Stephen M. Johnson – författare

This book integrates object relations theory, ego psychology, and character analytic approaches to provide a new understanding of human behavior and character development. In itself, this integration is a remarkably innovative undertaking, yielding a consistent, understandable and clinically useful view of psychopathology, therapy, and health.Johnson uses an active treatment approach that draws upon all major schools of psychotherapeutic thought, choosing techniques that serve specific purposes and outlining changes in behavioral, affective, and cognitive domains that are necessary for lasting characterological change. Focusing on character pathology resulting from disorders in attachment, the book discusses etiology, characteristic affects, behaviors and cognitions, bodily expressions of character, and therapeutic objectives and techniques.

It sacrifices fulfillment to driven achievement, self-worth to praise from others, and the joy of human connectedness to superficial, manipulative relationships.Johnson’s carefully conceived integrative psychoanalytic developmental theory will enable therapists to make sense of the array of symptoms seen in character disorders and character styles so that an eclectic treatment approach may be pursued with the guidance of a unified theory. This is the second book in a series that began with Characterological Transformation.

This monograph advocates the treatment of psychotherapy as a modern art form, shaped by the forms that predate it, but distinctive in its encouragement of creative self-expression. It describes modern treatment techniques as they apply to personality disorders and character neuroses.

Johnson shows how basic life issues underlie the severepathology of personality disorder, the nagging symptoms ofneurosis, and the more functional coping and adaptation ofthe character styles. Johnson’s dimensional model capturesthe complexity of the human personality, while allowing forvariability not seen in categorical systems such as DSM-IV.His descriptive names of the character styles not only linkchildhood experiences to later personality and psychopathologybut also put flesh and bones on psychiatric diagnosis.