Accessing the Relevant Areas of Maladaptive Personality Functioning

Abstract

Personality functions in different dimensions: perceptual, cognitive, and affective (emotional). It can be manifested in different areas—overt (conscious), covert (unconscious), or in some relative degree of each. Personality segments can operate independently of one another, as in multiple personalities or with varying degrees of mutual dependence and intercommunication, as in normal “ego states.” Therapeutic interventions will be more efficient if focused within the problem dimension, area, or segment. The essence of Alexander and French's “corrective emotional experience” was a restructuring of the patient through release and interpretation within the “emotional” sphere. When their concept is extended to other dimensions of personality functions, such as behavioral, perceptual, and cognitive, it allows interventions to be more specifically focused in the regions that are most relevant. In this paper we present specific techniques using this extended concept. Rapid and significant change followed in the patient so treated.