Childhood Experience and Personal Destiny : A Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis

THE THESIS PRESENTED IN THESE PAGES is that mental illness originates in the adaptations made to traumatic experiences in early life, and that in its details the illness bears the impress of those experiences and the child's reactions to them. The period covered by "early life" is that from birth to the age of six or thereabouts. I do not intend to imply that experiences occurring after this period are not traumatic or are without effect upon the formation of personality. But I believe that the experiences of early life are highly formative, for good or ill, and that they contain most of the qualitative variations of human experience in general. Experience in later life, traumatic or otherwise, mainly reaffirms or contradicts the experiences of earlier life. However, it is manifestly absurd to suppose that susceptibility to external influence terminates at the age of six years and to maintain that after that time the personality cannot do otherwise than carry out repetitiously and mechanically its al ready formed patterns of adaptation and behavior. If this were true, how could it be hoped that any process of psychotherapy might be effective in ameliorating mental illness? Or how could it be accounted for that, as sometimes happens, adult life-experience without benefit of psychotherapy produces alterations of personality, both favorable and unfavorable? Experience in the first six years of life generates a complex pattern of adaptative potentialities which are at the disposal of the later personality. Any one IX x PREFACE such potentiality or any grouping of them may be more or less utilized or more or less inhibited in meeting or in creating the situations of life in later years. It is in view of this that it seems reasonable to dose the books, as it were, in more or less tentative fashion at the age of six years. While acknowledging that personality may, perhaps even in large part, be determined by inherited constitutional factors, we are constrained to recognize that all attempts hitherto to establish the existence and nature of such factors have met with complete failure and have produced not a shred of convincing evidence. In these circumstances we are bound to emphasize-possibly, overemphasize-the significance of environmental factors in the formation of personality. We can be confident that work along these lines will never be wholly vitiated by the discovery of constitutional factors; the only effect of such discovery would be an altered view of the relative importance of experiential factors. Now they occupy the whole stage; then they might have to share the stage with other performers. My professional and personal debts in the writing of this volume must now be acknowledged. Every writer of such works as this owes an incalculable debt to Freud, which, in my own case, will be acknowledged in extenso in the Introduction and in detail at many points in the text. Of a similar nature, though indeed not so vast, is my debt to Harry Stack Sullivan, whose inßuence on my thinking will likewise be acknowledged and expounded more fully elsewhere. Clarence P. Oberndorf, Franz Alexander, Sandor Rado, and Clara Thompson, having participated in my psychiatrie and psychoanalytic training, all have my deep gratitude and my full awareness of the personal debt I owe them, in addition to the professional one. In the preparation of this book I have received invaluable assistance from Doctor Lilly Ottenheimer: she showed me that it had to be written, read with enormous patience and fortitude the various chapters as I wrote them, and made numerous suggestions for their improvement. Ruth Steele took over the difficult task of typing from a hand-written script, often almost "This account of the genesis of personality and neurosis represents a return to the crossroads at which Freud found himself when faced with the collapse of his traumatic theory of the etiology of neurosis: a return and affirmation that Freud was sound in his first intuition that neurosis emerges from traumatic childhood experience and its specific details. But Silverberg rejects as too narrow Freud's definition--that this traumatic experience is sexual seduction by an adult--and gives in this book a broader, more comprehensive definition of childhood experience and a new working hypothesis for psychotherapy. Strength and weakness of the ego are regarded by Silverberg as roughly equivalent to mental health and mental illness respectively. He is concerned with the kind of childhood experience that favors growth or diminution of this ego strength. He stresses the ego's functions and its mode of operation as well as interpersonal relationships and environmental factors of childhood experience. Specifically, the book is about the child growing up in our culture. The experiences of early life are discussed as children usually have them in the process of being brought up by parents of our culture. Although these successive areas of individual experience have not the universal and biologic significance which Freud ascribed to the genesis of libido, they parallel, more or less, the Freudian phases. Problems of deprivation in the oral area are followed by those of obedience, conformity, rebelliousness in the disciplinary area (Freud's anal phase) and by problems of comparison, competition, and genitality in the phallic area. For each area the author investigates the typical adaptations to the difficulties encountered by the child. He offers many keenly observed examples of solutions that are "normal" as well as pathologic in our culture. He brings out the vast difference and conflict between adaptations that are biologically successful or culturally successful. He shows that all experience of childhood involves parental love and approval, and that the child is as much concerned with maintaining these as with reaching pleasure goals. Since psychopathologic patterns are the result of experiences in the life history of the child and are therefore acquired, new experience can result in new and different psychologic patterns. A person can break his formed patterns of behavior by a process that leads to new self-understanding and from there to new adaptation. In this possibility lie the problem, the task, and the hope of psychotherapy"--Jacket. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved) Front Matter....Pages I-XIII Introduction....Pages 1-8 Toward a Theory of Personality and Neurosis....Pages 9-36 The Areas of Early Experience....Pages 37-50 The First Experiential Area: Problems of Orality and Deprivation....Pages 51-101 The Second Experiential Area: Problems of Discipline....Pages 102-152 The Third Experiential Area: Problems of Rivalry and Genitality....Pages 153-238 Psychotherapeutic Aims....Pages 239-270 Back Matter....Pages 271-289