ABSTRACT
Chapter 8, ‘Conflict and energy’ starts by outlining the principal tenet of the psychoanalytical perspective on personality: the psyche as the seat of conflicting forces, generating powerful psychic energies (‘psychodynamics’). The chapter outlines the principal models of personality derived from this tradition (with examples of characters):
Freud’s typology based on the four phases of infant development.
The emphasis on the ego placed by the neo-analytical (Fromm) and object- relations (Klein) schools.
Jung’s complex typology based on factors and attitudes.
A check-list of social and environmental factors contributing to the formation of personality (Jerome Kagan) is also included.
The chapter points to the links established over the past century between psychoanalysis and acting theory and practice and highlights a key assumption made by actors: that outer behaviour and declared objectives hide desires of which the character is not aware but the actor must be. The ‘assumption of the hidden’ is, thus, an important way of grasping character motivations. The chapter also lists the principal objections raised by scientific psychology to the psychoanalytical view of personality and seeks to reach a balanced position on the extent to which the psychoanalytic method can and should be applied to the analysis of characters.
