Personality change through life experience. (I): A model.

This paper offers a model for understanding personality change through life experience. The elements that led to the change in the patients described include a defective self-representation and a motivation to achieve an ideal self-representation; a decision to test the self-representation through an action in real life; the felicitous presence of an important object who contributed to the consolidation of a new self-representation in the context of the test; and identification with this object. The contributions of Hartmann, Hendrick, and White offer a theoretical substrate for understanding such change. The special importance of crisis, the potential for the development of psychopathology under other circumstances, and the personality characteristics of patients amenable to change are discussed.