Helene Deutsch - The "as-if" Personality

The "as-if" Personality

'Her best known clinical concept was that of the "asif" personality, a notion that allowed her to spotlight the origin of women's particular ability to identify with others'. Deutsch singled out schizoid personalities who 'seem normal enough because they have succeeded in substituting "pseudo contacts" of manifold kinds for a real feeling contact with other people; they behave "as if" they had feeling relations with other people...their ungenuine pseudo emotions'. More broadly, she considered that 'the "generally frigid" person who more or less avoids emotions altogether...may learn to hide their insufficiencies and to behave "as if" they had real feelings and contact with people'.

It has been suggested that it was 'Helene's tendency to love by identifying herself with the object, then experiencing that love as betrayed and running to the next object... she herself explored in her various studies on the "as if" personality'. Indeed, Lisa Appignanesi has written that 'her memoir sometimes fills one with the sense that she experienced her own existence to be an "as if" - living her life first "as if" a socialist in her identification with Lieberman; "as if" a conventional wife with Felix; "as if" a mother...then "as if" a psychoanalyst in the identification with Freud'.