The Process of Constructing the Self and Its Relation to Psychotherapy

Others learn that an affective strategy (C1-2) of rapid arousal yields the most satisfactory outcome and, in the most felicitous of outcomes, infants learn to integrate both sorts of information to yield balanced cognitive-affective strategy (B1-4) of predictable temporal contingencies and accurately expressed feelings for managing interpersonal relationships. New self-protective strategies and new forms of representation in the preschool years. Using preoperational intuitive intelligence that reflects maturational change in brain structure occurring at the end of the second year of life, 2-5 year old children both communicate with language and construct new strategies. Early linguistic representations, including both semantic and episodic representations (Tulving, 1979), permit more elaborated representations of the relation of self to others and to the context. Semantic representations consist of verbalized forms of procedural knowledge. Episodes are verbally constructed integrations of a sequence of events, the external context, and the affective response of self in a particular instance; they are, in other words, sophisticated, event-specific cognitive-affective integrations. Both representations require cortical processing, yield additional dispositional representations, and permit more sophisticated organizations of behavioral response than infant strategies (Crittenden, 1995). The compelled strategies involve children’s taking the parents’ perspective and organizing their behavior to please the parent, either through compulsive caregiving (accompanied by false positive affect and inhibition of anger, fear, and desire for comfort) of withdrawn or neglectful parents (A3) or compulsive compliance (accompanied by inhibition of all affect except fear) with hostile and punitive caregivers (A4). The coercive strategy involves splitting the negative affective states of anger, fear, and desire for comfort so as to display only anger (C3/5) or only fear and desire for comfort (C2/4), exaggerating the display of one while inhibiting the display of the other, and alternating the displays, based upon the behavior of the caregiver. This creates an unresolvable struggle for dominance between parent and child. The Type C strategy becomes organized around the coercive use of distorted nonverbal, affective communication to influence others’ behavior.