Customer Reviews

Search For The Real Self : Unmasking The Personality Disorders Of Our Age

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is the book that Dr. Drew on "LoveLine" recommends to his listeners.

This book will help you understand your behaviours in relationships and the driving force behind your behaviours. Primarily it deals with narcissism disorder, borderline peronality disorder, fear intimacy, abandonment depression and separation anxiety and how these underlying disorders manifests itself in your relationships. He describes the theories which explain the behaviour and then describes real life cases of people with these disorders and how they conduct themselves in relationships. After reading this, you will better understand your defenses that help the false self prevail over the real self and how to develop the real self so that you can express yourself genuinely in your life. You will also know how to recognize these behaviours in others and know which people to watch out for and know when you are engaging in descructive relationships. It really gives you some insight into yourself and others' actions. This is a great book for anyone looking to engage in some self therapy and discovering oneself. I highly recommend it.

After reading this book and picking it up to read passages over again I found it very close to heart. It made me understand why I may not be leading a fulfilling life, why I date a certain type of woman, and why I fail at relationships. Whether its truly "the answer" to all negative and self-defeating behavior I don't know. But it certainly makes one pause.

Masterson is extremely insightful about two common, and until recently considered untreatable, personality disorders: borderline spectrum and narcissism. He helps the reader to understand the etiology of these disorders and how both involve the creation of a false self. What I liked most about this book is that he doesn't treat people with these disorders as if they're an alien species ("crazy people"), while the rest of us are "normal". We all have a little borderline or narcissism in us. This is a compassionate and intelligent book.

I have read a good deal of Winnicott and Bollas writing about the true self, and it has been enlightening and informative, yet somewhat nebulous. Without realizing it, this probably relates to the fact that coherent theories of the Self are sketchy and incomplete. Masterson masterfully reviews these theories, the confusion between ego and self and "I", then offers a very clear conceptualization of the self, with focus on the Real Self. Far apart from the romantic or mystical connotations one might have, Masterson addresses the components and development of the Real Self, he defines it as such to highlight the role of the Real Self in dealing with reality, and describes a therapeutic technique - and the crucial timing of its use - as a means of supporting self-initiation, especially with borderline and narcissistic personalities. This is a must read for professionals working from a psychodynamic and/or object relations framework. It should have some value for the lay person, although it is not designed as such. A beneficial surprise is Masterson's look at the real self in relationship to creativity - creativity in living and artisitic creativity, as well as a brief review of the fate of the Real Self in different cultures.

I agree with the reviewer who said that this book is best taken metaphorically rather than at face value, but my personal qualms with the book are slightly different...

Contemporary scholarship and a bit of prudence would, I hope, lead one to question the existence of a unitary "self" and therefore take the book's theorizations with a grain of salt. But I think that in this case the author has been careful to separate the subjective notion of "self" (ie. the continuity of consciousness most of us actively perpetuates) from any claim that this self is in fact singular and unitary in practice. In fact, Masterson writes first and foremost (though only briefly) of the multiplicity of self-representation, only further postulating that these representations are ultimately regulated at the level of subjective experience by a supraordinate "self" acting as arbiter. This arguably allows his theory to coexist with more contemporary notions of "multiple" or "fragmented" selves, so I think that the concepts themselves can be of use even to one with a somewhat more postmodern bent, rather than requiring rejection out-of-hand.

I think that interpreting Masterson's analytical construct of "the real self" from a psychosocial standpoint, rather than an intrapsychic one as per the author's intent, by asserting an altogether different definition of the word "self" loses much of what is being got at; it sidesteps Masterson's own choice of focus, which he has rather carefully defined in the introductory chapters. Whether his rationale for coming to this definition was sound is a matter in itself (and this is where my own qualms lie), but if one is to grapple with Masterson's ideas I believe that one does best meet him on his own conceptual grounds rather than at a simplified level of semantics.

That being said, I do have considerable qualms with certain aspects of Masterson's thinking, some of which I share with the other reviewer. I think that by idealizing the maturation of a singular "real" self as pitted against all other (presumably pathological) "false" selves, and failing to take into account the practical effects of environment and culture in the construction of "ideal" functionality, Masterson's theory remains incomplete at best and direly problematic at worst. Plenty of writers (eg. Goffman, Sartre, Doi) have explored the problems encountered when one seeks to unify necessarily disparate social-role "selves" into a congruent whole; there is little evidence that this "unity" is either a universal necessity or a universal mechanism, and I think that its unquestioned assertion in therapy may potentially create more problems than it may solve.

I really sympathize with the poor bloke whose mind was fried by reading this thing; it wreaks utterly of the deterministic, pathologizing mindset so common amongst psychoanalysts. Masterson's reductionism also has a way of pulling all sorts of common daily psychological phenomenon under an enormous umbrella of personality malfunction, ever construed to be congruent with his essentializing structures. Moreover, like many psychoanalysts, Masterson possesses a deep streak of paternal idealism, with a consequent tendency to pathologize the otherwise functionally sound. The structure of his text is thus soaked to the core with the value judgments and prognoses of a particular brand of psychoanalysis, which -- as another reviewer pointed out -- rest on rather questionable foundations.

I think that many of the structures and mechanisms discussed in the book do seem intuitively sound, and while this judgment alone may not be enough to fully justify their active employment in diagnosis and treatment, there's still much to be had here for the interested reader. As food for thought, and as fodder for further synthesis with a discourse less preoccupied with maintaining its own essentialized notions, it can serve to raise some interesting themes. From the standpoint of postmodern discourse, for example, Masterson's emphasis on the "real self" functions as a nice, clearly defined conceptual counterpoint to more generally accepted alternatives.

By the way, if this review seemed helpful, I recommend "The Real Self: A Developmental, Self, and Object-Relations Approach," over this book, as it does a much better job of underlining the more technical aspects of Masterson's thinking. This book is geared much more towards mainstream readership, a purpose for which, incidentally, I can honestly recommend neither.

One last thing (and I should have probably said this earlier): If you've just been diagnosed with BPD, and are looking for further reading on the subject, avoid this book. Some others have recommended this book for its therapeutic value, but it has distinct way of tracing everyday actions back to pathological causes that can drive you batty if you identify too strongly with the case studies. Proceed with caution.

The Search for the Real Self straddles between serious analysis and pop psychology. It provides numerous examples of so-called borderline personalities, people whose real selves lie submerged under a surface of behavior designed to produce the least anxiety and to avoid conflicts lurking underneath.

The book targets underachievers and overachievers, those unable to form stable relationships for reasons not apparent to them, and people reacting to underlying fears of abandonment or engulfment. Author James Masterson traces the narrow, frustrated lives of these people to their childhood years and picks apart the reason for their apparent inability to grow up emotionally or feel like adults in a world where it seems everyone else does just fine.

Masterson carries the reader through the formation, experience and playing out of various defensive strategies people use to avoid what he calls their real selves, but his therapy seems to take years and fortunes, and it's unclear how much benefit patients actually get from the therapy. He acknowledges the power of creativity to free an individual but relegates the impact of religion and spirituality to pathology.

It's not a bad book, but the author's style lapses into over-analytical language that will put off a non-professional reader and perhaps not impressing a professional who may find the book too simplistic overall. It also will not appeal to those at odds with Freud's theories.

Worsening matters is that the detached and cool therapeutic approach necessary for Masterson's practice carries over to his writing style, making the doctor appear unfeeling and bloodless.

It's not that there's anything particularly wrong with the book, but it leaves an empty feeling in the reader and makes one wonder if analyzing various personality types really leads to changed behavior, or whether the hard work of reevaluating one's life is aided by such analysis.

If you take this book on its own terms, as saying something literally true about borderline and similar personalities, you should reject it-I'll say why in a moment. But in fact, this is probably the most helpful intellectually serious book about personality disorders written for the lay reader, and it offers a world of wisdom-if you take it correctly.

Taken literally, this book has three major flaws: (1) Its notion of the "real" self is based on antiquated notions, altogether innocent of any awareness that everyone has many "selves," and that set of selves is always in large part constructed by history and culture. Further, "selves" are in part functions of social situations, not internal organization. The idea of a unified "real" self makes no intellectual sense, relative to research of the last half century. (2) The old-fashioned psychoanalytic theory grounding this book has little or nothing to commend it, so far as real research goes. While Freud, Winnicott, Mahler, etc., were geniuses, and as probably right about as often as wrong, we don't really know which parts of psychoanalysis are and which nonsense. But we do know, beyond peradventure, that research has refuted or failed to confirm most psychoanalytic developmental theories. (3) Everyone outside of New York and a few other very conservative medical communities has recognized that Masterson's type of therapy just doesn't work. He is brilliant at delineating ways of thinking about personality disorders, but unoriginal and unhelpful therapeutically.

All that being said, this book can still be extremely helpful. Ideas do not have to be true to "work." The way to appreciate this book is to think of it as a complex system of metaphors-not literally true, but useful tools for looking at a perplexing set of phenomena.

Careful observation can lead to useful ways of thinking, even if the terms in which those observations are couched are just not adequate for an accurate science. The terms used for the observations give us useful tools to hold onto what we've observed until we really understand it. The Ptolemaic astronomers, for instace, or the pre-evolutionary nineteenth century taxonomists illustrate this oft-repeated fact of intellectual history.

Without such observations, and such ultimately inadequate terms, we would never know enough to get to, eventually, correct understanding. We always have to start somewhere, and collecting data with whatever terms we can come up with is the place we have to start. Again, the preevolutionary naturalists--a huge number of whom were Christian ministers--held beliefs about the nature of species and the organization of nature that are quite false. By pursuing their observations in support of these false theories, they collected the data that allowed better understanding to emerge.

Instead of "real self," think, for instance, "habits of living that encompass one's biological make up and social milieu." The issue isn't that the BPD has a "false" self, or that some "real self" lies underneath. Poor design, not falsity, is the problem. The BPD's habits of living fail to encompass and give form to what's integral to his or her biology, temperament, or talents, within the environmnt in which he or she lives.

Any number of "selves" are possible, given a person's actual make-up, and they may bear litle resemblance to each other. For the BPD, new habits of living must be developed; a new set of selves must be cultivated--but actively, not by uncovering something already there.

And don't think of the stuff about early family life as literally, causally true. No research supports that contention; quite the contrary. Seven decades of serious research have failed to uncover correlations between early childhood and adult life.

But Masterson has correctly observed SOMETHING, even if hs causal account is wrong. Think of this stuff as a set of metaphors for how the BPD experiences relationships now, in the present. However those ways of organizing one's experience got started, this set of metaphors gives you a way of glimpsing the very strange, agonizing world that the BPD occupies.

In my experience, BPDs can improve more drastically and quickly than Masterson knows-but not using his therapy methods. Trapped in the authority-ridden, conservative milieu of New York psychoanalysis, Masterson would never have had the freedom-if he ever even had the inclination-to think about non-analytic ways of treating BPD.

This is a helpful book, but not to be taken literally. It provides a set of metaphors that can shed some light, if you'll let them. Read it, but also read Santoro and Cohen's "The Angry Heart," which is a much better, more current, more effective guide to getting over BPD.

This is an excellent book. It helped me to understand my BPD behavior much better, and also to understand how I got that way. I wish I had been diagnosed twenty years ago. I was misdiagnosed with depression, bipolar, panic, etc. Knowing that I did not really fit those categories, I stopped medication for several years. I coped by using nutrition and solitude. But as soon as I was around people, my behavior would come out again. That was the key that no doctor ever looked at: I'm only crazy when there is someone there. Someone to cling to, manipulate, and feel abandoned by or attacked by or criticized by. My illness is a lot like the three-year-old who stops their tantrum when there is no one listening or watching. Now, with a diagnosis and study, I can use medication, nutrition, and counseling to cope with this illness and deal with people much more calmly and sanely. Sorry, I have not said much about the book. Well, this is the book that explained the illness better than anything else I read on the topic.

This book is an excellent treatise on borderline and narcissistic personality disorders, from how the personality disorders are formed, to what might be done to help these people.

This is a largely anecdotal book that does cover the behaviors and perceived reasons that contribute to these disorders. It was easy to read by a layman like myself, but failed to address the specific question I had in mind. This is particularly frustrating because I spoke to Dr. Masterson on the phone about this problem (adolescent clinical narcissism) and was assured that it did. Everything else is very well covered except this one subject. It is an interesting book that gives insight while helping to understand practical solutions to dealing with a person who exhibits one of these disorders.