Freud, Jung, Rogers, Skinner, Bandura and the Big Five: where Casarotto finds common ground, where he takes a different direction, and what his approach proposes to build. A guide to the comparison in Foundations of Virtology.
English editorial edition of Isabella Becker’s Portuguese essay, translated and adapted for international readers. The article presents Virtology’s interpretation; its specific theoretical mechanisms should be distinguished from independently established clinical findings.
Every school of psychology that proposes to explain who we are eventually faces a fair question: why this account, alongside all the others? The twentieth century produced an extraordinary range of personality theories. Anyone arriving later needs to explain what they are adding.
Eduardo Casarotto’s Virtology approaches that question through a comparison with eighteen theoretical accounts discussed in Theories of Personality, by Gregory J. Feist, Tomi-Ann Roberts and Jess Feist. Instead of relying only on criteria devised for his own model, he uses a familiar framework for evaluating theories.
The distinction matters: the criteria come from the textbook; the application to Virtology is Casarotto’s comparison. The textbook’s authors have not thereby assessed, endorsed or ranked Virtology. This essay follows the argument in Foundations of Virtology, with that attribution in view throughout.
The article is long because the comparison is substantial. It can be read in several sittings. Practitioners will find a map of the connections Casarotto makes between existing ideas and his proposed method. Other readers will find a set of questions worth asking of any account of personality, including this one.
Casarotto’s claim is an ambition of integration. He brings five inheritances into one proposed architecture: psychodynamic accounts of conflict and defense, human needs, stable dispositions, biological processes, and social learning.
His comparative argument is that the eighteen accounts each emphasize particular parts of this terrain, whereas Virtology seeks to specify how the parts work together. It also sets out a direction for practice: developing virtues as enduring capacities, rather than only giving a person a vocabulary with which to describe themselves.
That is the contribution the book asks readers to examine. A broad architecture is not, by itself, proof that a theory explains more accurately or produces better outcomes than alternatives. Its promise becomes a research question: can the proposed connections be measured, tested and put to useful work?
Virtology presents itself as a clinical and philosophical framework connecting neuroscience, depth psychology and virtues. Its focus is the organization from which a recurring response emerges: needs, temperament, learned character, defenses and capacities for action.
Casarotto contrasts this with accounts he reads as organizing psychological life around desire and lack. In that reading, different traditions debate whether desire should be restrained, released or worked through, while leaving desire at the center of the picture.
His alternative question is: what could a person develop so that their life is less governed by what feels missing?
This is the book’s interpretive contrast, rather than a complete history of psychoanalysis or all modern theories of the self. Those traditions are diverse, and many also address capacities, relationships, agency and change. The point of the contrast is to make Virtology’s emphasis visible.
| Emphasis on desire and lack, as framed in the comparison | Virtology’s proposed emphasis |
|---|---|
| Examine how a person relates to what they lack, desire or cannot obtain. | Examine the capacities and dispositions from which the person perceives and acts. |
| Work on the management or meaning of the unmet desire. | Work on the development of a response that is less organized around that lack. |
| Greater understanding may change the relationship to a conflict. | Understanding is paired with repeated practice intended to change an enduring pattern. |
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The book connects that intended change to learning and neuroplasticity. A learned pattern is not necessarily immutable, and practice matters to the proposal. But personality cannot be reduced to a simple slogan about neurons firing together. The specific mechanisms, timescales and outcomes claimed for the method require their own evidence.
The practical shift is easier to grasp than a grand opposition between schools: after an insight, what becomes possible in an ordinary situation that was not possible before?
A theory should be assessed with questions that can reveal its weaknesses as well as its strengths. Casarotto therefore borrows the textbook’s framework rather than offering only a list of features his own system happens to possess.
The six criteria are familiar in the Feist textbook tradition: generating research, being open to refutation, organizing knowledge, guiding action, maintaining consistency and avoiding unnecessary complexity. An earlier publisher-hosted evaluation chapter sets them out and makes clear that comparative ratings are judgments, not timeless verdicts.
The source essay cites the tenth edition. The eighteen entries below follow the selection and grouping used in Foundations of Virtology. Some entries cover more than one theorist, notably McCrae and Costa, and Rotter and Mischel. Eighteen is the number of accounts in this comparison, not an objective ranking of the eighteen greatest minds in psychology.
Casarotto also names a challenge for his model: it contains many constructs. Whether that complexity earns its place through greater explanatory and practical value is part of the assessment, not a question the author can settle by assertion.
The comparison proceeds through three lenses:
Virtology proposes a gradient rather than a fixed answer. The capacity to choose is understood as varying with the person's functioning in a particular area. As the relevant capacities develop, more responses become available.
Casarotto describes this through Evolution Bands. The proposal is not that some people possess greater human worth, but that awareness and the ability to act on it can differ across situations and subjects. A proposed gradient should also be distinguished from a validated measure of free will.
The book's optimism is attached to a method: practice may develop capacities that understanding alone does not produce. Casarotto distinguishes this emphasis from a reliance on an organism's tendency toward growth.
That does not make environment irrelevant. A person’s opportunities, safety, health and resources can help or obstruct the practice. A method becomes more credible when it specifies those conditions, rather than promising to overcome all of them.
Virtology attempts to keep both past influences and anticipated goals in view. Its Law of Flow is expressed in the source as PRF = E × I × PS × FA × PO × LV. The notation records the author's proposed relationships among factors in a response.
It should not be presented as an established physical equation that calculates a clinical outcome. Its value depends on what each factor means, whether it can be assessed, and whether the relationships produce predictions that survive testing.
Casarotto describes different operating states of the ego and an Operational Unconscious: an attempt to specify processes that act without conscious deliberation in terms of named factors.
His comparative argument is that clearer commitments should make a model easier to test than an explanation capable of accommodating any result after the event. Naming a process is a beginning; establishing its measurement and conditions of refutation is the next task.
The proposed architecture distinguishes inherited temperamental tendencies from learned character and virtues. Twelve bipolar temperament axes describe part of the inherited variation in the author's model; experience and practice shape how tendencies are expressed.
The source uses the metaphor of biology establishing a floor and a ceiling. That is a framing of constraints and possibilities, not a finding that each person's behavioral limits can be precisely read from their genes.
Virtology allows for shared dimensions and a person's particular configuration. This connects with the dispositional tradition's interest in both common traits and individual patterns. Similar ingredients need not produce identical lives.
The following compact map preserves the source essay's comparative lens. These are simplified placements made in that comparison, rather than definitive descriptions of everything each school has said.
| Account | Determinism or choice | Causes or purposes | Conscious or unconscious emphasis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Freud | Strong determinism | Causation | Unconscious |
| Adler | Creative choice | Purposes | Both |
| Jung | Intermediate | Both | Unconscious |
| Klein | Determinism | Causation | Unconscious |
| Horney | Moderate choice | Intermediate | Unconscious emphasis |
| Erikson | Intermediate | Intermediate | Both |
| Fromm | Intermediate | Both | Both |
| Maslow | Choice | Purposes | Conscious |
| Rogers | Choice | Purposes | Conscious |
| May | Strong emphasis on choice | Purposes | Intermediate |
| Allport | Limited freedom | Purposes | Conscious |
| McCrae and Costa | Not the central question | Not the central question | Trait description |
| Eysenck | Biological constraints | Causation | Nonconscious influences |
| Buss | Complex constraints | Evolutionary causation | Evolved processes |
| Skinner | Determinism | Causation | Contingencies rather than this opposition |
| Bandura | Agency | Goals | Conscious self-regulation |
| Rotter and Mischel | Bounded choice | Expectations and goals | Cognitive processes |
| Kelly | Choice | Anticipation | Construing events |
| Virtology | A proposed gradient by Evolution Band | Both, in the Law of Flow | States of the ego |
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The remaining dimensions concern the biological and social contributions, and shared features versus uniqueness. The source places Freud and Buss toward biological explanations, Adler, Horney, Fromm and Kelly toward social explanations, and several others across both. It treats Allport, Rogers, Kelly and the trait models as particularly attentive to individual differences. These placements are useful orientation points, not barriers between traditions.
Generating research. Casarotto identifies hypotheses involving SNO and SNE, development, rumination and the outcomes of virtue practice. The important distinction is between proposing studies and accumulating a substantial body of independent results. The source acknowledges that the latter remains young.
Being open to refutation. The author emphasizes stating what would count against a proposed mechanism. That is a strength to pursue, but an assessment also needs operational definitions, suitable measures, controls and tests that do not simply restate the theory.
Organizing knowledge. The five-part integration is the book's main comparative claim. Its quality should be judged by whether the connections clarify findings, avoid contradictions and yield useful predictions, rather than by the number of fields mentioned.
Guiding action. Virtology sets out practices, sequencing, proposed markers and criteria for reviewing progress. The comparison emphasizes this practical ambition. Having a protocol is different from showing its effectiveness, and established therapeutic traditions also provide methods for change.
Internal consistency. Casarotto seeks a vocabulary whose parts connect across the work. Editorial alignment can improve clarity and consistency. It does not replace external scrutiny of the model or empirical testing.
Parsimony. The model uses many constructs. Its answer is that the elements are related and intended to address a broad scope: formation, distress and change, not only differences between people. That answer is a proposition to examine. Added complexity must earn its explanatory value.
| Question | The claim to examine in Virtology |
|---|---|
| Does it lead to useful new studies? | The hypotheses should become research programs with independent tests. |
| Can a finding count against it? | Refutation conditions should be specified before results are known. |
| Does the architecture clarify what is known? | The five inheritances should connect without merely collecting terminology. |
| Does it help people decide what to do? | The proposed practices should be feasible, safe and evaluated for their intended use. |
| Do its terms and claims remain consistent? | The same construct should retain a coherent meaning across contexts. |
| Is the complexity justified? | More concepts should produce enough added value to warrant them. |
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The eighteen accounts are grouped into four families. The table describes what the comparison draws from each and what Casarotto proposes to connect to it.
| Family | Accounts | Inheritance emphasized | Proposed connection in Virtology |
|---|---|---|---|
| Psychodynamic | Freud, Adler, Jung, Klein, Horney, Erikson, Fromm | Conflict, unconscious processes, early relationships and defensive patterns. | Ego states, character armor and named processes linked to proposed ways of developing capacities. |
| Humanistic and existential | Maslow, Rogers, May | Needs, growth, freedom and meaning. | Needs and opportunities for practice considered in relation to Evolution Bands. |
| Dispositional and biological | Allport, McCrae and Costa, Eysenck, Buss | Enduring tendencies, individual differences, biology and evolution. | Temperament distinguished from learned capacities and their expression. |
| Learning and social-cognitive | Skinner, Bandura, Rotter and Mischel, Kelly | Learning, self-regulation, expectations and interpretations. | Repeated practice directed toward the development of virtues. |
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The categories overlap. They organize a reading route; they do not claim that a psychodynamic theorist had nothing to say about learning, or that a social-cognitive theory ignores biology.
Each entry follows three questions: what connection does Casarotto identify, what does he propose to add, and what distinction should remain visible when reading the comparison?
Common ground. Much behavior is shaped outside awareness, and psychological life involves conflict. The book retains a structural vocabulary, including the superego as a way of discussing internalized prohibitions.
The proposed addition. Casarotto describes operating states of the ego and attempts to specify unconscious processing through named factors. The ambition is to make a process more open to investigation than an explanation capable of accommodating contradictory outcomes equally well.
The comparative issue. The source draws on criticisms of falsifiability in classical psychoanalysis. That is an argument for explicit tests, not proof that every Freudian proposition is untestable or that Virtology has already passed stronger tests. A useful study would distinguish competing explanations of the same result.
Common ground. Meaning-making, creative agency and social interest connect with the book's concerns. How a person interprets an experience matters; a life also involves interests beyond the self.
The proposed addition. Virtology treats the capacity to reinterpret and choose as dependent on functioning in a particular area. An alternative explanation can be intellectually available without being emotionally or practically usable.
The comparative issue. The source sees a precursor to the Law of Flow in Adler's emphasis on meaning and a connection between social interest and Selflessness. These are interpretive parallels. They should not make differently developed constructs identical, or imply that the newer model was proved by the earlier account.
Common ground. Persona, shadow, complexes, the Self and individuation all enter the language of Foundations of Virtology. The comparison also connects Jung's oppositions with Casarotto's bipolar temperament axes.
The proposed addition. Individuation is one of the thirty-three virtues in Virtology. Casarotto seeks to give this aim a program of practice, proposed markers and ways of reviewing progress.
The comparative issue. This is the book's movement from a difficult developmental destination toward an operational practice. It does not establish that the Virtology construct has exactly the scope of Jungian individuation, or that analytical psychology offers no methods. The question is what the particular practice develops and how that change can be evaluated.
Common ground. Early relationships help organize later experience; a primary relationship can become a pattern through which subsequent relationships are approached. Early formation matters in both accounts.
The proposed addition. Casarotto's comparison reinterprets aspects of Kleinian positions through temperament and keeps learned character open to later development.
The comparative issue. This is a substantial departure, not a neutral restatement of Klein. Her paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions are not simply inherited temperament types, nor can the object-relations tradition be reduced to an irreversible childhood sequence. The source's reinterpretation should be read as Casarotto's hypothesis, including its need for independent support.
Common ground. The source highlights moving toward people, against them or away from them, and the distinction between choosing a response and performing it compulsively. One direction is not always unhealthy; losing flexibility is the concern.
The proposed addition. Virtology describes a legitimate defense becoming rigid and automatic through character armor. It seeks capacities that might make that defense less necessary.
The comparative issue. This is a substantial bridge: a response can become a problem through rigidity rather than through its mere existence. Describing that connection in neural language does not establish its mechanism. Flexibility, context and outcomes still need to be assessed.
Common ground. Psychosocial stages, with conflicts and strengths to develop, provide a reference point for the book's developmental phases and life tasks.
The proposed addition. Casarotto attempts to connect tasks with maturation and the capacities a person can reasonably exercise. Practice should take account of life phase rather than making identical demands of everyone.
The comparative issue. Developmental timing matters without making an age a precise neurological deadline. Erikson's psychosocial stages and Virtology's Evolution Bands also answer different questions. One concerns a developmental context; the other describes the author's proposed account of functioning in an area. They should not become one ladder.
Common ground. The source emphasizes inherited qualities and acquired character, and character as an enduring way of relating to the world.
The proposed addition. Virtology gives acquired character a central place in practice, connecting learning with experience-dependent plasticity. The intended result is a disposition rather than a brief intention.
The comparative issue. Fromm did distinguish inherited and acquired aspects; the source itself cites that distinction. Casarotto's addition is the particular architecture and practice attached to it. Its value depends on what it makes clearer or more workable, rather than on denying the earlier contribution.
Common ground. Casarotto acknowledges Maslow's importance to his Human Needs Groups. The distinction between a need and a particular desired object is central to the comparison.
The proposed addition. Virtology names fifty-one needs and considers their interaction, deprivation and excess in relation to Evolution Bands. Several needs remain active together across life.
The comparative issue. The source contrasts this with a rigid reading of Maslow's hierarchy. The familiar pyramid does not capture every nuance of Maslow's writing or its qualifications to a strict sequence. The useful question is what the additional distinctions enable a practitioner to notice and whether those distinctions can be supported.
Common ground. Conditions of worth — feeling valued only when one meets another person's expectations — connect in Casarotto's account with persona formation and lack.
The proposed addition. Removing an obstacle and practicing a capacity are different tasks. Acceptance may create room for change; repeated action is intended to make a disposition more available in daily life.
The comparative issue. This central contrast should not imply that person-centered practice consists of passive reassurance. Rogers offers a developed account of therapeutic conditions and relationship. The question is whether the added practices provide specific benefits, for whom, and under what conditions.
Common ground. Freedom is exercised within limits, and choosing can change the possibilities available for later choices. The source connects this with courage and facing the conditions of existence.
The proposed addition. Evolution Bands give that movement a proposed structure: a developed capacity may widen the responses available in a subsequent situation.
The comparative issue. This connects an existential formulation with a working model of development. A named scale is not yet a validated measurement. Its contribution would need reliable assessment and useful predictions, rather than a declaration that a difficult philosophical question has been measured precisely.
Common ground. An enduring disposition can make different situations functionally related and guide recognizable patterns of behavior. The source sees a precursor here to its concept of virtue.
The proposed addition. Virtology connects that account with practice and proposed consolidation mechanisms. It also draws a parallel with functional autonomy: a disposition may operate without needing the original reason for acquiring it.
The comparative issue. A person initially practices from instruction or a goal, then finds the response more readily available. This explains an ambition. Establishing that trajectory and its mechanisms remains an empirical task; the historical analogy does not specify a universal practice dose.
Common ground. The comparison recognizes enduring individual differences with biological and experiential contributions. This resonates with the book's interest in inherited tendencies and their expression.
The proposed addition. Virtology uses twelve temperament axes rather than adopting the Big Five as its grid. It aims to connect disposition, distress and a program of development.
The comparative issue. Description, explanation and intervention serve different purposes. A trait model need not be a complete psychotherapy to be useful. A broader framework does not supersede a trait measure simply by having a larger scope. Measurement quality and added explanatory and practical value remain the relevant questions.
Common ground. Eysenck's connections between personality dimensions and biological processes are important to the comparison. Casarotto also seeks relationships between inherited variation, functioning and outward patterns.
The proposed addition. Practice is proposed as a route toward changing the expression of a tendency. Biology becomes a condition for work, rather than a reason to treat every response as fixed.
The comparative issue. The floor-and-ceiling metaphor expresses constraints and possibilities, not a precise genetic forecast. A general relationship between biology and personality does not establish the book's particular twelve axes or virtue–temperament relationships.
Common ground. Status, dominance, affiliation and the problems of social life provide connections. Casarotto reads concern with position through SNO, his proposed Neurofunctional System of Pride.
The proposed addition. Alongside the question of how a tendency arose or served an adaptive function, Virtology asks how a person might develop a different relationship to it now.
The comparative issue. Explaining a tendency and prescribing its transformation are distinct moves. Evolutionary origins do not make a behavior good, inevitable or appropriate in every present context. A plausible survival account does not independently validate SNO; it provides a hypothesis to investigate.
Common ground. Contingencies, practice and reinforcement matter to the book's account. The comparison recognizes methods that attend to what a person does and what maintains the response.
The proposed addition. Casarotto centers an internal architecture of temperament, character and virtues, and describes freedom as a developmental gradient.
The comparative issue. It would be inaccurate to say Skinner denied thoughts and feelings. Radical behaviorism includes private events while rejecting particular mentalistic explanations. The B. F. Skinner Foundation's excerpt illustrates this. The disagreement concerns explanation and agency, not whether people have inner experiences.
Common ground. The source identifies four connections: modeling, self-efficacy supported by mastery experiences, reciprocal influence among person, behavior and environment, and moral disengagement.
The proposed addition. Virtology directs practice toward particular virtues and proposes sequencing, review periods and signs of progress. Positive Example connects with modeling; Responsibility and Selflessness connect with agency and consideration of others.
The comparative issue. Bandura is an especially important conceptual ally in this reading. But moral disengagement is not experimental proof of SNE, reciprocal causation is not identical to the Law of Flow, and mastery research does not establish a particular repetition schedule. These are connections on which to build research.
Common ground. Rotter's locus of control concerns expectations about whether actions influence outcomes. Mischel's characteristic responses across situations connect with the importance of context.
The proposed addition. Responsibility becomes a practiced capacity in Virtology, distinguished from guilt, compulsive control, overfunctioning and a belief in personal omnipotence.
The comparative issue. Knowing action matters does not mean every outcome is controllable. Circumstances, chance and other people remain real. A context-sensitive account asks where a response appears and where it does not. Neither one score nor one difficult incident establishes someone's entire pattern.
Common ground. Anticipation helps organize how people experience and respond to events. An interpretation can be reconsidered instead of becoming the only possible account.
The proposed addition. Casarotto connects this with other-reality and the interpretation factors in his Law of Flow. He asks what makes an alternative interpretation usable for this person, now.
The comparative issue. Evolution Bands are proposed as an additional account of differences in that capacity. Difficulty with an exercise should not automatically prove a lower band. Nor should the comparison imply Kelly had no account of obstacles to change. The additional construct must earn its place through prediction or practical value.
Across the eighteen entries, the direction recurs: an insight is recognized, placed within Casarotto's architecture, and connected to practice intended to develop a capacity. That is the proposal. Comparative effectiveness remains a separate question.
The capacity to choose is treated as varying by area, circumstance and developed capacity. You may consider alternatives calmly at work yet find little room to do so in one relationship. You may understand a response but struggle to carry it out under pressure.
Virtology uses Evolution Bands to describe that gap between available understanding and available action. Its ambition is to identify what might widen the range of responses, rather than simply telling someone to make a choice they already know sounds reasonable.
Practice, support, meeting needs and understanding defenses enter this account. The goal is to develop something that makes a later choice more available, not to blame the person for failing to exercise an abstract freedom.
This is not a ranking of rights or dignity. It is also not the only psychological tradition to recognize constrained or developing agency. What needs assessment is Casarotto's particular structure for that variation, including whether it can be used reliably.
Continue with Where are you in your own evolution?, which explains the seven bands and why they should not become labels attached to whole people.
Broader intellectual traditions. The source places Evolution Bands in dialogue with Maslow's needs, Lacan's symbolic, Jungian individuation and Baudrillard's simulacra. These are interpretive connections. The book asks how dependence on recognition and cultural signs might change as capacities develop; it does not establish that these thinkers described an identical process.
Developmental psychology. Chronological phases are distinguished from a proposed state of functioning that can vary across domains and circumstances. That should not imply that Piaget, Kohlberg and Erikson offer one uniform, strictly irreversible account. Evolution Bands are a particular construct, not a replacement for the whole study of lifespan development.
Motivational neuroscience. The source notes points of contact with Eysenck and Gray, including BAS/BIS. SNO and SNE are not alternate names for those systems. Their precise relationship is a hypothesis, as the essay acknowledges. The SNO/SNE article develops the distinction between position and advantage.
Diagnostic classification. ICD-11 approaches personality disorder through severity and relevant trait qualifiers. That creates a comparison with dimensional thinking, not an endorsement of Virtology's explanation or practices. Classification retains clinical purposes. See the WHO clinical manual and Your personality is not a box.
Casarotto adds a philosophical layer beyond a simple biology–society opposition. He calls it life and its laws: twenty-two principles through which his framework interprets a relationship with existence.
The source recounts a house metaphor. Someone enters without respecting its rules, encounters consequences, and calls the host unfair. In the lecture, this becomes an invitation to examine how a person relates to the conditions of a life, rather than asking only what symptom they have.
The argument belongs to Virtology's worldview. The twenty-two Laws of Life should not be equated with experimentally established physical laws. References to Hermetic traditions, neuroscience, quantum physics or chaos theory do not independently verify the whole set. Different explanatory languages need different forms of evidence.
The book also proposes that the relevance of principles changes with an Evolution Band and describes practice as bringing its own tests. A reader can take this as an invitation to notice opportunities for a new response. It should not become an assertion that life deliberately sends adversity because someone practiced a virtue, or that illness proves a violated law.
The practical question can remain useful without those conclusions: what conditions, limits, responsibilities and relationships belong to the situation in which this distress occurs? It can complement appropriate assessment rather than replace it.
Casarotto asks what a recurring response protects, how rigidly that protection operates, and what capacity could reduce its necessity. A symptom is considered within a wider account of functioning and circumstances.
The proposed chain runs from an unmet need or painful experience to a defense, then to a defense that has become automatic. Virtology calls this rigidity character armor and asks what could make a freer response possible.
It is a formulation lens, not a reason to assume every diagnosis has one defensive cause. Diagnosis, medical evaluation and evidence-based care can remain necessary. A humane account helps locate what needs attention rather than making someone responsible for having failed to develop a virtue.
The distinctive ambition of Foundations of Virtology is to connect an extensive theoretical map with practice. Its strength depends on both parts: a clear explanation and evidence that the resulting work does what it proposes. Inviting tests is valuable; their results still matter.
For the practical side, read The virtue you may need to develop next. For the circumstances in which a pattern operates, see The area of your life that goes dark first.
| Term | Meaning within the author's framework |
|---|---|
| Evolution Band | A proposed description of functioning, awareness and response in an area; not an age category or judgment of worth. |
| Character armor | A protective response that has become rigid or automatic in the author's interpretation. |
| Operational Unconscious | Processes outside deliberate awareness described through named factors. |
| Law of Flow | The proposed relationship PRF = E × I × PS × FA × PO × LV; not a validated physical equation. |
| Virtue | A developed disposition intended to guide perception and action more reliably through practice. |
| Temperament | Inherited tendencies described through twelve bipolar axes in this model. |
| Character | Learned patterns formed through experience and available for development within the account. |
| Temperament–virtue interface | The proposed relationship between an inherited tendency and capacities shaping its expression. |
| SNO and SNE | The proposed Neurofunctional Systems of Pride and Selfishness: position and advantage, respectively. |
| Conditions of worth, persona and lack | Casarotto's connection between conditional acceptance, a socially maintained image and a sense of something missing. |
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This body of work supplies the human-development background to God Bless America. Structural Americanism is that book's central cultural question: how a pattern of values and expectations becomes part of what people pursue and recognize.
Foundations of Virtology extends across 2,000+ manuscript pages and 100+ chapters. Its English translation is in progress, with evaluation materials available on request through Isabella Becker. The English translation of God Bless America is available for editorial consideration.
Editorial basis: Isabella Becker's Portuguese essay following Casarotto's chapter on the eighteen personality theories in Foundations of Virtology. The source cites Feist, Roberts and Feist, Theories of Personality, tenth edition. This is an English editorial adaptation of Casarotto's comparison, not an independent systematic review or a claim that the textbook's authors evaluated Virtology. The earlier theories are presented concisely; their original works provide fuller accounts.
Translated and edited from the Portuguese essay; original artwork retained.