Is Personality Influenced by Early Psychic Wounding?

How does personality develop in childhood? Experiences during this time period build expectations for social relations carried throughout life. Attachment is one such set of expectations that are integrated into one’s developing neurobiology (Schore, 2019; Siegel, 2012).* Yet in terms of personality, developmental psychology tends to emphasize what it considers the genetic aspects of temperament.

Object relations theory provides an alternative analysis based on the relationships the child experiences with primary caregivers. Psychoanalytic scholars tend to be clinicians who then base their theories on what has gone wrong with the clients they treat. Neuroses emerge from a lack of appropriate “holding” in early months and years (Winnicott, 1960), a “basic fault” or trauma that occurred in the primary relationship(s) (Balint, 1968).

Horney (1950) described personality as emergent from the unconscious need to quell anxiety experienced in early life. In the emergency of unmet needs, personality is a coping mechanism that becomes fixed, a repetitious compulsion. Early instinctual needs for relationship and self-growth or individuation are frustrated. Within civilization’s child-raising, many things can go wrong in early life as cultural practices trump instinctual parenting of old (i.e., the evolved nest). Interpersonal needs may be unmet or overindulged.

Naranjo writes that one becomes “unconscious to one’s essential self or to one’s adaptive maneuvers…unconscious to the fall from consciousness itself.” (Chestnut, 2008, p. 27). In this view, the individual forgets that she has made an adaptation to survive and ends up identifying with this defensive self, a false self. The individual has a degraded consciousness and does not realize she has experienced a loss and failed to reach her potential.

Johnson (1994) proposes a process of early defensiveness and its resulting neuroses: The child expresses a need, the social environment blocks that need (does not meet it), resulting in emotional frustration, triggering one of the innate emotion system—rage, terror, panic/grief. The child then imitates the way the caregiving environment has ignored or blocked the need, identifying with the negation of that need. This sets up an internal conflict which shapes personality formation. The child “makes the best of it” by making compromises to resolve the unresolvable conflict. According to Johnson (1994), “character or personality consists of what parts of the real self one have suppressed and what parts of one exaggerates“ (Chestnut, 2008, p. 28). Naranjo writes:

”life is not guided by instinct but through the persistence of an earlier adaptational strategy that competes with instinct and interferes with the “wisdom” of the organism in the widest sense of the expression…..We may say that the individual is not free anymore to apply or not the results of his new learning, but has gone “on automatic,” putting into operation a certain response set without “consulting” the totality of his mind, or considering the situation creatively in the present. It is this fixity of obsolete responses and the loss of ability to respond creatively in the present that is most characteristic of psychopathological functioning.” (Naranjo, 1994, pp. 5-6)

This psychopathological functioning contrasts with the healthy self, described by Kohut. Barbara Chestnut notes:

“Kohut used the architectural metaphor when describing the “self” to promote the idea that the individual's “self” has certain basic things it needs to have a solid foundation---to be structurally sound. He defined health as having a solid sense of self, one that has had certain needs met so that one could respond creatively in the moment throughout life without having to spend one’s energy defending or compensating for weak spots in the self. Weak spots in one’s sense of self represent important needs that did not get met.” (Chestnut, 2008, p.43)

*Norton's Series of books on interpersonal neurobiology is very informative here.