Hemingway has a style. Faulkner has a style. Michael Jackson and Jackson Pollock have styles. But style doesn't belong only to writers and artists. Mathematicians, chess players, scientists have styles even though they are doing abstract intellectual things. Olivier, Brando, Streep--the greatest actors' selves show through no matter what part they play. Politicians have their styles, too: FDR's artful duplicities; LBJ's bulling forward; Reagan's faith in hierarchies.
We all have our styles. We walk, talk, make love, argue, and all the rest in individual ways--styles. These styles which must come--where else could they come from?--from our selves, our personalities, character, or, I would say, styles of being.
Some say self emerges from the midline structures in the brain that are active when we are not doing some psychological task but thinking about ourselves (the "default mode network"). But that network, I think, drives our sense of ourselves. It is inner. I'm talking about self or identity as a style that someone outside ourselves (and perhaps we ourselves) can observe. I follow Grigsby and Stevens in thinking that that style (which they call "character") probably consists of procedural memories dating back to infancy, sources of which we are unconscious. Procedural memories were traditionally defined as motor skills (swimming, biking), but more recent work suggests that procedural memories include non-verbalizable cognitive skills like recognizing faces or reading. (I believe it also includes defense mechanisms.) As such a style of being is probably widely distributed in the brain.
Procedural memories are very hard to unlearn or change. Have you ever tried to improve your handwriting? Your golf game?
Think of such a style of being as a theme in music: established early in the piece but open to infinite variations. But within those variations you the listener can always trace the theme.
Psychoanalysis, whatever its deficiencies as science, has over the course of a hundred years, taught us to "listen with the third ear." That is, you listen for choice of words, more for how something is said than what is being said. You listen for the style. A practiced interpreter can then put into words that character, personality, style of being, identity (or more accurately, identity theme).
I did it with Ronald Reagan in 1989, but more recently, at the International Conference in Literature-and-Psychology in Lisbon, July, 2008, I suggested that the group before its next annual meeting discuss online the language of then-candidate Barack Obama, inferring an identity or style of being.
I suggested at the time two themes that I derived from reading Obama's pre-speechwriter autobiography, Dreams from my Father. One, he wants to bring people together. (Many people have noted this, and look at his hands in the graphic.) 
Two, he does so after an initial failure or obstacle which must be overcome by people's coming together. Thus, although the title of his first book suggests an ideal father, in fact, he first found that his father was a failure in his career and in his relationships. But the book ends with Obama bringing the hitherto divided halves of his father's family together.
In the New York Times (07/28/08) David Brooks, though no psychoanalyst, picked up that first theme in Obama's Berlin speech. "Obama used the word "walls" 16 times . . . and in 11 of those cases, he was talking about walls coming down." "'People of the world,' Obama declared, 'look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together and history proved there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.'"
Recently (1/19/09), the New Yorker printed a 1996 interview with the Obamas in which he showed this characteristic theme of conflicted dualism resolved. "All my life," Obama said, "I have been stitching together a family, through stories or memories or friends or ideas. Michelle has had a very different background--very stable, two-parent family, mother at home, brother and dog, living in the same house all their lives. We represent two strands of family life in this country--the strand that is very stable and solid, and then the strand that is breaking out of the constraints of traditional families, travelling, separated, mobile. I think there was that strand in me of imagining what it would be like to have a stable, solid, secure family life." Again, listen for the dualisms: "Michelle is a tremendously strong person, and has a very strong sense of herself and who she is . . . . But I also think . . . [t]here is a part of her that is vulnerable and young and sometimes frightened, and I think seeing both of those things is what attracted me to her."
Brooks in a later column (08/05/08) introduced another theme. He called Obama a "sojourner," one who stands apart, who is "of" causes and institutions but not "in" them: the famous Obama "cool" or distance. In that 1996 interview, Obama went on in a remarkable passage to describe his marriage in terms of that distance:
[W]hat sustains our relationship is I'm extremely happy with her, and part of it has to do with the fact that she is at once completely familiar to me, so that I can be myself and she knows me very well and I trust her completely, but at the same time she is also a complete mystery to me in some ways. And there are times when we are lying in bed and I look over and sort of have a start. Because I realize here is this other person who is separate and different and has different memories and backgrounds and thoughts and feelings. It's that tension between familiarity and mystery that makes for something strong, because, even as you build a life of trust and comfort and mutual support, you retain some sense of surprise or wonder about the other person.
Less happily, in 2009, we come to the health care debate. Obama's character says, resolve these opposing views (say, government option vs. keep government out). But now he faces an implacable, ideological opposition that sees no advantage in having the walls come tumbling down or the two sides come together. It seeks only, as one Republican senator put it, to "break him." The opposition he faces will not vote for anything he proposes, even so innocuous a Supreme Court appointment as Sonia Sotomayor.
In this context of stitching together a health plan, the question becomes, from a psychological point of view: can 
Obama adapt this core identity, this pervasive style of being, to this polarized situation?
I believe that one cannot change core identity but you can transform it from dysfunctional to functional. In my 1985 book, I gave examples of individuals whose core identity persisted, one through a successful psychoanalysis and another through Chinese torture and brainwashing.
Can Obama adapt his style of being and resolve the health care debate on which his presidency depends? His legacy depends upon it.
Some items I have referred to:
Grigsby, Jim and David Stevens. Neurodynamics of Personality. New York: Guilford Press, 2000.
Holland, Norman N. The I. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1985. Available at: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/nnh/theihome.htm
Holland, Norman N. "The L-Shaped Mind of Ronald Reagan: A Psychoanalytic Study." Psychohistory Review 17.2 (1989): 183-214. Available at: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/nholland/online.htm#reagan
