The development and validation of a measure of character: The CIVIC

The present research study sought to develop and validate a character scale – the Comprehensive Inventory of Virtuous Instantiations of Character using a total sample size of 3679 across five studies. In Study 1, character trait items were generated using an integrative classification system. In Study 2, character trait scales were further refined and their factor structure examined, revealing eight higher-order character dimensions or character cores: appreciation, intellectual engagement, fortitude, interpersonal consideration, sincerity, temperance, transcendence, and empathy. Study 3 established convergent validity of character traits with extant measures and discriminability from personality facets, social desirability, and moral cognitive development. Study 4 revealed that character cores were more strongly related to evaluative constructs than personality dimensions. Study 5 demonstrated that character cores predicted performance and psychological well-being outcomes above and beyond personality. The implications of our findings for the assessment and taxonomy of character are discussed.     

Masculinity unraveled: the roots of male gender identity and the shifting of male ego ideals throughout life

A model of masculine gender identity development is presented that demonstrates how a male's sense of his masculinity and the ambiguities of his gender are being reworked throughout his life. Of factors shaping the boy's sense of masculinity early on, particular emphasis is placed on the role of the involved father, the nature of the parental relationship, and the mother's recognition and affirmation of her son's maleness. While healthy masculine gender identity is founded predominantly on the boy's unique struggles in separating from his mother, it does not result from what has been traditionally viewed as the boy's disidentification from her (and from the feminine more generally). Indeed, boys who need to violently repudiate their identifications with their mother are more susceptible to a fragile, rigid masculine identity and narcissistic psychopathology. A case example of a young adult man illustrates the impact of identifications with both parents. The interplay of early masculine identity development and later life challenges confronting the adult male is briefly noted. "Masculine" ego ideals shift across developmental junctions until, ultimately, a more mature sense of masculinity emerges: the phallic wish to deny differentiation and maintain unlimited possibility is renounced and mourned and certain real limits concerning sex, gender, and generational differences are accepted. This reshaping of the "masculine" ego ideal consequently involves the transformation of a man's previously adaptive "phallicism" into more realistic, "genital" ego ideals-an achievement involving interplay between masculine and feminine identifications and the integration of antithetical elements no longer so unconsciously gendered.     

Celibacy and male psycho-sexual development

This prospective, observational pilot study was conducted on an academic inpatient rehabilitation unit. Ninety-three persons with spinal cord dysfunction or severe neurological illness participated. All completed admission surveys; 46 completed surveys six months after discharge. The aims were to describe admission and post-discharge spirituality and associations between spirituality and rehabilitation outcomes. At admission, participants reported spirituality similar to that of other samples of medical patients. After discharge, frequency of private spiritual practices increased and spiritual and existential well-being decreased. No significant associations were detected between spirituality and rehabilitation outcomes. Findings suggest the importance of spirituality to the participants and future research with a larger sample and modifications to the methodology.     

The evolution of paternal identity in late adulthood

The experience of fatherhood in late adulthood has received little attention in the psychoanalytic literature. After a presentation of the literature on fatherhood and a consideration of the developmental tasks of late adulthood in which the experience of fatherhood is embedded, the dynamically charged, developmentally conflicted nature of the relationships between late-life fathers and their children is explored. A basic premise is that the changing nature of these relationships inevitably confronts the elderly patriarch with considerable intra-psychic turmoil, reflection, and conflict that must be engaged and mastered if these most significant relationships are to be maintained and sustained for both generations. Clinical examples illustrate the theoretical points presented.     

The paternal function in Winnicott: The psychoanalytical frame

My first aim has been to identify the implicit assumptions underlying Winnicott's detailed notes on a fragment of an analysis dating from 1955 and published after his death. The importance given by Winnicott to the father figure as early as 1955 is one of my discoveries; another is the deep Freudian roots of his thinking. In this essay I propose a new way of linking together the concepts of ‘paternal function’ and the ‘psychoanalytical frame’. Developing my hypothesis, I compare my reading of Winnicott and my way of reading José Bleger's study on the frame. Like Winnicott, I explore in detail a process of discovery, focusing on what the analyst and the patient are nor fully aware of …'as yet'. I am not proposing to unify Winnicott's and Bleger's thinking. My aim is to avoid the pitfall of eclecticism and, in so doing, to recognize both the related depths they sound in their thinking and their otherness. I want to share with the readers their ‘meeting’ in my mind.     

The roots of self-awareness

In this paper we provide an account of the structural underpinnings of self-awareness. We offer both an abstract, logical account – by way of suggestions for how to build a genuinely self-referring artificial agent – and a biological account, via a discussion of the role of somatoception in supporting and structuring self-awareness more generally. Central to the account is a discussion of the necessary motivational properties of self-representing mental tokens, in light of which we offer a novel definition of self-representation. We also discuss the role of such tokens in organizing self-specifying information, which leads to a naturalized restatement of the guarantee that introspective awareness is immune to error due to mis-identification of the subject.     

The roots of creativity

The various factors which seem to be important in the creative child with extraordinary potential include: A good biologic endowment, often with high intelligence and a correlation between special sensory sensitivities and other physical requirements to implement the special interest. There is also sometimes the capacity to utilize or else compensate for deficit. The fostering of interests by a parent or interested adult. Specific kinds of ongoing encouragement. Sometimes there is self-selection of interest by the child. The child must feel valued and loved. The family background and relationship of parents centers on the child. The time, place, and institutions foster the development of interest and value of the work and the child's belief in its value. The child is allowed freedom of development, without undue inhibition or restriction. Creative people have shown uneven development--the child is not "age-specific" generally. Gifted children have been observed to tolerate isolation and even loneliness well--these are often necessary conditions for developing skills. For some creative people, early object losses seem to be frequent. The creative child is curious and a keen observer. The creative child has an uncanny ability to make connections--to perceive similarities in the apparently dissimilar. The creative child is not hampered by conventional thought. The creative child has a capacity for love and devotion--or at least a positive orientation; a spiritness or passion; and a spirituality or unworldliness. It has been said that the poetic truths in a work of art are only half understood by its creator. Generally conveyed subliminally, these truths are revealed in different ways to different audiences at different times. Such is the view of William Livingstone (1987), and considering the childhood antecedents of creative work helps to understand why this is so.     

The autistic character.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the autistic character as a diagnostic entity and then delineate the formative early object relations, the symptoms and how they develop out of the early object relations, and the related defensive behavior. The paper will end with recommendations for treatment.     

The ontological character of anxiety

Conclusion We conclude from our analysis of Tillichian and Rogerian anthropology that anxiety is ontological in character. It is ontological because it is the necessary concomitant condition of the fact and structures of existence. Man is faced with one basic threat—the possibility of non-being. In an absolute form, he is threatened with the total extinction of being. In an absolute form, he is threatened with the total extinction of being. In a relative form, he is threatened with personal death and with the failure of personal fullillment—with the loss of being and becoming. Ontological anxiety has to do with the absolute threat of extinction and ontic anxiety with the relative threat to self-preservation and self-enhancement. From this condition there is no escape. Refusal to accept the inescapable results in neurotic anxiety, a nonessential concomitant of being which, therefore, can be removed. These distinctions are revealed by an ontological and phenomenological analysis of human existence that brings ontology and psychology into a complementary relationship.     

The social character of thinking

What Freud called "the reality principle," or judgment, presumes on the part of the child who has arrived at judgment the implicit grasp of a complex of concepts: truth and falsity, belief, subjective and objective, the objectively real, my perspective and yours. Work in both philosophy and infant research points to the essential importance in the development of judgment of a triangulating situation that involves particular sorts of communications between two creatures and an external object that interests them both. In this light Bion's theory of thinking is critically examined and the meaning of primary process and fantasy is discussed.