ACT for psychoanalysis.
Depressive Personality: Individuals with depressive personality are prone to feelings of depression and inadequacy, tend to be self-critical or self-punitive, and may be preoccupied with concerns about abandonment or loss. The person treats themselves like someone they despise. A psychologically insightful observer might describe the person as their own worst enemy. Where there is an enemy, there is often anger and aggression. One underlying psychological theme in depressive personality is internal attacks against the self. The person is angry, defends against experiencing anger, and instead directs it at themselves in the form of self-criticism, self-deprivation, and self-punitiveness.
Anxious-Avoidant Personality: Individuals with anxious‐avoidant personality are chronically prone to anxiety, are socially anxious and avoidant, and attempt to manage anxiety in ways that limit and constrict their lives. Anxiety pervades their experience of themselves and their world. They ruminate and dwell on perceived dangers and past mistakes. Their predominant emotions are anxiety, shame, and embarrassment. They defend against sources of anxiety by avoidance. The problem is that the sources of anxiety are everywhere, including within. Ultimately, avoidant responses become bars in a psychological prison, constricting and limiting freedom of thought, feeling, choice, and action. As a result, people with anxious-avoidant personalities lead constricted lives and tend to adhere to familiar routines.
Dependent‐victimized Personality: Individuals with dependent‐victimized personality are highly dependent and fearful of being alone, tend to show insufficient concern for their own well‐being to the point of jeopardizing their welfare or safety, and have difficulty expressing anger directly. People with dependent- victimized personalities are characterized by intense dependency, leading them to subordinate their needs to those of others in order to maintain desperately needed attachments. This leaves them vulnerable to mistreatment and exploitation. The person experiences the attachment relationship as essential to their existence and seems prepared to go to any length to preserve it, including agreeing to things they find objectionable and things that may be self-destructive. Externally, they are ingratiating, passive, and submissive. Internally, they experience themselves as unworthy, undeserving, and bereft without the connection to and approval of the other person.
Obsessive-compulsive Personality: Individuals with obsessive-compulsive personality are intellectualized and overly “rational” in their approach to life, are emotionally constricted and rigid, and are critical of themselves and others and conflicted about anger, aggression, and authority. The predominant unconscious theme is around being in control versus being controlled. They are caught in an internal conflict around submitting to others’ expectations and demands versus defying them. On one side of the conflict is submission to someone else’s control, following the rules, deferring to authority. This leads to feelings of humiliation and rage. On the other side of the conflict is defiance, experienced unconsciously as destructive aggression. This leads to fear of retaliation and punishment and accompanying anxiety and guilt. Both sets of feelings are frightening and unacceptable: post
Schizoid-schizotypal Personality: Individuals with schizoid-schizotypal personality are characterized by pervasive impoverishment of, and peculiarities in, interpersonal relationships, emotional experience, and thought processes. Patients who match the schizoid-schizotypal prototype lack close relationships and appear indifferent to human company or contact. They lack social skills and tend to be socially awkward or inappropriate. They may seem odd or peculiar in appearance or manner; something about them seems “off.” They tend to think in concrete terms and have little capacity to appreciate metaphor, analogy, or nuance. They have difficulty making sense of others’ behavior and likewise have little insight into their own. Despite apparent detachment, they suffer inwardly, often greatly, and experience themselves as outcasts and outsiders. A subset of schizoid-schizotypal patients shows substantial aberrations in thinking, reasoning, and perception, and their speech and thought processes may be digressive and circumstantial.
Antisocial‐psychopathic Personality: Individuals with antisocial-psychopathic personality exploit others, experience little remorse for harm or injury caused to others, and have poor impulse control. People with antisocial-psychopathic personality lack an internalized moral system. What is right is what they can get away with. They are out for personal gain, take advantage of other people, and manipulate and deceive without guilt or inhibition. They show reckless disregard for others’ rights, property, or safety. They experience little remorse for the harm they cause. On the contrary, they take sadistic pleasure in dominating and exercising power over others. People with antisocial-psychopathic personality experience little anxiety, and they show minimal autonomic reactivity in response to aversive events. Many have a high need for stimulation and seek thrills, novelty, and excitement. They push limits and act impulsively, because impulses are not checked by anxiety, empathy, or an internalized moral system. People with antisocial-psychopathic personality are motivated by self-interest, sensation seeking, and desire for power and dominance.
Narcissistic Personality: Individuals with narcissistic personality are grandiose and entitled, dismissive and critical of others, and often show underlying signs of vulnerability beneath a grandiose façade. Coexistence of contradictory feelings of superiority and grandiosity and feelings of vulnerability, emptiness, and inadequacy. Narcissistic personality is characterized by the coexistence of contradictory feelings of superiority and grandiosity and feelings of vulnerability, emptiness, and inadequacy. In overt narcissism, we tend to see only one side of this inner conflict: the self-importance, grandiosity, and entitlement. But internally, the person is torn between feelings of superiority and painful feelings of emptiness and unworthiness. The overt grandiosity defends against and masks the underlying feelings of emptiness, inadequacy, and inferiority. The person works continually to shore up their fragile sense of self and makes use of others to support this effort. They need others as an audience, to witness and affirm their importance, and this need can override the awareness that those recruited as their audience are also human beings with their own emotions, needs, vulnerabilities, and experiences. This interferes with developing the kind of mutual, genuine relationships that give life a sense of meaning and purpose, that could counteract the inner sense of emptiness and deficiency. The result is that a person with a narcissistic personality dynamics can be surrounded by admirers, but starve emotionally in a sea of plenty. In vulnerable or covert narcissism, in contrast, the narcissistic defenses against inadequacy fail. Rather than experiencing themselves as superior, people with covert narcissism experience themselves, and come across to others, as deflated, self-critical, and beaten down by life. Although they often present symptoms of depression in clinical practice, they generally derive little benefit from treatments that specifically target these depressive symptoms. Beneath their suffering and self-criticism, clinicians often find that their inner life is dominated by fantasies of importance, success, and glory. They are the main characters in their internal narratives –unappreciated, unrecognized, and denied their rightful place in the world. At different times, the same individual may present as either a grandiose or vulnerable narcissist, depending on how well their defenses are functioning at that point in time and how well the external world is cooperating with those defenses. Both manifestations of narcissism lead to difficulties in developing and maintaining meaningful and lasting interpersonal connections. Ultimately, the person’s life feels painfully empty: post.
Paranoid Personality: Patients with paranoid personalities are chronically suspicious, angry, and hostile. They read malevolent intent into others’ words and actions and are quick to assume others mean them harm. They hold grudges, dwell on slights, and react to perceived threats with rage and aggression. They see their difficulties as externally caused and lack insight into their own role in shaping events. At the core of paranoid personality is the defense of projection. People with paranoid personalities are filled with aggression and rage, which they project onto others and (mis)perceive as originating from them. People with paranoid personalities experience the world as cold, hostile, and dangerous because they see their own hostility wherever they look.
Hysteric-histrionic Personality: Individuals with hysteric‐histrionic personality are emotionally dramatic and cognitively impressionistic, sexually provocative, and interpersonally suggestible, idealizing of admired others, and paradoxically both intensely and superficially attached. On the surface, people with hysteric-histrionic personality styles exemplify gender stereotypes. They present as stereotypically feminine or masculine, like a leading lady or leading man in a stylized Hollywood movie. They are emotional and dramatic. They use their physical attractiveness and sexuality to gain attention. They are flirtatious, seductive, and sexually provocative. They may lead people on and make romantic conquests. They tend to become involved in romantic triangles involving rivals. They can charm and captivate members of the other sex (when both are heterosexual) but may annoy or threaten members of the same sex. Their emotions can seem simultaneously intense and shallow. They can develop intense infatuations which they describe as love, and lose interest when a new prospect arrives. For people with hysteric-histrionic personality, facts and reason take a backseat to emotion. Their reactions tend to be based on feelings, not reason. If you ask a person with hysteric-histrionic personality what they think, they are likely to tell you how they feel. Their cognitive style tends to be glib, global, and impressionistic; they miss details and gloss over inconsistencies. They come across as naïve and seem to know less about the ways of the world than might be expected. Their beliefs can seem cliché or stereotypical, as if taken from storybooks or movies. They tend to be suggestible. Their impressionistic cognitive style is unrelated to intelligence and serves a defensive function. People with hysteric-histrionic personality do not look too closely at details or connect too many dots, for fear of seeing and knowing too much. At the core of hysteric-histrionic personality are conflicts around gender and power. Unconsciously, they see their own gender as weak, defective, or inferior. They see the other gender as powerful, exciting, and frightening, and they are unconsciously envious. They use sexuality as a way to turn the tables and gain power over the other gender.
Borderline-dysregulated Personality: Individuals with borderline-dysregulated personality have impaired ability to regulate their emotions, have unstable perceptions of self and others that lead to intense and chaotic relationships, and are prone to act on impulses, including self‐destructive impulses. People with borderline-dysregulated personality have been described as “stably unstable.” There is a pattern of instability in emotional life, self-concept, and relationships. Core features include affect dysregulation, splitting, identity diffusion, projection, projective identification, and insecure attachment. People with borderline-dysregulated personality have difficulty regulating affect. Their emotions can change rapidly and unpredictably and spiral out of control, leading to extremes of despair, anxiety, agitation, and rage. They experience episodes of deep depression in which they lose access to any glimmer of hope. They are often filled with rage, and they are prone to destroy relationships with hateful, rage-filled outbursts. Poor impulse control is an ongoing problem and leads to ill-considered actions and self-destructive behavior.
Splitting: Perceiving others in black-and-white categories; seeing them as one-dimensional, as all good or all bad
Denial: Refusal to acknowledge or accept reality when it does not fit your wishes & preferences
Omnipotent Control: Seeking to control others’ behavior, speech, and even thoughts; insisting others should think your thoughts instead of their own
Devaluation: Denigrating and dismissing certain people and seeing them as having lesser value or importance
Moral Masochism: Believing your suffering makes you more important or virtuous than others; for example, feeling superior to others in proportion to your suffering or victimization
Projection: Being unaware of undesirable/unacceptable feelings and motives in yourself (for example, spite, hate, cruelty, envy) and mistakenly seeing them in other people instead
Transference: Responding to another person as if they were someone from your past; for example, hating someone in the present because they remind you of someone else who wronged you when you were growing up
False Self: A false sense of identity created to meet the expectations or gain the approval of others, in place of exploring and developing an authentic sense of identity of your own
Omnipotence: Believing and insisting you have power over other people or circumstances; insistence that your desires and preference can and should override reality
Externalization: Blaming other people or circumstances when things go wrong, instead of accepting responsibility for your own conduct and choices, or recognizing your own role in shaping events
Reaction Formation: Masking underlying feelings and attitudes by expressing their opposite to an exaggerated degree (e.g., expressing exaggerated approval and admiration toward people or groups you secretly look down on)
Extreme Envy: Destructive envy that leads you to want to attack and destroy what you can’t have or be—as if to say, if I cannot have it, then it should not be allowed to exist
Repetition and Enactment: When something we do not want to know or understand about ourselves gets played out with others over and over
External Splitting: Treating others in ways that cause them to polarize into opposing camps, for or against you (generally accompanies internal splitting described in #1)
Displacement: Shifting feelings from one person or situation to a different, safer one; for example, attacking someone who cannot defend themselves in place of someone who can retaliate
Projective Identification: Projecting unacknowledged feelings/motives onto someone else, then treating them in ways that provoke the very feelings you have projected. E.g., projecting rage onto someone else, then treating them so badly that they actually become enraged
Dialectical: counters the tendency towards stasis or one-sidedness, by inviting to consider the continuous and paradoxical interchanges between opposites within the whole.
Symbolic: counters the tendency towards concreteness or literalism, by inviting to consider the equivalence between physical reality and psychic reality, microcosm and macrocosm. (external/internal)
Formal: counters the tendency to get lost in the details, by inviting to disregard contingencies in order to extract themes or patterns between seemingly unrelated elements.
Skeptical: counters the tendency towards certainty and definitiveness, by inviting to keep the inquiry going with a questioning, open-ended, and humble attitude.
Investigative: counters the tendency to take things at face value, by inviting to adopt a suspicious attitude and look for “clues” of how things may have been hidden, distorted, or disguised.
Emancipatory: counters the tendency towards alienation, victimhood, or abdication of responsibility, by inviting to strive towards accountability, autonomy, and empowerment.
Genealogical: counters the tendency to neglect history by inviting to consider the origin of things (where they come from) and their future possibilities (where they tend to).
Enkratic: counters the tendency to act upon mental states, by inviting to think or talk about them instead, and make sure that, if one has to act, one does so intentionally.
Dynamic: counters the tendency to focus on verbal content or behavioral intentions alone, by inviting to consider the affective states underlying speech and behavior (their quality, intensity, and changes over time).
Mimetic: counters the tendency to represent things by means of labels or hearsay, inviting instead to depict one’s subject as faithfully as possible, using particularized expressions that stay close to its “essence”.
Spontaneous: counters the tendency to over-control the process, by inviting to go with the “flow” of the material as it unfolds, without filtering, deviating, or accelerating it.
Self-reflective: counters the tendency to look “outside”, by inviting to turn one’s attention inward, onto one’s personal implication in the process as well as what is happening in the here and now.
two main sub-groups of operators can be identified: those that are prevalently used for filtering-linking-transforming (Dialectical, Symbolic, Formal, Investigative, Genealogical, Dynamic) and those that are prevalently used for (re-)positioning (Skeptical, Emancipatory, Enkratic, Mimetic, Spontaneous, Self-reflective).
Read Bion.
Greater attachment security / sense of safety in relationships
More integrated & coherent experience of self & others
Increased sense of personal agency
More realistically-grounded & reliable self-esteem
Greater emotional resilience & capacity for affect regulation
Greater ability to reflect on & understand own and others’ inner experience (“mentalization”)
Increased comfort in functioning both independently & communally (interdependently)
More robust sense of vitality and aliveness
Enhanced capacity for acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude
Movement toward more mature and flexible defenses
denial (ignoring or disregarding things that are disturbing, as if they did not exist);
withdrawal (from reality into fantasy);
indiscriminate forms of introjection (the wholesale ‘taking in’ of someone else’s characteristics, attitudes, and even mannerisms, sometimes called introjective identification);
omnipotent control (treating another as an extension of oneself and insisting the other person think the thoughts assigned to them instead of their own);
acting out (repetitively living out an internal drama that is not remembered, felt, or understood);
somatization (developing physical symptoms under stress);
severe dissociation (incongruous disconnections between different aspects of experience, or shifts of self-states without a sense of the continuity of experience);
extreme idealization (seeing another as all-good and larger than life, as a small child might see an admired adult);
extreme devaluation (seeing another as completely worthless, with no redeeming qualities whatever).
Nancy McWilliams & Jonathan Shedler, Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual (PDM-3)
Overwhelmment
retreating, avoiding, procrastinating, hiding out, denying, dissociating.
seize control of the situation
Give them what they want. Accommodate
Insufficiency
I am unworthy
Overcompensate, seek power
Seek the reassurance of others
Overwhelmment responses resemble: flight/freeze; fight; fawn. Insufficiency: flop; fight; friend.
Armored Amazon – masculine strength: Superstar; Dutiful daughter; Martyr mother; Warrior queen.
Eternal girl – helpless girl: Darling doll; Girl of glass; High flyer; Misfit
fleeing or withdrawing or adapting or rebelling
martyr and misfit; warrior queen and darling doll?;
Others propose
Primitive superego, conflict between RAGE and other emotions, especially FEAR and PANIC/GRIEF but also PLAY, giving rise to paranoia, guilt and shame respectively.
“the superego is constituted not only through projected RAGE but also by FEAR, directly, which inevitably conflicts with RAGE.” (drive theory)
“The LUST drive is roughly equivalent to what Freud termed the genital component of the libidinal drive. The equivalents in affective neuroscience of Freud’s oral, anal, and phallic component drives are PANIC-GRIEF, RAGE, and PLAY, respectively.” (Oed complex)
“Think for example of the great variety of conflicts that can and do arise between LUST on the one hand and both PANIC-GRIEF and CARE on the other, between PANIC-GRIEF and CARE on the one hand and SEEKING on the other, between CARE and RAGE, between RAGE and FEAR, between SEEKING and FEAR, between PANIC-GRIEF and PLAY, etc.” (Response to Otto Kernberg, 116)
“…it seems that the category of object inherent in each of the basic emotion systems is conceptually equivalent to – if not identical with –what Wilfred Bion called “preconceptions”.
“Defeat is orchestrated again and again to perpetuate the longing and need for the exciting and unavailable other, the unobtainable good mother or father who existed in the child’s fantasy. The fantasy is always more exciting than reality, and moreover, when the person gets close to what he has longed for that had seemed unobtainable, reality begins to intrude in an unwelcome and even intolerable way.” (unknown)
“… despite the rejection of him by Jung himself, Hegel nevertheless seems to be the only one who could provide to Jungian psychology the kind of logic with which alone it could truly comprehend and say what it has to say.” (Giegerich)
“The unconscious ego, with its defensive functions, strives to gain control of affective consciousness [i.e., the id]. This goal of the ego can be achieved in various ways. At one theoretical extreme, the ego can convert affective consciousness entirely into cognitive consciousness. This coincides with the fictitious case of Mr. Spock, where the (affective) drive—or the “demand made upon the mind for work”—exerted by the id upon the ego yields perfectly efficient (cognitive) work. At the opposite extreme, the ego can also fail entirely to achieve this goal, in which case it will be overwhelmed by affect, and cognitively incapacitated. At yet another extreme, the ego can exclude affective consciousness from its (cognitive) realm entirely. This results in the id generating negative affects of which the ego has no knowledge; a common enough situation, as every psychoanalyst will attest… All the common-and-garden varieties of defence can be located between the theoretical extremes I have just described.” (Solms)
“analysis appears as a field of ever-expanding transformations more concerned with the future than with the reconstruction of the past. Or, better still, it focuses on the past to the extent that it lives on in the present, even in the form of negativity. The successful psychic transformations from beta to alpha always mark the discovery of invariants in the patient’s experience of reality, that is, constant and (subjectively) significant relationships between the different elements by which the patient’s reality is formed.” (G. Civitarese, Truth and the unconscious in psychoanalysis, pp. 23-24)
Last revised on November 16, 2024 at 21:28:08. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.