On Being One’s Self emerges from discussions in John Steiner’s Workshop and investigates the meanings of self and identity, including the many ways in which the development of personal identity can be subverted, interrogating what can facilitate the development of a reasonably stable identity.
The variety of problems that can arise in relation to the development of a unique identity is reflected in rich clinical material that vividly illustrates ‘identities’ felt to be weak, unformed, fluid or brittle, in many cases demonstrating how the sense of self is held together by pathological defences and organisations. The book examines several long-term adult analytic cases, suggesting that a mature personal identity involves not only ‘knowing who one is’ but also the capacity for empathic identification with the experience of others as separate human beings.
The question of ‘having’ an identity, or the fear of losing it, is a central concern of individuals, and this volume, which will be of interest to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists alike, considers these issues by looking at the deepest conflicts around self and identity as they emerge and are relived in the transference relationship.
Author(s): Sharon Numa
Series: The New Library of Psychoanalysis
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 320
City: London
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction
1 An outline of the Kleinian model of the mind and its implications for the understanding of personal identity
2 Identification and pathological identification:
implications for identity
3 The cerebral mind versus the body mind: containing and recovering unknown parts of the self
4 Orientation, disorientation and identity development: an illustration from Dante’s Divine Comedy
5 A mind of one’s own: the growth of identity in an adult patient
6 Failure to mourn: idealisation, illusion and identity
7 Identity and the struggle to “be” in the face of distorting projections from an ill object
8 A lost child: the failure to develop an identity
9 Forming an identity: from somatisation and hypochondriasis to hysteria and beyond
10 ‘If you are not my mum, who are you?’: a woman’s
analytic journey from a melancholic identification to
an identity of her own
11 Liquid fear: a dissolving identity
12 Identity as the threads of meaning through a person’s life
Index
