Harvey Peskin

Influence of the developmental schedule of puberty on learning and ego functioning

Developmental schedules refer to temporal factors of pubertal processes as they might bear on ego development. The longitudinal research reviewed here from the 30-year archives of the Guidance Study of the Institute of Human Development pertains to the effects of varying lengths of the prepubertal and pubertal period on the short-term and enduring integration of drive states initiated at puberty. The personality correlates of varying lengths of these periods serve as vehicle for establishing properties of these stages as well as of the transition between them. The different ways the sexes respond to the early onset of puberty, as reported here, may provide an important microcosm for understanding normative sex differences in the general regulation of drive states.

Longitudinal Hierarchical Linear Modeling Analyses of California Psychological Inventory Data From Age 33 to 75: An Examination of Stability and Change in Adult Personality

Twenty aspects of personality assessed via the California Psychological Inventory (CPI; Gough & Bradley, 1996) from age 33 to 75 were examined in a sample of 279 individuals. Oakland Growth Study and Berkeley Guidance Study members completed the CPI a maximum of 4 times. We used longitudinal hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to ask the following: Which personality characteristics change and which do not? Five CPI scales showed uniform lack of change, 2 showed heterogeneous change giving an averaged lack of change, 4 showed linear increases with age, 2 showed linear decreases with age, 4 showed gender or sample differences in linear change, 1 showed a quadratic peak, and 2 showed a quadratic nadir. The utility of HLM becomes apparent in portraying the complexity of personality change and stability.

Uses of the Past in Adult Psychological Health

If being adult is being fully grown up, then adult development is something of an oxymoron. But not if we take it as we take adult entertainment: intended only for adults; not suitable for children. We begin with this bit of conceptual hyperbole to highlight the sense that development in adulthood marches to a different drama than in childhood. Nevertheless, just as there is obviously no well-developed child apart from a well-developing one, there is no well-developed adult. Such, essentially, was Jung’s (1933) complaint to Freud: not against the validity of libido theory itself, but with Freud’s failure to recognize that the second half of life (“the psychology of the afternoon,” Jung called it) had passed beyond the aims of psychosexuality to follow now utterly new directions and seize new terms of being, rather than to stay put, protecting the winnings of the first half (“the psychology of the morning”) from dwindling any further.

The second holocaust: Therapeutic rescue when life threatens

Abstract This paper, in its first part, describes a phenomenon termed the second Holocaust, observed in Holocaust survivors and their children, whereby the original destruction of the Holocaust is not only reexperienced in postwar losses, but reenacted without conscious awareness. The Holocaust colors postwar adjustment, leaving survivors and their children resigned to attenuated and devitalized lives in the shadow of catastrophic Holocaust loss. In its second part, this paper deals with therapeutic interventions that can interrupt this phenomenon by initiating psychological equivalents of rescue in a patients current life that were unforthcoming during war persecution. Such therapeutic rescue after the event helps restore the parental function of engaging and animating life.

Personal warmth and psychological health at midlife

Personal warmth, arguably a strong trait in the makeup of psychological health, seems to fade in conceptual importance at midlife. In contrast, ideas of interiority and androgyny appear to gain conceptual importance at midlife. The present study sought to rebalance these foci by determining the predictive power of personal warmth for psychological health of men and women at age 50: first, by developing separate California Psychological Inventory (CPI) scales to assess personal warmth; next, by joining these warmth scales with the 20 standard CPI scales to predict psychological health. Without the personal warmth scale, the standard CPI scales do not significantly predict psychological health for men; for women, the standard scales do. For both genders, the personal warmth scales add significantly to the predictability of psychological health. The results point to an amendment of current theoretical formulations of interiority and androgyny to better understand optimal psychological development in men and women at midlife.