Character, cognition, and therapeutic process

CHARACTER, COGNITION, AND THERAPEUTIC PROCESS

Joseph Barnett

The concept of character has always been ill-at-ease in psychoanalytic theory. As an aggregate of traits characteristic of the person, it has been seen as superficial and peripheral to the main concerns of psychoanalysis. The early-instinct versus defense model of psychoanalysis explained character as expressions of or defenses against instinctual pressures. As a result, character has usually been assigned an epiphenomenal role, at most a derivative of ego and superego functions. It has remained an ambiguous notion, poorly defined and rather peripheral to our theories of mind and of therapy. The growing concern with issues of epistemics and cognition, however, has begun to shift this orientation and promises significant reevaluations of the concept of character and its importance both to theory and practice.

This paper will examine the nature and function of character as a structural phenomenon related to the architectonics of knowing. It will extend observa- tions I have made about the central significance of cognition to our understanding of the functioning of mind, the relationship of the concept of character to issues of cognition, and the implications of these views on issues of psychodynamics and therapeutic process.

Psychoanalysis studies what, how, and why the individual knows and does not know. Its theoretical premises include both the fact that early experience effects knowing and meaning, and that subsequent behavior and mental functioning reflect these earlier patterns of meaning. In essence, psychoanalytic therapy may be considered an exercise in personal epistemology, in which the patient's ways of knowing and personal meaning systems are explored and understood in order to correct dysfunctional mental processes and behaviors.

Because of its roots in clinical observation, psychoanalysis, more than the academic psychologies, has recognized the importance of felt and sensate experience on the organization of meaning in a person's life. Yet, like academic psychology, psychoanalytic theory too narrowly defines cognition as being related simply to processes of thinking. Affect or feeling has been

Joseph Barnett, M.D., Faculty, Division of Psychoanalytic Training, New York Medical College; Training and Supervising Analyst, William Alanson White Institute.

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis ~) 1979 Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis

Vol. 39, No. 4, 1979 0002-09581791040291 - 11 $01.00

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considered an opposing phenomenon to thought, with the unfortunate and arbitrary consequence of creating and institutionalizing the dualism of thought versus feeling. This dualism and its attendant dialectics have assumed unwarranted prominence in psychoanalytic theory and practice. Cognition is equated with thought and then contrasted with affect as mutually exclusive processes in our conceptualizations of personality. Rapaport, 1° for example, considers thought and affect as alternate results of delay in the gratification of drive tension. The implications of "either-or" in the production of thought or affect patterns many of our clinical and therapeutic concerns. Clinically, the implied dialectics of this one-or-the-other approach to thought and affect dominates our attitudes to the problem of character, although it is often contrary to observable clinical data, and its oversimplification leads to theoretical and clinical impasses.

I have suggested, therefore, that we expand our use of the term cognition to include all those processes involved in experiential knowing2 Cognition so considered would include a range of knowing from the more direct, sensory and immediate awareness of experience to more linguistically structured and syntactically organized awareness. Knowing might then be said to occur on a continuum, the points of which differ primarily in their degree of sensate or syntactic structure. The more syntactically structured an experience is, the more we may be said to comprehend. Sensate experience would be knowing on a level of apprehension, rather than comprehension. By custom we refer to the mere immediately apprehended aspects of experience as feeling, and the more linguistically structured as thought. Thought and affect are not opposing, mutually exclusive, competing aspects of mental life, but rather are formal and structural reflections of a continuum of knowing, existing in intimate interchange and reaction to each other, and to the actional system.

To be truly dynamically significant, and not just a nosological afterthought, character must be distinguished from presenting style, 11 must be freed from its definition as merely an aggregate of superficial traits. I see character as an underlying structural phenomenon whose design and formal attributes determine a great deal of the mental life of the individual. From a structural perspective, character may be viewed as a behavioral and cognitive reflection of the organization of experience in a person's life. Character is a template, formed by the impact of historical experience, which functions to determine the organization of ongoing experience, its perception and interpretation, the designs of expectation and anticipation, and the behavioral tendencies and interpersonal operations of the individual.

Character, in its cognitive aspects, represents relatively durable patterns of relationships between sensate and syntactic experience and their organization into systems of apprehension and comprehension. It reflects the individual's ways of knowing and his systems of meaning. Ideally, the state of

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cognition in character organization would be an expanding interchange between levels representing both sensate and syntactic structure, each en- riching and renewing the other, and each dependent on the other for optimal functioning. This ideal model is that of an open-ended system in homeostasis with the environment, restricted only by the inherent limitations of the human organism. But from a practical viewpoint, the study of character is more often the study of the limitations and distortions imposed on these systems during their development by a great variety of sources. The very delineation of a character type already implies the existence of a skew in the organization of experience, a dysfunctional relationship between sensate and syntactic experience which leads to closure rather than open-ended homeostasis. To distinguish, therefore, between hysterical characters and hysterical neuroses, or obsessional characters and obsessional neuroses, would be arbitrary and ignores the fact that they are both structural deformations differing only in extent, or in the cultural or personal bias of the observer.

Dysfunctional character organizations have consistent areas of "not knowing" or innocence which function as predictable systems. These systems of innocence imply historically and dynamically created areas of difficulty in cognitive organization. Their effect is to block the interchange between apprehension and comprehension, to create closure of cognition, and to restrict opportunities for growth. Knowing is interfered with at various specific levels of cognition, and the creative interplay between apprehension and comprehension is limited by the confines of a rigid template.

In normal living, affective experience has both external and internal importance to the personality. Affect is used expressively for reaction and communication, and intrapsychically as data for thought and syntactic organization of experience. Affect thus normally gives rise to expression and impression. Expression involves the direct presyntactic communication of affects such as in gesture, posture, facial expression, crying, laughing, etc. Impression refers to the perception and storage of sensate data of experience, which become important sources of experience for syntactic organization and comprehension.

In dysfunctional character formations, however, affective experience is used either explosively or implosively. Explosion of affect is a cognitive dynamism in which a forceful ejection or voiding of apprehended experience takes place before adequate structuring or thoughtful integration of experience can occur. Implosion of affect is a cognitive dynamism in which affect is forced inward on the cognitive processes and disorganizes them. Both explosion and implosion interfere with normal cognitive ordering of experience, but differently. In affective explosion, there is an emptying of the apprehended data of experience before adequate syntactic structuring and comprehension can take place. Implosion of affect, on the other hand, disorganizes the very

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processes necessary for adequate organization, with the result that apprehended data is contained, but left simply as raw data. These dynamisms are reflected in characteristic ways in the dysfunctional characters.

I believe that two basic types of dysfunctional character can be defined structurallywthe explosive disorders and the implosive disorders. Explosion of affect is the dominant cognitive dynamism in the hysterical disorders, the acting-out personalities, and the impulse disorders. Affective implosion char- acterizes the obsessional disorders, the paranoid character disorders, and the depressive personality.

Explosion of affect finds its most direct expression in the hysterical character neuroses. 3'4 The hysterical character typically expels affective experience before adequately structuring it syntactically. A fear of affect historically and of associated feelings of helplessness lead the patient to void large areas of apprehended experience prematurely and often in substitutive forms. This expelled, undigested affective experience, good or bad, is then used to form the overgeneralizations and crude formulations that characterize the hysteric's transitory comprehension of experience, unrefined by the effect of impression. The lack of organization and the premature voiding do not allow for the differentiation, nuances, and ordering of the meaning of experience, and as a result, the hysteric's comprehension of experience is simple and imprecise. Furthermore, the rapid riddance of emotional reaction deprives the hysterical person of essential material for the integration of experience with significant others into stable realizations of their identities. Their images of others can shift abruptly from adoring idealization to hateful contempt and cynicism. Communication is then more related to sensate experience than to syntactic experience, and is consequently often exaggerated and highly col- ored emotionally.

The hysteric's assets, on the other hand, also lie in the area of apprehended experience. The development of this aspect of cognition leads to the empathic sense of interpersonal events and transactions, the expressive ability to convey affective experience to others, and the ability to chance action and commitment, which are typical of the hysteric.

The obsessional personality represents the most characteristic example of the phenomenon of implosion of affects. I Raised in a climate of ambiguity, where explicit avowals of love and concern covered implicit rejection or hostility, the obsessional person has learned to fear the implicit in interpersonal situations. By imploding the affective experience of these interactions, the individual who uses obsessional operations disintegrates cognitive organization and the meaning of events. Fearing specific cognitive configura- tions implicit in interpersonal situations that might challenge existing self- concepts, he avoids making anxiety-provoking interpersonal inferences. He maintains disruption of these inferences by implodin 8 preexpressive affects


into the inferential processes that organize the implications of ongoing experience. He becomes syntax-bound, excessively literal, and legalistic because of the disturbances in the processes of thought. Apt in the recitation of a stereotypic, ideologic dogma regarding the conduct of human relations, and often even correct in pro-forma behavior, the obsessional person can be party to emotionally intense positive or negative interpersonal interchanges without even vaguely grasping their meaning. Ambiguous referential systems based on his past experience persist and lead to the indecisiveness, ambivalence, and lack of commitment characteristic of the syndrome. Because of the implosive use of preexpressive affects and their disorganizing effects, the obsessional person may feel a chaotic and turbulent cauldron of affectivity, which nonetheless serves poorly as data of experience.

The impulse disorders and the acting-out personalities are related cogni- tivety to the hysteric by their utilization of explosion of affect. Like the hysteric, the impulse neurotic voids apprehended experience, but largely through action rather than feelings. Comprehension of experience again is imprecise, but an added dimension to the maintenance of innocence here is the input of information about the significance of the impulsive actions. Disclaiming intention of the effect, on others or on himself, of unfortunate behavioral and actional operations, the acting-out person can repeatedly violate the simplest canons of socially acceptable interpersonal relations without the slightest appreciation of their meaning or impact. The basic organization of the two character types around affective explosion accounts for the frequent blending of hysterical and impulse-disorder phenomena in clinical situations.

The paranoid character disorders are closely related to the obsessional disorders in that they both utilize implosion of affects to disorganize ongoing inference-making in interpersonal situations. Both try to avoid knowing because of central damage to their sense of self and their very precarious self-esteem. But while the obsessional person substitutes static, cliched and stereotyped judgments to replace ongoing inferences, the paranoid character substitutes inferences of an arbitrary sort based on existing assumptions he holds of a threatening and hostile interpersonal environment. Recently, I suggested that the roots of such isolating cognitive assumptions lie in specific types of family ideologies or belief systems. ° The similarities in obsessional and paranoid cognition accounts for their tendency to overlap clinically. Paranoid phenomena frequently appear in obsessional patients, and most paranoid characters utilize obsessional mechanisms.

The depressive personality is another variety of implosive character. Unlike the obsessional and paranoid characters, the depressive is openly identified with his low self-esteem. The depressive person uses his damaged sense of self openly in interpersonal operations designed to claim attention and sympathy

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from others, to exploit them in covert power operations and dependent demands for care, and to punish them for real or imagined hurts he has sustained. Like the obsessional and the paranoid characters, he does obscure and deny the meaning of his behavior, in that he denies the use to which he puts his damaged self-image. Data that might furnish him with understanding is promptly employed in a mea culpa operation that compounds the mal- functioning cognitive system.

Depression may also be used as a symptom by any dysfunctional character type. Symptomatic depression should be distinguished from the depressive character itself. In the obsessional, for example, I find that a low-grade depression is almost a constant. Overt or covert depression accompanies implosion of affects and is most severe in interpersonal situations which provoke the most implosion--i.e., where there is the greatest need for maintaining innocence. In the paranoid character, like the obsessional, depression is frequent, related to implosion, but seems relieved somewhat by the arbitrary inferences which are expressed in response to threatening situations.

In the explosive disorders, where affective explosion prevents adequate comprehension of experience, depression accompanies blocking of explosive phenomena--i.e., with the occurrence of relative implosion. In the hysteric, this occurs when explosion of affect is blocked, while in the impulse disorders and the acting-out personalities, depression accompanies blocking of exploded action.

Character, then, as I see it, is a superordinate, rather than a subordinate, system. It is a structural or formal concept which reflects the pattern of relationships between sensate and syntactic experience and their corollaries of meaning, as well as the patterns of action designed by these systems.

Patterns of cognition have more extensive effects on intentionality and motivation than is envisioned by those who adopt the epiphenomenal view of cognition, or by those who limit their conceptions of motivation to instinctual-drive forces alone. As I see it, intentionality and motivation are created by the meaning to the individual. For the very reason that character designs knowing and meaning in the individual, it therefore designs intentionality and motivation. George S. Klein 9 has shown that a train of thoughts, especially when it is repressed, may have the quality of peremptoriness necessary to create motivational power. This important separation of the notion of motivation from a necessary relationship to instinct and energy is an important theoretical step. My own feeling is that implicit patterns of thought or affect and the meaning they convey to the person are the ultimate sources of motivation.

The bridging concept between the designs of knowing and meaning, on the one hand, and action and behavior, on the other, is the self, a subject of growing moment to contemporary psychoanalysis. Already a central con-


ceptual tool in post-Freudian theory and practice, it is of growing importance now to almost all theoretical persuasions in the field. Most theoreticians either explicitly or implicitly view the self as a cognitive concept. I have defined self as the recognition, both felt and thought, of one's meaning to the interpersonal environment, to one's inner and outer world, especially in terms of one's roles and functions. 8 Self is not just another structure of mind, to be compared or equated with ego, as it often is. Self is a cognitive experience. Self, as experienced by the person, has its sensate (felt or sensed) aspects, as well as its syntactic (comprehended) components. Which aspects of the self are apprehended, which are comprehended, and which fall within the individual's systems of innocence are determined by the design of the person's cognition. Both the structure and the limits of the experience of self are patterned by the formal aspects of character structure. Significant modification orgrowth in the experience of self must be prefaced by changes in cognition and character.

The bridging function of self between the designs of cognition and the designs of action is related to the fact that self is perceived in terms of roles and functions with the environment. Roles and functions imply actional relationships with the environment, and the self therefore mediates the personal meanings which are the necessary and, I believe, the sufficient cause for both intentionality and motivation. Cognizing self, according to this view, provides the person with the basic template for actional thrust vis-a-vis the environment and its inner representations. Sullivan 12 recognized this structured aspect of the actional system in personality, as well as its relationship to self in his construct of the self-system, which he defined as the organization of operations designed by the individual in his attempt to avoid anxiety in interpersonal relations. Although I agree that anxiety is an important determi- nant of meaning in experience, I believe that anxiety, like the instincts, is too limited to explain all of motivation.

Such a broadened view of the significance of character to mental functioning has, of course, had considerable impact on my approach to the therapeutic process. It is certainly inadequate to consider character analysis as a prelude to the actual tasks of the analysis of the Oedipal conflict, of the transference neuroses, or even of the self-system. Nor does it suffice that changes in character be considered as by-products, occurring incidentally, of progress in the analysis by whatever measures current theoretical orientations offer. Nor can I content myself with a theory of therapy where character finds its niche only in the analysis of resistances or of the defenses. The task of analysis is the task of character analysis, and I cannot conceive of truly successful analytic work without significant change in the person's character structure.

On the issue of resistance, I find myself hard pressed to see resistances as being specific to the analytic situation, as is usually claimed° I also no longer

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differentiate between character resistances and other types of resistances, because I see all resistances as characterological both in origin and intent. The patient's resistances follow the skewing of mental functioning and behavior that is meant to maintain systems of innocence. Resistances involve interpersonal operations intended to subvert collaboration and to avoid exposure of self, to self and to others. They are not specific to the analytic situation in that they are a class or category of interpersonal operations also seen with regu- larity in the patient's interactions with other people, where interpersonal collaboration or intimacy is required. Internalized resistances to one's own mental processes also fol low this rule, and are constructed in accordance with the conditions of relatedness to internalized and personified others. One may be resistant to performing certain tasks when quite alone, when the task implies collaboration or exposure to an internalized figure, such as a parent or an idealized aspect of self. In practice, the analysis of resistances marks the beginnings of the analysis of character and the earliest view of the core of the patient's neurotic problems.

Transference, too, seems to me an indication'of characterological problems and is not specific to the therapeutic situation. I prefer the process and cognition-oriented concept of parataxic distortion 1~ used in interpersonal theory to the more static, content-oriented concept of transference used by more classical theories, because I feel that it better describes the effect of dysfunctional knowing systems on the perception and interpretation of the patient-analyst dyad. Additionally, it is easier to utilize~the concept in interpersonal situations other than the analytic encounter, where I feel transference phenomena occur constantly.

Let us return to our more general discussion. I maintain that analysis is always character analysis, and that, since the nature and function of character is so involved with issues of knowing and meaning, it becomes necessary to more directly address the issue of cognition in our theories of therapy. I have, accordingly, defined the central task of psychoanalytic therapy as that of cognitive repair. 2'4

Cognitive repair implies the correction of the distortions and imbalances of the person's systems of knowing and meaning, and the repair of those dysfunctional or nonfunctioning mental processes and operations which maintain systems of innocence and prevent integration of meaning with experience and action. Without such a concept as an integral part of our theories of therapy, there is too much: danger that new experience cannot occur, that insight cannot be integrated into experience, that the patient will continue the dysfunctional patterns of the past, and that analysis will become futile and interminable. 7

Cognitive repair is a process involved with cognition but oriented by character. The dominant trends in the patient's character indicate the dysfunctional patterns of cognition and their integration into experience and


action. These dysfunctional patterns, outlined above, provide us with a guide for the necessary operations of a psychoanalytic therapy that is oriented toward cognitive repair.

In the explosive disorders, the hysteric, the impulse neurotic, and the acting-out personalities, cognitive repair is directed toward the systems of innocence created by the patient's failure to adequately structure experience syntactically. The analyst's stance must be to foster what Forrest ~ calls containment of the patient's affectivity, which I feel is utilized to empty self of the apprehended data of experience before adequate syntactic organization and comprehension can occur. Actually, we are aided in this endeavor by the methods of analytic therapy, particularly when it stresses the need to attend to detail and channels associations to meaningful conclusions. Guidance to dwell on and analyze emotional experience and to relate present experience to the experience of the past aids containment and impression of affect. In effect, we are geared to the task of increasing syntactic organization, at least implicitly. It is probably because of this emphasis in the structure of analytic therapy that patients with explosive character disorders, such as the hysteric fare so well in treatment.

I feel that more explicit and more extensive concern with cognitive repair would improve results and expedite significant change. These patients tend to overvalue their affectivity and apprehension of experience. They believe that what they feel must be right. Unfortunately, without syntactic refinement, they often miss the mark of their perceptions. Emphasis on conceptual exami- nation and analysis of their perceptions of self and others aids in the process of refinement of experience. It is also useful in introducing them to more syntactic modes of comprehension, which can permit increased validation of experience with others, and therefore decreased isolation.

Explosive characters frequently use global generalizations in their reactions to interpersonal situations, toward the same end of avoiding comprehension and maintaining innocence. The hyperbolic nature of these responses, larger than life as they are, must be related to their need to maintain innocence and to minimize the reality of events, thus avoiding the true impact of experience on them. Characterologically, a major purpose of these excessive responses is to discard the initial perception entirely because of the magnitude of the overreaction. The analyst's task is to aid those patients in their understanding of these processes, while at the same time preserving the valid core of their responses.

The profoundly dependent needs which are so central to the origin of explosive characters are often conventionalized and rationalized as needs for intimacy. Their symbiotic concept of self and their excessive needs for interpersonal contact to deny their real problems with intimacy needs to be explored in therapy.

The implosive characters, the obsessional, the paranoid, and the depressive

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personalities, in my opinion, are those patients who are least likely to emerge from psychoanalytic therapy with effective insight and characterological change. These are the patients who swell the ranks of our therapeutic failures or who most often come for reanalysis. Our neglect of the cognitive disorders of these patients and our failure to deal with the characterological templates of meanin 8 and with the dysfunctional thought processes that maintain them are largely responsible for our frustrated therapeutic efforts. The primary theoretical focus on fear of feelings and the methodology which focuses on haphazard detail and on unlimited free association miss the point of the cognitive difficu Ities of these patients. The very design of our treatment and its concerns often reinforce or even create the dead, sterile intellectualizations that caricaturize real insight and only serve to reinforce the obscurantism that is at the heart of the neurotic characterological problems.

Repair of the cognitive faults of the implosive characters requires that we address their need to maintain innocence, to avoid knowin 8 and com- prehending experience. Their psychodynamics involve a need to obscure and hide through deviousness, inhibition, and denial. This must be demonstrated to the patient along with the specific operations that make it possible.

From the onset, therapy with implosive characters should be a search for clarity. These patients desperately do not want to know. Their innocence is organized around their self-contempt and fear of knowing their interpersonal significance; it is maintained by defects in interpersonal inference-making which might organize this awareness. Careful definition of the defects in inference-making is necessary in the early phases of therapy. Mappin 8 of the areas in which these processes are disturbed gives clues as to the historical and developmental origins of the systems of innocence. These clues can be pursued with attentive questions to elicit specific information from which viable inferences may be drawn. The stereotypic labelling the patient uses in the place of these inferences must be recognized as such, and related to the context of the patient's life experiences.

Ambivalence, doubt, and indecision are cognitive symptoms of considerable importance to the attempt to resolve the dysfunctional thought processes of these patients. I feel that these symptoms are related to the presence of ambiguous referential systems. These dual lexicons, a public and private definition of the meanings of interpersonal events and concepts, often directly contradicting each other, must be conceptualized, clarified, and traced to the early history in the family and the events which helped create the more private and dissociated referential processes. Furthermore, these patients need help to define the family ideologies which molded their beliefs, dogmas, values, and myths, as well as their cognitive operations that prescribe and proscribe what they may know and what they must not know.

This outline of my concerns with cognitive repair is meant to indicate the


direction of my interest in explicit ly dealing with the cognitive disorders, which are, to me, the core issue of neurotic living. I view character as a central structural concept, which can aid us in understanding the epistemic issues at the heart of neurosis, and their relationship to actional systems. The concepts of character and cogni t ion presented here can be integrated into psychoanalytic theories and into our designs of therapy with considerable advantage. With these concepts, we can help our patients make fuller use of their human capacity for coordinated sensate and syntactic knowledge. Our patients' uti l ization of their experiences is the key to their gaining meaning and significance in their lives.

References

1. Barnett, J. On cognitive disorders in the obsessional. Contemp. Psychoanalysis, 2 (2): 122-134, 1966.

2. Barnett, J. Cognitive repair in the treatment of the obsessional neuroses. In Proceedings of the Fourth World Congress of Psychiatry, 1966. Amsterdam: Excerpta Medica Foundation, 1966, pp. 752-757.

3. Barnett, J. Cognition, thought and affect in the organization of experience. In J. Masserman (Ed.) Science and Psychoanalysis, Vol. 12. New York: Grune & Stratton, Inc., 1968, pp. 237-247.

4. Barnett, J. Narcissism and dependency in the obsessional-hysteric marriage. Family Process, 10 (1): 75-83, 1971.

5. Barnett, J. Therapeutic intervention in the dysfunctional thought processes of the obsessional. Am. J. Psychotherapy, 26 (3): 33-351, 1972.

6. Barnett, J. On the dynamics of interpersonal isolation. J. Am. Acad. Psychoanal. 6 (1): 59-70, 1978.

7. Barnett, J. Insight and therapeutic change. Contemp. Psychoanal. 14 (4): 534-544, 1978.

8. Forrest, T. Personal communication. 9. Klein, G. S. Peremptory ideation: structure and force in motivated ideas. In R. R.

Holt (Ed.), Motives and Thought (Psychological Issues, Vol. 5). New York: Inter- national Universities Press, 1967.

10. Rapaport, D. Toward a theory of thinking. In D. Rapaport (Ed.), Organization and Pathology of Thought. New York: Columbia University Press, 1951.

11. Shapiro, D. Neurotic Styles, New York: Basic Books, 1965. 12. Sullivan, N. S. The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry, New York: W. W. Norton,

1953.

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Character, cognition, and therapeutic process

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