERPERSONAL AND VARIABILITY SYSTE/MS 69
respectively to the components of the vector sum in these two directions. Representation of the eight or sixteen scores comprising a patient's circle by a single point in two-dimensional space is a considerable simplification. What is preserved in this simplification is the general tendency of the circle. What is lost are the individual fluctuations around the circle.^
The formulas for the two components of the vector sum are relatively evident. They are:
1. Dom = i«Ri sin ^, and
t \= 1
2. Lov = i«R, cos 0i
2 i= 1
where R, = the score in the 1-th category,
01 = the angle made by moving in counter-clockwise direction from L to the i-th category (from LM if octant scores are used).
In the present calculations, octant scores were used and .7 was taken as the value of sin 45°; the following simplified formulas resulted:
3. Dom =AP -HI +.7 (NO + BC - FG - JK),
4. Lov =LM-DE + .7 (NO - BC - FG + JK), where AP = score in octant AP, etc. (4, p. 140)
It is thus possible to convert the pattern of scores on the sixteen variables into two numerical indices which locate a subject's inter- personal behavior on a diagnostic grid. Figure 3 presents the descrip- tive summary point for the therapy patient whose behavior has been previously diagramed in Figure 2. We note that the two summary indices place him in the JK octant; they thus become a simplified and numerical summary of the circular diagram. The vertical and hori- zontal lines represent varying discrepancies from the mean (the center point of the circle). We obtain in this manner a circular grid, every point on which is statistically defined. We determine the summary point of the patient's interpersonal behavior as rated by the sixteen variables in relationship to the population studied — which in this case might be a hundred randomly selected psychotherapy patients. Our subject is seen as considerably more trustful and compliant than the average therapy patient (point 1 in Figure 3).
The great advantage of the latter circular grid method of summari- zation is that many summary points can be graphed on the same dia-
' The two components of the vector sum must each be divided by N = Ri (the
i= 1 total around the circle all eight or sixteen scores) to get the two components of the vector mean. These latter may also be thought of as the first two Fourier coefficients of a curve fitted to the observed data. More complicated curves can be fitted by the computation of additional coefficients.
70
BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
gram, facilitating comparison among levels of any individual's per- sonality or comparisons among different individuals. Let us suppose that the psychotherapy patient we have been using for illustration shifted his interpersonal behavior markedly in the second twenty hours
:.^^^S0CH1ST\C
^(Hjr '
Figure 3. Diagram Summarizing the Interpersonal Behavior of Patient During First Twenty Hours (T) and the Second Twenty Hours ® of Psychotherapy. Summary points are located by inter- section of horizontal and vertical indices. The indices are deter- mined by the raw number of interactions converted to vector scores by the trigonometric formulas described on page 69.
of treatment, expressing disappointment and distrust towards the analyst. The several thousand interactions are rated, statistically sum- marized, and graphed as point 2^on Figure 3. A diagrammatic con- densation of the changing behavior of the patient (based on quanti- tative objective methods) becomes available. This patient has shifted his interpersonal behavior in therapy. He was compliant (point 1)
INTERPERSONAL AND VARIABILITY SYSTEMS
71
during the initial stage of treatment but became passively hostile and withdrawn in the second stage of therapy. Later changes in the treat- ment relationship can be similarly plotted — always in relationship to the average of the population.
Previous Suggestions for a Two-Dimensional Classification of Personality Traits
The notion of classifying human emotions in terms of four syste- matically related variables is certainly not novel. The history of psychology provides several interesting correspondences to the present system of arranging data in terms of the four nodal points.
The four quadrants of the interpersonal system comprise blends of the nodal dichotomies: love versus hate and power versus weakness. The four "blended" quadrants fit rather closely the classical humors theory of Hippocrates. The upper left quadrant (hostile strength) equates with the choleric temperament, the lower left (hostile weak- ness) with the melancholic, the lower right (friendly weakness) with the phlegmatic, and the upper right (friendly strength) with the sanguine.
The same fourfold classification reappears in Freudian thought, Freud's treatment of the individual stresses two basic motives — love and hate. His theories of social phenomena and group interaction, on the other hand, emphasize domination, power, and the interaction of the weak versus the strong. In his open letter to Einstein "Why War?" these two avenues of Freud's thought intersect and illustrate his commitment to the four concepts. He presents his power theory first:
Such then, was the original state of things: domination by whoever had the greater might— domination by hate violence or by violence supported by intellect. (2, p. 275)
In the following paragraph he says:
The situation is simple so long as the community consists only of a number of equally strong individuals. . . . But a state of rest of that kind is only theo- retically conceivable. In actuality, the position is complicated by the fact that from its very beginning the community comprises elements of unequal strength —men and women, parents and children— and soon, as a result of war and con- quest, it also comes to include victors and vanquished, who turn into masters and slaves. The justice of the community then becomes an expression of the unequal degrees of power obtaining within it; the laws are made by and for the ruling members and find little room for the rights of those in subjection. From that time forward there are two factors at work in the community which are sources of unrest over matters of law but tend at the same time to a further growth of law. First, attempts are made by certain of the rulers to set them- selves above the prohibitions which apply to everyone— they seek, that is, to go
y2 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
back from a dominion of law to a dominion of violence. Secondly, the op- pressed members of the group make constant efforts to obtain more power and to have any constant efforts to obtain more power and to have any changes that are brought about in that direction recognized in the laws— they press forward, that is, from unequal justice to equal justice for all. (2, pp. 276-77)
Later, in the same paper, Freud goes on to summarize his familiar theories of individual motivation.
According to our hypothesis human instincts are of only two kinds: those which seek to preserve and unite— which we call "erotic," exactly in the sense in which Plato used the word "Eros" in his Symposium, or "sexual" with a deliberate extension of the popular conception of "sexuality"— and those which seek to destroy and kill and which we class together as the aggressive or destruc- tive instinct. As you see, this is in fact no more than a theoretical clarification of the universally familiar opposition between Love and Hate which may per- haps have some fundamental relation to the polarity of attraction and repulsion that plays a part in your own field of knowledge. We must not be too hasty in introducing ethical judgments of good and evil. Neither of these instincts is any less essential than the other, the phenomena of life arise from the operation of both together, whether acting in concert or in opposition. It seems as though an instinct of the one sort can scarcely ever operate in isolation; it is always accompanied— or, as we say, alloyed— with an element from the other side, which modifies its aim or is, in some cases, what enables it to achieve that aim. Thus, for instance, the instinct of self-preservation is certainly of an erotic kind, but it must nevertheless have aggressiveness at its disposal if it is to fulfill its purpose. So, too, the instinct of love, when it is directed toward an object, stands in need of some contribution from the instinct of mastery if it is in any way to possess that object. The difficulty of isolating the two classes of instinct in their actual manifestations is indeed what has so long prevented us from recognizing them.
If you will follow me a little further, you will see that human actions are subject to another complication of a different kind. It is very rarely that an action is the work of a smgle instinctual impulse (which must in itself be com- pounded of Eros and destructiveness). In order to make an action possible, there must be as a rule a combination of such compounded motives. This was perceived long ago by a specialist in your own subject, a Professor G. C. Lichtenberg who taught physics at Gottingen during our classical age-though perhaps he was even more remarkable as a psychologist than as a physicist. He invented a Compass of Motives, for he wrote. "The motives that lead us to do anything might be arranged like the thirty-two winds and might be given names on the same pattern: for instance, 'food-food-fame' or 'fame-fame- food'. So that when human beings are incited to war they may have a whole number of motives for assenting— some noble and some base, some of which they speak openly and others on which thev are silent. There is no need to enumerate them all. A lust for aggression and destruction is certainly among them: the countless cruelties in history and in our every day lives vouch for its existence and its strength. The gratification of these destructive impulses is of course facilitated bv their admixture with others of an erotic and idealistic kind." (2, pp. 280-82)
INTERPERSONAL AND VARIABILITY SYSTEMS
73
The similarity between these suggestions for a "Compass of Mo- tives" and the circular classificatory system described in this book is so close as to require no further comment.
In addition to these earlier approaches to a fourfold classification system of human motives, other similar conceptual schemes have been developed contemporaneously with (and independently of) the inter- personal system.
The interpersonal system, it will be recalled, was developed from the rawest kind of empirical approach. It can be said that the patients in the earliest pilot study group developed the interpersonal circle by providing the varied pool of interpersonal responses which were gradually refined into the present circular continuum. It is most inter- esting, therefore, that the results of our empirical studies tend to con- firm hypotheticated fourfold classifications independently proposed by other writers.
Ross Stagner, for example, in 1937 presented a two-dimensional representation of behavior which has a certain similarity to the inter- personal "compass." Stagner wrote: "The hypothesis which we wish to present is that the directions of variability in human behavior are very limited in number, present evidence suggesting that there are only two dimensions along which such variations may be plotted. These two dimensions may be considered: 1) approach to or with- drawal from a stimulus object; and 2) increased or decreased organis- mic activity with reference to the object." (II, p. 52)
Although Stagner is noninterpersonal in his variable system and, perhaps, overly optimistic about the simplicity of direction and moti- vation, his paradigm attracts our interest for two reasons: First, it is remarkably similar to the interpersonal circular system. Secondly, it is close to the spatial theory of the genesis of interpersonal relations which we have discussed in the preceding pages.
Talcott Parsons, who is perhaps the most sophisticated and syste- matically mature sociological writer of our generation, has described a conceptual method which he calls the "paradigm of motivational process." He states that this
. . . started with the assumption that a process of interaction which has been stabilized about conformity with a normative pattern structure, will tend to continue in a stable state unless it is disturbed. Concretely, however, there will always be tendencies to deviance, and conversely these tendencies will tend to be counteracted by re-equilibrating processes, on the part of the same actor or of others.
It was furthermore maintained that neither the tendencies toward deviance nor those toward re-equilibration, that is, toward "social control" could occur in random directions or forms. Deviance was shown to involve four basic
74 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
directions, according to whether the need was to express alienation from the normative pattern— including the repudiation of attachment to alter as an object —or to maintain compulsive conformity with the normative pattern and attach- ment to alter, and according to whether the mode of action was actively or passively inclined. This yielded four directional types, those of aggressiveness and withdrawal on the alienative side, and of compulsive performance and compulsive acceptance on the side of compulsive conformity. It was further- more shown that this paradigm, independently derived, is essentially the same as that previously put forward by Merton for the analysis of social struc- ture and anomie. (9, p. 68)
Thus, we see that two productive sociologists, Parsons and Merton, although working from somewhat different subject matters and frames of reference, have arrived at solutions for categorizing human inter- action which are close to the interpersonal circle.
Another very interesting correspondence has developed from the researches of George T. Lodge. Lodge has developed some promising applications of the Haskell Coaction technique to psychological meas- urement. This is a method for plotting the resolution of two coacting variables in terms of a two-dimensional surface. The coaction compass functions exactly as the interpersonal circle, and the standard trigono- metric solutions of coaction variables have been applied by Haskell and Lodge to their data in the same manner as La Forge's formulas for the interpersonal system.
Lodge describes his use of the Haskell Coaction Compass method as follows:
The Coaction Compass as formulated by Edward F. Haskell is a general conceptual scheme which is beginning to find wide applications in biological and social science. This compass is a Cartesian coordinate frame strictly com- parable to the mariner's wind rose. Its use permits assignment of vector magni- tudes to the resultant forces from any two interdependent power systems, and their subsequent treatment by methods of analytic geometry. In the field of Clinical Psychology, it is convenient to view the processes of inhibition and facilitation as representing two such coacting power systems. It is not our purpose at present to go into the details of a coaction theory of personality as such. We have attempted a preliminary formulation of such a theory else- where. Here, we shall try only to set forth certain necessary steps for the interest of those who may wish to apply coaction reasoning in their analyses of Rorschach protocols. . . .
The Rorschach method lends itself readily to the study of personality in terms of a coaction formulation, at least insofar as consideration of the scoring of determinants is concerned. If the form level of a response be regarded as reflecting the strength of the inhibitory process, and if the amount of expression of color, shading, and movement be regarded as reflecting the level of manifest affect or facilitation, the response may be represented geometrically as a re- sultant vector determined by the relative strengths of the two coacting power systems. (6, pp. 67h58)
INTERPERSONAL AND VARIABILITY SYSTEMS 75
The Variability of Interpersonal Behavior
Eitiploying the continuum of sixteen variables, summarized nu- merically, it is possible to make three different types of systematic studies of the same person. We can investigate the interpersonal be- havior of one individual at many levels of his personality. Charting the measurements for all aspects of behavior on the same circular grid provides a systematic pattern diagnosis of the structure of personality at one time. By adding summaries of the same measurements as they change in time, we obtain a picture of temporal variation in the multilevel pattern of personality. In the preceding example we have noted such a temporal change in one level of personality — inter- personal behavior in one cultural context, the psychoanalytic ses- sions. A third use of the circular continuum is to chart the varying patterns of behavior in different interpersonal situations. How does the patient behave with his boss, with his wife, with his children?
These measurements of behavior, at different levels, at different times, and in different situations comprise the basic patterns and changing processes of personality. They are called structural, tem- poral, and situational variation patterns, respectively. Temporal varia- tion— the changes in personality patterns over time — has extreme functional importance since our prediction about future developments (e.g., prognosis for psychotherapy) is involved. Situational variation refers to the cultural relativity of interpersonal relationships. Struc- tural variation refers to the relationship among the levels of personal- ity and brings us to the basic issues of the notational system — the or- ganization of personahty into levels.
The Formal Notational System: The Levels of Personality
The fact that behavior exists at more than one level of awareness has been intuitively recognized for centuries. The discovery of un- conscious motivation — in the sense of a formal theoretical statement — was first made by Sigmund Freud.
This was an epochal landmark in the study of personality and human nature.
The neat personality structures of rationalistic psychology were exploded into an untidy disarray. It is no longer possible to depend on the solid validity of the subject's conscious report. If the subject in a perception experiment judges one stimulus object as larger than another, it may have to do with the physical aspects of perception — but it may also reflect a desire to agree or disagree with other subjects, to assist or frustrate the experimenter's purpose (as he imagines it to be).
76 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
The concept of levels destroys the simple, unidimensional notions of behavior determined by chains of stimulus-response reactions. All the major learning theories since Freud, however cognitive and physical- istic they may strive to be, have by necessity taken into account this multidimensional quality of motivation. The complexity of human na- ture for the first time begins to command adequate conceptual respect.
Accompanying the early positive rewards of the "unconsciousness theory" is a series of premature, intuitive concepts and logical falla- cies. To deal with some of these illogical procedures, we have stated in the fifth working principle that any statement about human be- havior must indicate the level of personality data to which it refers.
When this postulate was applied to the varied mosaic of miscel- laneous protocols obtained from the pilot study cases, the first task required was to classify them into discrete levels. The questions then became: How many levels of personality should be employed? What are they? And how shall they be defined?
Any solutions to these problems must be arbitrary, formal decisions. That is, we must assume no divinely instituted or platonically ideal number of personality divisions. In selecting the number of levels, we are limited on the broad side by the practicalities of the empirical method and on the narrow side by theoretical adequacy, that is (at this primitive state of our knowledge), if we have too many levels, the permutations and combinations of the interlevel relationships become impossibly unwieldy. If we have too few, important nuances become lost by being compressed into general categories.
After reviewing the many types and sources of personality data, a classification into five levels was found to be the most effective. This decision is a notational procedure which seems to meet the functional criteria of the present time. When we say that it is convenient to con- ceive of five levels of personality, we do not imply that there is "really" or "eternally" such a structural division. Early psychoanalytic writers naively tended to imply, and the uncritical reader tended to assume, that there "really were" two or three levels of personality in the same sense that there "are" five fingers on the hand. When the formal na- ture of these divisions of consciousness was not made explicit, a meta- physical language threatened to develop. At this point we designate five levels of personality data which we suggest are the most profitable for research, theory, and functional prediction.
These five general levels of personality data are: I. the Level of Public Communication; II. the Level of Conscious Description; III. the Level of Private Symbolization; IV. the Level of the Unexpressed Unconscious; and V, the Level of Values. These levels are defined in
INTERPERSONAL AND VARIABILITY SYSTEMS 77
terms of the operations which produce the pertinent data. That is, the source of the data automatically determines the level of classifica- tion. In this way we obtain operational definitions of the five levels of personality.
There are many different specific kinds of expression which can contribute data to any one level. For example, there are several ways in which fantasy symbols can be manifested — dreams, projective tests, fantasies, etc. All of these produce Level III data, although the opera- tions by which the themes are expressed are quite separate. In order to insure clarity and precision we always indicate (by code) the spe- cific source of the data. The general level is designated by a roman numeral and the sublevel operations are designated by a code letter. Level III-D, for example, means private interpersonal symbols ob- tained from dreams. Level III-T indicates private interpersonal sym- bols obtained from TAT stories. The general definition of levels and the specific test and rating procedures by which they are measured will now be presented.
Level I (Public Communication) consists of the overt behavior of the individual as rated by others along the sixteen-point circular con- tinuum. These judgments are made by trained observers or by naive fellow subjects who observe the subject in interpersonal situations. They rate his interpersonal impact as it appears to them. What we ob- tain is a series of ratings of the interpersonal effect the subject has on others who share social situations with him. Other estimates of Level I behavior are obtained from special test procedures — situation test, prediction scales and the like.
Level I data is objective or public — rather than private or subjec- tive. It may or may not agree with the subject's own view of the situa- tion. To obtain Level I data it is necessary to have the subject in- volved in social interaction and to have others rate their view of his purposive behavior. This gives a measurement of his social "stimulus value." Other specialized methods for assessing Level I require the patient to take criterion-specific tests (like the MMPI) which allow us to predict his interpersonal role.
The situation in which we rate interpersonal behavior can be an extraclinic event or it can be restricted to the more controlled en- vironment of the clinic or assessment situation. The raters can be re- searchers, diagnostic or therapeutic clinicians, fellow patients, or family members. The meaning of the Level I rating thus depends on the cultural context and the category of the rater. These differences provide interesting sublevel variations of the broad, general Level I of Public Communication.
78
BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
There are five methods which provide estimates of Level I public behavior. These are coded as follows:
Level I-Al: MMPI indices which reflect the interpersonal pressure exerted on the clinician by the patient's symptoms.
Level I-R: Ratings by trained personnel of the patient's minute-by- minute behavior in a social situation.
Level I-S: Sociometric ratings (from check lists) by fellow patients or by trained observers.
Level I-P: MMPI indices wliich predict the interpersonal behavior to be expected in group psychotherapy.
Level I-T: Scores from standard situational tests which assess the patient's interpersonal reactions.
The following chapter is devoted to a detailed description of the im- phcations, measurement, and validation of Level I behavior.
Level II {Conscious Descriptions) includes the verbal content of all the statements that the subject makes about the interpersonal be- havior of himself or "others." His descriptions of himself and others are obtained from a variety of sources — conversations, therapy proto- cols, autobiographies, check lists. They are then rated along the same sixteen-point circular continuum. We are interested here in the sub- ject's reported perceptions of himself and his interpersonal world. We are not interested at this level in the consensual accuracy of these per- ceptions or in the potential deeper meanings. We are concerned only with the phenomenological field — the way in which the subject re- ports his view of self and world. It must be noted that one single sen- tence expressed by a subject can provide both a Level I and a Level II rating. If a patient says, "I am a responsible person," the Level II rat- ing reflects the surface meaning of responsibility (coded as O) re- ported by the subject. Observers of the interpersonal context in which the sentence was uttered might agree that its Level I-R effect was to establish autonomy from the therapist (coded B) or superiority over other patients (also coded B). The reported self-perception usually is different from the interpersonal impact on or meaning to others.
There are four methods which provide data for Level II descrip- tions of self and others. These are coded as follows:
Level II-Di: Ratings by trained personnel of the verbal content from diagnostic interviews.
Level II-Ti: Ratings by trained personnel of the verbal content from therapy interviews.
Level II-C:, Scores from the Interpersonal Adjective Check List on which the patient checks his view of self and others.
Level II-A: Ratings by trained personnel of the content of autobiog- raphies written by patients.
INTERPERSONAL AND VARIABILITY SYSTEMS
79
The illustration, implications, use, and validation of this level of con- scious description will be considered in Chapter 8.
Level III {Private Symbolization) consists of projective, indirect fantasy materials. These data come from a variety of sources — dreams, fantasies, artistic, or autistic productions, projective tests — which elicit imaginative expressions. The interpersonal themes of all these symbolic expressions are rated by two or more trained raters along the sixteen-point circular continuum. We thus possess a technique for systematically measuring the indirect autistic data of personality in terms of the same interpersonal variables which we use to categorize the public or conscious aspects of behavior. The broad general nature of the level categories must be mentioned again. There are many sub- level varieties of symbolic data. Some creative, projective tests, for example, may be more closely related to the level of conscious de- scription. Others may be consistently identified with the pattern of dream themes. The exact "depth" of any symbolic response depends on a variety of factors — cultural context, type of symbolic stimulus, the nature of the Level I behavior at the time, etc. The detailed sys- tematic organization and specific differentiation of these private pro- ductions becomes one of the most important and fascinating problems of current dynamic psychology.
There are at present seven methods for collecting Level III pre- conscious data from patients. These are coded as follows:
Level III-T: Ratings of TAT stories.
Level III-IFT: Ratings from the Interpersonal Fantasy Test.^ Level Ill-i: Ratings of responses to the Iflund projective test. (3) Level III-B: Ratings of responses the Blacky projective test. (1) Level III-D: Ratings of interpersonal themes in dream protocols. Level III-F: Ratings of interpersonal themes from waking fan- tasies expressed by the subject. Level III-M: MMPI indices which predict to preconscious be- havior.
There is one distinction to be made in dealing with preconscious data that is most important. This is the division between the hero and the world personages in fantasy productions. Evidence from several samples suggests that clearly different sublevels of behavior are in- volved.
* The Interpersonal Fantasy Test is a Level III instrument developed by the Kaiser Foundation psychology research project to fit the interpersonal system. It is a TAT- type test in which the cards are designed to explore systematically the subject's fan- tasies about interpersonal relationships between heroes and paternal, maternal, cross- sex, and same-sex figures. Scores are obtained for Level III Self, Mother, Father, Cross-sex and Therapist.
8o BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
These findings are of considerable value because they define two distinct sublevels of the symbolic or preconscious area. One is desig- nated Level III Hero. This is the symbolic self-image. Its theoretical and clinical meaning is different from the preconscious images of the symboKc world. This latter area is designated Level III Other. These two subdivisions of symbolic expression have been found to be lawfully distinct. They often define different kinds of interlevel conflict and different personality types, and they are related to different sympto- matic pictures. Chapter 9 which is devoted to Level III symbolic be- havior will consider these distinctions.
Level IV (the Unexpressed Unconscious) is defined by the inter- personal themes which are systematically and compulsively avoided by the subject at all the other levels of personality and which are conspicuous by their inflexible absence. Here we refer to those activi- ties which are consistently and deliberately "not present" in the per- sonality profile. These "unexpressed" aspects of personality are as yet unexplored. For this reason, this level will not be employed in the basic systematization that follows.
The definition of Level IV is a problem as yet unsolved. The most convincing demonstration of the presence of motivation previously unexpressed (at the other three levels) would require two parallel sets of evidence. The negative proof would involve statistical demonstra- tion that the subject significantly avoids certain patterns of interper- sonal response with a frequency far beyond the expectations of chance. The proof positive requires that the same interpersonal themes be picked up in significant frequency by certain subliminal, indirect perceptual tests, e.g., abnormally long reaction times or perceptual distortions in response to thematic stimuli presented at spht-second (blurred) tachistoscope exposures. The implications and problems in- volved in the unexpressed behavior of Level IV will be surveyed in Chapter 10.
Level V (Values) consists of the data which reflect the subject's system of moral, "superego judgments," his ego ideal. We refer here to the interpersonal traits and actions that the subject holds to be "good," proper, and "right" — his picture of how he should be and would like to be. These idealized interpersonal themes are obtained in the same manner as the conscious descriptions of Level II. We single out from interview, free association, check list, and questionnaire the expressions which concern his value-feelings. These are rated and scored according to the sixteen-point circular continuum.
Like the other levels of personality, the "ego ideal" cannot be con- ceived of as a unitary or narrowly defined category. Some "values" may be consciously expressed — others may be rated as they appear
INTERPERSONAL AND VARIABILITY SYSTEMS 8i
in implied form. Thus some may be "deeper" than others. There are three methods for obtaining Level V ratings of the ego ideal. These are coded as follows:
Level V-C: Scores from the Interpersonal Adjective Check List on which the patient checks his ego ideal.
Level V-Di: Ratings by trained personnel of the subject's ideals as expressed in diagnostic interviews.
Level V-Ti: Ratings by trained personnel of the subject's ideals as expressed in therapy interviews.
The measurement and meaning of this level of behavior will be discussed in Chapter II.
There follows in Table 1 a summary of the various sources of data for each level and sublevel of personality. We should observe again that the assignment of data to the appropriate level operates automati- cally. The source of the data routinely and rigidly defines the level. It should also be noted that while our method is rigid, behavior is flexible and fluid, and does not always follow our notational schemes. By this we mean that there exist sublevel variations; some Level II
TABLE 1
Operational Definition of Five Levels of Personality According to Source of Data
Level I: (Public Communication) This level concerns the interpersonal impact of the subject on others— his social stimulus value. There are four different ways of ob- taining this measure:
Level I-R: Ratings by trained personnel of the patient's minute-by-minute be- havior in a social situation.
Level I-S: Sociometric ratings (from check lists) by fellow patients or by trained observers.
Level I-M: MMPI indices which predict the interpersonal behavior to be expected.
Level I-T: Scores from standard situational tests which assess the patient's in- terpersonal reactions.
I^evel II: (Conscious Descriptions) The subject's view of self and world obtained from interviews, autobiography, check list, questionnaire. There are four methods which provide data for this level:
Level II-Di. Ratings by trained personnel of the verbal content from diagnostic interviews.
Level II-Ti: Ratings by trained personnel of the verbal content from therapy interviews.
Level II-C: Scores from the Interpersonal Adjective Check List on which the patient checks his view of self and others.
Level II-A: Ratings by trained personnel of the content of autobiographies writ- ten by patients.
Level III: (Preconscious Symbolization) The subject's autistic, projective fantasy pro- ductions. There are two sublevels of preconscious expression: Level III Hero and Level III Other.
82 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
Level III Hero is defined by the interpersonal themes attributed to the heroes of preconscious protocols obtained from dreams, fantasies, projective stories
Level III Other comprises the interpersonal themes attributed to the "other" figures from the same preconscious protocols.
There are at present seven methods for collecting Level III data:
Level III-T Ratings of TAT stories.
Level III-IFT: Ratings from the Interpersonal Fantasy Test.
Level III-i: Ratings of responses to the Iflund pro)ective test.
Level III-B: Ratings of responses to the Blacky projective test.
Level III-D- Ratings of interpersonal themes in dream protocols.
Level III-F: Ratings of interpersonal themes from waking fantasies expressed
by the subject.
Level III-M: MMPI indices which predict preconscious behavior.
Level IV: (Unexpressed Unconscious) This level is defined by two criteria: the inter- personal themes significantly omitted at the top three levels and significantlv avoided on tests of subliminal perceptions, selective forgetting, and the like. Specific methods for obtaining this data are not yet developed.
Level V: (Ego Ideal) This level comprises the subject's statements about his inter- personal ideas, standards, conceptions of good and evil as obtained in interview, autobiography, questionnaire, or check list. There are three methods for obtaining Level V ratings of values:
Level V-C: Scores from the Interpersonal Adjective Check List on which the
patient checks his ego ideal. Level V-Di- Ratings by trained personnel of the subject's ideals as expressed in
diagnostic interviews. Level V-Ti: Ratings by trained personnel of the subject's ideals as expressed in
therapy interviews.
reports (let us say from the intense confidence of psychotherapy) turn out to be much closer to our Level III measurements. Some symbolic productions (Level III) from subjects who are striving to "overload" their presentations in one thematic direction may duplicate Level II conscious reports. These sublevel shifts are generally due to differences in the social situation, or in the stimulus materials, or gen- eral variability factors such as time, oscillation, and interlevel dynamics. All of these are, fortunately, open to some systematic measurement and predictive control, and will be treated in a later publication.
To conclude this preliminary glance at the five defined levels of personality, an illustration of the way data are assigned to levels may prove helpful. If a subject is rated as displaying aggressive behavior in a unit of interpersonal action, the rating of hostility (E) is then coded into the matrix of Level I-R variables. Should this same subject describe himself in a conscious report (on a check list) as friendly and agreeable, a Level II-C rating of affiliation (M) would be made. Should he report a dream in which the hero behaves in a submissive, trustful fashion, dependence (K) would be coded into the Level III-D pattern. Should nurturant behavior be absent from all of these three levels (to a statistically significant degree), and if it appears in the
INTERPERSONAL AND VARIABILITY SYSTEMS 83
form of exaggerated avoidance or distortion of tenderness themes on Level IV measuring devices, then the presence of Level IV nurturance (N) could be inferred. If his description of his "ego ideal" on the check list stresses the themes of power and independence, then the Level V-C scores of A and B are emphasized.
Let us assume that hundreds of additional measurements at all levels continue to emphasize the same pattern. The summary totals for each level are converted to standard scores, comparing them to the means of appropriate normative larger samples of cases. By means of the vector method described above we can chart the personality structure in the form of a diagram summarizing five levels of self-behavior. The data from each level has been converted into a systematic rating lan- guage which is standardized, and directly comparable with the data from other levels. The many implications and theoretical aspects of this multidimensional organization of personality will be discussed in Chapter 13,
The Measurement of the Self-Other Interaction
A final notationa^ procedure remains before the basic elements of the personality structure can be assembled. Formal recognition must be made of the fact that any interpersonal behavior involves more than one person — and by definition cannot be considered as an iso- lated phenomenon. We accepted (in the fourth working principle) the premise that the interpersonal theory logically requires that for each variable or variable system by which we measure the subject's behavior, we must include an equivalent set for measuring the parallel behavior of the subject's interpersonal world.
The reciprocal nature of social interaction, the reflex way in which human beings tailor their responses to others, and the automatic way in which they force others to react to them will become one of the main points of emphasis in this book. To take systematic account of these interchanges (at all levels of personality) a notational step is required. This is accomplished by categorizing and summarizing separately the interpersonal responses of the subject and the specific others with whom he interacts. When we observe the subject's public communications at Level I we rate not only his purposive behavior, but also what others do to him. Then we score the patient's interpersonal responses to the psychotherapist and we also score the latter's reactions toward the patient. We note, for example, that the subject acts de- pendent (K) and the therapist reacts with nurturance (O).
When we measure the subject's conscious reports at Level II, we rate not only his perceptions of himself, but also his descriptions of his interpersonal world as he views it. Thus we score the interpersonal
84 BASIC ASSUMPTIONS
themes the patient attributes to himself and, in addition, the themes he attributes to the specified "others" with whom he is concerned. We rate, for example, the subject's statement "I am helpless to solve this problem" (/) and his description of the therapist "You are a person who can help me with my problem" (O). When we summarize his Level II material, we obtain a numerical or diagrammatic total for the reported view of self, his view of his therapist, of his family mem- bers, of the other members of his therapy group, and all "others" he has described.
When we deal with the symbolic data of Level III, we rate not only his fantasy themes attributed to self or to self-identified heroes, but also the interpersonal themes he assigns to the "others" with whom his fantasy self interacts. The subject might report, for example, a dream in which he attacks (E) his rejecting unsympathetic psychothera- pist (C). We summarize the Level III fantasy materials in the same manner — obtaining separate totals from his symbolic self and symbolic others.
The usefulness of this self-other classification for the unexpressed themes of Level IV is, at present, an unsettled question. Some psy- chologists hold that the vague, diffuse themes from the less conscious areas of personality cannot be differentiated into self-other categories. Since there is no adequate data to settle this question, Level IV behavior will not be formally systematized in this book.
The division of behavior into self-and-other does not seem to apply as directly to the "value" data from Level V. It might be assumed that the "ego ideal" or superego judgment of what's "right-and-good" holds as a general value system for one's view of self and all others. On the other hand, it is possible to obtain measurements on the "ideal- for-self" and the "ideal-for-specified-others." Thus the subject might be asked to describe his view of the "ideal" mother, the "ideal" father, the "ideal" spouse, the "ideal" therapist, the "ideal" boss, etc. The Kaiser Foundation research project is at this time conducting investi- gations of this sort, but the results are not yet tabulated. For this reason in this book. Level V will be considered as a unitary field and will not be divided into self and other.
Variability Indices: The Organization of Personality
The interpersonal system deals, therefore, with eight generic areas of personality data: two each (self and other) for Levels I, II, III, and one each for Levels