ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses both the usefulness and the ambiguity of the distinction between content and form or structure. It suggests that the concept of egosyntonicity has always referred to the principles of constructing experience which seem to be beyond effective question by the person who develops and applies them. The chapter explores the interpretive and technical importance of focusing on flux and contradiction in the analysand’s mode of activity in the analytic situation. Permanent character traits are either perpetuations of original impulses in modified form, sublimations of them, or reaction formations against them. Character refers to the actions that people typically perform in the problematic situations that they typically define for themselves. Character also refers to just what it is that these same people regularly define as dangerous, the conflictual courses of action they regularly envisage, and the reasons why they have established these regularities.
