Table Of ContentChildhood Experience
and Personal Destiny
CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCE
AND PERSONAL DESTINY
A PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY OF NEUROSIS
By WILLIAM v. SILVERBERG, M.D.
Clinical Professor 01 Psychiatry
New York Medical College
1952
Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
ISBN 978-3-662-38950-8 ISBN 978-3-662-39901-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-662-39901-9
Copyright 1952 Springer Science+Business Media New York
Originally published by Springer Publishing Company, Inc. in 1952.
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1s t edition 1952
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
T 0 the memo,y 0/
ISABEL BEAUMONT FISHER,
honored colleague and loved friend,
this uolume is affectionately dedicated.
Contents
Preface .................................................. IX
Introduction
Tbe need for a theory of personality ......................... .
I
Toward a theory of personality and neurosis . . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . .. . 9
II
The areas of early experience ..... . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. 37
III
Tbe first experiential area:
Problems of orality and deprivation 51
IV
The second experiential area:
Problems of discipline ..................................... 102
V
The third experiential area:
Problems of rivalry and genitality 153
VI
Psychotherapeutic aims .................................... 239
Bibliography ............................................. 271
Index ................................................... 277
Preface
THE THESIS PRESENTED IN THESE PAGES
is that mental illness originates in the adaptations made to trau-
matic experiences in early life, and that in its details the illness
bears the impress of those experiences and the child's reactions to
them. The period covered by "early life" is that from birth to the
age of six or thereabouts. I do not intend to imply that experi-
ences occurring after this period are not traumatic or are without
effect upon the formation of personality. But I believe that the
experiences of early life are highly formative, for good or ill, and
that they contain most of the qualitative variations of human ex-
perience in general. Experience in later life, traumatic or other-
wise, mainly reaffirms or contradicts the experiences of earlier life.
However, it is manifestly absurd to suppose that susceptibil-
ity to external influence terminates at the age of six years and to
maintain that after that time the personality cannot do other-
wise than carry out repetitiously and mechanically its al ready
formed patterns of adaptation and behavior. If this were true,
how could it be hoped that any process of psychotherapy might
be effective in ameliorating mental illness? Or how could it be
accounted for that, as sometimes happens, adult life-experience
without benefit of psychotherapy produces alterations of per-
sonality, both favorable and unfavorable? Experience in the first
six years of life generates a complex pattern of adaptative poten-
tialities which are at the disposal of the later personality. Any one
IX
x PREFACE
such potentiality or any grouping of them may be more or less
utilized or more or less inhibited in meeting or in creating the
situations of life in later years. It is in view of this that it seems
reasonable to dose the books, as it were, in more or less tentative
fashion at the age of six years.
While acknowledging that personality may, perhaps even in
large part, be determined by inherited constitutional factors, we
are constrained to recognize that all attempts hitherto to establish
the existence and nature of such factors have met with complete
failure and have produced not a shred of convincing evidence.
In these circumstances we are bound to emphasize-possibly,
overemphasize-the significance of environmental factors in the
formation of personality. We can be confident that work along
these lines will never be wholly vitiated by the discovery of con-
stitutional factors; the only effect of such discovery would be an
altered view of the relative importance of experiential factors.
Now they occupy the whole stage; then they might have to share
the stage with other performers.
My professional and personal debts in the writing of
this volume must now be acknowledged. Every writer of such
works as this owes an incalculable debt to Freud, which, in my
own case, will be acknowledged in extenso in the Introduction
and in detail at many points in the text. Of a similar nature,
though indeed not so vast, is my debt to Harry Stack Sullivan,
whose inßuence on my thinking will likewise be acknowledged
and expounded more fully elsewhere. Clarence P. Oberndorf,
Franz Alexander, Sandor Rado, and Clara Thompson, having
participated in my psychiatrie and psychoanalytic training, all
have my deep gratitude and my full awareness of the personal
debt I owe them, in addition to the professional one.
In the preparation of this book I have received invaluable
assistance from Doctor Lilly Ottenheimer: she showed me that it
had to be written, read with enormous patience and fortitude
the various chapters as I wrote them, and made numerous sug-
gestions for their improvement. Ruth Steele took over the diffi-
cult task of typing from a hand-written script, often almost
PREFACE XI
indecipherable by reason of numerous corrections and after-
thoughts, and performed it with utmost skill and devotion. Mr.
Harry EIlis, who edited the manuscript, carried out his task with
consummate skill and tact, and it is a pleasure thus to record my
appreciation of his labors. Many others have contributed to this
book. Acknowledgment to some of them is made in footnotes
throughout the text. What I have learned from patients, from
students-both in and out of class-from acquaintances and
from mere passers-by is considerable in amount, but I could not
begin to state it in detail and in many instances this would
scarcely be desired by them. Many of them will not even know
that I intend to include them in this blanket acknowledgment,
but all of them, known and unknown, knowing and unknowing,
I regard with feelings of warmth and gratefulness.
I wish to acknowledge gratefully various suggestions made
by Drs. Bemard Glueck and Frances S. Arkin.
Finally, I want to express deep appreciation of the intelli-
gent cooperation of Mr. Bemhard J. Springer, my publisher,
whdse help has freed me from much drudgery and whose compe-
tent wisdom was always generously at my disposal.
WILLIAM V. SILVERBERG, M.D.
New York, N. Y.
April 1952
Childhoocl Experience
and Personal Destiny
