The book discusses personality as a unified set of evolved and
culturally developed structures that serves a single and definable
purpose, to maintain the individual's safety, in the context of dyadic
relationships, group processes and more abstract and fluid social
configurations. The infant-mother relationship remains the blueprint for
modes of relating to the social surround, at whatever level of
complexity, and for approximating the sense of safety originally
provided by the mother. The personality is organized around the need to
maintain self-esteem, thereby preserving the individual's sense of
safety and warding off deep-seated paranoid anxiety, which signals the
potential of annihilation of the self. Paranoid anxiety is the
counterpart of intraspecific aggression and the potential of the group
as a whole to attack and annihilate the individual. Paranoid anxiety,
which was recognized by Melanie Klein as playing a critical role in
infant development, is not overcome as development proceeds but remains
latent, buried under layers of personality organization that are
essentially concerned with sourcing recognition and approval from the
social environment, thereby inhibiting others' aggression and guarding
against annihilation of the self. The book adds to self psychology
(Kohut) by showing how the principle of self-preservation underpins all
aspects of normal and abnormal character dynamics. It integrates self
psychology with other branches psychoanalytic theory and revives the
link between psychoanalysis and ethology. Ethology (Lorenz, Hass,
Eibl-Eibesfeldt) has provided insights into how interrelated
intraspecific aggression and appeasement gestures are critically
important for the evolution of social behavior in higher animals as well
as for cultural evolution in humans, insights that allow, more
generally, for a bridging of the gap between psychoanalysis and the
biology of social behavior. Furthermore, an evolutionary approach to
character dynamics and related social phenomena will have important
implications for understanding psychopathological vulnerabilities and
self-perpetuating processes in mental illness.
