The Personality for Psychoanalysis

In this text, I write about personality in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, which emerged from the work of Sigmund Freud, is quite complex and difficult to explain in a few words. But I will try, as much as possible, to explain the different types of people that we find out there through the concept of structure and defense mechanisms.

We could define personality, in psychoanalysis, in several ways. Here, I will talk about individual differences, mainly with the contributions made by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.

From the Oedipus Complex, the psyche is structured in a certain way. Each structure excludes the possibility of another. That is, a subject who finds himself in a structure will never jump to another structure in this life.

We have, then, from Oedipus, 3 great structures:

In psychoanalytic thinking, any of us can be classified into one of these three personality types. Each one is within a certain structure and will always be within this structure.

The suffering that drives people to seek clinical psychology or psychoanalysis is the basis for this system of thought. As can be seen, the three structures are closely linked to the idea of ​​psychic illness. And what is the difference between illness and normality? For Freud, the only difference is one of degree. Some will have more symptoms, and with that, more suffering. But, ultimately, one can categorize each person into a certain structure.

Each structure has subdivisions:

Psychosis is divided into: Schizophrenia, Autism and Paranoia.

Neurosis is divided into: Obsessive Neurosis and Hysteria.

Perversion encompasses some forms of manifestation, but it is not divided. Among these forms, fetishism is an example.

I repeat, the notion that each individual “belongs” to a structure – starting from the Oedipus Complex – is fundamental for understanding psychoanalysis, in general, and the Lacanian theory of the subject, in particular.

If a subject is neurotic he will never freak out (he will have a psychotic break), just as it is practically impossible for a pervert to be guilty of an obsessive.

Each structure precludes the possibility of the other’s existence. The psyche is the way it is. And even with the analysis, it is not possible to modify our structure.

See in the table below the 3 structures and the defense mechanism of each one of them:

In other words, in each structure there is an – unconscious – way of dealing with the suffering caused by the Oedipus Complex. This “way of dealing” is what is called a defense mechanism.

In psychosis we enter three sub-divisions: paranoia, autism and schizophrenia. The defense mechanism is foreclosure.

The psychotic finds outside what he excludes inside, he outside-includes, he includes outside what, in neurosis, represents the dynamics of repression. In other words, in psychosis the problem is found outside, the problem is always outside, in other people.

In paranoia, it is the other who pursues. In autism, it is the other that (almost) does not exist. In schizophrenia, how is the other? The other might appear as a bizarre, bizarre outbreak like a monster, an ET or Napoleon Bonaparte. In schizophrenia psychic dissociation is the most evident.

One of the characteristics of paranoia consists in the fact that in this structure the patients themselves have, according to Freud, the peculiarity of revealing (in a distorted way) exactly those things that other neurotics keep hidden as a secret.

Neurosis has two sub-divisions: hysteria and obsessive neurosis. The defense mechanism is repression or repression.

In neurosis, the keeping of the problematic content as a secret is what we call repression or repression. The neurotic patient hides from himself the problem, the symptom or the difficulty that the psychotic finds outside himself.

That is, in neurosis there is a split of the psyche. Some contents are repressed, hidden, in secret and cause suffering in the symptoms the person complains about.

In hysteria, the complaint goes round and round about the problem. It’s like a person can never get to the point they really want to talk about. Their desire is always unsatisfied, as if the person were looking for something (either an object or a love relationship) to satisfy them – but satisfaction never appears. The complaint is endless.

In obsessional neurosis there are also twists and turns around the problem. But in obsessional neurosis what we notice most often is the attempt to organize, to organize things around in order to try not to think about what is really the main problem.

And finally, in the perverse structure, there is the defense mechanism of denial.

We can understand perversion and denial with the following quote from Sigmund Freud’s text, entitled “Fetishism”:

“In recent years I have had the opportunity to analytically study a number of men whose object choice was dominated by a fetish. It is not necessary to expect these people to come to analysis because of their fetish, for although it is no doubt recognized by its adherents as an abnormality, it is rarely experienced by them as the symptom of an illness which is accompanied by suffering. As a rule, they are entirely satisfied with it, or even praise the way in which it facilitates their erotic life. As a rule, therefore, the fetish appears in the analysis as a subsidiary discovery.

The excerpt in italics describes the relationship between the idea of ​​abnormality (of a fetish) and the perverse subject’s feeling that this abnormality is not a disease that brings suffering. That is, the subject denies, which, for example, for a neurotic would be a reason for a lot of suffering.

We have another way of understanding structures.

One can also divide the structures according to the background anxiety in each one of them. Depression is included here because it is related to Psychosis (with regard to the symptom, for example, of the so-called manic depression – today bipolar disorder):

Psychosis – Anguish of surrender

Depression – Achievement anxiety

Obsessive neurosis – anxiety of change

Hysteria – Anguish of permanence

In psychosis, the problem, the symptom returns from outside (foreclusion). Therefore, it is unusual for a psychotic to seek analysis because “hell is other people” – not the self. The anguish is the surrender to the other.

In depression, the issue is with self-realization. There is a narcissistic wound – which there is not in psychosis – that the self is not good enough, never good enough…

In hysteria, the desire never remains, it is always changing… changing… The anguish, then, would be to remain fixed in a place or in a desire.

In obsessional neurosis, it would be the opposite: desire is always dead (like Hamlet’s unsolvable question – to be or not to be…), that is, it is not in motion, it is still-dead… Anxiety would be the anxiety of changing.

Perversion does not appear in this didactic framework. Like psychosis, perversion rarely appears on the couch. It could be said that perversion also denies anguish… (anguish, in this sense, does not exist for the perverse)…

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