A Concept of Gradient of Personality Integration as a Substitute for Freudian Concepts in Problems of Mental Hygiene

Abstract

Useful as the Freudian concepts have been in describing conditions of maladjustment in personality, they have been open to certain objections. Some of the foremost of these have been: first, they tend to anthropomorphize forces or to make tendencies appear to be personalities; second, their pan-sexualism does not properly emphasize or describe activities of life which are not properly called sexual; and third, the ego-super-ego-id division of personality is too crude properly to describe the complex functions of a person and to relate these functions to the conditions of life which give him the status implied in personality. The tendency to use more simple methods of description might be expected to arise out of professional psychiatric practice, in which only a restricted sampling of cases, and a restricted sector of case situations would be presented. The work of clinical psychologists, however, with school children who come from all cultural organizations and who adjust well or badly in a great variety of ways, has led to a concept of levels of personality adjustment, or levels of life-striving. The writer first came into contact with such a concept through work in the Kansas Child Guidance Clinics under the direction of Dr. Geo. A. Kelly. The implication of such a concept is that the higher levels of striving exercise dominant control over the lower levels. The writer envisages this control as analogous to the dominance of the higher neural and symbolic organizations over the lower ones as treated by Travis in his book, Speech Pathology. The higher levels organize, limit and inhibit the activities of the lower levels, breaking up and interfering with the lower-level organizations in order that the higher may be achieved. In problems of speech pathology, Travis envisages the mechanism formerly used only for eating, a lower-order activity, now integrated into a new pattern of activity by a new gradient, the of symbolic speech. In problems of personality adjustment, we can think of such an activity as participation in married life, formerly organized only with regard to satisfaction of sexual cravings, now integrated around a higher-order motive, that of performing an activity which might be called mutual appreciation of all areas of life, and still later, this might yield to a higher form of integration which might be called organization, consciously patterning activity, so as to make a contribution to community life. The term gradient of personality as we use it, does not refer to the way in which a specific act is performed. The of personality integration, rather, refers to the type of organization customary to a person in meeting life situations from time to time. These are more or less constant levels of organization with reference to the whole personality structure; which pervade enough of the personality to cause large areas of conflict in mental disease, or to organize successfully all the strivings of the individual in mental health. There are listed below some levels at which a personality may be