ABSTRACT
Even a casual stroll through a museum of modern art can convince one that twentieth-century representations of the human form reflect the distortions, blockages, contradictions, and absences of modern experience. What artists manage to express in their works the rest of us live out in our daily lives. Modern artists give shape to the hesitation, anxiety, regret, and tension of our inner landscapes. We can describe the process of character formation in a slightly different manner by focusing on the process called socialization. As a child is prepared for participation in civilized life, she is left with images of herself and others that are either positively or negatively toned. These images, or self-and- other representations, arise directly from paradigmatic interactions between the child and significant others. The chapter shows how defense mechanisms such as reaction formation, denial, displacement, and intellectualization usually saturate the process of decisionmaking to the point that one cannot tell where thinking ends and defensive process begins.
