Personality Structure and Human Interaction Quotes

“The child who finds his outer world frustrating turns inwards, and he turns his own mind into 'a place to live in' instead of using it as 'an active function to live with'. He starts doing his living in imagination, in phantasy, not in fact. He peoples his inner world with good and bad objects whom he hopes he can manipulate at will. He seeks what he wants inside in phantasied satisfactions. This is based on the capacity to hallucinate satisfactions so vividly (as in dreams) that emotionally they can substitute for a time for outer reality. Unfortunately, in this process, he sets up 'bad' as well as 'good' figures inside, and perpetuates disturbance. The inner world then becomes the enduring though repressed and unconscious structure of the dynamic personality, which is filled with conflict and self-frustration. Over the top of this at the level of consciousness, a superficial personality constructed mainly of social adjustments, and functioning without much real mature feeling, carries on the business of outer life in a way that is far more automatic than is usually recognized.”
― Harry Guntrip, Personality Structure and Human Interaction: The Developing Synthesis of Psychodynamic Theory

“What is the fundamental fact that remains a constant, whether overt or disguised, in all abnormally developed types of personality ? Is it not that so far as emotions are concerned such people live their outward life in terms of inner subjective factors. Their emotional relationships with their outer world are not objectively realistic. They may be intellectually objective in the matter of their correct appraisal of ways and means to their own ends, and in relation to matters that are of no private emotional significance to them. But the moment their personal needs and aims are involved they lose emotional objectivity and behave on the basis of inner mental situations. All patients live in an individual private mental world and to help them we have to discover its structure.”
― Harry Guntrip, Personality Structure and Human Interaction: The Developing Synthesis of Psychodynamic Theory

“The fact is, however, that in a human being every psychic process is a personal activity, and that the neo-Freudian development of Freud's theory of the super-ego expresses the fact that the human environment does not remain a wholly external repressing force impinging on a unitary organism only from the outside : rather it comes to be psychically internalized in such a way as to form the endopsychic structure of a personality. Thus, in the long run, the intimate traumatic situations in which the individual suffers are no longer outside but are embedded in the personality itself.”
― Harry Guntrip, Personality Structure and Human Interaction: The Developing Synthesis of Psychodynamic Theory

“We do not have first of all an individual, fully formed and neat and complete in himself, and then a group set up by the bringing together of a number of these self-contained individuals. Rather, the group goes into the making and structure of the individual while, pari passu, individuals in their personal relationships are constituting the group. Individuals and groups are mutually constitutive in highly complex ways as is shown by the psychodynamic study of human object-relationships.”
― Harry Guntrip, Personality Structure and Human Interaction: The Developing Synthesis of Psychodynamic Theory

“Academic psychology has developed, in its modern methods of personality testing for diagnostic purposes, a skilfully impersonal way of dealing with personality, by means of which, once more, human beings can be classified and categorized without anyone ever coming into intimate personal human rapport with the patient as a meaningful individual in his own right.”
― Harry Guntrip, Personality Structure and Human Interaction: The Developing Synthesis of Psychodynamic Theory

“When science begins to treat man as an object of investigation, it somehow loses him as a person.”
― Harry Guntrip, Personality Structure and Human Interaction: The Developing Synthesis of Psychodynamic Theory