David Shapiro. Dynamics of Character. Self-Regulation in Psychopathology (2000) M.: Independent Firm “Class”, 2009. - 216 p. — (Library of psychology and psychotherapy). - ISBN 978-5-86375-159-7. Translation from English by V. Mershavka and A. Telitsyna In this book, David Shapiro deepens his research outlined in the books “Neurotic Styles” and “Autonomy and Rigid Personality.” Creates a general picture of character dynamics as a self-regulating system, covering individual attitudes, forms of action and attitudes towards the outside world. The author shows the formal connection between obsessive-obsessive and paranoid, hysterical and psychopathic and psychopathic and hypomanic states. Explores the connection between neurotic conditions and schizophrenia. He concludes that a qualitatively altered form of schizophrenic symptoms is better considered as a radical spread of neurotic defenses, and not as a rupture or complete destruction of them. The author is critical of the simplified model of complex mental processes, which reduces the causes of symptoms to a biological defect or psychological trauma. This book thus expands and deepens David Shapiro's original, sophisticatedly coherent view of psychopathology. David Shapiro is a graduate professor at the New School for Social Research. D. Shapiro is a well-known psychotherapist in private practice in New York and is the author of the books “Neurotic Styles,” “Autonomy and the Rigid Personality,” and “Psychotherapy of the Neurotic Character.”

“This book serves as a continuation of my previous work related to the characterological understanding of psychopathology, which, although different from the traditional psychoanalytic concept, was formed on the basis of the psychoanalytic concept of the structure of the human psyche. The purpose of the book is to give an idea of the self-organization and self-regulation of the human psyche in various forms of psychopathology, about human attitudes, the organization and dynamics of these attitudes, including those that the person himself is not aware of, cannot formulate and express verbally, as well as about forms of activity and types reactions associated with these attitudes. If we study psychopathology in this way, we will see it in a completely new light. Seemingly disparate symptoms and behaviors often turn out to be variations of more general patterns and behaviors. Thus, we have the opportunity to understand the most diverse psychopathology with the widest range of expressed symptoms as a type of mental organization and system of mental regulation.”