Character styles

About this book

This book presents a theoretical and research-based integration of personality. In describing life's most basic, existential issues, it shows how tragedies in human development create painful psychopathology that requires heroism to overcome. The book shows how these basic life issues underlie the severe pathology of personality disorder, the nagging symptoms of neurosis, and the more functional coping and adaptation of the character styles. Further, it details both an external description of these personalities along the continuum of psychic structure and the internal experience or phenomenology that makes people's behavior understandable and worthy of empathy.--Adapted from book jacket.