Selfhood, Identity and Personality Styles

A key text for Psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, as well as trainees in the area. Presenting a clinical model which has close connections with American constructivist psychotherapy and Bowlby’s Attachment Theory.

• Delineates a set of principles in the study of consciousness that place the first-person perspective at the heart of the analysis of emotional disorders

• Differentiates six personality styles, describing the origin of the subjective emotional experience; the ordering and the regulation of the emotional domain, and the psychopathological disorders

• Provides neuroscientific evidence showing that brain activity could be related to personality styles

  “This is a scholarly book which will provide the reader with plenty to chew on. This book will make you think, will illuminate how people function and will help you understand how self disordered experience, such as the feeling that one disappears or doesn’t exist when another leaves, occurs. The authors tackle with great sophistication, the big questions of how sameness, changing experience and temporality are woven together by language and narrative. Refusing to be reduced to the simplicity of objectivist account of functioning they offer profound phenomenological views on identity and emotion that show a deep appreciation of the complexity of what it is to be a person. Their analysis of functioning leads to the specification of inward and outward dispositional dimensions and using clinical and literary examples they provide descriptions of different styles of personality along this continuum ranging from eating disorder prone personalities, focused on the other at one end of the continuum and depression prone personalities focused excessively inwardly, at the other end.”

Leslie Greenberg,Professorof Psychology, York University, Canada