ABSTRACT
The concept of ``personality'' is a two-edged sword. At one level, it serves a useful integrative function, helping explain how the myriad forms and facets of human functioning are organized into a larger and potentially more holistic pattern. Personality, in this sense, is what makes you you, a self both distinguishable from others and recognizable, with meaningful variations and developments, across time. As such, the personality or ``self'' has played a central role in the history of psychotherapy, serving as an orienting concept for clinical diagnosis, as well as a target for clinical interventions. From Freud's classic structural formulation of ego functioning (Freud, 1940/1964) to its elaboration by object relations (Kernberg, 1976) and self-theorists (Kohut, 1971), and from early conceptions of the ``proprium'' (Allport, 1961) to humanistic theories of self-development (Rogers, 1961), various models of personality have provided a foundation for theories of psychotherapy. Even scienti®cally parsimonious cognitivebehavioral therapies (Beck, 1993) implicitly presume a foundational role for the self in their focus on training clients in selfmonitoring, recording of self-talk, and similar procedures. Viewed in a critical sociohistorical perspective, such models can be seen as expressing a modernist discourse in which the self is viewed as individualistic, singular, essential, stable, and knowable, at least in principle (R. A. Neimeyer, 1998). It follows that psychotherapy, as a series of authoritative technical procedures to bring about self-change, would focus chie¯y on intrapsychic disorders that impair adaptation and then treat them in such a way as to enhance the client's self-actualization, self-control, self-ef®cacy, and the like.
