Cognitive Psychodynamics: From Conflict to Character
Abstract
Dr. Horowitz is one of the long-distance runners in psychiatric clinical research and practice. Since his early publications in the late 1960s on psychic trauma, he has continued to focus his work on the impact of trauma on development, on temperament and socially structured character, and on what he refers to as the individual's working models and enduring schema. In this book, as in some of his earlier summary statements, he attempts to broaden the application of his findings to understanding the impediments to "living well" the ability to experience "passion, resilience to challenges, and a reasoned, morally tenable maintenance of commitments" (p. ix)and to the ways in which we can help people out of the mess and morass of daily living caused by the continuing pressures of their past. Most investigators struggle to limit the number of variables they study. They search for "clean" samples, such as first episodes of depression in individuals without alcoholism or character disorder. The danger is that the results often do not apply to the real world, where almost all cases are complex and confusing. At its most successful, such research supplies us with bits of helpful information and with a simplified