ABSTRACT
Joseph Barnett wrote at a time when analysts identified as interpersonal were still trying to clarify the distinctions between their own thinking and the hegemonic classical Freudian tradition in the United States. The Freudian unconscious of that time was largely composed of drive states, while Barnett's "post-Freudian" unconscious consisted of the meaning people give to lived experience with others. To describe the process by which people give meaning to experience, Barnett used a term that was unique to him - "cognition". The regularities in the way in which the individual processes current experience of themselves and their worlds - cognition as analogous to a worldview - defines each person's essential personality or character. Character, therefore, consists of the particular ways in which the individual's cognitive organization transforms his encounter with the world into subjective, emotional meaning. Extrapolating from Harry Stack Sullivan's conception of the "self-system", Barnett equated character with self.
