From the publisher:

In this strikingly original study, the author of the widely acclaimed Neurotic Styles develops a vivid picture of human autonomy and its meaning in psychology and psychopathology.

Beginning with a discussion of the problem of autonomy in dynamic psychiatry and a review of the development of autonomy from infancy to adolescence, David Shapiro goes on to demonstrate in fascinating detail, with numerous clinical vignettes, the distortions of this development in obsessive-compulsive conditions, sadism and masochism, and, finally, in its extreme form, paranoia. Of particular interest are the author's new views on masochism and on the realotin between paranoia and homosexuality in Freud's famous paper on the Schreber case.

The psychology of individual autonomy is significant in two ways, notes the author. First, since the neurotic is typically in conflict with his own wants and intentions, all symptomatic behavior can be said to involve some loss of autonomy. But there is also the phenomenon of conflict that emerges from the development of autonomy itself. What happens when the development of self-direction goes awry? How can distortions of autonomy become an independent source of psychopathology? By closely examining the behavior and the emotional experiences of obsessional, sadomasochistic, and paranoid people--whom David Shapiro characterizes as suffering from "rigid character"--he provides compelling answers to these and other vivid questions.

All psychotherapists and students of human behavior will welcome this important book as essential to the understanding of the relationship between volition and psychopathology.