Psychotherapy as Personality Change

Written By: Dr. Yedidya Levy

The etymology of the word psychotherapy is derived from the Greek words psyche (ψυχή), meaning “soul,” and therapeia (θεραπεία), meaning “healing” or “treatment.” Psychotherapy therefore translates roughly to “treatment of the soul.” As with all forms of healing, the intervention purports to relieve suffering by changing that which ails the individual. In the case of psychotherapy, this change occurs to an immaterial aspect of the sufferer, namely, their experience of “self” or “other.” Many words today are used to describe the immaterial quality of human existence: mind, consciousness, spirit, and, of course, soul, among others. Personality is the most modern and common term for the object of change in psychotherapy. In other words, the therapist and client undertake the ambitious task of cultivating personality change.

Personality is generally defined as enduring patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving that distinguish individuals from one another. These patterns are believed to emerge from the interaction of many factors, including genetics, health, family, culture, history, and circumstance.

Personality is always, in whole or in part, a contributor to an individual's suffering. Unfortunately, it is increasingly common to meet practitioners who do not adequately consider what constitutes personality, how it is formed, and how it can change. For these practitioners, suffering can be understood primarily as the result of external circumstances. Psychotherapy is therefore reduced to an experience of pointing beyond the self and “blaming,” “griping,” and/or “complaining,” at best yielding no personality change and, at worst, reinforcing maladaptive personality characteristics.

Understanding the role of one's personality in their suffering is what makes psychotherapy a change-oriented exercise. This does not preclude identifying the contributions of others to the experience of personal pain, but these identifications are secondary to the process of examining the contributions of personal predispositions and behavioral patterns to the experience of suffering. Psychotherapy is not the adjudication of victim and perpetrator, but rather the cultivation of curiosity regarding the client's experience, attributions, and personality features that may maintain their attributional style.

For example, a client who was homeschooled reports having been locked in the home classroom for 10 hours a day from the ages of 6 to 12. They state this as a matter of fact without blaming their parents. Psychotherapy involves exploring how this experience informs the client's sense of self and, perhaps more importantly, being curious about the personality characteristics of the client that contribute to the neutrality with which they describe what otherwise sounds harrowing to have endured as a child.

Issues of personality can be categorized in all sorts of ways. Classic analytic theorists saw personality functioning as existing on a spectrum from neurotic to psychotic, reflecting variability in the extent to which a person's perception of reality aligned with external reality. The neurotic individual experiences emotional distress but generally remains in touch with reality, whereas the psychotic individual experiences substantial disturbances in their capacity to distinguish internal experience from external reality (Kernberg, 1984).

*Edited with ChatGPT

References

American Psychiatric Association. (2022). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed., text rev.; DSM-5-TR). American Psychiatric Association Publishing.

American Psychological Association. (2017). Clinical practice guideline for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in adults. https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline

American Psychological Association. (2023). Personality. In APA dictionary of psychology. https://dictionary.apa.org/personality

Kernberg, O. F. (1984). Severe personality disorders: Psychotherapeutic strategies. Yale University Press.