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90 CHARACTERISTICS OF BRAIN AND BEHAVIORrelationships. The result is a personality organization around effective interpersonalpatterns, the social self (Masterson, 1972).In adolescence, even though the young person must reject the attachment relationof childhood and move to demand adult autonomy, the childhood attachmentscontinue to provide an essential secure base. This base becomes increasingly lessdependent on parental interaction and increasingly more internalized, forming astable and validated representation of the self. In addition, the object relations thatwere established initially through parental interaction now become the templatesfor attachment relations with peers and potential mates.At the same, the skills in establishing autonomy that were practiced in childhoodare now put to the test of supporting a nascent adult identity. In the reasoningof object relations theory, these are not just interpersonal skills. Rather, theyare now psychological capacities, integral to the representation of self as a competent,autonomous agent separate from embedding relationships. The primarytask of adolescent individuation is to transition from the dependency of childhood.The primary motive for this transition is the negativism and rebellion of the youngadolescent, rekindling the separation-individuation process of the toddler (Mahler,1968; Masterson, 1972). When it is effective, the striving toward autonomy becomesa positive motivation, allowing not only independent actions but theadolescent’s insightful, critical reasoning achieved from an autonomous perspective.The result is a personal self (Masterson, 1972).The close integration of interpersonal orientation and psychological organizationcan be seen not only in the new intellectual capacities of the adolescent, butin the personality disorders that take form during this period. In modern ego analytictheory, personality disorders reflect exaggerated strategies of self-control(Shapiro, 1965). These self-regulatory patterns become lifestyles for those withenduring personality disorders. But they are often seen in more transitory formsof self-regulation in adolescence, in the young person’s volatile efforts at forgingroles that may eventually compose an adult identity.In histrionic and impulsive personalities, for example, self-regulation is looseand responsive to both immediate internal urges and hedonic opportunities thatappear in the environment. Both cognition and interpersonal functioning reflect acommon mode of self-regulation. The hysteric or histrionic personality is easilycaught up in intense, emotionally charged relationships and exhibits cognition thatis not only dramatic and impressionistic, but specifically deficient in analytic reasoning(Shapiro, 1965). In the borderline personality, the self is poorly formed,such that the person attempts to self-regulate through only partially internalizedobject relations, and thus strives for self-control through manipulating the actionsof others (Kohut, 1978; Masterson, 1972).Quite different, and in many ways opposite, patterns of interpersonal andintrapersonal self-regulation are seen in the obsessive and schizoid personalities(Shapiro, 1965). Self-control is tight and disciplined, with little expression of