To identify what is going on in a person, come up with two or three explanations for what you see, then watch for the evidence that tells them apart. Treat any label as a hypothesis. Keep it until their behaviour over time confirms it or rules it out.
\nWork through these six steps in order. The first two gather evidence. The middle two weigh possible explanations. The last two check them in real life and over time.
\nYou can describe what is going on in someone at four depths, from a passing state to a clinical disorder. The levels help you decide how deep a claim you can make about a person, and how sure you can be of it. The higher the number, the longer the thing lasts and the more evidence you need before naming it. At level 4 an outsider cannot make the claim at all. For each level you get what it is, how long it lasts, an example, and what you can safely conclude from outside. Level 3 takes in attachment, defences, schemas and character style, and each has its own chapter later.
\nA passing condition
A stable tendency that everyone has to some degree
A recurring way of handling needs, feelings and people: attachment, defences, schemas, character style
A pattern that is pervasive, rigid, and causes real distress or impairment
Most useful identification happens at level 3, patterns. A state is too brief to tell you much about the person, and a disorder is a diagnosis you cannot make from outside. You can see a pattern for yourself if you watch it repeat across several relationships. Traits tell you how someone tends to behave. Patterns tell you why, and what they will do under pressure.
\nThese rules catch the most common mistakes. Run through them before you settle on any label.
\nNot \"he's a narcissist.\" Instead: \"Under criticism he goes cold, then counterattacks. Praise restores him quickly. He rarely asks about anyone else. That fits grandiose narcissistic defences better than shame-proneness, because he doesn't withdraw or attack himself. Next I'll watch how he handles a peer's success.\"
\nYou don't need these terms yet. In brief, grandiose narcissistic defences protect self-esteem by inflating it and hitting back. Shame-proneness turns the hurt inward, into withdrawal or self-attack. Both have full entries later.
\nThat identification names the behaviour, the pattern, the evidence for it, the alternative it rules out, and the next test. Every section below is built to support identifications like that one.
","mins":6,"h3":[{"id":"six-steps","t":"Six steps"},{"id":"four-levels-of-description","t":"Four levels of description"},{"id":"four-rules-that-prevent-most-misidentifications","t":"Four rules that prevent most misidentifications"},{"id":"what-a-good-identification-sounds-like","t":"What a good identification sounds like"}],"text":" To identify what is going on in a person, come up with two or three explanations for what you see, then watch for the evidence that tells them apart. Treat any label as a hypothesis. Keep it until their behaviour over time confirms it or rules it out. Six steps Work through these six steps in order. The first two gather evidence. The middle two weigh possible explanations. The last two check them in real life and over time. Observe behaviour, not character. \"She went silent when the deadline was questioned\" is an observation. \"She's defensive\" is already an interpretation. Describe what a camera would have recorded. Notice what they evoke in you. Feeling bored, protective, irritated, dazzled, guilty or uneasy around someone tells you something about how they operate. Clinicians call this reaction countertransference and rely on it heavily. Treat it as a clue, and check that the feeling is not mostly about your own history. Come up with at least three explanations. The same behaviour can have very different causes underneath. Chronic lateness can come from avoidance, passive aggression (saying no by being late instead of in words), ADHD, entitlement (feeling that other people's time matters less), depression, or a chaotic home. Find what tells them apart. Each explanation predicts something different in a new situation. Every entry in the Dictionary lists these signs, called tells, that separate it from its look-alikes. Test lightly. Change one thing: praise instead of critique, give space instead of pursuing, ask one direct question. See which explanation the response supports. Revise. Hold a label for weeks, not minutes. A pattern repeats across settings. A state, such as a bad mood or a tired week, passes. Four levels of description You can describe what is going on in someone at four depths, from a passing state to a clinical disorder. The levels help you decide how deep a claim you can make about a person, and how sure you can be of it. The higher the number, the longer the thing lasts and the more evidence you need before naming it. At level 4 an outsider cannot make the claim at all. For each level you get what it is, how long it lasts, an example, and what you can safely conclude from outside. Level 3 takes in attachment, defences, schemas and character style, and each has its own chapter later. Level What it is Time frame Example What you can conclude from outside State A passing condition Minutes to days Anxious before a pitch That it is happening Trait A stable tendency that everyone has to some degree Years High neuroticism Fairly reliably, after weeks of contact Pattern or style A recurring way of handling needs, feelings and people: attachment, defences, schemas, character style Years, triggered by context Idealises new partners, then devalues them Reliably, if you see it across several relationships Disorder A pattern that is pervasive, rigid, and causes real distress or impairment Long-standing Narcissistic personality disorder Not reliably. Diagnosis needs a history, a structured interview, and other causes ruled out. You can name the pattern. Most useful identification happens at level 3, patterns. A state is too brief to tell you much about the person, and a disorder is a diagnosis you cannot make from outside. You can see a pattern for yourself if you watch it repeat across several relationships. Traits tell you how someone tends to behave. Patterns tell you why, and what they will do under pressure. Four rules that prevent most misidentifications These rules catch the most common mistakes. Run through them before you settle on any label. Function over form. Ask what the behaviour does for the person. It might protect them from shame, keep closeness at a safe distance, keep control, or get care. The function tells you what you are dealing with. The form is how the behaviour looks from outside, and it is only the surface. Ordinary causes first. Most difficult behaviour comes from fear, tiredness, grief, stress or incentives that reward the wrong thing. Personality disorders account for a small minority of people. Rule out the ordinary explanations before the clinical ones. Context and culture. Directness, eye contact, emotional display and deference to authority vary by culture, class, gender and setting. A behaviour becomes a pattern when it shows up across settings where it doesn't fit. Pressure reveals structure. People show how they are organised underneath when they face criticism, loss of status, a win, conflict, being told no, or holding power. Watch those moments more than calm ones. What a good identification sounds like Not \"he's a narcissist.\" Instead: \"Under criticism he goes cold, then counterattacks. Praise restores him quickly. He rarely asks about anyone else. That fits grandiose narcissistic defences better than shame-proneness, because he doesn't withdraw or attack himself. Next I'll watch how he handles a peer's success.\" You don't need these terms yet. In brief, grandiose narcissistic defences protect self-esteem by inflating it and hitting back. Shame-proneness turns the hurt inward, into withdrawal or self-attack. Both have full entries later. That identification names the behaviour, the pattern, the evidence for it, the alternative it rules out, and the next test. Every section below is built to support identifications like that one. ","part":0,"wrap":{"summary":"A six-step method, four levels of description and four rules for working out what drives someone.","intro":"Most misreadings of people come from naming a cause too fast. This chapter gives you a way to slow down: describe what you see, list explanations, then test them. It also shows how deep a claim you can safely make about someone.","objectives":["tell an observation apart from an interpretation","explain the four levels of description and what you can conclude at each","use the six-step method and the four rules to test a hypothesis about someone"],"keyterms":[{"name":"Hypothesis","id":null,"def":"A best guess you hold loosely and test against new evidence. Every label in this guide is one."},{"name":"State and trait","id":"trait-vs-state","def":"A state is a passing condition, like nerves before a pitch. A trait is a lasting tendency, like being prone to worry."},{"name":"Pattern","id":null,"def":"A recurring way of handling needs, feelings and people that shows up across settings and relationships, often under pressure."},{"name":"Disorder","id":"personality-disorder","def":"A pattern so pervasive and rigid that it causes real distress or impairment. Only a clinician can diagnose one."},{"name":"Countertransference","id":"countertransference","def":"The feelings a person stirs in you, such as boredom, guilt or unease. They are clues to how that person operates."},{"name":"Defence","id":"defence-mechanisms","def":"An automatic, mostly unconscious way of keeping a painful feeling out of awareness, such as blaming others or joking it away."}],"takeaways":["Describe behaviour before you interpret it. 'She went silent' is evidence. 'She's defensive' is already a conclusion.","Hold at least three explanations at once, and look for the sign that tells them apart.","Level 3, patterns, is where identification pays off. A pattern seen across several relationships tells you why someone acts as they do.","Ordinary causes come first: fear, tiredness, grief, stress, bad incentives. Disorders are rare, and only a clinician can diagnose one.","Watch people under pressure. Criticism, loss, a win or being told no shows how they are organised underneath."],"quiz":[{"q":"A colleague snapped at you in this morning's meeting. You have not seen him do it before. Which statement can you actually support?","options":["He's an angry person.","He was irritable this morning.","He has a hostile personality style.","He probably has a personality disorder."],"answer":1,"why":"One incident shows a state, a passing condition. 'Angry person' claims a trait, which needs weeks of contact. A style needs the pattern across several relationships, and a disorder cannot be judged from outside."},{"q":"Your partner keeps cancelling plans at the last minute. You suspect they are avoiding you. What does the method say to do next?","options":["List at least two other explanations and what each would predict.","Ask them directly why they are avoiding you.","Decide it's avoidant attachment and adjust your expectations.","Say nothing and wait to see if it stops."],"answer":0,"why":"Step 3 asks for at least three explanations, such as overwork, low mood or a chaotic schedule. Asking a direct question is a light test from step 5. It comes later, once you know what each answer would mean."},{"q":"A new hire is quiet, keeps eye contact brief and never challenges the boss in meetings. You start to think 'low confidence'. Which rule should you apply first?","options":["Pressure reveals structure","Function over form","Context and culture","Ordinary causes first"],"answer":2,"why":"Eye contact, directness and deference to authority vary by culture and setting, so check what is normal where they come from. 'Ordinary causes first' is close, but it covers fear, tiredness and stress, not cultural norms."}],"practice":"Pick one person whose behaviour puzzles you. Write down one thing they did, as a camera would have recorded it. Then write three different explanations and, for each, one thing it predicts they will do next. Watch for a week and see which prediction holds."}},{"id":"the-architecture-of-a-person","title":"The architecture of a person","html":"What you see is the top layer: behaviour. Everything that explains it lies underneath, and you can only infer it from what you see. Identifying what is going on means working down through the layers below, from the fastest-changing to the slowest.
\nRead the table from top to bottom. Each row is one layer. The top layers change fast, with the setting or the moment. The lower you go, the more slowly a layer changes and the longer you need to watch before you can name it. The order is rough. Emotion, for example, shifts moment to moment, though the capacity to bear it changes slowly. Each row gives the question the layer answers, the main terms for it, and how fast it changes.
\n| Layer | \nThe question it answers | \nKey terms | \nHow fast it changes | \n
|---|---|---|---|
| Social forces | \nWhat is this situation pulling out of anyone in it? | \nConformity, obedience, social identity, dominance and prestige | \nInstantly, with the setting | \n
| Relational patterns | \nWhat do they keep recreating with other people? | \nTransference, drama triangle, pursuer-distancer, psychological games | \nYears; replayed in each new relationship | \n
| Defences | \nWhat do they do when a feeling is too much? | \nProjection, splitting, intellectualisation, humour, sublimation | \nYears; how mature their defences are shows overall health | \n
| Cognition | \nHow do they interpret what happens? | \nSchemas, cognitive distortions, biases, mentalising | \nMonths to years; can be trained | \n
| Emotion and regulation | \nWhat do they feel, and how much can they bear? | \nShame, envy, window of tolerance, alexithymia | \nMoment to moment; regulation capacity changes slowly | \n
| Self-structure | \nHow solid is their sense of who they are and what they're worth? | \nSelf-esteem, contingent self-worth, identity, narcissism, superego | \nSlowly; the core of personality organisation | \n
| Traits | \nWhere are their stable dials set? | \nBig Five, HEXACO, dark traits | \nSlowly across adulthood; partly heritable | \n
| Relational templates | \nWhat did early life teach them to expect from people? | \nAttachment, internal working models, early maladaptive schemas, family roles | \nVery slowly; earned security is possible | \n
| Core needs | \nWhat are they actually after? | \nSafety, belonging, autonomy, competence, status, meaning | \nStable; which need dominates varies | \n
| Body and temperament | \nWhat is their baseline arousal and sensitivity? | \nTemperament, behavioural inhibition, allostatic load | \nBaseline from birth; state shifts with stress and sleep | \n
Two things follow from this. First, the same behaviour can come from any layer. A person can withdraw from a meeting because of the social setting (low status in the room), a defence (schizoid withdrawal, retreating inward when contact feels like too much), a template (avoidant attachment, an early-learned habit of keeping people at a distance) or their body (exhaustion). Second, the lower the layer, the more stable the pattern and the more confidently you can predict from it, but the more observation you need before naming it.
\nPatterns repeat because they confirm themselves. A situation threatens a core need. That produces a feeling. If the feeling is too much, a defence (an automatic way of keeping the feeling out of awareness) takes over and shapes the behaviour. The behaviour provokes a reaction from others, and the reaction confirms the original expectation. Someone who expects rejection withdraws first, and others drift away, which proves rejection again. Most of what this guide names is one part of that loop.
\nYou can break the loop at any step. The defence step is where identification helps most: name the defence and you know what the behaviour is protecting.
","mins":5,"h3":[{"id":"the-loop-that-makes-patterns-repeat","t":"The loop that makes patterns repeat"}],"text":" What you see is the top layer: behaviour. Everything that explains it lies underneath, and you can only infer it from what you see. Identifying what is going on means working down through the layers below, from the fastest-changing to the slowest. Read the table from top to bottom. Each row is one layer. The top layers change fast, with the setting or the moment. The lower you go, the more slowly a layer changes and the longer you need to watch before you can name it. The order is rough. Emotion, for example, shifts moment to moment, though the capacity to bear it changes slowly. Each row gives the question the layer answers, the main terms for it, and how fast it changes. Layer The question it answers Key terms How fast it changes Social forces What is this situation pulling out of anyone in it? Conformity, obedience, social identity, dominance and prestige Instantly, with the setting Relational patterns What do they keep recreating with other people? Transference, drama triangle, pursuer-distancer, psychological games Years; replayed in each new relationship Defences What do they do when a feeling is too much? Projection, splitting, intellectualisation, humour, sublimation Years; how mature their defences are shows overall health Cognition How do they interpret what happens? Schemas, cognitive distortions, biases, mentalising Months to years; can be trained Emotion and regulation What do they feel, and how much can they bear? Shame, envy, window of tolerance, alexithymia Moment to moment; regulation capacity changes slowly Self-structure How solid is their sense of who they are and what they're worth? Self-esteem, contingent self-worth, identity, narcissism, superego Slowly; the core of personality organisation Traits Where are their stable dials set? Big Five, HEXACO, dark traits Slowly across adulthood; partly heritable Relational templates What did early life teach them to expect from people? Attachment, internal working models, early maladaptive schemas, family roles Very slowly; earned security is possible Core needs What are they actually after? Safety, belonging, autonomy, competence, status, meaning Stable; which need dominates varies Body and temperament What is their baseline arousal and sensitivity? Temperament, behavioural inhibition, allostatic load Baseline from birth; state shifts with stress and sleep Two things follow from this. First, the same behaviour can come from any layer. A person can withdraw from a meeting because of the social setting (low status in the room), a defence (schizoid withdrawal, retreating inward when contact feels like too much), a template (avoidant attachment, an early-learned habit of keeping people at a distance) or their body (exhaustion). Second, the lower the layer, the more stable the pattern and the more confidently you can predict from it, but the more observation you need before naming it. The loop that makes patterns repeat Patterns repeat because they confirm themselves. A situation threatens a core need. That produces a feeling. If the feeling is too much, a defence (an automatic way of keeping the feeling out of awareness) takes over and shapes the behaviour. The behaviour provokes a reaction from others, and the reaction confirms the original expectation. Someone who expects rejection withdraws first, and others drift away, which proves rejection again. Most of what this guide names is one part of that loop. Patterns repeat because each turn confirms the last Worked example: someone who expects to be rejected Trigger A partner is slow to reply Core need threatened Belonging: am I wanted? Feeling Fear of being left, shame Defence shapes behaviour Withdraws first, goes cold a mature defence breaks it Others react Partner feels shut out Template confirmed “People always leave” too much to bear next trigger lands harder You can break the loop at any step. The defence step is where identification helps most: name the defence and you know what the behaviour is protecting. ","part":0,"wrap":{"summary":"The layers beneath behaviour, from the social setting down to the body, and the loop that repeats patterns.","intro":"You only ever see behaviour. Its causes sit in layers underneath, from the setting someone is in down to early experience and the body. Knowing the layers stops you blaming character for what the room, a defence or exhaustion is doing.","objectives":["explain the layers beneath behaviour and how fast each one changes","tell apart a cause in the situation from a cause in the person","spot each step of the loop that keeps a pattern repeating"],"keyterms":[{"name":"Layer","id":null,"def":"One level of explanation beneath behaviour, such as the setting, a defence or early experience. Upper layers change fast, lower ones slowly."},{"name":"Inference","id":null,"def":"A conclusion you reach from evidence instead of seeing it directly. Everything beneath behaviour is inferred."},{"name":"Defence","id":"defence-mechanisms","def":"An automatic, mostly unconscious way of keeping a painful feeling out of awareness, such as blaming others or joking it away."},{"name":"Attachment","id":"attachment-theory","def":"Expectations about closeness learned with early caregivers and carried into adult relationships as a template."},{"name":"Core needs","id":null,"def":"What a person is ultimately after: safety, belonging, autonomy, competence, status or meaning."},{"name":"Temperament","id":"temperament","def":"An inborn baseline of arousal and sensitivity, visible from infancy, such as how easily someone startles or settles."}],"takeaways":["Behaviour is the only layer you can see. Everything else is inferred, so hold it as a hypothesis.","The same behaviour can come from any layer: the room, a defence, an early template or plain exhaustion.","Lower layers are more stable and predict more, but you need more observation before naming them.","Patterns repeat because they confirm themselves. The behaviour provokes the very reaction the person expected.","Name the defence and you know what the behaviour is protecting. That is where identification helps most."],"quiz":[{"q":"A normally talkative team member says almost nothing in a meeting where the board is present. What should you consider before inferring anything about their personality?","options":["Their attachment style","Their status in that room","Their level of neuroticism","Their need for meaning"],"answer":1,"why":"Social forces are the top, fastest-changing layer, and they act on anyone in the room. Rule them out first. Attachment could explain withdrawal, but it is a slow layer that needs evidence across many relationships."},{"q":"Someone expects rejection, so they pull away early in new friendships. People then drift off. In the loop, what is the drifting off?","options":["The defence","The feeling","Others' reaction confirming the expectation","The threatened core need"],"answer":2,"why":"The loop runs from a threatened need to a feeling, a defence, behaviour, then others' reaction. Pulling away is the behaviour the defence shapes. The drifting off is the reaction that confirms the original expectation."},{"q":"Which of these claims needs the most observation before you make it?","options":["She learned early to expect people to leave.","She's stressed this week.","This team pulls everyone into silence.","She tends to read feedback as an attack."],"answer":0,"why":"Relational templates sit near the bottom of the layers and change very slowly, so naming one needs evidence across many relationships. Reading feedback as an attack is a habit of interpretation, a higher layer that shows sooner."}],"practice":"Next time someone's behaviour annoys you, run it down the layers. Ask what the setting is pulling out of them, what feeling might be too much for them, and how tired they are. Write one possible cause from three different layers before you decide which fits."}},{"id":"the-fields-of-psychology","title":"The fields of psychology","html":"Psychology is sixteen overlapping fields, and each one sees something in people the others miss. For identification, three do most of the work: personality psychology (what's stable), psychodynamic psychology (what's hidden from the person themselves), and social psychology (what the situation is doing). Each field below gives its core question, what it lets you see, the people behind it, and where to start. The italic line under each heading is the question the field asks. You do not need to know the thinkers yet. They are listed so you can follow up later.
\nHow do the brain, hormones, nervous system and body produce behaviour, mood and feeling?
\nIt shows how much of what looks like character is state. Sleep, stress hormones, hunger and chronic threat change judgement, temper and empathy within hours. You stop moralising about a stressed person's behaviour and start recognising the load they carry. It also makes you sceptical of neuro-flavoured claims that outrun the evidence.
\nThinkers: Robert Sapolsky, Jaak Panksepp, Joseph LeDoux, Antonio Damasio, Bruce McEwen, Lisa Feldman Barrett. Start with: Sapolsky, Human Behavioral Biology (Stanford lectures, free on YouTube).
\nHow does a person become who they are, and does the mind keep developing after youth?
\nAdult patterns usually have a history. The way someone handles closeness, authority or failure often repeats an early solution that once worked. Adults also differ in how they make meaning, not just in what they know, so two equally clever people can be at different developmental places. You learn to ask what a behaviour was originally for.
\nThinkers: John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, Erik Erikson, Margaret Mahler, Robert Kegan, Jane Loevinger, Jerome Kagan, Diana Baumrind. Start with: Levine and Heller, Attached, then Kegan, In Over Our Heads (1994).
\nHow do people differ in stable ways, and what do those differences predict?
\nIt gives you the few dimensions that actually predict behaviour across settings, so you can separate a stable trait from a bad week. It also tells you which personality claims are well measured (the Big Five and HEXACO, two models that score people on a handful of basic traits, and the Dark Triad of vain, manipulative and callous traits) and which are folklore. You get better at predicting how someone will act under pressure from how they act ordinarily.
\nThinkers: Gordon Allport, Hans Eysenck, Paul Costa and Robert McCrae, Lewis Goldberg, Kibeom Lee and Michael Ashton, Delroy Paulhus, Walter Mischel, Dan McAdams. Start with: Daniel Nettle, Personality (2007).
\nHow do situations, groups, roles and other people shape what a person thinks and does?
\nMuch of what you would attribute to character is produced by the situation: the role, the audience, the group's norms, a chain of small commitments. Social psychology corrects the reflex to explain others by their character and yourself by your circumstances. It also shows you the levers people pull on you, from reciprocity (the urge to return a favour) to social proof (doing what others seem to be doing).
\nThinkers: Kurt Lewin, Solomon Asch, Stanley Milgram, Leon Festinger, Henri Tajfel, Lee Ross, Robert Cialdini, Roy Baumeister, Jonathan Haidt. Start with: Scott Plous, Social Psychology (Wesleyan, Coursera, free to audit).
\nHow do people perceive, judge, decide and model other minds, and where does it go wrong?
\nIt shows the predictable ways a sane, intelligent person misreads evidence, including you when you judge people. You learn to spot motivated reasoning (reaching the conclusion you wanted), the certainty that your view is simply the facts, and the thought habits that keep depression and anxiety going. Research on mentalising adds the capacity to hold someone else's mind in mind, and shows how that capacity collapses under stress.
\nThinkers: Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Richard Nisbett, Aaron Beck, Peter Fonagy, Arie Kruglanski. Start with: Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011).
\nWhat separates ordinary distress from disorder?
\nIt gives you the outlines of depression, anxiety, ADHD, autism, addiction and the personality disorders. You can then recognise them in a colleague or partner without missing them and without diagnosing everyone. Dimensional models, which rate a problem on a scale instead of present or absent, show that most of this is a matter of degree. The field also tells you when something is beyond identification from outside and needs a professional.
\nThinkers: Emil Kraepelin, Aaron Beck, Marsha Linehan, Jeffrey Young, Roman Kotov, Allen Frances. Start with: Young, Klosko and Weishaar, Schema Therapy (2003).
\nWhat does a person not know about themselves, and how do early relationships live on in present ones?
\nIt identifies the gap between what someone says and what they do, and treats your own reaction to a person as evidence about them. You learn to see defences in action, the old relationship replayed with the boss or partner, and the difference between fragile and robust self-esteem. For a person who keeps producing the same outcome, this is the most useful single lens.
\nThinkers: Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, Otto Kernberg, Heinz Kohut, George Vaillant, Nancy McWilliams. Start with: McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis (2nd ed., 2011).
\nWhat does the psyche keep out of the public persona, and what is the person trying to become?
\nIt shows what someone disowns and then meets in others: the virtue loudly displayed and its hidden opposite. It names the complexes, emotionally loaded clusters of memory and feeling, that take over a person's voice when touched, and the midlife turn when the old adaptation stops working. Its claims are clinical and interpretive, not tested. Use it as a lens, not as proof.
\nThinkers: C.G. Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, James Hillman, Edward Edinger, Robert A. Johnson, James Hollis. Start with: Jung (ed.), Man and His Symbols (1964).
\nWhat does a person need in order to grow, and how do they face freedom, meaning, isolation and death?
\nIt shows how love that is made conditional produces a self built to earn approval, and the strain between the person someone is and the one they perform. The existential side shows how much ordinary behaviour defends against mortality and meaninglessness: overwork, status-seeking, busyness, certainty. It is especially good for identifying what drives people at midlife and after success.
\nThinkers: Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Viktor Frankl, Rollo May, Irvin Yalom, Ernest Becker. Start with: Rogers, On Becoming a Person (1961), then Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy (1980).
\nWhich recurring problems did human minds evolve to solve, and how do those pressures show up now?
\nIt explains why status, belonging, jealousy and in-group loyalty are so strong and so quickly triggered, and why people hide these motives even from themselves. It separates the two routes to rank: dominance, taken through fear, and prestige, given for skill. They look alike from a distance and feel very different up close. Treat specific adaptive stories with care: many are plausible but hard to test.
\nThinkers: Robert Trivers, David Buss, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Joseph Henrich, Joey Cheng and Jessica Tracy. Start with: Buss, Evolutionary Psychology (any recent edition).
\nWhat do people want, what do feelings do, and how do people manage both?
\nIt shows the motive underneath the behaviour: achievement, affiliation or power; approach or avoidance; autonomy or control. It gives you a precise vocabulary for the emotions behind most trouble between people (shame, envy, contempt, resentment) and for how people regulate or suppress them. You start hearing the feeling behind the argument.
\nThinkers: Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, David McClelland, Jeffrey Gray, E. Tory Higgins, Paul Ekman, James Gross, Lisa Feldman Barrett. Start with: Barrett, How Emotions Are Made (2017).
\nHow do personality, groups and systems shape performance, leadership and dysfunction at work?
\nIt shows which leader traits predict success and which predict derailment, where a capable leader fails through their own flaws, and why confident people get promoted past their competence. The psychoanalytic strand (Bion, Menzies Lyth, Kets de Vries) shows how whole teams defend against anxiety through ritual, scapegoating and dependence on a leader. You see the organisation as a system with its own unconscious, not only as a set of individuals.
\nThinkers: Robert Hogan, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Amy Edmondson, Chris Argyris, Christina Maslach, Wilfred Bion, Isabel Menzies Lyth, Manfred Kets de Vries. Start with: Hogan, Personality and the Fate of Organizations (2007).
\nWhat happens when experience overwhelms the capacity to cope, and how does it show up years later?
\nIt explains reactions that seem out of proportion: the freeze in a meeting, the flash of rage, the person who goes blank or over-accommodates. You learn to tell a trauma response from a personality trait. You also learn how long-term relational harm differs from a single shocking event. The field is clinically rich but has a popular fringe, so check claims about the nervous system against the evidence.
\nThinkers: Pierre Janet, Judith Herman, Bessel van der Kolk, Rachel Yehuda, Pat Ogden, Pete Walker. Start with: Herman, Trauma and Recovery (1992).
\nWhat patterns does a couple, family or team produce that no single member intends?
\nIt moves the focus from the person to the pattern between people: the pursuer and the distancer, the over-functioner and the under-functioner, the triangle that pulls in a third party. The couples research of John and Julie Gottman shows which couple behaviours predict breakdown. You stop asking who is to blame and start seeing the loop each person keeps feeding.
\nThinkers: Murray Bowen, Salvador Minuchin, John and Julie Gottman, Eric Berne, Stephen Karpman, Sue Johnson. Start with: Gottman and Silver, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (revised 2015).
\nCan people be sorted into a few recurring character patterns, and which systems hold up?
\nThe best typologies name the core fear or strategy that organises a character, which is quicker to spot than a profile of traits. Those are the systems of the psychoanalysts Karen Horney and Fritz Riemann, the psychologist David Shapiro, and the Enneagram in the clinical form given it by the psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo. Knowing how strong each system's evidence is lets you use them as hypotheses rather than verdicts. They also help you hear when someone uses a type label to excuse or freeze themselves.
\nThinkers: C.G. Jung, Isabel Briggs Myers, Karen Horney, Fritz Riemann, Claudio Naranjo, David Shapiro. Start with: Riemann, Anxiety: Using Depth Psychology to Find a Balance in Your Life (English edition 2008).
\nWhat is a person's stated motive hiding, and how do they face freedom, death and other people's success?
\nBefore psychology was a science, philosophers were its sharpest observers of motive. La Rochefoucauld, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Fromm, Sartre and Becker each found a gap between what people say drives them and what does: envy dressed as morality, vanity dressed as modesty, fear of freedom dressed as duty. Buber and Levinas add the other half: whether a person is being met as a person or used as a thing. None of this is tested science, but much of it anticipates findings that are, from defence mechanisms to terror management (research on how the fear of death shapes behaviour). Use it to ask what a position is for, not only whether it is right.
\nThinkers: François de La Rochefoucauld, G.W.F. Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Martin Buber, Erich Fromm, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Ernest Becker, Jessica Benjamin, Martha Nussbaum. Start with: Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), then Becker, The Denial of Death (1973).
","mins":10,"h3":[{"id":"biological-and-affective-neuroscience","t":"Biological and affective neuroscience"},{"id":"developmental-psychology","t":"Developmental psychology"},{"id":"personality-psychology","t":"Personality psychology"},{"id":"social-psychology","t":"Social psychology"},{"id":"cognitive-psychology-and-judgement","t":"Cognitive psychology and judgement"},{"id":"clinical-and-abnormal-psychology","t":"Clinical and abnormal psychology"},{"id":"psychodynamic-psychology-object-relations-and-self-psychology","t":"Psychodynamic psychology, object relations and self psychology"},{"id":"analytical-jungian-psychology","t":"Analytical (Jungian) psychology"},{"id":"humanistic-and-existential-psychology","t":"Humanistic and existential psychology"},{"id":"evolutionary-psychology","t":"Evolutionary psychology"},{"id":"motivation-and-emotion","t":"Motivation and emotion"},{"id":"organisational-psychology-and-group-dynamics-at-work","t":"Organisational psychology and group dynamics at work"},{"id":"trauma-studies","t":"Trauma studies"},{"id":"relationship-and-family-systems-psychology","t":"Relationship and family-systems psychology"},{"id":"typologies-and-character-systems","t":"Typologies and character systems"},{"id":"philosophy-and-the-unmasking-of-motive","t":"Philosophy and the unmasking of motive"}],"text":" Psychology is sixteen overlapping fields, and each one sees something in people the others miss. For identification, three do most of the work: personality psychology (what's stable), psychodynamic psychology (what's hidden from the person themselves), and social psychology (what the situation is doing). Each field below gives its core question, what it lets you see, the people behind it, and where to start. The italic line under each heading is the question the field asks. You do not need to know the thinkers yet. They are listed so you can follow up later. Biological and affective neuroscience How do the brain, hormones, nervous system and body produce behaviour, mood and feeling? It shows how much of what looks like character is state. Sleep, stress hormones, hunger and chronic threat change judgement, temper and empathy within hours. You stop moralising about a stressed person's behaviour and start recognising the load they carry. It also makes you sceptical of neuro-flavoured claims that outrun the evidence. Thinkers: Robert Sapolsky, Jaak Panksepp, Joseph LeDoux, Antonio Damasio, Bruce McEwen, Lisa Feldman Barrett. Start with: Sapolsky, Human Behavioral Biology (Stanford lectures, free on YouTube). Developmental psychology How does a person become who they are, and does the mind keep developing after youth? Adult patterns usually have a history. The way someone handles closeness, authority or failure often repeats an early solution that once worked. Adults also differ in how they make meaning, not just in what they know, so two equally clever people can be at different developmental places. You learn to ask what a behaviour was originally for. Thinkers: John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, Erik Erikson, Margaret Mahler, Robert Kegan, Jane Loevinger, Jerome Kagan, Diana Baumrind. Start with: Levine and Heller, Attached , then Kegan, In Over Our Heads (1994). Personality psychology How do people differ in stable ways, and what do those differences predict? It gives you the few dimensions that actually predict behaviour across settings, so you can separate a stable trait from a bad week. It also tells you which personality claims are well measured (the Big Five and HEXACO, two models that score people on a handful of basic traits, and the Dark Triad of vain, manipulative and callous traits) and which are folklore. You get better at predicting how someone will act under pressure from how they act ordinarily. Thinkers: Gordon Allport, Hans Eysenck, Paul Costa and Robert McCrae, Lewis Goldberg, Kibeom Lee and Michael Ashton, Delroy Paulhus, Walter Mischel, Dan McAdams. Start with: Daniel Nettle, Personality (2007). Social psychology How do situations, groups, roles and other people shape what a person thinks and does? Much of what you would attribute to character is produced by the situation: the role, the audience, the group's norms, a chain of small commitments. Social psychology corrects the reflex to explain others by their character and yourself by your circumstances. It also shows you the levers people pull on you, from reciprocity (the urge to return a favour) to social proof (doing what others seem to be doing). Thinkers: Kurt Lewin, Solomon Asch, Stanley Milgram, Leon Festinger, Henri Tajfel, Lee Ross, Robert Cialdini, Roy Baumeister, Jonathan Haidt. Start with: Scott Plous, Social Psychology (Wesleyan, Coursera, free to audit). Cognitive psychology and judgement How do people perceive, judge, decide and model other minds, and where does it go wrong? It shows the predictable ways a sane, intelligent person misreads evidence, including you when you judge people. You learn to spot motivated reasoning (reaching the conclusion you wanted), the certainty that your view is simply the facts, and the thought habits that keep depression and anxiety going. Research on mentalising adds the capacity to hold someone else's mind in mind, and shows how that capacity collapses under stress. Thinkers: Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Richard Nisbett, Aaron Beck, Peter Fonagy, Arie Kruglanski. Start with: Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011). Clinical and abnormal psychology What separates ordinary distress from disorder? It gives you the outlines of depression, anxiety, ADHD, autism, addiction and the personality disorders. You can then recognise them in a colleague or partner without missing them and without diagnosing everyone. Dimensional models, which rate a problem on a scale instead of present or absent, show that most of this is a matter of degree. The field also tells you when something is beyond identification from outside and needs a professional. Thinkers: Emil Kraepelin, Aaron Beck, Marsha Linehan, Jeffrey Young, Roman Kotov, Allen Frances. Start with: Young, Klosko and Weishaar, Schema Therapy (2003). Psychodynamic psychology, object relations and self psychology What does a person not know about themselves, and how do early relationships live on in present ones? It identifies the gap between what someone says and what they do, and treats your own reaction to a person as evidence about them. You learn to see defences in action, the old relationship replayed with the boss or partner, and the difference between fragile and robust self-esteem. For a person who keeps producing the same outcome, this is the most useful single lens. Thinkers: Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, Wilfred Bion, Otto Kernberg, Heinz Kohut, George Vaillant, Nancy McWilliams. Start with: McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis (2nd ed., 2011). Analytical (Jungian) psychology What does the psyche keep out of the public persona, and what is the person trying to become? It shows what someone disowns and then meets in others: the virtue loudly displayed and its hidden opposite. It names the complexes, emotionally loaded clusters of memory and feeling, that take over a person's voice when touched, and the midlife turn when the old adaptation stops working. Its claims are clinical and interpretive, not tested. Use it as a lens, not as proof. Thinkers: C.G. Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, James Hillman, Edward Edinger, Robert A. Johnson, James Hollis. Start with: Jung (ed.), Man and His Symbols (1964). Humanistic and existential psychology What does a person need in order to grow, and how do they face freedom, meaning, isolation and death? It shows how love that is made conditional produces a self built to earn approval, and the strain between the person someone is and the one they perform. The existential side shows how much ordinary behaviour defends against mortality and meaninglessness: overwork, status-seeking, busyness, certainty. It is especially good for identifying what drives people at midlife and after success. Thinkers: Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Viktor Frankl, Rollo May, Irvin Yalom, Ernest Becker. Start with: Rogers, On Becoming a Person (1961), then Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy (1980). Evolutionary psychology Which recurring problems did human minds evolve to solve, and how do those pressures show up now? It explains why status, belonging, jealousy and in-group loyalty are so strong and so quickly triggered, and why people hide these motives even from themselves. It separates the two routes to rank: dominance, taken through fear, and prestige, given for skill. They look alike from a distance and feel very different up close. Treat specific adaptive stories with care: many are plausible but hard to test. Thinkers: Robert Trivers, David Buss, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Joseph Henrich, Joey Cheng and Jessica Tracy. Start with: Buss, Evolutionary Psychology (any recent edition). Motivation and emotion What do people want, what do feelings do, and how do people manage both? It shows the motive underneath the behaviour: achievement, affiliation or power; approach or avoidance; autonomy or control. It gives you a precise vocabulary for the emotions behind most trouble between people (shame, envy, contempt, resentment) and for how people regulate or suppress them. You start hearing the feeling behind the argument. Thinkers: Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, David McClelland, Jeffrey Gray, E. Tory Higgins, Paul Ekman, James Gross, Lisa Feldman Barrett. Start with: Barrett, How Emotions Are Made (2017). Organisational psychology and group dynamics at work How do personality, groups and systems shape performance, leadership and dysfunction at work? It shows which leader traits predict success and which predict derailment, where a capable leader fails through their own flaws, and why confident people get promoted past their competence. The psychoanalytic strand (Bion, Menzies Lyth, Kets de Vries) shows how whole teams defend against anxiety through ritual, scapegoating and dependence on a leader. You see the organisation as a system with its own unconscious, not only as a set of individuals. Thinkers: Robert Hogan, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Amy Edmondson, Chris Argyris, Christina Maslach, Wilfred Bion, Isabel Menzies Lyth, Manfred Kets de Vries. Start with: Hogan, Personality and the Fate of Organizations (2007). Trauma studies What happens when experience overwhelms the capacity to cope, and how does it show up years later? It explains reactions that seem out of proportion: the freeze in a meeting, the flash of rage, the person who goes blank or over-accommodates. You learn to tell a trauma response from a personality trait. You also learn how long-term relational harm differs from a single shocking event. The field is clinically rich but has a popular fringe, so check claims about the nervous system against the evidence. Thinkers: Pierre Janet, Judith Herman, Bessel van der Kolk, Rachel Yehuda, Pat Ogden, Pete Walker. Start with: Herman, Trauma and Recovery (1992). Relationship and family-systems psychology What patterns does a couple, family or team produce that no single member intends? It moves the focus from the person to the pattern between people: the pursuer and the distancer, the over-functioner and the under-functioner, the triangle that pulls in a third party. The couples research of John and Julie Gottman shows which couple behaviours predict breakdown. You stop asking who is to blame and start seeing the loop each person keeps feeding. Thinkers: Murray Bowen, Salvador Minuchin, John and Julie Gottman, Eric Berne, Stephen Karpman, Sue Johnson. Start with: Gottman and Silver, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (revised 2015). Typologies and character systems Can people be sorted into a few recurring character patterns, and which systems hold up? The best typologies name the core fear or strategy that organises a character, which is quicker to spot than a profile of traits. Those are the systems of the psychoanalysts Karen Horney and Fritz Riemann, the psychologist David Shapiro, and the Enneagram in the clinical form given it by the psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo. Knowing how strong each system's evidence is lets you use them as hypotheses rather than verdicts. They also help you hear when someone uses a type label to excuse or freeze themselves. Thinkers: C.G. Jung, Isabel Briggs Myers, Karen Horney, Fritz Riemann, Claudio Naranjo, David Shapiro. Start with: Riemann, Anxiety: Using Depth Psychology to Find a Balance in Your Life (English edition 2008). Philosophy and the unmasking of motive What is a person's stated motive hiding, and how do they face freedom, death and other people's success? Before psychology was a science, philosophers were its sharpest observers of motive. La Rochefoucauld, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Fromm, Sartre and Becker each found a gap between what people say drives them and what does: envy dressed as morality, vanity dressed as modesty, fear of freedom dressed as duty. Buber and Levinas add the other half: whether a person is being met as a person or used as a thing. None of this is tested science, but much of it anticipates findings that are, from defence mechanisms to terror management (research on how the fear of death shapes behaviour). Use it to ask what a position is for, not only whether it is right. Thinkers: François de La Rochefoucauld, G.W.F. Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, Martin Buber, Erich Fromm, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Ernest Becker, Jessica Benjamin, Martha Nussbaum. Start with: Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), then Becker, The Denial of Death (1973). ","part":0,"wrap":{"summary":"Sixteen fields of psychology, what each one helps you see in people, and where to start reading.","intro":"Each field of psychology notices something in people that the others miss. Knowing them tells you which lens to reach for when a behaviour puzzles you. Three fields do most of the work in identification.","objectives":["recognise the three fields that do most of the work in identification","tell apart what the situation explains from what stable personality explains","use the right field as a lens when someone's behaviour puzzles you"],"keyterms":[{"name":"Big Five","id":"big-five","def":"The best-supported model of personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Everyone sits somewhere on each."},{"name":"Psychodynamic psychology","id":null,"def":"The study of motives and feelings a person keeps out of their own awareness, and of old relationships replayed in new ones."},{"name":"Fundamental attribution error","id":"fundamental-attribution-error","def":"Explaining other people's behaviour by their character while explaining your own by your circumstances."},{"name":"Mentalising","id":"mentalising","def":"Seeing behaviour, your own and others', as driven by thoughts and feelings. It weakens under stress."},{"name":"Dimensional model","id":"hitop","def":"Rating a problem on a scale from mild to severe, instead of sorting people into has it and does not."},{"name":"Dominance and prestige","id":"dominance-prestige","def":"Two routes to rank. Dominance takes it through fear and force. Prestige is given freely for skill or knowledge."}],"takeaways":["Personality psychology shows what is stable, psychodynamic psychology what is hidden, and social psychology what the situation is doing.","Much of what looks like character is the situation or the body. Sleep, stress and hunger change behaviour within hours.","Some fields are well tested, such as personality and social psychology. Jungian ideas, typologies and philosophy are lenses, not proof.","Clinical psychology helps you recognise conditions without diagnosing anyone, and tells you when a professional is needed.","Relationship psychology replaces the question of who is to blame with the question of which loop both people keep feeding."],"quiz":[{"q":"A colleague is curt and short-tempered every day of a product launch. Before you decide she is 'difficult', which field reminds you that sleep and stress hormones change temper within hours?","options":["Personality psychology","Biological and affective neuroscience","Psychodynamic psychology","Evolutionary psychology"],"answer":1,"why":"Neuroscience shows how much of what looks like character is state. Personality psychology is the near miss. It tells you what is stable, and one hard week cannot answer that question."},{"q":"A friend keeps ending up with partners who belittle him, though each one seemed different at first. Which field does the guide call the most useful single lens for this?","options":["Psychodynamic psychology","Social psychology","Cognitive psychology","Typologies and character systems"],"answer":0,"why":"Psychodynamic psychology studies how early relationships replay in present ones, which fits a person who keeps producing the same outcome. Social psychology would look at each situation, and would miss the repeat across them."},{"q":"A team member agrees with whoever is loudest in meetings, then says something different in one-to-ones. Which field would look first at the room?","options":["Personality psychology","Humanistic psychology","Clinical psychology","Social psychology"],"answer":3,"why":"Social psychology studies how groups, roles and audiences shape behaviour, and it corrects the reflex to blame character. Personality psychology is the look-alike, but behaviour that changes between settings points away from a stable trait."}],"practice":"This week, when someone's behaviour puzzles you, ask one question from each of the three core fields. What is stable about them? What might they be keeping from themselves? What is the situation doing to them? Note which question gave you the most useful answer."}},{"id":"attachment-development-and-family-systems","title":"Attachment, development and family systems","html":"Attachment is the pull towards someone we rely on for safety, and the expectations about closeness that early care leaves behind. It is the quickest way to understand how someone handles closeness, dependence and threat, with a partner and, more faintly, with a boss. Identify it on two dials rather than four boxes. The boxes are the four familiar styles: secure, anxious, avoidant and fearful-avoidant. The dials are anxiety (fear of being left or undervalued) and avoidance (discomfort with needing anyone). Low on both is secure. High anxiety alone is anxious. High avoidance alone is avoidant. High on both is fearful-avoidant.
\nHow to identify it
\nThe table below lists the main terms in this area. Read each row left to right: what the term means, what it is often mistaken for, and how strong the research behind it is. Strong means well replicated. Moderate means good support with gaps. Mixed means the findings conflict. Weak means little support. Clinical means it rests mainly on clinicians' observation rather than on studies. Tap a term to open its full entry.
\n| Term | \nWhat it is | \nOften confused with | \nEvidence | \n
|---|---|---|---|
| \n | People are born with a behavioural system that seeks closeness to a protective figure when threatened, and the reliability of early care shapes expectations of whether others will come and whether one deserves it. In adults the same system runs with partners and close friends, and more weakly with bosses, mentors and institutions; it is best measured as two dimensions, attachment anxiety and avoidance, rather than as boxes. | \nNeuroticism; Temperament | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Confidence that others will usually respond and that one is worth responding to, with comfort both in depending on others and in being depended on. In adults: low attachment anxiety and low avoidance. | \nDismissive-avoidant attachment; Earned security | \nStrong | \n
| \n | High attachment anxiety with low avoidance: a strong wish for closeness alongside chronic doubt that others will stay or value them. Constant monitoring for signs of withdrawal. | \nRejection sensitivity; Generalised anxiety; Dependent personality | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Low attachment anxiety with high avoidance: values self-reliance, keeps emotional distance and plays down the importance of closeness. A positive self-image propped up by not needing anyone. | \nSchizoid personality; Secure attachment; Fearful-avoidant attachment | \nStrong | \n
| \n | High attachment anxiety and high avoidance together: wants closeness, expects to be hurt by it, and so pulls people in and pushes them away. | \nAnxious-preoccupied attachment; Borderline personality; Disorganised attachment | \nModerate | \n
| \n | An infant pattern in which the child shows contradictory, frozen or dazed behaviour towards the carer under stress: approaching with head averted, stilling mid-movement. Seen when the carer is a source of both comfort and fear. | \nFearful-avoidant attachment; Dissociation | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Secure functioning in an adult whose early attachment experiences were difficult, shown by a coherent, balanced account of that history. | \nDismissive-avoidant attachment; Spiritual bypassing; Secure attachment | \nModerate | \n
| \n | The largely unconscious template of how close relationships work: whether others respond, and whether oneself deserves response. It shapes what a person expects, notices and remembers. | \nEarly maladaptive schemas; Transference; Self-verification | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Actions meant to re-establish contact with an attachment figure who seems to be withdrawing: repeated calls, keeping score, threatening to leave, provoking jealousy, sulking. | \nCoercive control; Passive aggression; Emotional blackmail | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Ways of turning the attachment system up: heightened vigilance for threat, amplified distress, intense pursuit and clinging, to get an inconsistent figure to respond. | \nDeactivating strategies; Rumination and worry; Emotional dysregulation | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Ways of turning the attachment system down: suppressing need, diverting attention from threat and avoiding dependence, so as not to be rebuffed. | \nExpressive suppression; Alexithymia | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Eight life stages, each posing a tension: trust v. mistrust, autonomy v. shame, initiative v. guilt, industry v. inferiority, identity v. role confusion, intimacy v. isolation, generativity v. stagnation, integrity v. despair. How each is resolved leaves a residue later stages build on. | \nPiaget's stages; Subject-object shift | \nMixed | \n
| \n | Low exploration and low commitment: no firm direction in work, values or relationships, and no active search for one. | \nIdentity moratorium; Levels of personality organisation; Major depression | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Commitment without exploration: an identity taken over wholesale from parents, a family firm, a religion or an early mentor and never examined. | \nIdentity achievement; Enmeshment | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Active exploration without commitment yet: trying on roles, values and paths, usually with visible anxiety. | \nIdentity diffusion; Midlife transition | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Commitment after exploration: values, work and relationships the person has examined, chosen and can explain. | \nIdentity foreclosure; Self-authoring mind | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Development consists of what a person is subject to (embedded in and unable to see) becoming object (something they can look at, question and manage). Each order of mind makes the previous order's subject into object. | \nCognitive flexibility; Mentalising | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Self constructed from the expectations and values of important others and groups. The person can hold others' perspectives but is subject to them: what they think of me is who I am. | \nPeople-pleasing; Conformity | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Self organised around an internal system of values and standards the person has authored; others' expectations become inputs to weigh, not the definition of self. | \nDismissive-avoidant attachment; Grandiose narcissism | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Holds one's own ideology as partial and provisional, and seeks out contradiction and other systems in order to revise it. Kegan describes it as rare and, when it appears, late. | \nSelf-authoring mind; Spiritual bypassing; Inflation | \nWeak | \n
| \n | A sequence in how people make sense of self and others, from impulsive and self-protective through conformist and conscientious to individualistic, autonomous and integrated. Measured by how a person completes sentence stems. | \nSubject-object shift; Openness to experience | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Biologically based differences in reactivity and self-regulation visible from infancy: activity, emotional intensity, fearfulness, soothability, attention. The raw material personality grows from. | \nAttachment theory; Big Five | \nStrong | \n
| \n | A temperament marked by wariness, withdrawal and high physiological reactivity to unfamiliar people, places and situations, visible by toddlerhood. | \nSocial anxiety; Introversion (Jung); Dismissive-avoidant attachment | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Some people are more sensitive to their environment for better and for worse: they do worse than average in harsh settings and better than average in supportive ones. 'Dandelions' do about the same anywhere. | \nSensory processing sensitivity; Neuroticism; Resilience | \nMixed | \n
| \n | A count of ten categories of childhood adversity: abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction such as parental addiction, mental illness, violence, incarceration or separation. Higher counts go with worse adult health and behaviour. | \nComplex PTSD; Childhood emotional neglect | \nModerate | \n
| \n | A typology of parenting by warmth and control: authoritative (warm, firm, explains), authoritarian (cold, strict, \"because I said so\"), permissive (warm, few demands), and neglectful (neither warmth nor control). | \nTheory X and Theory Y; Enmeshment | \nModerate | \n
| \n | A child needs a carer who adapts closely at first and then fails in manageable doses; these gradual, survivable failures are what let the child develop. | \nRupture and repair; Perfectionism | \nClinical | \n
| \n | An account of how a toddler moves from felt oneness with the mother to a separate self, through subphases including practising (exploring away) and rapprochement (returning anxiously, wanting independence and closeness at once). | \nDifferentiation of self; Fearful-avoidant attachment | \nClinical | \n
| \n | A role reversal in which a child meets a parent's emotional or practical needs: confidant, mediator, carer of siblings or of the household. | \nCodependency; Self-sacrifice schema; People-pleasing | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Family relationships so close and porous that individual boundaries, privacy and difference are not tolerated; members are expected to feel and think alike. | \nFusion versus intimacy; Emotional cutoff | \nClinical | \n
| \n | A failure to respond enough to a child's feelings: not noticing, naming or validating them, often in a materially secure home. Defined by what didn't happen. | \nEmotional deprivation schema; Alexithymia; Dismissive-avoidant attachment | \nModerate | \n
| \n | The capacity to stay emotionally connected to others while keeping one's own thinking and position, and to separate thinking from feeling under pressure. | \nEmotional cutoff; Self-authoring mind | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Managing unresolved attachment to family by reducing or ending contact, physically or emotionally, instead of working it through. | \nBoundaries; Differentiation of self; Dismissive-avoidant attachment | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Roles children take in a stressed or dysfunctional family to keep it stable: the hero or golden child (the family's success story), the scapegoat (carries the blame), the lost child (invisible, no trouble) and the mascot (comic relief). | \nScapegoating; Drama triangle | \nWeak | \n
| \n | The passing of patterns of attachment, parenting, trauma and relating from one generation to the next, through behaviour, modelling and possibly biology. | \nRepetition compulsion; Earned security | \nModerate | \n
| \n | A reappraisal, often in the 40s or 50s, of work, relationships and meaning, prompted by mortality, children leaving, a career plateau, or achievement that didn't satisfy. The dramatic crisis is a minority experience. | \nMajor depression; Bipolar disorder and hypomania; Identity moratorium | \nMixed | \n
| \n | Four stages of reasoning: sensorimotor (infancy), preoperational (early childhood, egocentric and intuitive), concrete operational (logical about tangible things) and formal operational (abstract, hypothetical, systematic). | \nErikson's stages; Ego development | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Attunement in close relationships breaks often, and the restoring matters more than the break. In Tronick's still-face experiment a parent's face goes blank mid-play: the infant tries to re-engage, protests, then withdraws, and recovers when the parent returns. | \nRepair attempts; People-pleasing; Fawn response | \nModerate | \n
| \n | A child whose parent needs them to be a certain way (admiring, calm, impressive, undemanding) becomes expert at sensing and supplying it, and loses contact with their own feelings. 'Gifted' means gifted at reading the parent, not intellectually gifted. | \nFalse self; Parentification; People-pleasing | \nClinical | \n
Every personality can be identified on two independent axes. The first is style: what kind of person they are. That covers their traits, character type, and core strategy. The second is level: how well organised that style is. A narcissistic style, organised around protecting a special self-image, can belong to a gifted, warm founder or to someone who wrecks everyone around them. The style is the same and the level is different. Most misidentifications come from confusing the two.
\nHow to identify level (Kernberg, McWilliams)
\nThe psychoanalysts Otto Kernberg and Nancy McWilliams grade level in three bands. Neurotic level is the healthiest: a stable sense of self, with problems confined to some areas of life. Borderline level sits in the middle: a shakier sense of self and stormier relationships. Psychotic level is the most impaired: a loose hold on shared reality. 'Neurotic' here means the healthiest band, and 'borderline' means a level, wider than the diagnosis of the same name. Four checks tell the levels apart.
\nHow to identify the type of narcissism
\nNarcissism is about how a person keeps up their sense of worth. Everyone has some. It becomes a problem when worth depends on being seen as special. It takes four common forms.
\nThe single best test is how they react to a peer's success.
\nThe table runs from broad trait models (the Big Five, HEXACO), through the dark traits and the forms of narcissism, to the personality disorders and character styles. Read each row as in the previous chapter: meaning, common look-alikes, strength of evidence. Disorder names describe a style at its extreme. Use them as hypotheses about a pattern, never as a diagnosis.
\n| Term | \nWhat it is | \nOften confused with | \nEvidence | \n
|---|---|---|---|
| \n | Five broad, continuous dimensions that capture most of the stable differences between people: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Everyone sits somewhere on each dimension; nobody is a 'type'. | \nMBTI; HEXACO model; Levels of personality organisation | \nStrong | \n
| \n | The breadth, depth and permeability of a person's mental life: appetite for ideas, art, novelty, feeling and unconventional views. High scorers are curious and imaginative; low scorers are practical, conventional and prefer the familiar. | \nExtraversion; Need for cognitive closure; Hypomanic character | \nStrong | \n
| \n | The tendency to be organised, reliable, self-disciplined, industrious and to follow through on commitments. Low scorers are flexible, spontaneous, disorganised and less bound by plans and rules. | \nOCPD; ADHD in adults; Perfectionism | \nStrong | \n
| \n | The tendency to seek social contact, stimulation, assertiveness and reward, and to feel positive emotion often and strongly. Low scorers (introverts) are reserved, prefer less stimulation and depend less on social reward. | \nSocial anxiety; Introversion and extraversion (Jung); Grandiose narcissism | \nStrong | \n
| \n | The tendency to be warm, cooperative, trusting, tactful and to put others' interests alongside one's own. Low scorers are blunt, sceptical, competitive and comfortable with conflict. | \nHonesty-humility; People-pleasing; Antisocial personality | \nStrong | \n
| \n | The tendency to experience negative emotion (anxiety, irritability, sadness, shame) often, intensely and for longer, and to be sensitive to threat. Low scorers are calm, even and resilient under stress. | \nGeneralised anxiety; Sensory processing sensitivity; Borderline personality | \nStrong | \n
| \n | A six-factor model of personality: Honesty-humility, Emotionality, eXtraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Openness. It re-cuts agreeableness and neuroticism and adds a dimension for fairness and lack of greed. | \nBig Five; Dark Triad | \nModerate | \n
| \n | The tendency to be sincere, fair, modest and uninterested in wealth and status for their own sake. Low scorers flatter to get ahead, bend rules for gain, feel entitled to special treatment and are drawn to luxury and status. | \nAgreeableness; Psychological entitlement | \nModerate | \n
| \n | A trait is how a person tends to be on average across situations; a state is how they are right now. Behaviour varies a lot moment to moment, but the average and range are stable and characteristic. | \nFundamental attribution error; Temperament | \nStrong | \n
| \n | A way of grading how healthy a personality's structure is, independent of its style, on three markers: identity integration, the kind of defences relied on, and reality testing. Neurotic organisation has an integrated identity, repression-based defences and intact reality testing; borderline organisation has identity diffusion, splitting-based defences and intact but fragile reality testing; psychotic organisation has identity diffusion, primitive defences and lost reality testing. | \nBorderline personality; Big Five; Psychosis | \nClinical | \n
| \n | A cluster of socially aversive traits found in the normal population: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy, with everyday sadism added in the Tetrad. They share a core of callousness and self-interest at others' expense. | \nHonesty-humility; Antisocial personality | \nModerate | \n
| \n | A cynical view of human nature combined with a willingness to manipulate, deceive and exploit people to reach goals. In theory it describes a patient, calculating manipulator who keeps up appearances. | \nPsychopathy; Self-monitoring | \nMixed | \n
| \n | A personality pattern combining shallow emotion, lack of empathy, guilt and remorse, with impulsivity, thrill-seeking and often charm and boldness. It exists on a continuum; most high scorers outside prison are not criminals. | \nAntisocial personality; Grandiose narcissism; Emotional numbing | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Enjoyment of other people's pain or humiliation in ordinary life, at a level far below criminal violence: cruel humour, trolling, relishing someone's public failure, choosing to hurt when indifference would have done. | \nPsychopathy; Passive aggression | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Narcissism expressed outwardly: inflated self-image, dominance, exhibitionism, entitlement and a need for admiration, with low conscious self-doubt. The person believes their own publicity, most of the time. | \nVulnerable narcissism; Healthy narcissism; Extraversion | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Narcissism expressed through hypersensitivity, shame and resentment: the person secretly feels special and entitled but is anxious, inhibited and easily hurt, and believes the world fails to recognise them. | \nGrandiose narcissism; Avoidant personality; Rejection sensitivity | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Narcissism that seeks grandiosity through being seen as exceptionally caring, helpful, moral or generous. The person believes they are the most giving, most trustworthy, world-changing helper, and needs that recognised. | \nAltruism; Codependency; Spiritual bypassing | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Ordinary, stable self-regard: enjoying one's abilities, wanting recognition, holding ambitions and ideals, and feeling hurt by slights, without needing others to be lesser and without falling apart when unrecognised. | \nGrandiose narcissism; Self-esteem; Vulnerable narcissism | \nClinical | \n
| \n | The experience of having one's self-image punctured: criticism, failure, being overlooked, being seen as ordinary. It is the wound itself, the hit of shame and deflation, not what the person does next. | \nNarcissistic rage; Humiliation; Shame | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Disproportionate anger, cold or hot, triggered by a narcissistic injury, aimed at erasing the person or fact that exposed the self as flawed. It seeks revenge and the undoing of the hurt, not resolution. | \nAnger as a secondary emotion; Narcissistic injury; Emotional dysregulation | \nModerate | \n
| \n | The attention, admiration, deference or emotional reaction that a narcissistic person draws from others to keep their self-image propped up. It can be positive (praise) or negative (fear, drama), as long as it confirms importance. | \nPsychological entitlement; Approval-seeking schema; Need to belong | \nClinical | \n
| \n | A stable belief that one deserves more than others and is exempt from the rules, duties and limits that apply to everyone else. It shows in expectations, not in how confident the person seems. | \nNarcissistic supply; Entitlement/grandiosity schema; Self-efficacy | \nModerate | \n
| \n | An enduring pattern of inner experience and behaviour that deviates from cultural expectations, is inflexible across situations, starts by early adulthood and causes distress or impairment. The modern view treats it as a matter of degree: how impaired the person's sense of self and relationships are, plus which maladaptive traits colour it. | \nLevels of personality organisation; Complex PTSD; Big Five | \nModerate | \n
| \n | A pervasive, unwarranted distrust of others' motives: the person assumes exploitation, deception or contempt, reads hidden threats into neutral events, and holds grudges. Reality testing is intact. The style ranges from the healthy sceptical auditor through rigid mistrust to pervasive hostility with fragile reality testing. | \nHypervigilance; Psychosis; Mistrust/abuse schema | \nMixed | \n
| \n | Detachment from relationships and a restricted range of emotion in others' company: prefers solitude, seems indifferent to praise or criticism, has few close relationships. Ranges from the self-contained scientist or artist to severe isolation with an inner world that replaces relationships. | \nAvoidant personality; Autism in adults; Extraversion | \nMixed | \n
| \n | Eccentric thinking, perception and behaviour with social anxiety and few close relationships: magical thinking, odd beliefs, unusual perceptions, peculiar speech or dress, and suspiciousness, without full psychosis. | \nSchizoid personality; Psychosis; Openness to experience | \nModerate | \n
| \n | A pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of others' rights from adolescence onward: deceit, impulsivity, aggression, recklessness, irresponsibility and lack of remorse. McWilliams argues it is almost never at a neurotic level because the core is an inability to form genuine attachments. | \nPsychopathy; Substance addiction; ADHD in adults | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Unstable relationships, self-image and emotion, with impulsivity: frantic efforts to avoid abandonment, swings between idealising and devaluing, emotional storms, chronic emptiness, intense anger, and often self-harm. Borderline personality disorder is this specific style; Kernberg's borderline organisation is the wider structural level it sits in. | \nComplex PTSD; Bipolar disorder; Vulnerable narcissism | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Excessive emotionality and attention-seeking: dramatic, rapidly shifting displays, discomfort when not the centre of attention, use of appearance and charm to draw focus, and seeing relationships as closer than they are. At a healthy level the style is warm, expressive and intuitive. | \nGrandiose narcissism; Borderline personality; Extraversion | \nMixed | \n
| \n | A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behaviour), need for admiration and lack of empathy, causing impairment in relationships and work. It includes grandiose and vulnerable presentations, often in the same person at different moments. Most people with the disorder sit at the borderline level of organisation. | \nGrandiose narcissism; Hubris syndrome; Antisocial personality | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Social inhibition, feeling inadequate and hypersensitivity to negative evaluation: the person wants relationships but avoids them unless sure of being liked. At a healthy level it appears as shyness with a rich private life. | \nSocial anxiety; Schizoid personality; Vulnerable narcissism | \nModerate | \n
| \n | A pervasive need to be taken care of, leading to submissive, clinging behaviour and fear of separation: difficulty deciding without reassurance, reluctance to disagree, urgent search for a new relationship when one ends. At a healthy level: cooperative and loyal. | \nAnxious-preoccupied attachment; Codependency; Borderline personality | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Preoccupation with order, perfectionism and control at the expense of flexibility and efficiency: rules and lists matter more than the goal, work crowds out leisure, standards are rigid and moral, delegation is reluctant. At a healthy level: the conscientious, reliable professional. | \nOCD; Conscientiousness; Perfectionism | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Repeated suffering that seems self-inflicted, love or moral standing secured through suffering, and undermining of one's own success. McWilliams stresses moral, not sexual, masochism. At a healthy level: self-sacrificing in service of ideals. | \nDepressive character; Self-sacrifice schema; Passive aggression | \nClinical | \n
| \n | A character organised around guilt, self-criticism and loss: assumes fault, turns anger inward, feels unworthy of care, drawn to helping roles. At a healthy level: empathic, conscientious, self-reflective. | \nMajor depression; Masochistic character; Persistent depressive disorder | \nClinical | \n
| \n | A character organised around flight from depression: high energy, charm, wit, grandiosity, restlessness and constant activity, with little tolerance for sadness, dependency or endings. The depressive character's mirror. At a healthy level: energetic, funny, entrepreneurial. | \nBipolar disorder; ADHD in adults; Extraversion | \nClinical | \n
| \n | A proposed trait of deeper processing of sensory and emotional information: easily overwhelmed by noise, crowds and pace, highly aware of subtleties, moved by art and others' moods, needing downtime. | \nNeuroticism; Autism in adults; Differential susceptibility | \nMixed | \n
| \n | How much people adjust their self-presentation to fit the situation. High self-monitors read the room and shape what they show; low self-monitors behave consistently with their inner states regardless of audience. | \nMachiavellianism; Masking; Impression management | \nModerate | \n
| \n | A tendency to anxiously expect, readily perceive and overreact to rejection. Ambiguous cues are read as rejection and the reaction (hostility, withdrawal, appeasement) can provoke the rejection feared. | \nRejection sensitive dysphoria; Anxious-preoccupied attachment; Vulnerable narcissism | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Competitive drive, time urgency, impatience and hostility, contrasted with a relaxed Type B. Proposed as a risk factor for heart disease; only the hostility component has held up well. | \nWorkaholism; Conscientiousness; Hypomanic character | \nMixed | \n
| \n | A disposition towards submission to established authority, aggression towards out-groups and deviants, and adherence to conventional norms. Modern research treats it as a preference for order and sameness, activated by perceived threat. | \nNeed for cognitive closure; Obedience to authority; System justification | \nModerate | \n
Most trouble between people runs on four feelings that are rarely named: shame, envy, contempt and resentment. Anger is usually the visible layer. Underneath it, look for hurt, fear or shame.
\nHow to identify it
\nSeveral popular terms in this area are useful shorthand but weak science: amygdala hijack (an emotional reaction that outruns thought), much of polyvagal theory (a model of three nervous-system states), and the fawn response (placating a threat to stay safe) as a formal category. The table below lists the main terms. Its Evidence column shows how well each one holds up, so you can tell the solid ones from the shorthand.
\n| Term | \nWhat it is | \nOften confused with | \nEvidence | \n
|---|---|---|---|
| \n | The claim that a small set of emotions (usually anger, fear, disgust, sadness, happiness, surprise, sometimes contempt) are evolved, universal programs, each with a recognisable face, physiology and action tendency. | \nConstructed emotion; Emotional contagion | \nMixed | \n
| \n | Emotions are not triggered programs but are built in the moment: the brain combines raw bodily feeling (pleasant or unpleasant, calm or activated) with learned concepts and context to produce 'anger' or 'anxiety'. | \nBasic emotions; Cognitive reappraisal | \nMixed | \n
| \n | A painful sense that the self is defective, exposed and unworthy in the eyes of others, rather than that one did a bad thing. | \nGuilt; Humiliation; Harsh superego | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Discomfort about a specific act or omission that harmed someone or broke one's own standard, with the self still basically intact. | \nShame; Moral injury; People-pleasing | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Being publicly lowered or degraded by someone else, in a way the person regards as unjust. | \nShame; Narcissistic rage; Resentment | \nModerate | \n
| \n | A two-person pain at another's advantage (status, talent, money, love) that one wants and lacks, with a wish either to have it or for them to lose it. | \nJealousy; Resentment; Social comparison | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Fear and anger about losing a valued relationship, or one's place in it, to a rival. | \nEnvy; Anxious-preoccupied attachment; Coercive control | \nModerate | \n
| \n | A cold sense that another person is beneath you, of lower worth or competence, and not worth engaging as an equal. | \nResentment; Secondary anger; Devaluation | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Lingering, re-chewed anger at a perceived injustice or slight, usually unexpressed to the person responsible. | \nContempt; Envy; Passive aggression | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Anger that sits on top of a more vulnerable primary feeling, usually hurt, fear or shame, and covers it. | \nNarcissistic rage; Displacement; Emotional flooding | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Fear is a short, sharp response to a present and specific danger; anxiety is a longer, diffuse apprehension about a possible future threat. | \nGeneralised anxiety; Hypervigilance; Panic | \nModerate | \n
| \n | The response to loss. Complicated grief is intense yearning and impairment that does not ease over many months; disenfranchised grief is loss others do not recognise (an ex, a pet, a job); anticipatory grief begins before an expected loss. | \nMajor depression; Trauma; Change curve | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Holding strong opposing feelings or wants toward the same person, choice or thing at once, such as love and anger toward a parent. | \nSplitting; Passive aggression; Procrastination | \nModerate | \n
| \n | How people influence which emotions they have, when, how strongly, and how they show them: choosing situations, shifting attention, reframing, or controlling expression. | \nExpressive suppression; Emotional dysregulation; Isolation of affect | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Changing how one interprets a situation so that its emotional impact changes, early in the emotional response. | \nExpressive suppression; Rationalisation; Spiritual bypassing | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Inhibiting the outward display of an emotion already under way, without changing the feeling itself. | \nSuppression; Isolation of affect; Emotional numbing | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Two or more people influencing each other's emotional and physiological state, typically one calmer person helping steady another. | \nEmotional contagion; Codependency; Containment | \nModerate | \n
| \n | A stable difficulty identifying and describing one's own feelings and telling them apart from bodily sensations, with an externally focused, concrete thinking style. | \nIsolation of affect; Emotional numbing; Autism in adults | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Unwillingness to stay in contact with unpleasant inner experiences and efforts to escape or control them, even at the cost of what the person values. | \nSuppression; Denial; Procrastination | \nModerate | \n
| \n | High physiological arousal during conflict in which a person can no longer listen, think flexibly or take in what is said. | \nStonewalling; Amygdala hijack; Panic | \nModerate | \n
| \n | The range of arousal within which a person can feel emotions and still think, relate and act; above it is hyperarousal, below it hypoarousal. | \nHyperarousal and hypoarousal; Emotion regulation; Polyvagal theory | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Hyperarousal is too much activation: tense, alert, irritable, unable to settle. Hypoarousal is too little: flat, foggy, slowed, disconnected. | \nMajor depression; Hypomanic character; Dissociation | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Goleman's term for a sudden, outsized emotional reaction in which threat responses outrun considered thought. | \nEmotional flooding; Secondary anger; Triggers | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Catching other people's emotions, often by automatically mimicking their faces, voices and postures. | \nCo-regulation; Projective identification; Attunement | \nModerate | \n
| \n | The stress response mobilises the body (cortisol, adrenaline, heart rate) to meet demands; allostatic load is the cumulative wear when it fires too often, lasts too long or fails to switch off. | \nBurnout; Generalised anxiety; Hyperarousal and hypoarousal | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Automatic defensive responses to threat: attack, escape, or go still and watchful, with collapse at the extreme. | \nFawn response; Dissociation; Stonewalling | \nModerate | \n
| \n | A trauma-shaped habit of reacting to threat by placating, agreeing and attending to the other person's needs to keep them from turning hostile. | \nPeople-pleasing; Agreeableness; Identification with the aggressor | \nClinical | \n
| \n | A theory that the autonomic nervous system has three hierarchical states (social engagement, mobilisation, shutdown) and that people automatically scan for safety and threat ('neuroception'). | \nWindow of tolerance; Fight, flight, freeze; Co-regulation | \nMixed | \n
| \n | A response to events that overwhelm a person's capacity to cope. 'Big T' is exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury or sexual violence; 'small t' covers repeated, less extreme harm such as humiliation, neglect or chronic criticism. | \nPTSD; ACEs; Grief | \nModerate | \n
| \n | After a traumatic event: intrusive re-experiencing, avoidance of reminders, negative changes in mood and beliefs, and heightened arousal, lasting over a month and impairing life. | \nComplex PTSD; Generalised anxiety; Major depression | \nStrong | \n
| \n | After prolonged or repeated trauma that was hard to escape: PTSD symptoms plus lasting difficulties with emotion regulation, a sense of self as worthless, and trouble sustaining relationships. Recognised in ICD-11, the World Health Organization's diagnostic manual, but not in DSM-5-TR, the American one. | \nPTSD; Borderline personality; Trauma | \nModerate | \n
| \n | A cue (sight, sound, smell, phrase, tone, situation) linked to past harm that sets off a reaction belonging to the original event rather than the present. | \nSecondary anger; Rejection sensitivity; Amygdala hijack | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Sustained scanning of the environment and people for danger, with heightened startle and difficulty relaxing. | \nConscientiousness; Paranoid personality; Fear versus anxiety | \nModerate | \n
| \n | A disruption of the normal integration of awareness, memory, identity, emotion and perception. Depersonalisation: detached from oneself, as if watching from outside. Derealisation: the world seems unreal, dreamlike or flat. | \nSchizoid fantasy; Emotional numbing; Isolation of affect | \nModerate | \n
| \n | A strong emotional attachment to someone who harms you, formed through a power imbalance and alternating cruelty and kindness. | \nLimerence; Codependency; Intermittent reinforcement | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Giving up trying to change a situation after repeated experience that one's actions make no difference, even when change later becomes possible. | \nDisengagement; Major depression; Locus of control | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Lasting harm from doing, failing to prevent, or witnessing acts that violate one's deep moral beliefs, or from being betrayed by those in authority. | \nPTSD; Guilt; Burnout | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Positive change reported after struggling with highly challenging events: closer relationships, new possibilities, greater strength, deeper appreciation, spiritual change. | \nResilience; Spiritual bypassing; Reaction formation | \nMixed | \n
| \n | A reduced capacity to feel emotions, especially positive ones such as love and joy, often after trauma, chronic stress or depression. | \nIsolation of affect; Dissociation; Anhedonia | \nModerate | \n
| \n | The sense of the body's internal state (heartbeat, breathing, hunger, tension, temperature) and how accurately a person perceives it. | \nAlexithymia; Health anxiety; Affect labelling | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Putting a feeling into words ('I feel anxious'), which reduces its intensity even without trying to change it. | \nCognitive reappraisal; Intellectualisation; Rumination | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Maintaining or returning to healthy functioning after adversity; more an outcome built from relationships, resources and skills than a fixed trait. | \nExpressive suppression; Post-traumatic growth; Grit | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Maté's claim that when a child must choose between authenticity (feeling and showing what they actually feel) and attachment (staying close to the people they depend on), they will choose attachment every time. The suppressed authenticity resurfaces in adulthood as an inability to say no, compulsive niceness, buried anger and, in his account, illness. | \nFawn response; People-pleasing; Expressive suppression | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Maté's reframe: ask not why the addiction but why the pain. Any behaviour a person craves, gets short-term relief from and can't give up despite harm (drink, drugs, work, sex, shopping, gaming, status) is an attempt to solve an emotional problem they can't otherwise solve. | \nSubstance addiction; Experiential avoidance; Behavioural addiction | \nClinical | \n
Cognition is how a person interprets what happens to them, and of all the layers it is the easiest to hear. Cognitive distortions, habitual errors of interpretation, show up in sentences. The sentences point to the schema underneath. A schema is a deep, lasting belief about yourself and other people, usually formed in childhood. A person who says \"this always happens to me\" and \"they're just being nice\" is showing you their model of the world in plain words.
\nHow to identify schemas
\nThe psychologist Jeffrey Young described 18 of these schemas, listed in the table below. They are among the most useful tools in this guide because they explain contradictions. Each schema can be lived out in three ways:
\nSo the arrogant founder and the self-effacing analyst can carry the same wound. When behaviour looks extreme in one direction, ask what it is keeping at bay. Schema modes, the state a person is in at a given moment, explain sudden switches. A calm adult becomes a sulking child or a punishing parent within one meeting.
\nThe biases that corrupt identification
\nA cognitive bias is a predictable error in how anyone judges people and evidence. The four biases below matter less for understanding others than for keeping your own identifications honest.
\nThe corrective is the method from the first chapter of this guide: three explanations, a test that tells them apart, and revision.
\nMentalising
\nMentalising is the skill this whole guide trains: seeing the mind behind the act and holding that interpretation loosely. It collapses when emotion runs high, theirs or yours. When it fails, people fall into certainty (\"I know exactly what you meant\"), into action-only evidence (\"if you loved me you'd have called\"), or into hollow psychological talk with no feeling in it.
\nThe table lists the common distortions first, each with a typical sentence you might hear. Then come Young's 18 schemas, each tagged with its domain, the area of childhood need it grew from. 'Often confused with' names look-alikes to rule out. 'Evidence' says how well research supports the idea.
\n| Term | \nWhat it is | \nOften confused with | \nEvidence | \n
|---|---|---|---|
| \n | Habitual, automatic errors in how a person interprets events, tilting conclusions consistently toward threat, blame or worthlessness. Aaron Beck, founder of cognitive therapy, found them in depressed patients' thinking; the psychiatrist David Burns made the list most people know. | \nConfirmation bias; Early maladaptive schemas; Rumination and worry | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Seeing things in two categories with nothing in between: success or failure, loyal or traitor. ‘If it isn’t perfect, it’s a failure.’ | \nSplitting; Perfectionism | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Jumping from a setback or uncertainty to the worst outcome, treating it as likely and unbearable. ‘If this goes wrong, we’re finished.’ | \nAnticipation; Vulnerability schema; Generalised anxiety | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Concluding what someone thinks or feels, usually something negative about you, without checking, and treating it as fact. ‘She thinks I’m an idiot.’ | \nMentalising; Projection | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Taking events as being about you or caused by you with little evidence, including other people’s moods. ‘He’s in a bad mood because of me.’ | \nGuilt; Spotlight effect | \nModerate | \n
| \n | A sweeping conclusion from one or a few events, applied across situations and into the future. ‘This always happens to me.’ | \nLabelling; All-or-nothing thinking | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Taking a feeling as proof of what is true. ‘I feel like a failure, so I must be one.’ | \nDual-process thinking; Impostor phenomenon | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Rigid rules about how you, others or the world must be, held as absolutes. ‘I should be further along by now.’ | \nUnrelenting standards schema; Moralisation | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Summing up a person, or yourself, with a single negative label based on one behaviour. ‘I’m such an idiot.’ | \nContempt; Overgeneralisation | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Rejecting positive evidence by insisting it doesn’t count, so a negative belief survives. ‘They’re just being nice.’ | \nMental filter; Honesty-humility; Impostor phenomenon | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Fixing on one negative detail until it colours the whole picture. ‘The presentation was a disaster’, after one awkward question among twenty good ones. | \nNegativity bias; Rumination | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Broad, lasting themes about oneself and relationships, formed when core childhood needs went unmet, that feel like plain truth. Young listed 18 in five domains: disconnection and rejection, impaired autonomy and performance, impaired limits, other-directedness, and overvigilance and inhibition. Each can be surrendered to, avoided or overcompensated. | \nCognitive distortions; Internal working model; Life script | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Disconnection and rejection. The people you rely on will leave, die or prove unreliable. ‘Everyone leaves in the end.’ | \nAnxious-preoccupied attachment; Emotional deprivation schema; Rejection sensitivity | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Disconnection and rejection. Others will deliberately hurt, humiliate, cheat, lie to or exploit you. ‘If I let my guard down, I’ll get used.’ | \nParanoid personality; Hypervigilance | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Disconnection and rejection. Your need for nurturance, empathy or protection will never be adequately met. ‘Nobody really gets me.’ | \nChildhood emotional neglect; Dismissive-avoidant attachment; Abandonment schema | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Disconnection and rejection. You are fundamentally flawed, and anyone who saw you clearly would reject you. ‘If they really knew me, they wouldn’t want me.’ | \nFailure schema; Grandiose narcissism; Impostor phenomenon | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Disconnection and rejection. You are different and don’t belong to any group. ‘I don’t fit in anywhere.’ | \nDefectiveness schema; Schizoid personality; Social anxiety | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Impaired autonomy. You can’t handle everyday responsibilities without substantial help. ‘I can’t manage this on my own.’ | \nDependent personality; Enmeshment schema; Learned helplessness | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Impaired autonomy. Catastrophe is about to strike and can’t be prevented: illness, madness, crime, ruin. ‘Something terrible is going to happen.’ | \nHealth anxiety; Catastrophising | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Impaired autonomy. Excessive closeness with a key person, usually a parent, at the cost of a separate identity. ‘If she’s upset, I can’t be okay.’ | \nEnmeshment; Dependence schema; Emotional cutoff | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Impaired autonomy. You have failed, will fail, or are less capable than peers. ‘I’m not as capable as everyone else.’ | \nDefectiveness schema; Impostor phenomenon; Self-handicapping | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Impaired limits. You are superior, entitled to special rights, not bound by ordinary reciprocity. ‘The rules don’t apply to me.’ | \nPsychological entitlement; Grandiose narcissism; Insufficient self-control schema | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Impaired limits. Persistent difficulty with, or refusal of, self-control and frustration tolerance. ‘I can’t stand it, I need it now.’ | \nADHD in adults; Entitlement schema | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Other-directedness. Handing control to others to avoid anger, punishment or abandonment; subjugating needs or emotions. ‘If I say what I want, there’ll be trouble.’ | \nSelf-sacrifice schema; Psychological reactance; People-pleasing | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Other-directedness. Voluntarily meeting others’ needs at the expense of your own, to spare them pain or avoid guilt. ‘Their needs come first.’ | \nAltruism; Subjugation schema; Codependency | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Other-directedness. Excessive emphasis on approval, recognition or attention; self-esteem rises and falls with others’ reactions. ‘What will people think?’ | \nPeople-pleasing; Grandiose narcissism; Contingent self-worth | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Overvigilance and inhibition. Pervasive focus on loss, conflict and what could go wrong, with chronic expectation of bad outcomes. ‘Don’t get your hopes up.’ | \nMajor depression; Vulnerability schema; Negativity bias | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Overvigilance and inhibition. Holding back spontaneous feeling, action and communication to avoid disapproval, shame or loss of control. ‘Keep it together.’ | \nAlexithymia; Expressive suppression | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Overvigilance and inhibition. You must meet very high internal standards, at the cost of pleasure, health and relationships, with hypercriticism of self and others. ‘Good enough isn’t good enough.’ | \nConscientiousness; OCPD; Perfectionism | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Overvigilance and inhibition. People, yourself included, should be harshly punished for mistakes; forgiving is very hard. ‘No excuses. They deserve what they get.’ | \nUnrelenting standards schema; Moralisation | \nModerate | \n
| \n | The emotional state and coping response a person is in at a given moment, as opposed to stable schemas: vulnerable child, angry or impulsive child, punitive or demanding parent, detached protector, compliant surrenderer, overcompensator, healthy adult. | \nEgo states; Splitting; Dissociation | \nModerate | \n
These are features of ordinary human thinking that everyone shares. Use them two ways: to explain how someone reached a judgement, and to check your own judgement of them.
\n| Term | \nWhat it is | \nOften confused with | \nEvidence | \n
|---|---|---|---|
| \n | Explaining someone's behaviour by their character while under-weighting the situation they were in. You see the act, not the pressures that produced it. | \nLabelling; Self-serving bias; Projection | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Seeking, noticing and remembering information that supports what you already believe. Once you have a view of someone, evidence for it registers and evidence against it slides past. | \nMotivated reasoning; Mental filter; Anchoring | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Taking credit for success and attributing failure to circumstances, other people or luck. | \nSelf-enhancement; Fundamental attribution error; Rationalisation | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Reasoning toward a conclusion you want while believing you are reasoning toward the truth. The bar rises for unwelcome conclusions and drops for welcome ones. | \nConfirmation bias; Rationalisation; Denial | \nStrong | \n
| \n | The discomfort of holding conflicting cognitions, especially a gap between what you did and what you believe about yourself. People usually change the belief to fit the act. | \nRationalisation; Sunk cost fallacy; Ambivalence | \nModerate | \n
| \n | After learning an outcome, believing it was more predictable than it was and misremembering what you predicted. | \nSelf-serving bias; Confirmation bias | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Continuing to invest money, time or loyalty because of what has already been spent rather than the expected return from here. | \nCommitment and consistency; Cognitive dissonance; Trauma bonding | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Judgements pulled toward an initial value or impression, even an arbitrary one, with too little adjustment. | \nConfirmation bias; Halo effect | \nStrong | \n
| \n | One salient trait (attractiveness, confidence, status, a single success) colouring judgements of unrelated traits. The horns effect spreads a single flaw. | \nIdealisation; Liking; Anchoring | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Negative information carries more weight than positive of equal size. One bad act shifts an impression more than one good act. | \nMental filter; Negative sentiment override; Negativity schema | \nStrong | \n
| \n | People get what they deserve and deserve what they get; under threat, people conclude the victim earned their fate. | \nFundamental attribution error; System justification | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Overestimating how many others share your beliefs, preferences and habits. | \nProjection; Naive realism; Mind reading | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Overestimating how much others notice your appearance, mistakes and behaviour. | \nPersonalisation; Social anxiety; Grandiose narcissism | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Overestimating your ability to influence outcomes that depend largely on chance or other people. | \nOmnipotent control; Locus of control; Optimism bias | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Expecting good things to be more likely, and bad things less likely, for yourself than the evidence supports. | \nIllusion of control; Manic defence; Hubris syndrome | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Low-skill performers tend to overestimate their performance, partly because judging performance needs the same knowledge as doing it well. High performers slightly underestimate. The popular version is overstated. | \nConfidence-competence gap; Grandiose narcissism; Impostor phenomenon | \nMixed | \n
| \n | The conviction that you see the world as it is, so those who disagree must be uninformed, irrational or biased. | \nFalse consensus effect; Bias blind spot; Paranoid personality | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Recognising biases in others while believing you are less affected yourself. | \nNaive realism; Dunning-Kruger effect; Self-enhancement | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Understanding your own and others' behaviour in terms of mental states (feelings, wishes, beliefs, intentions) and holding those readings as provisional. | \nTheory of mind; Mind reading; Attunement | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Representing others as having beliefs, desires and knowledge different from your own, and predicting behaviour from them. Usually in place by age four or five. | \nMentalising; Autism in adults | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Fast, automatic, associative intuition (System 1) and slow, effortful reasoning (System 2). Most judgements are made by the first and endorsed after the fact by the second. | \nAmygdala hijack; Emotional reasoning | \nModerate | \n
| \n | How a person habitually explains events: internal or external, stable or temporary, global or specific. The pessimistic style explains bad events as 'me, always, everything'. | \nLocus of control; Learned helplessness; Overgeneralisation | \nModerate | \n
| \n | A general expectation that outcomes depend on your own actions (internal) or on luck, powerful others and fate (external). | \nExplanatory style; Self-efficacy; Illusion of control | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Desire for a firm answer and aversion to ambiguity; seizing on early information and freezing the conclusion. | \nConfirmation bias; OCPD; Authoritarian personality | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Repetitive, hard-to-stop negative thinking. Rumination circles the past ('why did this happen'); worry projects into the future ('what if'). | \nOCD; Generalised anxiety; Anticipation | \nStrong | \n
| \n | The ability to shift perspective or strategy when circumstances change and hold more than one interpretation. Rigidity is persisting with a frame after it stops fitting. | \nOCPD; Autism in adults; Need for cognitive closure | \nModerate | \n
To know what someone will do, find out what they are after. The psychologist David McClelland found that most people run mainly on one of three motives: achievement (doing better against a standard), affiliation (being liked and close) or power (having impact on others). Most people's sense of worth also hangs on a few specific conditions. Psychologists call this contingent self-worth. Find both and much of their behaviour becomes predictable.
\nHow to identify it
\nEvidence is uneven here. Self-efficacy (belief that you can do a specific task), the need to belong and reactance (pushing back when your freedom feels threatened) are robust. Ego depletion (the idea that willpower gets used up) and the popular mindset and grit claims are weaker than their fame suggests.
\nThe table gives each term, the look-alikes to rule out, and how strong the evidence is.
\n| Term | \nWhat it is | \nOften confused with | \nEvidence | \n
|---|---|---|---|
| \n | Needs ordered from physiological and safety through belonging and esteem to self-actualisation, with lower needs taking priority until reasonably met. The strict ordering is weakly supported. | \nSelf-determination theory; Will to meaning | \nWeak | \n
| \n | People have three basic needs (autonomy, competence, relatedness); motivation ranges from controlled (pressure, reward, guilt) to autonomous (valued for itself), and autonomous motivation produces better persistence, performance and wellbeing. | \nMaslow's hierarchy; Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation; Psychological reactance | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Doing something because it is satisfying in itself versus for a separate outcome such as money, praise or avoiding punishment. Tangible rewards for something already enjoyed can reduce the enjoyment. | \nSelf-determination theory; Flow | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Three learned, largely non-conscious motives: achievement (doing better against a standard), affiliation (being liked and close), power (having impact on others). Each person's profile predicts what situations they seek. | \nStatus motive; Need to belong; Dominance and prestige | \nModerate | \n
| \n | One system moves people toward rewards (BAS); one makes them halt and scan when a goal might bring punishment or conflict (BIS). People differ in the sensitivity of each. | \nRegulatory focus; Behavioural inhibition; Neuroticism | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Promotion focus pursues ideals and gains with eager strategies; prevention focus pursues duties, security and avoiding losses with vigilant strategies. | \nApproach and avoidance; Self-discrepancy | \nModerate | \n
| \n | The belief that abilities can be developed (growth) versus fixed, said to shape responses to difficulty, effort and criticism. Intervention effects are small on average. | \nSelf-efficacy; Contingent self-worth; Grit | \nMixed | \n
| \n | Awareness of death creates potential terror, which people manage by investing in cultural worldviews and self-esteem that promise literal or symbolic immortality. | \nWill to meaning; Midlife transition | \nMixed | \n
| \n | A fundamental need for frequent, positive interaction within ongoing, caring relationships. When unmet: distress, poorer health, lower self-control. | \nAnxious-preoccupied attachment; People-pleasing | \nStrong | \n
| \n | The desire for respect, admiration and voluntary deference within a group. Unlike wealth or power, status is granted by others. | \nMcClelland's needs; Grandiose narcissism; Dominance and prestige | \nModerate | \n
| \n | A person's overall evaluation of their own worth. It can be high and secure, high and fragile, or low. | \nContingent self-worth; Grandiose narcissism; Self-efficacy | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Self-worth that depends on succeeding in specific domains (appearance, approval, competence, virtue), so it rises and falls with outcomes there. | \nSelf-esteem; Perfectionism; Narcissistic supply | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Belief in one's capability to carry out the actions a specific task needs. Built through mastery, watching similar others succeed, persuasion and managing arousal. | \nSelf-esteem; Locus of control; Optimism bias | \nStrong | \n
| \n | How clear, confident, consistent and stable a person's beliefs about themselves are. | \nIdentity diffusion; Self-monitoring; False self | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Persistent belief that one's success is undeserved and due to luck or error, with fear of exposure despite evidence of competence. | \nDunning-Kruger effect; Discounting the positive; Perfectionism | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Excessively high standards plus critical self-evaluation. Self-oriented (I must be perfect), other-oriented (you must be), socially prescribed (others demand I be). | \nConscientiousness; Unrelenting standards schema; OCPD | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Creating or claiming obstacles before a performance so failure can be blamed on the obstacle and success looks more impressive. | \nProcrastination; Impostor phenomenon; Rationalisation | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Treating oneself with the kindness one would offer a friend in failure or pain: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindful awareness without over-identifying. | \nSelf-esteem; Spiritual bypassing; Self-enhancement | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Voluntarily delaying an intended action despite expecting to be worse off for it. Usually mood repair, not laziness. | \nSelf-handicapping; ADHD in adults; Anhedonia | \nStrong | \n
| \n | The desire to be seen as one sees oneself, even when the self-view is negative, because confirmation makes the world feel predictable. | \nSelf-enhancement; Repetition compulsion; Defectiveness schema | \nModerate | \n
| \n | The motive to see oneself positively: rating oneself above average, taking credit, explaining away failure, remembering selectively. | \nGrandiose narcissism; Self-serving bias; Self-verification | \nModerate | \n
| \n | The internalised, evolving story a person tells about how they became who they are and where their life is going. Redemption stories go with wellbeing; contamination stories with distress. | \nLife script; Self-concept clarity; Post-traumatic growth | \nModerate | \n
| \n | The gap between the actual self and the ideal self (who one hopes to be) or ought self (who one feels obliged to be). Ideal gaps bring sadness; ought gaps bring anxiety and guilt. | \nIncongruence; Harsh superego; Regulatory focus | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Sustained perseverance and consistency of interest toward long-term goals despite setbacks. Overlaps heavily with conscientiousness. | \nConscientiousness; Sunk cost fallacy; Growth mindset | \nMixed | \n
| \n | The idea that self-control draws on a limited resource that gets used up. Large replication attempts largely failed. | \nBurnout; Allostatic load; Insufficient self-control schema | \nMixed | \n
| \n | The ability to resist an immediate reward in favour of a larger later one. | \nConscientiousness; Insufficient self-control schema; Ego depletion | \nModerate | \n
| \n | The primary human drive is to find meaning, not pleasure or power. When frustrated, people fall into an existential vacuum of boredom and emptiness, often filled with pleasure-seeking or power. | \nTerror management theory; Anhedonia; Midlife transition | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Complete absorption in an activity where challenge and skill are balanced, goals are clear and feedback is immediate; self-consciousness disappears. | \nIntrinsic motivation; Behavioural addiction; Dissociation | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Emotional responses to positive or negative changes fade over time, so happiness drifts back toward a baseline. | \nAnhedonia; Contingent self-worth; Mimetic desire | \nModerate | \n
| \n | The motive to feel moderately different from others. In its pathological form it becomes a need to be special: exceptional, set apart, never ordinary. | \nGrandiose narcissism; Envy; Enneagram Type 4 | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Using spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep painful feelings, unresolved wounds, conflict or developmental work. Welwood called it premature transcendence. | \nSelf-compassion; Experiential avoidance; Inflation | \nClinical | \n
| \n | An unpleasant state triggered by a perceived threat to freedom, leading people to restore it by doing the opposite or valuing the forbidden option more. | \nPassive aggression; Self-determination theory; Boundaries | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Internalised standards for when one is worthy of love, from caregivers' conditional approval: lovable only if successful, quiet, good or helpful. | \nContingent self-worth; Approval-seeking schema; Harsh superego | \nModerate | \n
| \n | A mismatch between self-concept and actual experience, producing anxiety and defensiveness. Congruence is when they match. | \nSelf-discrepancy; False self; Cognitive dissonance | \nClinical | \n
| \n | For Adler, feeling inferior is universal and the spur to growth. The complex is when the feeling hardens into a verdict ('I can't') that excuses the person from life's tasks of work, love and friendship, and is used, mostly without awareness, to avoid being tested. | \nImpostor phenomenon; Self-handicapping; Defectiveness/shame schema | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Adler's master motive: everyone strives from a felt minus to a felt plus, toward a private goal of completeness. It is healthy when aimed at contribution. The superiority complex is when the goal is personal dominance and the striving covers an inferiority that was never faced. | \nGrandiose narcissism; Status motive; Self-enhancement | \nClinical | \n
| \n | A felt sense of belonging to and caring about the human community, shown as contribution. Adler made it the yardstick of mental health: problems arise when striving serves personal superiority rather than the common good. | \nAltruism; People-pleasing; Communal narcissism | \nClinical | \n
The earlier chapters covered feelings, interpretations and needs. A defence is what a person does, automatically and mostly without knowing it, when a feeling becomes too much to bear. Defences tell you more about a person's overall health than anything else you can see. Everyone uses them. What matters is which level of defence, on the ladder below, someone falls back on under pressure, and how rigidly. The psychiatrist George Vaillant followed the same men for decades in the Grant Study, a Harvard study of adult life that began in 1938, and found that the maturity of their defences predicted their health, marriages and careers better than their childhood circumstances did.
\nVaillant's ladder, from most to least distorting
\nVaillant sorted defences into four levels by how much they bend reality. Level 1 bends it most and level 4 least. Most lines also say who pays the cost. Most defences named here have their own entry in the table further down.
\nHow to spot a defence in real time
\nEach entry starts with its level on Vaillant's ladder. A few say 'Primary' instead. That is the psychoanalyst Nancy McWilliams' word for the most basic defences, which blur the line between self and other. 'Often confused with' names look-alikes to rule out. 'Evidence' says how well research supports the idea.
\n| Term | \nWhat it is | \nOften confused with | \nEvidence | \n
|---|---|---|---|
| \n | Automatic, mostly unconscious mental operations that change how a person perceives a painful feeling, wish, fact or relationship so they can keep functioning. Vaillant ranked them in four levels (psychotic, immature, neurotic, mature) by how much they distort reality and what they cost; McWilliams sorts them into primary (boundary-level) and secondary (within the self). | \nEmotion regulation; Cognitive distortions | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Psychotic in its gross form; in everyday form a primary defence. The person refuses to accept a fact that is plainly available and acts as if it isn't so, rather than knowing it and setting it aside. | \nSuppression; Repression; Optimism bias | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Immature. The person disowns a feeling, wish or trait in themselves and experiences it as belonging to someone else. | \nProjective identification; Mind reading; False consensus effect | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Immature. The person disowns a feeling and then, through subtle pressure in how they treat you, gets you to actually feel it or act it out, while they stay oddly free of it. | \nProjection; Countertransference; Emotional contagion | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Immature. People, including oneself, are experienced as all good or all bad with no stable blend, and the label can flip completely after one event. | \nAll-or-nothing thinking; Ambivalence; Idealise-devalue-discard cycle | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Immature. The person attributes exaggerated perfection, power or goodness to someone, a group or an idea. | \nHalo effect; Limerence; Selfobject needs | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Immature. The person attributes exaggerated badness, stupidity or worthlessness to someone or something, often something they need or once admired. | \nContempt; Counterdependence; Envy | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Immature. The person feels and acts as if they can control people and outcomes at will, treating others as extensions of their own will. | \nIllusion of control; Coercive control; Conscientiousness | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Immature. The person discharges a feeling or impulse through behaviour instead of feeling it, thinking about it or putting it into words. | \nInsufficient self-control schema; Passive aggression; Emotional flooding | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Immature. Hostility is expressed indirectly, through failure, delay, forgetting or compliance that doesn't deliver, so the aggression can always be denied. | \nProcrastination; Silent treatment; Stonewalling | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Immature. The person retreats into an inner world of daydream instead of engaging with a conflict or need. | \nSchizoid personality; Avoidant personality; Dissociation | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Neurotic. An unacceptable feeling, wish or memory is kept out of awareness, while its effects leak out in symptoms, slips and odd blanks. | \nSuppression; Denial; Dissociation | \nMixed | \n
| \n | Neurotic. A feeling is redirected from the person or thing that caused it onto a safer target. | \nProjection; Secondary anger; Scapegoating | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Neurotic. An unacceptable impulse becomes its exaggerated opposite: hate into sugary kindness, desire into disgust, dependence into fierce independence. | \nMoralisation; People-pleasing; Altruism | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Neurotic. An emotional situation is handled by thinking and talking about it in concepts and analysis, so the feeling never arrives. | \nIsolation of affect; Rationalisation; Alexithymia | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Neurotic. A plausible, self-serving explanation is supplied for behaviour or feelings whose real motive the person doesn't want to see. | \nMotivated reasoning; Cognitive dissonance; Intellectualisation | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Neurotic. A painful event is remembered and reported in full while the feeling that belongs to it is cut off. | \nEmotional numbing; Intellectualisation; Dissociation | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Neurotic. A guilty or hostile thought or act is cancelled by doing something that symbolically reverses it. | \nRepair attempts; OCD; Reaction formation | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Immature. Emotional distress is experienced and communicated as bodily symptoms rather than as feelings. | \nHealth anxiety; Secondary gain; Alexithymia | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Usually immature. Under stress the person falls back to an earlier, more childlike way of functioning. | \nEgo states; Dependent personality; Learned helplessness | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Neurotic. Contradictory values, behaviours or parts of life are kept in separate mental boxes so they never meet. | \nSplitting; Moral disengagement; Suppression | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Neurotic. A person who has been frightened or hurt takes on the attitudes or behaviour of the one who hurt them, either treating others the same way or reading and complying with the aggressor's wishes. | \nTrauma bonding; Fawn response; Introjection | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Primary. The qualities, attitudes or voice of another person, usually an important early figure, are taken in and become part of the inner world without being noticed. | \nHarsh superego; Identification with the aggressor; Conditions of worth | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Neurotic. Anger or criticism meant for someone else is redirected onto oneself. | \nPersonalisation; Guilt; Masochistic character | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Neurotic. A situation charged with feeling is turned into a question of duty, principle or right and wrong, so one's own wishes and fears disappear behind the moral frame. | \nRationalisation; Should statements; Moral foundations | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Mature. A forbidden or frustrated impulse (aggression, sexuality, envy, grief) is channelled into valued, satisfying activity. | \nDisplacement; Workaholism; Reaction formation | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Mature. The absurd or ironic side of a painful situation is seen and openly shared, so the feeling is acknowledged, not hidden. | \nManic defence; Devaluation; Denial | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Mature. Some of the distress of a coming difficulty is felt in advance, in measured doses, and planned for realistically. | \nRumination and worry; Catastrophising; Generalised anxiety | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Mature. A feeling or problem is consciously set aside for now, known to be there, with the intent to return to it. | \nRepression; Expressive suppression; Denial | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Mature. One's own distress or need is handled by meeting the same need in others, with real satisfaction. Anna Freud's altruistic surrender, living one's wishes through others, is its less healthy cousin. | \nCodependency; Self-sacrifice schema; People-pleasing | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Immature in effect; a Kleinian concept. Depressive feelings of loss, guilt, dependence and helplessness are warded off with triumph, contempt, control and frantic activity. | \nHypomanic character; Bipolar disorder; Workaholism | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Immature. Needing anyone is treated as weakness and total self-sufficiency is presented: \"I don't need anyone.\" | \nDismissive-avoidant attachment; Devaluation; Self-efficacy | \nClinical | \n
Depth psychology is the family of approaches, starting with Freud and Jung, that look for causes outside a person's awareness. The names in brackets are the clinicians who proposed each idea, most of them psychoanalysts writing in the twentieth century. Many of these ideas rest on clinical observation more than experiments, as the Evidence column shows.
\n| Term | \nWhat it is | \nOften confused with | \nEvidence | \n
|---|---|---|---|
| \n | Mental activity that shapes feeling, perception and action without the person being aware of it. In the depth sense, some of it is kept out of awareness because knowing it would hurt. | \nRepression; Dual-process thinking | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Freud's model of the mind as three agencies in tension: the id (drives and wants), the superego (conscience and ideals, absorbed from parents and culture) and the ego (the part that reckons with reality and brokers between the other two). | \nEgo states; Schema modes | \nClinical | \n
| \n | A conscience that has turned cruel: it punishes rather than guides, holds standards no one could meet, and attacks the whole person rather than the act. | \nUnrelenting standards schema; Guilt; Perfectionism | \nClinical | \n
| \n | The image of who one should become, built from early idealised figures and from the lost sense of infant perfection. Falling short of it produces shame rather than guilt. | \nHarsh superego; Self-discrepancy | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Experiencing a person in the present through the template of an important earlier relationship, usually a parent, so that feelings, expectations and behaviour from then are applied to now. | \nProjection; Countertransference; Internal working model | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Your own emotional and bodily reaction to another person. Freud saw it as interference; later analysts showed it is often information about what the other person is doing, evoking, or cannot feel themselves. | \nTransference; Projective identification; Emotional contagion | \nClinical | \n
| \n | The tendency to recreate painful early situations again and again, in new relationships and settings, instead of remembering and grieving them. | \nLife script; Trauma bonding | \nClinical | \n
| \n | The parts of oneself that do not fit the self-image and are therefore disowned: often aggression, envy, sexuality, ambition or weakness, but also unused strengths. | \nProjection; Contempt; Repression | \nClinical | \n
| \n | The role a person presents to the world, shaped to what their position and society expect. Necessary and normal; the problem is identifying with it so fully that there is no one behind it. | \nFalse self; Impression management; Self-monitoring | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Jung's inner image of the 'other' (in his framing, the feminine in a man and the masculine in a woman), projected onto real people and shaping fascination and falling in love. Many modern Jungians treat it as the image of whatever qualities a person has not developed, regardless of gender. | \nLimerence; Idealisation | \nWeak | \n
| \n | The lifelong process of becoming one's whole self: integrating the shadow, separating from the persona and from collective expectations, and coming into relation with the deeper self. | \nDifferentiation of self; Midlife transition; Spiritual bypassing | \nClinical | \n
| \n | A cluster of memories, images and feelings organised around an emotional core, often an early experience, which, when touched, takes over the person's reactions with a predictable mood and script. | \nTriggers; Early maladaptive schemas; Narcissistic injury | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Staying psychologically young: living in possibility, avoiding commitment and limits, believing real life will start later. The female form is puella aeterna. | \nHypomanic character; ADHD in adults; Dismissive-avoidant attachment | \nClinical | \n
| \n | The ego identifies with something larger than itself (a role, a mission, an idea, or an archetype like the hero or saviour) and takes on its grandeur as personal. | \nHubris syndrome; Grandiose narcissism; Bipolar disorder | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Universal patterns or roles (the hero, the mother, the trickster, the wise old man, the child) that Jung believed were inherited and that shape how people imagine themselves and others. | \nFamily roles; Life script | \nWeak | \n
| \n | People carry internal versions of early relationships, each made of a self-image, an image of the other and a feeling linking them, and these internal pairs shape what they expect and recreate with others. | \nAttachment theory; Internal working model | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Two states of mind people move between. In the paranoid-schizoid position the world is split into good and bad and threat comes from outside. In the depressive position others are whole and mixed, one sees one's own part in harm, and the main anxiety is concern for others, with guilt and a wish to repair. | \nSplitting; Major depression; All-or-nothing thinking | \nClinical | \n
| \n | A self built around compliance with what others need, formed when a child's spontaneous gestures went unmet and the child learned to anticipate and fit instead. It protects the true self by hiding it, often so well the person cannot find it. | \nPersona; People-pleasing; Masking | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Three things everyone needs from others to keep a stable sense of self: mirroring (to be seen and enjoyed), idealising (to look up to someone and borrow calm and strength) and twinship (to feel essentially alike). Unmet early, they show up later as hunger, rage or collapse. | \nNarcissistic supply; Anxious-preoccupied attachment; Approval-seeking schema | \nClinical | \n
| \n | The child's desire for one parent and rivalry with the other, and eventual acceptance of being outside the parents' relationship. In modern use, any recurring pattern of rivalry, exclusion and competition in three-way relationships, especially with authority. | \nTriangulation; Jealousy; Status motive | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Primary gain is the internal relief a symptom gives, such as avoiding an unbearable conflict. Secondary gain is the outside benefit that follows (attention, care, exemption, leverage), which can keep the symptom going. | \nSelf-handicapping; Somatisation | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Whatever a person does, usually without knowing it, to avoid becoming aware of or changing something painful, even while consciously wanting help or change. | \nPsychological reactance; Passive aggression; Ambivalence | \nClinical | \n
| \n | The habitual attitudes, mannerisms and chronic bodily tensions that protect a person against anxiety and feeling. The defence lives in how someone is, not only in what they say. | \nIsolation of affect; Persona; Emotional numbing | \nWeak | \n
| \n | One person takes in another's unbearable feelings, holds them without being overwhelmed or retaliating, and gives them back in a form that can be thought about. | \nCo-regulation; Psychological safety; Codependency | \nClinical | \n
| \n | The mind as a system of sub-personalities ('parts'), each with its own feelings and agenda, plus a core Self that is calm, curious and compassionate when the parts step back. Exiles carry old pain and shame; managers work to stop it surfacing; firefighters douse it, by any means, once it breaks through. | \nEgo states: Parent, Adult, Child; Schema modes; Dissociation | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Experience is always formed between two subjectivities, so what happens in a relationship is co-created and can't be wholly assigned to either person. Your reading of someone is partly made by you: your history, your organising principles, and how you are with them. | \nTransference; Projective identification; Naive realism | \nClinical | \n
From the outside you can name a pattern. You can't diagnose. A diagnosis needs a trained clinician, a full history and other causes ruled out. What you can do is notice when something looks like more than personality, avoid the most common misidentifications, and know when to suggest a professional assessment.
\nThe look-alikes that cause most misidentifications
\nEach row below pairs conditions or styles that look alike from outside. The right-hand column gives one question that separates them. The answer tells you which hypothesis fits better and what to watch next. It does not settle the label.
\n| Pair | \nThe question that separates them | \n
|---|---|
| ADHD versus anxiety versus depression | \nHas it been there since childhood across every setting (ADHD), does it follow worry (anxiety), or is it a change from how they used to be (depression)? | \n
| Hypomania versus hypomanic character | \nIs the high energy an episode, a clear change from their usual self lasting days with little sleep (hypomania), or how they have always been (character)? | \n
| OCD versus OCPD | \nDo they hate their rituals and know they're excessive (OCD), or believe their rules are simply correct (OCPD)? | \n
| Autism versus social anxiety versus schizoid style | \nDo they want connection but miss the unwritten rules (autism), want it but fear judgement (social anxiety), or not much want it (schizoid)? | \n
| Depression versus burnout | \nDoes it spread to weekends, holidays and things they once loved (depression), or stay tied to work (burnout)? | \n
| Grief versus depression | \nDoes pain come in waves tied to the loss while self-worth holds (grief), or is it a constant low with self-loathing (depression)? | \n
| Covert depression versus temperament in men | \nIs the irritability, overwork or drinking new, with lost pleasure and poor sleep (covert depression), or has he always been like this (temperament)? | \n
| Bipolar disorder versus borderline personality | \nDo moods shift over days to weeks regardless of people (bipolar), or within hours in response to relationships (borderline)? | \n
Comorbidity, having two or more conditions at the same time, is the rule, not the exception. Anxiety travels with depression, ADHD with anxiety and addiction, and trauma with substance use. Finding one pattern doesn't rule out another.
\nWhen to stop observing and act. If someone talks about being a burden, about wanting to disappear, or about no way out, or if they give things away or withdraw after a loss, ask them directly and calmly whether they are thinking about suicide. Asking does not plant the idea. Then connect them with professional or crisis help. The same applies to signs of psychosis (losing touch with shared reality, such as hearing voices or holding fixed false beliefs), mania (days of very high energy, little sleep and reckless decisions), or an eating disorder that is harming their health.
\nThe table below lists the main conditions. Each row gives the term, what it is, the terms it is often confused with, and how strong the evidence is. Strong means well replicated. Moderate means good support with caveats. Mixed means disputed results. Clinical means drawn from clinical practice with little controlled testing. Weak means little scientific support.
\n| Term | \nWhat it is | \nOften confused with | \nEvidence | \n
|---|---|---|---|
| \n | At least two weeks in which low mood or loss of interest dominates most days, with changes in sleep, appetite, energy, concentration, self-worth and sometimes thoughts of death. A change from usual functioning, not temperament. | \nBurnout; Grief; ADHD in adults | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Depressed mood on more days than not for at least two years, milder than a major episode but chronic. People often treat it as their personality. | \nDepressive character; Major depression; Anhedonia | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Episodes of mania (bipolar I) or hypomania (bipolar II) lasting days to weeks, usually alternating with depression. Hypomania is an observable change: raised energy, little need for sleep, faster speech and thought, riskier decisions. | \nHypomanic character; ADHD in adults; Major depression | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Persistent, hard-to-control worry about many everyday matters for months, with tension, restlessness, fatigue, poor sleep and irritability. The worry moves from topic to topic. | \nADHD in adults; Major depression; Conscientiousness | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Intense fear of being scrutinised or humiliated in social or performance situations, leading to avoidance or distress. The person wants connection; fear of being seen as inadequate gets in the way. | \nAutism in adults; Schizoid personality; Avoidant personality | \nStrong | \n
| \n | A sudden surge of intense fear peaking within minutes: pounding heart, breathlessness, dizziness, sense of imminent catastrophe. Panic disorder adds fear of the next attack and avoidance. | \nGeneralised anxiety; Health anxiety; Amygdala hijack | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Unwanted intrusive thoughts, images or urges that cause distress, and rituals (visible or mental) performed to neutralise them: contamination, harm, taboo, symmetry, doubt. | \nOCPD; Generalised anxiety; Perfectionism | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Persistent inattention, impulsivity and restlessness from childhood. In adults hyperactivity often becomes inner restlessness; the main impairment is self-regulation: starting, sustaining, timing, finishing. | \nGeneralised anxiety; Major depression; Bipolar disorder | \nStrong | \n
| \n | A lifelong difference in social communication, with preference for routine, focused interests and sensory sensitivities. Many adults, especially women and high-IQ people, reach adulthood undiagnosed through compensation. | \nSocial anxiety; Schizoid personality; ADHD in adults | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Conditions in which eating, weight and shape become central to self-worth and are controlled, or lost control of, in ways that harm health. Among the highest mortality of any psychiatric condition. | \nBody dysmorphic disorder; Perfectionism; Major depression | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Continued use of alcohol or drugs despite clear harm, with loss of control, craving, and the substance taking priority over obligations and relationships. A spectrum from mild to severe. | \nBehavioural addiction; Denial; Emotional dysregulation | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Repetitive rewarding behaviour (gambling, gaming, sex, shopping, social media) continuing despite harm, with loss of control, preoccupation and escalation. Impaired control defines it, not time spent. | \nSubstance addiction; Workaholism; OCD | \nMixed | \n
| \n | Losing contact with shared reality: hallucinations, delusions (persecution, special significance, being controlled) and disorganised thinking. Occurs in several conditions and with drugs, sleep loss or illness. | \nParanoid personality; Schizotypal personality; Dissociation | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Persistent preoccupation with having a serious illness, misreading normal sensations, checking and reassurance-seeking that brings only brief relief. Can coexist with real illness. | \nSomatisation; Panic; Vulnerability schema | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Preoccupation with perceived flaws in appearance that are minor or invisible to others, with checking, comparing, concealing or reassurance-seeking. | \nEating disorders; OCD; Social anxiety | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Reduced capacity to want, anticipate or enjoy rewards; runs across depression, schizophrenia, substance use and trauma. | \nEmotional numbing; Alexithymia; Burnout | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Difficulty controlling the intensity, duration and expression of emotion: reactions faster, stronger and slower to settle than the situation warrants, driving regretted behaviour. | \nBorderline personality; Bipolar disorder; Emotional flooding | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Suppressing autistic or ADHD traits and imitating neurotypical behaviour (how people without autism or ADHD tend to act) to fit in: scripted conversation, forced eye contact, copied gestures. Exhausting over time. | \nImpression management; False self; People-pleasing | \nModerate | \n
| \n | A popular, clinician-coined term for intense, sudden pain at perceived rejection, said to be common in ADHD. Not in the DSM, the main American diagnostic manual. | \nRejection sensitivity; Borderline personality; Social anxiety | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Observable changes in behaviour, speech and mood suggesting someone may be thinking about suicide or harming themselves. Self-harm is separate but signals intense distress and raises later risk. | \nMajor depression; Emotional dysregulation; Secondary gain | \nModerate | \n
| \n | The two main diagnostic systems: the DSM (American, research and US practice) and the ICD (global). Both define conditions by symptom lists and duration. | \nHiTOP; Personality disorder; Comorbidity | \nModerate | \n
| \n | A research-led system describing mental health problems as dimensions (scales of more or less, instead of yes-or-no categories) in a hierarchy: a general factor (overall proneness to mental health problems), broad spectra (internalising, thought disorder, disinhibited and antagonistic externalising, detachment, somatoform), then narrower syndromes. | \nDSM-5-TR and ICD-11; Big Five; Comorbidity | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Two or more conditions in the same person, at once or over a lifetime. In mental health it is the rule rather than the exception. | \nHiTOP; DSM-5-TR and ICD-11 | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Depression in men that doesn't look like sadness. The low mood is defended against through action and numbing (irritability, overwork, drinking, withdrawal into screens or hobbies, risk-taking, affairs), with shame underneath. Real, an American family therapist, calls it covert because the man often doesn't know he is depressed, and it can turn overt. | \nMajor depression; Burnout; Substance addiction | \nClinical | \n
In relationships, the pattern lives between people, not inside one of them. The most useful question is not \"what's wrong with them?\" but \"what role have I been cast in, and what do I keep doing that feeds the loop?\"
\nHow to identify relationship patterns
\nHow to identify group dynamics and influence
\nThe terms below describe patterns between two people, mostly partners, family members and close colleagues. Read the third column as look-alikes to rule out before you settle on a term. The last column says how strong the evidence is.
\n| Term | \nWhat it is | \nOften confused with | \nEvidence | \n
|---|---|---|---|
| \n | Three roles in conflict: Persecutor (blames, controls), Victim (helpless, aggrieved) and Rescuer (fixes, unasked). The roles are interchangeable; the drama lies in the switch. | \nTriangulation; Codependency; Psychological games | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Organising your worth and behaviour around another person's needs, moods or problems, typically someone addicted, unstable or demanding, at the cost of your own needs. | \nDependent personality; People-pleasing; Altruism | \nWeak | \n
| \n | The lines that mark what you are responsible for, what you will and won't do, and what you will accept. A boundary is a statement about your own behaviour ('If you shout, I'll end the call'), not a rule for someone else. | \nCoercive control; Emotional cutoff; Enmeshment | \nClinical | \n
| \n | One person pushes for discussion, change or contact; the other avoids, goes quiet or leaves; each response drives more of the other. | \nStonewalling; Anxious-preoccupied attachment; Silent treatment | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Four ways of fighting that predict breakdown: criticism (attacking the person), contempt (speaking from superiority), defensiveness (counter-attack or innocent victimhood) and stonewalling (shutting down). | \nContempt; Negative sentiment override; Defensive routines | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Withdrawing while still physically present: no eye contact, no response, flat face, monosyllables, or walking out. Often flooding, not strategy. | \nSilent treatment; Emotional flooding; Deactivating strategies | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Small attempts to get attention, interest or support, often disguised as trivial remarks ('Look at that boat'). The other can turn toward, away or against. | \nProtest behaviour; Attunement | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Anything during or after conflict that stops escalation: a joke, a touch, 'I'm getting defensive', 'Can we start again?'. What matters is whether it is accepted. | \nHoovering; Rupture and repair; Negative sentiment override | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Accumulated negativity colours how one person reads everything the other does, so neutral or positive acts are taken as hostile. | \nConfirmation bias; Fundamental attribution error; Mental filter | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Systematically making someone doubt their memory, perception or sanity so they defer to your version of reality. One disputed memory is not gaslighting. | \nNaive realism; DARVO; Invalidation | \nClinical | \n
| \n | A response to being held to account: Deny, Attack the person raising it, Reverse Victim and Offender. | \nGaslighting; Narcissistic rage; Projection | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Overwhelming someone early with attention, praise, gifts and declarations of future commitment, creating fast attachment and later leverage. An enthusiastic start alone is not love bombing. | \nLimerence; Idealisation; Idealise-devalue-discard cycle | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Rewards delivered unpredictably produce more persistent behaviour than steady ones. Warmth that comes and goes hooks people more than steady warmth. | \nTrauma bonding; Anxious-preoccupied attachment | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Pulling a third person into tension between two, so the third carries messages, takes sides or absorbs the anxiety. Popularly, also bringing in a third person to provoke jealousy. | \nDrama triangle; Jealousy; Scapegoating | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Deliberately withholding speech, attention or acknowledgement to signal displeasure, punish or force compliance, often for hours or days. | \nStonewalling; Emotional cutoff; Passive aggression | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Putting someone on a pedestal, turning critical and contemptuous, then dropping them abruptly, sometimes returning later. A relationship that cooled and ended is not this. | \nSplitting; Limerence | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Attempts to pull someone back after they have withdrawn or been discarded, using charm, crisis, guilt, nostalgia or promises of change. | \nRepair attempts; Emotional blackmail | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Putting others' approval and comfort ahead of your own needs and judgement: reflexive yes, conflict avoidance, shaping yourself to what others want. | \nFawn response; Agreeableness; Codependency | \nModerate | \n
| \n | In Transactional Analysis (TA), Eric Berne's model of how people interact, three coherent sets of thinking, feeling and behaviour: Parent (copied from caregivers, critical or nurturing), Adult (here-and-now reasoning), Child (replayed from childhood, free or adapted). A crossed transaction answers from a state the speaker didn't address. | \nId, ego, superego; Schema modes; Regression | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Repeated exchanges with a hidden motive that end in a predictable payoff of bad feeling, confirming an old belief. Examples: 'Why Don't You, Yes But', 'Now I've Got You', 'Kick Me'. | \nDrama triangle; Repetition compulsion; Passive aggression | \nClinical | \n
| \n | An unconscious life plan formed in childhood from parental messages and early decisions, steering toward a predictable ending: success, quiet failure, sacrifice, repeated near-misses. | \nNarrative identity; Repetition compulsion; Early maladaptive schemas | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Domination through isolation, surveillance, micro-regulation of daily life, degradation and threats, with or without physical violence. The harm lies in the accumulated pattern. | \nJealousy; Boundaries; High-control groups | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Getting what you want by threatening, openly or by implication, to make someone suffer if they refuse, working through fear, obligation and guilt. | \nBoundaries; Coercive control; Passive aggression | \nWeak | \n
| \n | An unconscious agreement to share and avoid the same fear, each acting out one side: one carries competence and the other helplessness, one anger and the other calm. | \nCodependency; Over-functioning and under-functioning; Groupthink | \nClinical | \n
| \n | One person takes on more and more responsibility for a shared system while the other does less, and each move reinforces the other. | \nCodependency; Parentification; Learned helplessness | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Accurately sensing another's inner state and responding so they know you got it, often by matching intensity or rhythm rather than content. | \nMentalising; People-pleasing; Emotional contagion | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Communicating that someone's feelings or perceptions are wrong, unimportant or illegitimate, as opposed to disagreeing with their conclusion. | \nGaslighting; Childhood emotional neglect; Cognitive reappraisal | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Involuntary, obsessive longing for another person, with intrusive thoughts, fear of rejection and a craving for reciprocation that can matter more than the person. | \nLove bombing; Anxious-preoccupied attachment; Idealisation | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Fusion is closeness that depends on agreement and sameness, so difference feels like betrayal; intimacy is closeness in which each can be fully known, disagree and remain themselves. | \nEnmeshment; Codependency; Differentiation of self | \nClinical | \n
| \n | A map of social behaviour on two axes: dominance, or agency (control, assertion, status), running from dominant to submissive, and warmth, or communion (affection, affiliation), running from warm to cold. Every interpersonal act, and every person's typical style, sits somewhere on the circle. | \nBig Five; Dominance and prestige; Conflict modes | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Each interpersonal act invites a particular reply. On the warmth axis like invites like: warmth draws warmth, hostility draws hostility. On the dominance axis opposites are invited: dominance draws submission and submission draws dominance. When both people give the invited reply, the interaction is stable and repeats. | \nEmotional contagion; Projective identification; Psychological games | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Real's claim that self-esteem fails in two directions: one-up (grandiosity, contempt, entitlement: 'I'm better than you') and one-down (shame: 'I'm worse than you'). Both are the same position, a ranking, and people flip between them. Health is 'same-as': holding yourself and others in warm regard regardless of performance. | \nGrandiose narcissism; Vulnerable (covert) narcissism; Contingent self-worth | \nClinical | \n
| \n | The sense that another person understands you, values who you are and cares about your needs, built up each time you disclose something and their reply shows they got it. The perception is what counts: responsiveness you don't perceive does nothing. | \nAttunement; Love bombing; Bids for connection | \nStrong | \n
The terms below describe how groups, status and persuasion shape what people do. Many come from social psychology experiments. Where a famous finding has held up less well than its reputation, the evidence column says so.
\n| Term | \nWhat it is | \nOften confused with | \nEvidence | \n
|---|---|---|---|
| \n | Changing what you say, do or believe to match a group, through informational pressure (they probably know something) or normative pressure (I don't want to be the odd one out). | \nObedience to authority; Pluralistic ignorance; People-pleasing | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Doing what a legitimate authority instructs, including acts you would refuse on your own. Milgram, whose experiments had people give what they believed were painful electric shocks on instruction, called it an 'agentic state', seeing yourself as an instrument of someone else's will; Haslam and Reicher argue people obey when they identify with the authority's cause. | \nConformity; Authority bias; Identification with the aggressor | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Each individual is less likely to act when others are present, because responsibility feels shared and others' calm suggests nothing is wrong. In real public conflicts someone in the group usually steps in. | \nPluralistic ignorance; Social loafing; Moral disengagement | \nModerate | \n
| \n | A cohesive group's drive for agreement overrides realistic appraisal: illusion of invulnerability, collective rationalisation, self-censorship, illusion of unanimity, self-appointed 'mindguards'. | \nConformity; Basic assumption groups; Pluralistic ignorance | \nMixed | \n
| \n | The part of the self-concept that comes from group membership. When salient, people think and act as group members rather than individuals. | \nIn-group bias; Need to belong; Conformity | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Favouring your own group in trust, judgement and resources, even when the group is trivial. Mostly warmth toward 'us'; hostility toward 'them' follows under threat. | \nSocial identity; Halo effect; Scapegoating | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Loss of individual accountability in groups, especially when anonymous. The modern view: people swap personal norms for the group's, so anonymity amplifies what the group already values. | \nConformity; Emotional contagion; Moral disengagement | \nMixed | \n
| \n | Less effort in a group than alone, especially when individual contributions can't be identified. Shrinks when contributions are visible or the task matters. | \nDisengagement; Over-functioning and under-functioning; Procrastination | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Most members privately reject a norm but go along because they wrongly believe others accept it. | \nConformity; False consensus effect; Groupthink | \nModerate | \n
| \n | A group pins its frustration, failure or guilt on one person or subgroup so it can feel united and blameless. The target is chosen because it is safe to blame. | \nDisplacement; Family roles; DARVO | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Moves that let people do harm while seeing themselves as good: moral justification, euphemism, advantageous comparison, displacing or diffusing responsibility, distorting consequences, dehumanising, blaming the victim. | \nRationalisation; Psychopathy; Moral licensing | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Having done good, or established credentials as good, makes people feel entitled to act less well afterwards. Effects are smaller than first reported. | \nMoral disengagement; Psychological entitlement; Impression management | \nMixed | \n
| \n | Moral intuition sorted into foundations: care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, liberty. People weigh them differently, and judgement usually comes first as a gut reaction, reasons after. | \nNaive realism; Moralisation; Social identity | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Controlling how others see you. Five strategies: ingratiation (liked), self-promotion (competent), exemplification (virtuous), intimidation (dangerous), supplication (needy). | \nSelf-monitoring; False self; Masking | \nStrong | \n
| \n | The near-universal rule that we should repay what others give. Because it is felt even for unrequested gifts, it can extract repayment far larger than the favour. | \nLiking; Emotional blackmail; Compliance techniques | \nStrong | \n
| \n | After a public, active or effortful commitment, people feel pressure to act in line with it, so small early commitments steer later larger ones. | \nSunk cost fallacy; Cognitive dissonance; Self-verification | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Treating what others do as evidence of what is correct, especially under uncertainty and when the others seem similar. | \nConformity; Authority bias; Mimetic desire | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Too much weight on perceived authorities, responding to symbols (titles, clothes, confidence, credentials) as if they were substance. | \nObedience to authority; Halo effect; Dominance and prestige | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Things seem more valuable when rare, running out or about to be lost; competition increases the pull. | \nPsychological reactance; Mimetic desire; Intermittent reinforcement | \nModerate | \n
| \n | We say yes more readily to people we like. Liking is created by similarity, compliments, familiarity, cooperation and association with good things. | \nHalo effect; Love bombing; Reciprocity | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Foot in the door: small request first, then the big one. Door in the face: outsized request refused, then the real one as a concession. Low-ball: agreement at an attractive price, then terms change. | \nCommitment and consistency; Reciprocity; Gaslighting | \nModerate | \n
| \n | A motive to see existing arrangements as fair and natural, even when they disadvantage oneself; strongest when people feel dependent on or trapped in the system. | \nJust-world belief; Learned helplessness; Identification with the aggressor | \nMixed | \n
| \n | Two routes to rank. Dominance gains influence through fear, intimidation and control of resources; prestige through skill, knowledge and generosity others seek to learn from. Both work. | \nAuthority bias; Grandiose narcissism; Status motive | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Power activates approach and reduces inhibition: more action, more stereotyping, less perspective-taking, more acting on impulse. | \nHubris syndrome; Grandiose narcissism; Dominance and prestige | \nMixed | \n
| \n | The proposal that fear of confirming a negative group stereotype impairs performance. Replications are mixed. | \nImpostor phenomenon; Social anxiety; Spotlight effect | \nMixed | \n
| \n | Evaluating your abilities, opinions and status against others. Upward comparison can inspire or deflate; downward usually comforts. | \nEnvy; Mimetic desire; Contingent self-worth | \nStrong | \n
| \n | We copy the desires of models. When the model is close (a peer, sibling, colleague) and wants the same thing, imitation becomes rivalry, and rivals grow alike while each feels uniquely opposed. | \nEnvy; Social comparison; Jealousy | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Groups exerting intense control over thinking, behaviour, information and emotion. Lifton's eight criteria: milieu control, mystical manipulation, demand for purity, cult of confession, sacred science, loading the language, doctrine over person, dispensing of existence. | \nSocial identity; Coercive control; Groupthink | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Seeing others as less than fully human, in two forms. Animalistic dehumanisation denies uniquely human traits such as refinement, civility, rationality and moral sense, casting people as crude or childlike; mechanistic dehumanisation denies human nature such as warmth, emotion and depth, casting people as objects or machines. | \nContempt; In-group bias; Objectification: seven ways of treating a person as a thing | \nStrong | \n
At work, identify three things at once: the person, the role they are in, and what the organisation is defending against, meaning the anxieties its work stirs up and the habits it uses to avoid them. A leader's strengths become their derailers under pressure. A derailer is a behaviour that knocks a career or a team off course. A team's habits often protect it from anxiety at the expense of its real task.
\nHow to identify it
\nThe table below lists the main work terms. Read the third column as look-alikes to rule out. The last column says how strong the evidence is.
\n| Term | \nWhat it is | \nOften confused with | \nEvidence | \n
|---|---|---|---|
| \n | A shared belief in a team that it is safe to take interpersonal risks: ask a naive question, admit a mistake, disagree with the boss, raise bad news. A property of the group's climate, not one person. | \nGroupthink; Pluralistic ignorance; Disengagement | \nModerate | \n
| \n | A response to unmanaged chronic workplace stress: exhaustion, cynicism or depersonalisation, and reduced professional efficacy (in Christina Maslach's model). ICD-11 restricts the term to the occupational context. | \nMajor depression; Disengagement; Workaholism | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Managing your own feelings and expressions to meet a job's emotional demands. Surface acting fakes the display; deep acting changes the feeling itself. | \nImpression management; Expressive suppression; False self | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Fairness judgements along four lines: distributive (outcomes), procedural (process and voice), interpersonal (dignity) and informational (truth and reasons). Procedural unfairness drives resentment more than bad outcomes. | \nPsychological entitlement; Resentment; Social comparison | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Habits that protect people from embarrassment but stop them finding the problem: send a mixed message, act as if it isn't mixed, make it undiscussable, and make its undiscussability undiscussable. | \nSocial defences against anxiety; Groupthink; Passive aggression | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Two sets of assumptions managers hold about people, named by Douglas McGregor. Theory X: people dislike work, avoid responsibility and must be controlled. Theory Y: people seek responsibility and commit to goals under the right conditions. Each tends to produce the behaviour it assumes. | \nAuthoritarian personality; Omnipotent control; Fundamental attribution error | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Strengths that turn destructive under pressure, fatigue or power. Eleven: Excitable, Sceptical, Cautious, Reserved, Leisurely, Bold, Mischievous, Colourful, Imaginative, Diligent, Dutiful. | \nPersonality disorder; Hubris syndrome; Dark Triad | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Systematic behaviour by a leader that undermines the organisation or subordinates' wellbeing: ridicule, public put-downs, silent treatment, taking credit. Absent, laissez-faire leadership is also destructive. | \nTheory X and Theory Y; Power and disinhibition; Coercive control | \nStrong | \n
| \n | People are promoted for doing their current job well until they reach one they can't do well, where they stay. The best individual contributor becomes a poor manager. | \nImpostor phenomenon; Confidence-competence gap; Founder syndrome | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Five ways of handling conflict on assertiveness and cooperativeness: competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, accommodating. Trouble starts when one mode is used for everything. | \nPeople-pleasing; Passive aggression; Pursuer-distancer | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Claims people react to change in grief-like stages: shock, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Derived from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's stages of dying and grief, which lack evidence. | \nGrief; Psychological reactance; Resilience | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Withdrawing the self from the work role: doing what is required but no longer bringing effort, ideas or care. | \nBurnout; Social loafing; Major depression | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Ambiguity: not knowing what is expected, what authority you have, or how you'll be judged. Conflict: incompatible demands from two bosses, two goals, or a clash with your values. | \nTriangulation; Enmeshment; Impostor phenomenon | \nStrong | \n
| \n | A founder's identification with the organisation and need to control it hold it back once it outgrows what one person can oversee. | \nOCPD; Grandiose narcissism; Hubris syndrome | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Groups pick leaders on displays of confidence, dominance and charisma, which are loosely related to competence, favouring overconfident and often narcissistic candidates. | \nDunning-Kruger effect; Halo effect; Grandiose narcissism | \nModerate | \n
| \n | An inner compulsion to work excessively, with difficulty stopping and guilt or anxiety when not working. The compulsion defines it, not the hours. | \nFlow; Perfectionism; Burnout | \nModerate | \n
| \n | Voluntary behaviour that harms the organisation or its people: theft, sabotage, deliberate slowness, lying, gossip, incivility, bullying. | \nPassive aggression; Disengagement; Moral licensing | \nStrong | \n
| \n | Every group works on two levels: the work group, on task, and a basic assumption group behaving as if it met for another purpose: dependency (a leader will rescue us), fight-flight (an enemy to attack or flee), pairing (two members will produce a saviour). | \nGroupthink; Scapegoating; Social defences against anxiety | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Organisations build structures and habits that protect members from the anxiety of the work, often at the work's expense. In Isabel Menzies Lyth's 1950s study of a London hospital, nurses rotated wards and split into task lists partly so no one bonded with a dying patient. | \nDefensive routines; Basic assumption groups; Isolation of affect | \nClinical | \n
| \n | A proposed acquired change in people holding substantial power for years: excessive self-confidence, contempt for advice, identifying self with the organisation, loss of contact with reality, reckless decisions. Tends to fade when power is lost. | \nGrandiose narcissism; Power and disinhibition; Bipolar disorder | \nWeak | \n
Typologies, systems that sort people into types, are useful for generating hypotheses and poor as verdicts. The best ones name the core fear a character is organised around, and that is often faster to spot than a profile of traits. The weakest ones sort people into boxes the data doesn't support.
\nWhich to trust for what
\nThis table compares the best-known systems. Read each row for what the system is good for, then for how far to trust it. Strong means well supported by research. Clinical means drawn from clinicians' experience and little tested. Weak means little or no research support.
\n| System | \nWhat it's good for | \nValidity | \n
|---|---|---|
| Big Five / HEXACO (see Personality) | \nPredicting behaviour, comparing people, hiring | \nStrong; the scientific standard | \n
| Horney's three trends | \nSpotting someone's default move under threat: toward, against or away | \nClinical; quick and robust in use | \n
| Riemann's four anxieties | \nIdentifying how someone handles closeness and change | \nClinical; underused, very practical | \n
| Shapiro's neurotic styles | \nIdentifying character from how someone thinks and attends | \nClinical; deep, for advanced identification | \n
| Enneagram | \nNaming a core fear and passion; rich descriptions for self-inquiry | \nWeak as a test; useful as hypotheses | \n
| MBTI | \nShared language for preferences in teams | \nWeak; types are unstable on retest | \n
| DISC, four temperaments, love languages, Spiral Dynamics | \nConversation starters | \nWeak | \n
How to use them well
\nThe table below gives each system in brief, with the nine Enneagram types after the overview row. For each type, read the core fear first. 'Often confused with' lists look-alikes to rule out, and the last column rates the evidence as in the table above. 'Neurotic' in Horney's and Shapiro's names means an everyday rigid pattern, not a mental illness.
\n| Term | \nWhat it is | \nOften confused with | \nEvidence | \n
|---|---|---|---|
| \n | Sorts people into 16 types from four forced choices: extraversion or introversion, sensing or intuition, thinking or feeling, judging or perceiving. Treats each preference as either-or, though scores pile up in the middle like most traits. | \nBig Five; Jungian cognitive functions | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Jung's four functions: two for taking in information (sensation, intuition), two for judging it (thinking, feeling), each turned outward or inward. Typology communities claim a fixed order, with the 'inferior' function erupting under stress. | \nMBTI; Shadow | \nWeak | \n
| \n | The extravert orients to the object: outer facts and people set the terms. The introvert orients to the subject: the inner response to the object is what counts. | \nExtraversion; Schizoid personality | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Nine character types, each organised around a core fear, a compensating desire and a passion, meaning a habitual emotional driver (anger, pride, deceit or vanity, envy, avarice, fear, gluttony, lust, sloth). Lines claim each type moves toward another's worse traits under stress and another's better traits in growth. | \nMBTI; Big Five | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Fear: being bad or corrupt. Desire: to be good and right. Passion: anger, held down and leaking as resentment and criticism. | \nType 6; Type 3; OCPD | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Fear: being unwanted or unworthy of love. Desire: to be loved, secured by being needed. Passion: pride, the hidden belief that they need nothing and everyone needs them. | \nType 9; People-pleasing; Communal narcissism | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Fear: being worthless apart from achievement. Desire: to be valuable and admired. Passion: deceit or vanity, self-deception about who one is beneath the image. | \nType 8; Type 7; Grandiose narcissism | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Fear: having no identity or significance; being fundamentally flawed. Desire: to find themselves. Passion: envy, the sense that others have something essential one lacks. | \nType 5; Vulnerable narcissism; Depressive character | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Fear: being useless, helpless or overwhelmed by others' demands. Desire: to be capable. Passion: avarice, hoarding time, energy, knowledge and privacy. | \nType 9; Type 4; Schizoid personality | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Fear: being without support or security. Desire: to be safe. Passion: fear, shown as compliance with authority (phobic) or defiance and testing of it (counterphobic). | \nType 8; Type 1; Paranoid personality | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Fear: being deprived, trapped or stuck in pain. Desire: to be satisfied and free. Passion: gluttony, an appetite for more experience and options. | \nType 3; Hypomanic character; ADHD in adults | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Fear: being harmed or controlled. Desire: to protect themselves and set their own course. Passion: lust, meaning excess and intensity in everything. | \nType 6; Type 3; Antisocial personality | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Fear: loss of connection, conflict. Desire: inner peace. Passion: sloth, meaning inattention to oneself, one's priorities and one's anger. | \nType 5; Type 2; Passive aggression | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Three areas where attention and anxiety concentrate: self-preservation (security, health, comfort), social (standing, belonging), sexual or one-to-one (intensity, the charged bond). | \nMaslow's hierarchy; Enneagram | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Four styles defined by the anxiety each avoids, on two axes (closeness against distance, permanence against change). Schizoid fears closeness and seeks distance; depressive fears separation and seeks closeness; obsessive fears change and seeks permanence; hysterical fears permanence and seeks change. | \nAttachment theory; Horney's trends; Schizoid personality | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Three strategies for basic anxiety, a child's sense of being helpless in a hostile world: moving toward people (compliance, love), against (aggression, mastery), away (detachment, self-sufficiency). Trouble starts when one becomes compulsive and the others are repressed. | \nConflict modes; Fight, flight, freeze; Riemann's anxieties | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Four ways of thinking and attending: obsessive-compulsive (sharp, rigid, driven by 'should'), paranoid (searching, suspicious, finds hidden meaning), hysterical (global, impressionistic, led by feeling), impulsive (captured by the immediate, no felt sense of deciding). | \nCognitive distortions; OCPD; Histrionic personality | \nClinical | \n
| \n | A workplace profile: Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, Conscientiousness, from two axes (outgoing against reserved, task against people). | \nBig Five; Four temperaments | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Sanguine, choleric, melancholic, phlegmatic. In modern terms, the four corners of extraversion crossed with emotional stability. | \nTemperament; Big Five | \nWeak | \n
| \n | The claim that people give and receive love through one of five channels: words, time, gifts, acts of service, touch. The matching claim isn't supported. | \nBids for connection; Attunement | \nWeak | \n
| \n | A colour-coded stage model of values from survival through tribal, power, order, achievement, egalitarian, to systemic and holistic. Popular in integral and coaching circles; little research support. | \nEgo development; Subject-object shift; Moral foundations | \nWeak | \n
Philosophers reached many of psychology's insights about motive first, and they are still the sharpest at one thing: noticing when a stated value is doing a hidden job. None of these ideas has been measured and tested by research. Treat them as questions to ask of a person, not as findings. Each bullet below names the thinker behind the idea, and the table after the bullets gives each idea in full. You don't need to know the philosophers to use the questions.
\nHow to identify it
\nThe table gives each idea in full. 'Often confused with' links each one to the psychological terms it overlaps with. Most are rated Weak because they are philosophical ideas, not research findings.
\n| Term | \nWhat it is | \nOften confused with | \nEvidence | \n
|---|---|---|---|
| \n | A festering, powerless hostility toward people who have what you want. Unable to act on it, you take revenge by revaluing: what they have becomes bad and your lack becomes virtue. Envy turned into a moral position. | \nEnvy; Resentment; Moralisation | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Nietzsche's view that the basic drive in living things isn't survival or pleasure but the expansion of their own force: growth, mastery, overcoming, giving shape to things. Pleasure and self-preservation are by-products. It drives creation and self-overcoming as much as domination. | \nNeeds for achievement, affiliation and power; Striving for superiority and the superiority complex; Status motive | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Two ways of making values. Master morality starts from self-affirmation: 'good' means noble, strong, proud, and 'bad' is an afterthought for the low. Slave morality starts from reaction: 'evil' is whatever the powerful are, and 'good' becomes humility, meekness and patience, the traits of the weak, rebranded. Ressentiment is its engine. | \nRessentiment; Moral foundations; Communal narcissism | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Self-love that hides inside apparent virtue. La Rochefoucauld's line: 'Our virtues are most often only vices in disguise.' Generosity, modesty, sincerity and even humility can be ways of securing regard. | \nSelf-enhancement; Impression management; Communal narcissism | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Lying to yourself about your freedom: treating yourself as a thing with a fixed nature ('that's just who I am') or as wholly determined by circumstance ('I had no choice') to escape the anxiety of being responsible for what you do. Sartre's examples are the waiter who plays at being a waiter and the woman who lets her hand be held while pretending not to notice. | \nRationalisation; Locus of control; Learned helplessness | \nClinical | \n
| \n | For Kierkegaard despair is not a mood but a misrelation in the self: refusing to be the self you are. It has three forms: not knowing you have a self, not willing to be yourself (weakness: wanting to be someone else, or no one), and defiantly willing to be a self of your own invention (defiance). Most despair is unconscious and sits comfortably inside a successful life. | \nMajor depression; False self; Self-discrepancy | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Kierkegaard's line that 'anxiety is the dizziness of freedom': vertigo felt not before a threat but before possibility, when you see that you could do anything, including what you shouldn't, and that the choice is yours. Like standing at a height, where part of the fear is that you might jump. | \nGeneralised anxiety; Ambivalence; Need for cognitive closure | \nClinical | \n
| \n | 'The they' or 'the one': the anonymous public way of being in which you do, think and feel what one does. Everyday life is mostly lived this way, absorbed in idle talk, curiosity and what everybody knows, and it spares you owning your choices. Heidegger contrasts it with authenticity, usually prompted by facing your own death. | \nConformity; Socialised mind; Social proof | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Becker's claim that people deny death by building or joining something that will outlast them and prove they matter: an immortality project. Culture is a system for producing heroes. The project can be a company, a family name, a cause, a body of work or a faith. | \nTerror management theory; Founder syndrome; Will to meaning | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Fromm's argument that modern freedom from tradition leaves people isolated and anxious, and that many escape it rather than use it. He named three routes: authoritarianism (submitting to, or dominating within, a strong hierarchy), destructiveness (eliminating what you can't relate to) and automaton conformity (becoming what others expect). | \nAuthoritarian personality; Conformity; High-control groups and thought reform | \nWeak | \n
| \n | One of Fromm's non-productive character orientations, alongside the receptive, exploitative and hoarding types. The person experiences themselves as a commodity whose value depends on what they would fetch on the personality market, so they become whatever is in demand and their worth tracks their saleability. | \nSelf-monitoring; Persona; Contingent self-worth | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Two modes of existence. In the having mode you relate to everything, including knowledge, people and yourself, as possessions to acquire and hold. In the being mode you relate through activity, experience and engagement. The same act can be done in either mode: you can have a degree or be learning. | \nMarketing orientation; Hedonic adaptation; Status motive | \nWeak | \n
| \n | The underground man's insight: people will act against their own interest just to prove they are free, and not a piano key or a formula. Spite is self-harm in the service of autonomy, and the satisfaction lies in refusing what reason or other people predict. | \nPsychological reactance; Passive aggression; Self-handicapping | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Relating to a person as an object: something to use, manage, assess or explain. Most of life runs in this mode and has to. It becomes a problem when someone can't leave it, or when a bond that should allow real meeting has quietly turned into a transaction. | \nMarketing orientation; Psychopathy; Deactivating strategies | \nWeak | \n
| \n | Meeting the other as a whole person, present and without agenda, rather than as a set of qualities or uses. It can't be willed or held: it happens, then passes, and every Thou becomes an It again. | \nAttunement; Limerence; Love bombing | \nWeak | \n
| \n | People become selves by being recognised by someone they in turn recognise as a self. Honneth names three forms: love (your needs matter to someone), respect (you're treated as an equal bearer of rights) and esteem (your contribution is valued). Being denied any of them is a core injury, not a slight. | \nNarcissistic supply; Organisational justice; Status motive | \nWeak | \n
| \n | When mutual recognition breaks down, the relationship becomes a seesaw: one of you must be the doer and the other the done-to, and each experiences the other as the one doing it. The way out is the 'third': a shared space both can step into, where each can own a part without simply submitting. | \nDrama triangle; DARVO; Interpersonal complementarity | \nClinical | \n
| \n | Treating a person as a thing, in any of seven separable ways: instrumentality (a tool for your purposes), denial of autonomy, inertness (lacking agency), fungibility (interchangeable), violability (their boundaries don't matter), ownership, and denial of subjectivity (their experience doesn't count). The philosopher Rae Langton added three: reduction to body, reduction to appearance, and silencing. | \nCoercive control; Dehumanisation: animalistic and mechanistic; Boundaries | \nWeak | \n
| \n | The other person's face makes an ethical demand on you before any analysis; its first word, Levinas says, is 'you shall not kill'. Reducing someone to a concept, category or system (what he calls totality) is a quiet violence, because it erases the part of them that exceeds what you can know. | \nLabelling; I–It; Dehumanisation: animalistic and mechanistic | \nWeak | \n
You are the hardest person in this guide to identify. Your own defences feel like plain perception from the inside. Clinicians call such a pattern ego-syntonic, meaning it fits your sense of who you are, so it doesn't register as a problem. The patterns you are most certain you don't have are where to look first.
\nThis turns step 2 of the method from the first chapter, noticing what someone evokes in you, into a routine. After any charged interaction, ask three questions:
\nOnce a week, take one interaction that stayed with you. Write down what happened, what you felt, three explanations for the other person's behaviour, and three for your own. Then name the one test that would tell them apart. Within a few months the method from the first chapter becomes automatic, and you will identify your own patterns as readily as other people's.
","mins":5,"h3":[{"id":"your-reactions-are-data-about-both-of-you","t":"Your reactions are data about both of you"},{"id":"where-your-patterns-show","t":"Where your patterns show"},{"id":"the-traps-of-psychological-knowledge","t":"The traps of psychological knowledge"},{"id":"a-practice","t":"A practice"}],"text":" You are the hardest person in this guide to identify. Your own defences feel like plain perception from the inside. Clinicians call such a pattern ego-syntonic, meaning it fits your sense of who you are, so it doesn't register as a problem. The patterns you are most certain you don't have are where to look first. Your reactions are data about both of you This turns step 2 of the method from the first chapter, noticing what someone evokes in you, into a routine. After any charged interaction, ask three questions: What exactly do I feel? Name it precisely: contempt, envy, a need to rescue, boredom, a wish to impress, fear of their disapproval. Is this feeling usual for me? If it is foreign and appears only with this person, it is probably information about them. It may be projective identification: they cannot bear a feeling, disown it, and act in ways that make you feel it instead. If it is familiar and appears with many people, it is information about you: your transference (an old relationship colouring this one), your schema (a core belief formed early), your complex (an emotionally charged sore spot). What would acting on it confirm? If the pull is to attack, rescue or withdraw, and doing so would complete their expected story, decline the role and watch what happens. Where your patterns show Disproportionate irritation. A trait in someone else that bothers you far more than it bothers others usually belongs to your shadow, the parts of you that don't fit your self-image and so get disowned. Jung's rule of thumb: what we can't stand in others often lives in us, unlived or disowned. The same ending with different people. If the story keeps ending the same way with different casts, the common factor is you. Look for repetition compulsion (recreating a painful early situation), a life script (an unconscious plan for your life formed in childhood), or a schema you keep acting out. You may surrender to the old belief, or overcompensate by acting as its opposite. Contempt and superiority. These usually defend against envy or shame. When you catch yourself looking down, ask what the other person has that you want, or what they show you about yourself that you'd rather not see. Your derailer under load. A derailer is a strength that turns destructive under pressure (see Work and organisations). Notice what you become when tired, threatened or powerful. The people who work most closely with you have seen it. What your worth depends on. Find the domain where a loss would hit hardest: performance, approval, being special, being good, being needed. That is where you will be least objective about yourself and others. Your move when contact breaks. When someone goes quiet, do you pursue, withdraw, or do both in turn? That shows your attachment strategy, the way you learned early to keep important people close (see Attachment, development and family systems). The traps of psychological knowledge Labels as weapons. Diagnosing a partner or colleague mid-argument (\"you're being narcissistic\") ends the inquiry and starts a fight. Keep labels for your own thinking, and in conversation describe behaviour. Identification as I–It. Analysing someone is itself a way of treating them as an object, what Buber called I–It (see the previous chapter). Used all the time, it stops you meeting people at all, and they feel it. Name the pattern, then put the guide down and be in the room with them. Insight as armour. Fluent self-analysis with no change in feeling or behaviour is intellectualisation, a defence that swaps thinking for feeling. You will know insight is real when your behaviour changes, not when your explanation improves. Psychology as bypass. Understanding why someone hurt you doesn't mean you have dealt with being hurt. The same goes for spiritual frameworks, where it is called spiritual bypassing. Understanding has to come after feeling, not instead of it. Identifying while flooded. Mentalising, your capacity to read behaviour in terms of thoughts and feelings, collapses under strong emotion. A judgement you make while angry, hurt or infatuated is a draft. Make it again the next day. A practice Once a week, take one interaction that stayed with you. Write down what happened, what you felt, three explanations for the other person's behaviour, and three for your own. Then name the one test that would tell them apart. Within a few months the method from the first chapter becomes automatic, and you will identify your own patterns as readily as other people's. ","part":3,"wrap":{"summary":"Turning the method on yourself: read your reactions, spot your repeats, avoid psychology's traps.","intro":"Every identification you make passes through you. Your own defences and moods shape what you see in others, and from the inside they feel like plain perception. This chapter turns the method on you, which makes your reading of other people more accurate.","objectives":["use your own reactions to tell apart what comes from the other person and what comes from you","spot your repeating patterns, such as disproportionate irritation, the same ending with different people, and your move when contact breaks","recognise when psychological knowledge is being used as a weapon, as armour or as a bypass"],"keyterms":[{"name":"Ego-syntonic","id":null,"def":"A pattern that fits your self-image, so it feels like plain truth and you don't notice it as a pattern."},{"name":"Projective identification","id":"projective-identification","def":"Someone disowns a feeling they can't bear and acts in ways that make you feel it instead."},{"name":"Transference","id":"transference","def":"Experiencing someone in the present through the template of an important earlier relationship, often with a parent."},{"name":"Shadow","id":"shadow","def":"The parts of yourself that don't fit your self-image, so you disown them and often notice them in others."},{"name":"Repetition compulsion","id":"repetition-compulsion","def":"Recreating a painful early situation again and again in new relationships, instead of remembering it."},{"name":"Intellectualisation","id":"intellectualisation","def":"A defence that swaps feeling for thinking. Fluent analysis leaves the feeling and the behaviour unchanged."}],"takeaways":["The patterns you are surest you don't have are the first place to look.","A feeling foreign to you that appears with one person is likely about them. A familiar feeling with many people is likely about you.","If the story keeps ending the same way with different people, the common factor is you.","In conversation, describe behaviour and keep labels for your own thinking. Redo any judgement you made while angry, hurt or infatuated.","Next steps: use the Situations page when something happens in front of you, and follow the Library study path to go deeper."],"quiz":[{"q":"You feel an unusual urge to rescue a new colleague. You rarely feel this way, and you feel nothing like it with anyone else on the team. What is the best first hypothesis?","options":["It is your own transference","It is information about the colleague, possibly projective identification","It is your shadow","It is your attachment strategy"],"answer":1,"why":"A feeling that is foreign to you and appears with only one person is probably information about them. Transference is the nearest look-alike, but it shows up as a familiar feeling across many people."},{"q":"Three business partnerships in a row have ended with you feeling betrayed and walking out. What does this chapter suggest you do first?","options":["Look for a pattern of your own, such as a life script or repetition compulsion","Screen future partners harder for the trait they shared","Treat each ending as having its own separate cause","Check whether you were too angry to think clearly each time"],"answer":0,"why":"When the same ending recurs with different people, the common factor is you. Screening partners feels sensible, but it assumes the cause lies only in them and leaves your part of the repeat untouched."},{"q":"After a heated call, you decide your co-founder is 'clearly narcissistic' and plan to say so at tomorrow's meeting. What does this chapter advise?","options":["Say it, since naming the pattern helps","Read more about narcissism first, then say it","Treat the judgement as a draft, revisit it tomorrow, and describe behaviour instead of using the label","Ask a third person to confirm the label before you raise it"],"answer":2,"why":"A judgement made while flooded is a draft, and a label used mid-conflict ends the inquiry and starts a fight. Reading more feels responsible, but it still ends in a label instead of a description of behaviour."}],"practice":"Pick one interaction this week that stayed with you. Write what happened, what you felt, three explanations for the other person's behaviour and three for your own. Name one test that would tell them apart. Then open the Situations page, find the behaviour you saw, and compare its patterns with your list."}}],"deeper":[{"id":"schema-therapy","terms":["early-maladaptive-schemas","abandonment-schema","mistrust-abuse-schema","emotional-deprivation-schema","defectiveness-schema","social-isolation-schema","dependence-schema","vulnerability-schema","enmeshment-schema","failure-schema","entitlement-schema","insufficient-self-control-schema","subjugation-schema","self-sacrifice-schema","approval-seeking-schema","negativity-schema","emotional-inhibition-schema","unrelenting-standards-schema","punitiveness-schema"],"intro":"One book, one talk and one study. Each opens on another site.","items":[{"kind":"Read","title":"Reinventing Your Life","by":"Jeffrey Young and Janet Klosko, 1993","url":"https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780452272040","why":"Written for readers, not clinicians, with one chapter for each of the eleven lifetraps.","only":["early-maladaptive-schemas","abandonment-schema","mistrust-abuse-schema","vulnerability-schema","dependence-schema","emotional-deprivation-schema","social-isolation-schema","defectiveness-schema","failure-schema","subjugation-schema","unrelenting-standards-schema","entitlement-schema"],"chapter":{"abandonment-schema":"Abandonment","mistrust-abuse-schema":"Mistrust and abuse","vulnerability-schema":"Vulnerability","dependence-schema":"Dependence","emotional-deprivation-schema":"Emotional deprivation","social-isolation-schema":"Social exclusion","defectiveness-schema":"Defectiveness","failure-schema":"Failure","subjugation-schema":"Subjugation","unrelenting-standards-schema":"Unrelenting standards","entitlement-schema":"Entitlement"}},{"kind":"Read","title":"Schema Therapy: A Practitioner’s Guide","by":"Jeffrey Young, Janet Klosko and Marjorie Weishaar, 2003","url":"https://www.guilford.com/books/Schema-Therapy/Young-Klosko-Weishaar/9781593853723","why":"The clinicians’ book, and the one that covers all eighteen schemas, including the seven the popular book leaves out.","only":["enmeshment-schema","insufficient-self-control-schema","self-sacrifice-schema","approval-seeking-schema","negativity-schema","emotional-inhibition-schema","punitiveness-schema"]},{"kind":"Listen","title":"Jeff Young interview, part 1","by":"Schema Therapy Training Online podcast, episode 12, 2021","url":"https://wp.schematherapytrainingonline.com/?p=77","why":"The model’s originator on how it began, on schemas and modes, and on where it is going. Free to play, no sign-up."},{"kind":"Study","title":"The higher-order structure of early maladaptive schemas","by":"Jan Thimm, Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2022","url":"https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychiatry/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2022.1053927/full","why":"Pools 27 studies and nearly 14,000 people. The five domains drawn on this site got weak support. Four groups fit better, and the author says the question is still open."}]},{"id":"jung","terms":["complex","shadow","persona","anima-animus","individuation","archetypes","inflation","puer-aeternus","jung-introversion","cognitive-functions"],"intro":"A book and a video. Jung’s ideas have little controlled research behind them, so this set has no study.","items":[{"kind":"Read","title":"Man and His Symbols","by":"Carl Jung and colleagues, 1964","url":"https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/89056/man-and-his-symbols-by-carl-g-jung/","why":"The one book Jung planned for general readers, finished by his colleagues after his death."},{"kind":"Watch","title":"When Someone Lives Too Much in Your Mind","by":"Jung at Night, YouTube","url":"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I-BSaA4u9Q","why":"A narrated take on why one person can take up so much room in our thoughts, in Jung’s terms. We haven’t checked its quotes against Jung’s own writing."}]},{"id":"money","terms":["money-scripts","money-avoidance","money-worship","money-status","money-vigilance","money-shame","money-conflict","financial-infidelity","financial-enabling","financial-enmeshment","financial-dependence"],"intro":"One book, one talk and one study. Each opens on another site.","items":[{"kind":"Read","title":"Mind over Money","by":"Brad Klontz and Ted Klontz, 2009","url":"https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/93802/mind-over-money-by-brad-klontz-psyd-and-ted-klontz-phd/","why":"Written for readers by a father and son who work in financial psychology. It sets out the money scripts and the money disorders they lead to, among them money avoidance, financial infidelity, enabling and dependence.","only":["money-scripts","money-avoidance","money-worship","money-status","money-shame","money-conflict","financial-infidelity","financial-enabling","financial-enmeshment","financial-dependence"]},{"kind":"Listen","title":"The Money Scripts That Are Holding Back Your Financial Future","by":"The Art of Manliness podcast, episode 529, 2019","url":"https://www.artofmanliness.com/finance/money/podcast-529-the-money-scripts-that-are-holding-back-your-financial-future/","why":"Brad Klontz on how money scripts form in childhood, on money avoidance and money worship, on the pull back to the class you grew up in, and on secrecy, enabling and dependence in families. Free to play, with a full transcript.","only":["money-scripts","money-avoidance","money-worship","money-status","money-shame","money-conflict","financial-infidelity","financial-enabling","financial-dependence"]},{"kind":"Study","title":"Money Beliefs and Financial Behaviors: Development of the Klontz Money Script Inventory","by":"Bradley Klontz, Sonya Britt, Jennifer Mentzer and Ted Klontz, Journal of Financial Therapy, 2011","url":"https://journals.newprairiepress.org/jft/article/id/5669/","why":"The paper behind the four money scripts. 422 people answered an online survey on 72 beliefs. Avoidance, worship and status went with lower income or net worth. The sample was mostly white, married and highly educated, and the authors say it can’t show which came first. Free to read.","only":["money-scripts","money-avoidance","money-worship","money-status","money-vigilance"]}]}],"lineage":{"schools":[{"id":"roots","name":"Before Freud"},{"id":"psychoanalysis","name":"Psychoanalysis"},{"id":"jung","name":"Jung"},{"id":"types","name":"Types and traits"},{"id":"development","name":"Development and attachment"},{"id":"humanistic","name":"Humanistic and transactional"},{"id":"cognitive","name":"Cognitive therapies"},{"id":"family","name":"Families and couples"},{"id":"fourth-way","name":"Fourth Way and Enneagram"}],"people":[{"id":"hippocrates","name":"Hippocratic writers and Galen","years":"c. 400 BCE to c. 200 CE","school":"roots","at":-400,"note":"The four humours, and the four temperaments built on them.","work":"On the Nature of Man, c. 400 BCE","terms":["four-temperaments"]},{"id":"epictetus","name":"Epictetus","years":"c. 50–135","school":"roots","at":108,"note":"Stoic teacher: what troubles us is our view of things.","work":"Enchiridion, c. 125","terms":[]},{"id":"la-rochefoucauld","name":"François de La Rochefoucauld","years":"1613–1680","school":"roots","at":1665,"note":"Saw vanity at work behind the virtues.","work":"Maxims, 1665","terms":["amour-propre"]},{"id":"kierkegaard","name":"Søren Kierkegaard","years":"1813–1855","school":"roots","at":1844,"note":"Anxiety as the dizziness of freedom, and despair.","work":"The Concept of Anxiety, 1844","terms":["dizziness-of-freedom","kierkegaard-despair"]},{"id":"darwin","name":"Charles Darwin","years":"1809–1882","school":"roots","at":1872,"note":"Emotions as shared, inherited expressions.","work":"The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 1872","terms":["basic-emotions"]},{"id":"charcot","name":"Jean-Martin Charcot","years":"1825–1893","school":"roots","at":1878,"note":"Studied hysteria at the Salpêtrière in Paris.","work":"Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System, 1877","terms":[]},{"id":"nietzsche","name":"Friedrich Nietzsche","years":"1844–1900","school":"roots","at":1886,"note":"Ressentiment, slave morality and the will to power.","work":"On the Genealogy of Morality, 1887","terms":["ressentiment","will-to-power","slave-morality","resentment"]},{"id":"janet","name":"Pierre Janet","years":"1859–1947","school":"roots","at":1889,"note":"Dissociation and trauma.","work":"Psychological Automatism, 1889","terms":["dissociation","trauma"]},{"id":"william-james","name":"William James","years":"1842–1910","school":"roots","at":1890,"note":"The self, habit and self-esteem.","work":"The Principles of Psychology, 1890","terms":["self-esteem"]},{"id":"breuer","name":"Josef Breuer","years":"1842–1925","school":"roots","at":1895,"note":"The talking cure, with his patient Anna O.","work":"Studies on Hysteria (with Freud), 1895","terms":["repression"]},{"id":"gurdjieff","name":"G. I. Gurdjieff","years":"1866?–1949","school":"fourth-way","at":1915,"note":"Taught the nine-pointed figure as a symbol of process, and the chief feature.","terms":["enneagram"],"work":"Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, 1950"},{"id":"ouspensky","name":"P. D. Ouspensky","years":"1878–1947","school":"fourth-way","at":1947,"note":"Wrote down Gurdjieff’s teaching in In Search of the Miraculous.","terms":[],"work":"In Search of the Miraculous, 1949"},{"id":"ichazo","name":"Oscar Ichazo","years":"1931–2020","school":"fourth-way","at":1968,"note":"Joined nine personality types to Gurdjieff’s figure.","terms":["enneagram-1","enneagram-2","enneagram-3","enneagram-4","enneagram-5","enneagram-6","enneagram-7","enneagram-8","enneagram-9","enneagram-instincts"],"work":"Founded the Arica School, 1968"},{"id":"naranjo","name":"Claudio Naranjo","years":"1932–2019","school":"fourth-way","at":1972,"note":"Brought the types into psychology as character portraits.","terms":[],"work":"Character and Neurosis, 1994"},{"id":"myers-briggs","name":"Isabel Briggs Myers","years":"1897–1980","school":"types","at":1943,"note":"With her mother, Katharine Briggs, built the MBTI from Jung’s types.","terms":["mbti"],"work":"Gifts Differing, 1980"},{"id":"eysenck","name":"Hans Eysenck","years":"1916–1997","school":"types","at":1947,"note":"Measured introversion, extraversion and neuroticism as traits.","terms":["neuroticism","extraversion"],"work":"Dimensions of Personality, 1947"},{"id":"costa-mccrae","name":"Paul Costa and Robert McCrae","years":"1980s","school":"types","at":1985,"note":"Built the NEO questionnaires that made the Big Five standard.","terms":["big-five","openness","conscientiousness","agreeableness"],"work":"NEO Personality Inventory, 1985"},{"id":"ashton-lee","name":"Michael Ashton and Kibeom Lee","years":"2000s","school":"types","at":2004,"note":"Added honesty-humility as a sixth factor: HEXACO.","terms":["hexaco","honesty-humility"],"work":"The H Factor of Personality, 2012"},{"id":"jung","name":"Carl Jung","years":"1875–1961","school":"jung","at":1913,"note":"Analytical psychology: complexes, archetypes, the shadow, psychological types.","terms":["shadow","persona","anima-animus","individuation","complex","inflation","archetypes","cognitive-functions","jung-introversion"],"work":"Psychological Types, 1921"},{"id":"freud","name":"Sigmund Freud","years":"1856–1939","school":"psychoanalysis","at":1900,"note":"Founded psychoanalysis: the unconscious, defences, transference.","terms":["unconscious","id-ego-superego","defence-mechanisms","repression","transference","repetition-compulsion","healthy-narcissism","narcissistic-injury","entitlement","narcissistic-personality-disorder","obsessive-compulsive-personality","masochistic-character","depressive-character","projection","idealisation","acting-out","displacement","reaction-formation","isolation-of-affect","undoing","regression","turning-against-self","sublimation","humour-defence","suppression","harsh-superego","ego-ideal","countertransference","oedipal-dynamics","secondary-gain","resistance","fear-vs-anxiety","generalised-anxiety"],"work":"The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900"},{"id":"adler","name":"Alfred Adler","years":"1870–1937","school":"psychoanalysis","at":1912,"note":"Individual psychology: inferiority, striving, social interest.","terms":["inferiority-complex","striving-for-superiority","social-interest"],"work":"The Neurotic Constitution, 1912"},{"id":"klein","name":"Melanie Klein","years":"1882–1960","school":"psychoanalysis","at":1932,"note":"Object relations: splitting, envy, projective identification.","terms":["hypomanic-character","projective-identification","devaluation","omnipotent-control","manic-defence","object-relations","paranoid-schizoid-depressive","envy","panic"],"work":"The Psycho-Analysis of Children, 1932"},{"id":"anna-freud","name":"Anna Freud","years":"1895–1982","school":"psychoanalysis","at":1936,"note":"Set out the defences in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence.","terms":["intellectualisation","altruism-defence"],"work":"The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, 1936"},{"id":"horney","name":"Karen Horney","years":"1885–1952","school":"psychoanalysis","at":1945,"note":"Moving toward, against and away from people, and the tyranny of the shoulds.","terms":["should-statements","horney-trends"],"work":"Our Inner Conflicts, 1945"},{"id":"winnicott","name":"Donald Winnicott","years":"1896–1971","school":"psychoanalysis","at":1960,"note":"The good-enough parent and the false self.","terms":["good-enough-parenting","false-self"],"work":"Playing and Reality, 1971"},{"id":"bion","name":"Wilfred Bion","years":"1897–1979","school":"psychoanalysis","at":1961,"note":"Containment, and the hidden assumptions of groups.","terms":["containment","basic-assumption-groups"],"work":"Experiences in Groups, 1961"},{"id":"riemann","name":"Fritz Riemann","years":"1902–1979","school":"psychoanalysis","at":1961,"note":"Four basic forms of anxiety.","terms":["riemann-anxieties"],"work":"Grundformen der Angst, 1961"},{"id":"kohut","name":"Heinz Kohut","years":"1913–1981","school":"psychoanalysis","at":1971,"note":"Self psychology: mirroring, idealising, narcissistic rage.","terms":["grandiose-narcissism","narcissistic-rage","selfobject-needs"],"work":"The Analysis of the Self, 1971"},{"id":"kernberg","name":"Otto Kernberg","years":"b. 1928","school":"psychoanalysis","at":1975,"note":"Levels of personality organisation, and the structure of borderline and narcissistic personalities.","terms":["personality-organisation","grandiose-narcissism"],"work":"Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism, 1975"},{"id":"maslow","name":"Abraham Maslow","years":"1908–1970","school":"humanistic","at":1943,"note":"The hierarchy of needs and self-actualisation.","terms":["maslows-hierarchy"],"work":"A Theory of Human Motivation, 1943"},{"id":"rogers","name":"Carl Rogers","years":"1902–1987","school":"humanistic","at":1959,"note":"Conditions of worth and the person-centred view.","terms":["conditions-of-worth","incongruence"],"work":"On Becoming a Person, 1961"},{"id":"berne","name":"Eric Berne","years":"1910–1970","school":"humanistic","at":1964,"note":"Transactional analysis: ego states, games, scripts.","terms":["ego-states","psychological-games","life-script"],"work":"Games People Play, 1964"},{"id":"karpman","name":"Stephen Karpman","years":"b. 1942","school":"humanistic","at":1968,"note":"The drama triangle.","terms":["drama-triangle"],"work":"Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis, 1968"},{"id":"piaget","name":"Jean Piaget","years":"1896–1980","school":"development","at":1936,"note":"Stages of how children come to think.","terms":["piagets-stages"],"work":"The Origins of Intelligence in Children, 1936"},{"id":"erikson","name":"Erik Erikson","years":"1902–1994","school":"development","at":1950,"note":"Eight stages of a life, and the identity crisis.","terms":["eriksons-stages"],"work":"Childhood and Society, 1950"},{"id":"marcia","name":"James Marcia","years":"b. 1937","school":"development","at":1966,"note":"Four identity statuses, from Erikson’s identity stage.","terms":["identity-diffusion","identity-foreclosure","identity-moratorium","identity-achievement"],"work":"Ego-identity status, 1966"},{"id":"bowlby","name":"John Bowlby","years":"1907–1990","school":"development","at":1969,"note":"Attachment theory and internal working models.","terms":["attachment-theory","internal-working-model","protest-behaviour","devaluation-of-need"],"work":"Attachment, 1969"},{"id":"ainsworth","name":"Mary Ainsworth","years":"1913–1999","school":"development","at":1978,"note":"The Strange Situation and the first attachment styles.","terms":["secure-attachment","anxious-attachment","avoidant-attachment"],"work":"Patterns of Attachment, 1978"},{"id":"kegan","name":"Robert Kegan","years":"b. 1946","school":"development","at":1982,"note":"Orders of mind across adult life.","terms":["subject-object-shift","socialised-mind","self-authoring-mind","self-transforming-mind"],"work":"The Evolving Self, 1982"},{"id":"main","name":"Mary Main","years":"1943–2023","school":"development","at":1986,"note":"Disorganised attachment and the Adult Attachment Interview.","terms":["disorganised-attachment","earned-security","hyperactivating-strategies","deactivating-strategies"],"work":"The Adult Attachment Interview, 1985"},{"id":"beck","name":"Aaron Beck","years":"1921–2021","school":"cognitive","at":1967,"note":"Cognitive therapy: automatic thoughts and distortions.","terms":["cognitive-distortions","all-or-nothing-thinking","mind-reading","personalisation","overgeneralisation","emotional-reasoning","mental-filter"],"work":"Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders, 1976"},{"id":"burns","name":"David Burns","years":"b. 1942","school":"cognitive","at":1980,"note":"Feeling Good and the popular list of ten distortions.","terms":["emotional-reasoning","labelling","discounting-the-positive"],"work":"Feeling Good, 1980"},{"id":"young","name":"Jeffrey Young","years":"b. 1950","school":"cognitive","at":1990,"note":"Schema therapy: early maladaptive schemas and modes.","terms":["early-maladaptive-schemas","abandonment-schema","mistrust-abuse-schema","emotional-deprivation-schema","defectiveness-schema","social-isolation-schema","dependence-schema","vulnerability-schema","enmeshment-schema","failure-schema","entitlement-schema","insufficient-self-control-schema","subjugation-schema","self-sacrifice-schema","approval-seeking-schema","negativity-schema","emotional-inhibition-schema","unrelenting-standards-schema","punitiveness-schema","schema-modes"],"work":"Reinventing Your Life, 1993"},{"id":"linehan","name":"Marsha Linehan","years":"b. 1943","school":"cognitive","at":1993,"note":"Dialectical behaviour therapy, invalidation and emotional dysregulation.","terms":["invalidation","emotional-dysregulation"],"work":"Cognitive-Behavioral Treatment of Borderline Personality Disorder, 1993"},{"id":"bowen","name":"Murray Bowen","years":"1913–1990","school":"family","at":1966,"note":"Family systems: differentiation, triangles, cutoff.","terms":["differentiation-of-self","emotional-cutoff","pursuer-distancer","triangulation","over-under-functioning","fusion-vs-intimacy"],"work":"Family Therapy in Clinical Practice, 1978"},{"id":"minuchin","name":"Salvador Minuchin","years":"1921–2017","school":"family","at":1974,"note":"Structural family therapy: boundaries and enmeshment.","terms":["enmeshment","boundaries"],"work":"Families and Family Therapy, 1974"},{"id":"gottman","name":"John Gottman","years":"b. 1942","school":"family","at":1994,"note":"Couples research: the four horsemen, bids and repair.","terms":["emotional-flooding","four-horsemen","stonewalling","bids-for-connection","repair-attempts"],"work":"The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, 1999"}],"links":[{"from":"freud","to":"jung","kind":"direct","note":"Worked closely with Freud from 1907 and broke with him in 1913."},{"from":"freud","to":"adler","kind":"direct","note":"A member of Freud’s circle from 1902 until he left in 1911."},{"from":"freud","to":"anna-freud","kind":"direct","note":"His daughter, trained in psychoanalysis by him."},{"from":"anna-freud","to":"erikson","kind":"direct","note":"Analysed by Anna Freud and trained in Vienna."},{"from":"erikson","to":"berne","kind":"direct","note":"Berne studied under Erikson from 1947 to 1949."},{"from":"berne","to":"karpman","kind":"direct","note":"Karpman did postgraduate study under Berne, who urged him to publish the triangle."},{"from":"klein","to":"winnicott","kind":"direct","note":"Klein supervised him in the 1930s, and he later went his own way."},{"from":"klein","to":"bowlby","kind":"direct","note":"Klein supervised his training. He turned from her focus on fantasy to what really happened to children."},{"from":"klein","to":"bion","kind":"direct","note":"Analysed by Klein after the Second World War."},{"from":"bowlby","to":"ainsworth","kind":"direct","note":"Joined Bowlby’s research unit in London, then tested his ideas."},{"from":"ainsworth","to":"main","kind":"direct","note":"One of Ainsworth’s first doctoral students."},{"from":"adler","to":"maslow","kind":"direct","note":"Adler was one of his mentors in New York."},{"from":"beck","to":"burns","kind":"direct","note":"An early student of Beck’s."},{"from":"beck","to":"young","kind":"direct","note":"Postdoctoral study with Beck."},{"from":"gurdjieff","to":"ouspensky","kind":"direct","note":"Studied with Gurdjieff from 1915."},{"from":"ichazo","to":"naranjo","kind":"direct","note":"Studied with Ichazo in Chile in 1970."},{"from":"gurdjieff","to":"ichazo","kind":"built","note":"Took Gurdjieff’s figure and attached personality types to it."},{"from":"jung","to":"myers-briggs","kind":"built","note":"Built the MBTI on Jung’s Psychological Types."},{"from":"jung","to":"eysenck","kind":"built","note":"Took Jung’s introversion and extraversion and measured them as a trait."},{"from":"eysenck","to":"costa-mccrae","kind":"built","note":"Their questionnaires began from Eysenck’s neuroticism and extraversion."},{"from":"costa-mccrae","to":"ashton-lee","kind":"built","note":"HEXACO adds a sixth factor to the Big Five."},{"from":"freud","to":"klein","kind":"built","note":"Trained by two of Freud’s circle, Ferenczi and Abraham, then went further than Freud."},{"from":"freud","to":"horney","kind":"built","note":"Trained in Freud’s method in Berlin, then challenged his view of women and culture."},{"from":"freud","to":"kohut","kind":"built","note":"Trained as a Freudian analyst, then built self psychology."},{"from":"klein","to":"kernberg","kind":"built","note":"Built on Klein’s object relations."},{"from":"freud","to":"riemann","kind":"built","note":"A German analyst working in Freud’s tradition."},{"from":"freud","to":"beck","kind":"built","note":"Trained as a psychoanalyst, tested its ideas on depression, and left them for cognitive therapy."},{"from":"piaget","to":"kegan","kind":"built","note":"Built his orders of mind on Piaget’s stages."},{"from":"erikson","to":"marcia","kind":"built","note":"Turned Erikson’s identity stage into four statuses that could be measured."},{"from":"beck","to":"linehan","kind":"built","note":"DBT began as cognitive behaviour therapy, adapted with acceptance and Zen practice."},{"from":"jung","to":"young","kind":"parallel","note":"Jung’s complex and Young’s schema describe something alike: a charged pattern from early life that takes over. No line of teaching joins them."},{"from":"charcot","to":"freud","kind":"direct","note":"Freud studied with Charcot in Paris in 1885 and 1886."},{"from":"charcot","to":"janet","kind":"direct","note":"Janet studied under Charcot at the Salpêtrière."},{"from":"breuer","to":"freud","kind":"direct","note":"Worked with Freud on the case of Anna O. and wrote Studies on Hysteria with him."},{"from":"janet","to":"jung","kind":"direct","note":"Jung studied with Janet in Paris in 1902."},{"from":"epictetus","to":"beck","kind":"built","note":"Beck traced cognitive therapy’s philosophical origins to the Stoics."},{"from":"hippocrates","to":"eysenck","kind":"built","note":"Eysenck set the four temperaments on his two dimensions, neuroticism and extraversion."},{"from":"nietzsche","to":"adler","kind":"parallel","note":"Adler’s striving for superiority is often compared with Nietzsche’s will to power."}]}}