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Personality development, as conceived by some theorists (in the United States) is strictly physical, internal growth based on genetic and physiological variables. Personality socialization, on the other hand, consists of all the interactions with intimates over time who matter and who furnish and receive nurturance emotionally, physically, financially, and materially. Consequently, the purpose of this book is to present a theoretical framework that integrates personality socialization in functional and dysfunctional intimate relationships, along the whole individual and family life cycles, in continuity with evidence generated from sources internal and external to the framework.

Personality socialization, therefore, is the study of communal and exchange relationships between and among intimates and nonintimates in specific settings. Most psychological terms or constructs do have relational meaning once it is understood that even internal, intrapsychic constructs have definite relational outcomes. This meaning will be expanded in all the subsequent chapters of this book.

If goal theorists, as well as other theorists of intentions, values, attitudes, beliefs, needs, and wants were to use the construct of importance as underlying their constructs, then their conceptualizations would become much more closely related to the present model of priorities.

Life is a continuously negotiated process within the context of intimate and nonintimate relationships. However, as indicated here, the ability to negotiate, although necessary, is not sufficient to achieve intimacy in intimate relationships.

Intimate relationships are not always what they seem or appear to be at the surface. They occur at various levels of analysis, observation, and interpretation. We need to look underneath them to find how and why we relate the way we do, positively, negatively, and in between. We may relate one way at one level but in another way at a lower level. The congruency of both levels may be determined by internal factors, that in turn are determined by our history, how we have been nurtured by our caretakers, and how we reacted to them.

Most intimate relationships develop over time primarily in the home and secondarily in other settings.

The ability to love and to be close or distant as one desires is not enough. We need to add the ability to negotiate to give a more complete picture of intimate relationships.

Both assumptions of love and negotiation are necessary but not sufficient to “describe” intimate relationships. They are processual, too general, and nonspecific. Nonetheless, their combination allows us to classify Cluster B and C disorders of Axis II into a model that considers both love and negotiation as orthogonal dimensions. However, we need more specific models to cover the whole range of possible intimate relationships, functional and dysfunctional, to indicate especially what is exchanged in relationships and the content of what is really exchanged and shared between intimates and nonintimates.

Personal and interpersonal competence is defined by what an individual , and in different settings. From the two sets of abilities and six resource classes are derived various skills and testable models. Presence needs to be balanced with power according to settings and task demands. A classification of sex and sexuality finds support in a culture that apparently makes performance and production more important than presence.

How does the process of developmental identity differentiation take place over the life cycle of individuals and their intimate relationships? It looks like most of the evidence, some of it already admittedly quite outdated, would support the model in the sense that major dysfunctions were present inside the two extreme ranges of the continuum, symbiosis-alienation and sameness-oppositeness. The next chapter will deal with applications of these ranges to styles in intimate relationships.