From “It's Not Me” to “It Was Me,After All”: A Case Presentation of a Patient Diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder

In cases of extreme childhood trauma associated with abuse and neglect, one's sense of self is seriously compromised. Attachment patterns, symptoms, defensive operations, and character formation will differ depending upon the level of interference and impingement. When repeated trauma occurs in early childhood, the dissociative response may become the first line of defense for the person to rely upon. In its most severe form, patients are diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). This paper addresses the case of a woman diagnosed with DID. It describes the restoration of a cohesive sense of self from the eight parts of a dissociated and fragmented self in the course of therapy. The clinical case material presented is that of the child part of her, known as Lucy. Her treatment resulted in the integration of the “it's not me!” self to the patient's knowledge that “it was me, after all.”     

Discussion of Robert Grossmark's Case of Pamela

The author discusses Robert Grossmark's “Case of Pamela” from the perspective of developmental (relational) trauma and offers the view that Pamela's remarkable growth as well as the stunning power of the clinical process that made it possible is best illuminated from the vantage point of self-states, dissociation, affect dysregulation, and the dread of annihilation. The phenomenon of pathological narcissism, which in a classical idiom would be a central concept in describing Pamela's personality organization, is here formulated relationally in a self-state context. That is, each self-state, to the extent that it is protectively dissociated from others becomes, inherently, an island of narcissism and is what narcissism truly means. In the face of trauma, each island of selfhood operates to obliterate, automatically, the felt invasion of otherness from parts of the self that hold alternative views of “self-truth,” as well as from an other in real life—a separate person with a mind of his or her own. As each narcissistic island of Pamela's selfhood was recognized and accepted as valid in its own terms by Robert, the experiential wholeness of Pamela's sense of self began to be restored. The clinical process through which this was accomplished is seen by the author as the expansion and enrichment of Pamela's overarching self-coherence through her gradual representation of Robert's “otherness” as part of each self-representation. This in turn allowed the restoration of safe, communicative interchange between the formerly dissociated self-state islands of narcissistic insularity.     

Cracking the Code of Genocide: The Moral Psychology of Rescuers,Bystanders, and Nazis during the Holocaust

What turns neighbors into genocidalists? Why do some stand by, while others risk their lives to help? A narrative analysis of interviews with rescuers, bystanders, and Nazi supporters during World War II focuses attention on self‐image, worldview, and cognitive categorization as critical influences. Rescuers, bystanders, and Nazis demonstrated dramatically different self concepts, yet identity constrained choice for all groups. A critical aspect of identity is relational: the sense of self in relation to others. Worldview, canonical expectations, and idealized cognitive models are critical determinants, with the ethical importance of values emanating not from particular values but from the integration of these values into the speaker's sense of self. Finally, cognitive categorization carries strong ethical overtones. The dehumanization that spurs perpetrators and the sense of moral salience that drives rescuers work through the cognitive classification of “the other.”     

Naked Subjectivity: Minimal vs. Narrative Selves in Kierkegaard

In recent years a significant debate has arisen as to whether Kierkegaard offers a version of the “narrative approach” to issues of personal identity and self-constitution. In this paper I do not directly take sides in this debate, but consider instead the applicability of a recent development in the broader literature on narrative identity—the distinction between the temporally-extended “narrative self” and the non-extended “minimal self—to Kierkegaard's work. I argue that such a distinction is both necessary for making sense of Kierkegaard's claim that we are ethically enjoined to become selves, and can indeed be found in Either/Or and the later The Sickness Unto Death . Despite Kierkegaard's Non-Substantialism, each of these texts speaks (somewhat obliquely) of a “naked self” that is separable from the concrete facticity of human being. In both cases, this minimal self is linked to issues of eschatological responsibility; yet the two works develop very different understandings of “eternity” and correspondingly divergent accounts of the temporality of selfhood. This complicates the picture of Kierkegaardian selfhood in interesting ways, taking it beyond both narrativist and more standard neo-Lockean models of what it is to be a self.     

LOVE AND HISTORY

In this essay, I argue that a proper understanding of the historicity of love requires an appreciation of the irreplaceability of the beloved. I do this through a consideration of ideas that were first put forward by Robert Kraut in “Love De Re” (1986). I also evaluate Amelie Rorty's criticisms of Kraut's thesis in “The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love is Not Love Which Alters Not When It Alteration Finds” (1986). I argue that Rorty fundamentally misunderstands Kraut's Kripkean analogy, and I go on to criticize her claim that concern over the proper object of love should be best understood as a concern over constancy. This leads me to an elaboration of the distinct senses in which love can be seen as historical. I end with a further defense of the irreplaceability of the beloved and a discussion of the relevance of recent debates over the importance of personal identity for an adequate account of the historical dimension of love.     

The integration of Iraqis in two European cities: Emotions and identity work

In this study of Iraqi refugees in Helsinki and Rome, we explore the verbal construction of identity as evidence of the process of integration into a new society. We make use of Snow and Anderson's idea of “identity work” and link it to McCall's idea of “not-me.” The data for this paper derive from a larger comparative study conducted by the second author. They are based on the findings from forty-eight open-ended, semi-structured interviews, half conducted in each city. We argue that despite differences between the two locales regarding such things as the respective welfare regimes and relations with natives, the identity work required for refugees to reinscribe and reconstruct their sense of self was remarkably similar.     

The Essentialized Self: Implications for Motivation and Self‐Regulation

Persuasion attempts are more likely to stick and less likely to be counterargued if they fit the ways people naturally make sense of themselves and their world. One way to do that is to yoke persuasion to the social categories people experience as “true” and “natural.” Gelman and Echelbarger's (2019) integrative review of essentialism outlines the emergence of essentialism in children's reasoning. Connecting their discussion with identity‐based motivation theory (D. Oyserman, 2015) and a culture‐as‐situated cognition (D. Oyserman, 2017) perspective, this commentary addresses how an essentialized self can facilitate or impair motivation and self‐regulation and potentiate or undermine persuasive efforts.     

Remarks on the Case of Pamela

This is a discussion of Robert Grossmark's paper: “The Case of Pamela.” It emphasizes the trauma in her early upbringing and uses her own words to describe the severe damage this did to both her physical and her emotional sense of existence. It touches on the crumbling of her ability to trust, the dysregulation of her physical and mental economy, the substitution of false self personnae for the endangered real self, and the inevitable enactments that occur in a treatment of this sort. Though recognizing the remarkable help that this treatment afforded her, it suggests that a further phase of explicit negative transference is being postponed and might be necessary for the full completion of this treatment.     

The Narratable Self: Adriana Cavarero with Sojourner Truth

This essay engages the work of Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero and her concept of the narratable self. Her relational humanism, rooted in our exposure to others, offers an ontology of uniqueness whose critique of abstraction, masculinism, and identity politics still resonates today where the meaning of a unique “you” is negotiated in embodied exchanges that may offer care or wounds. Cavarero develops an altruistic ethics that cultivates this humanism. I argue that her work should be extended to better capture the political purchase of the narratable self that interacts dynamically and often ambiguously with the “we” of collective politics. Putting her work into conversation with the nineteenth‐century abolitionist and women's rights advocate Sojourner Truth, I suggest that Cavarero's work illuminates Truth as a philosopher of the narratable self. Moreover, Truth's work extends Cavarero's concerns with exposure that may do violence or offer care by making explicit the challenges of narration in the context of inequality, especially in terms of race and class. Exposure as an ontological and phenomenological condition then needs to take account of a broader publicity of textual, individual, and collective exposure to others to develop the critical, ethical, and political purchase it offers.     

Settling on what we are: The central place of the sense‐of‐self in education,and the implication of the concepts of the teleon and telentropy for the development of the sense‐of‐self

The purpose of this article is to illustrate the centrality of the development of a person's sense‐of‐self in his or her personal growth, and so to justify why educators should deliberately focus the attention of learners on the development of their own senses‐of‐self.

We describe the sense‐of‐self as a person's working hypothesis of what he or she is, as a functioning being. (This is in contrast to the notion of self‐concept, which is composed of the beliefs and evaluations that one has about oneself as a person in a social context.)

To illustrate the centrality of the sense‐of‐self we introduce two associated concepts—the teleon and telentropy. Teleons are “purposeful action patterns,” which may be regarded as the defining characteristic of any living system, including human beings.

Telentropy is similar to entropy (encountered in physics and chemistry), but instead of dealing with the level of disorder in externally described systems, it represents the level of informational confusion existing within an organism regarding its own true nature.

We discuss the implications of the concepts “teleon” and “telentropy” for a person's educability, using examples from daily life and educational institutions.

We provide a number of suggestions for the revising of educational practice to foster the development of the sense‐of‐self in learners. This we demonstrate to have potentially beneficial effects of the general stress levels of society.     

Ibsen's Nora and the Confucian Critique of the “Unencumbered Self”

Criticisms of the liberal‐individualist idea of the “unencumbered self” are not just a staple of communitarian thought. Some modern Confucian thinkers are now seeking to develop an ethically particular understanding of social roles in the family that is sensitive to gender‐justice issues, and that provides an alternative to liberal‐individualist conceptions of the “unencumbered self” in relation to family roles. The character of Nora in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House seemingly exemplifies such conceptions of the unencumbered self in her rejection of her housewife role for a more authentic selfhood. Drawing upon the capabilities approach to justice, and positive early Japanese bluestockings’ responses to Ibsen's play, I argue that Nora's character is better understood as exemplifying an ethically compelling disencumbered self in potentially cross‐cultural circumstances: a self criticizing and rejecting social roles that are found to be unjust according to universal, as opposed to particularist, “Confucian” ethical standards.     

Enthusiastic Improvement: Mary Astell and Damaris Masham on Sociability

Many commentators have contrasted the way that sociability is theorized in the writings of Mary Astell and Damaris Masham, emphasizing the extent to which Masham is more interested in embodied, worldly existence. I argue, by contrast, that Astell's own interest in imagining a constitutively relational individual emerges once we pay attention to her use of religious texts and tropes. To explore the relevance of Astell's Christianity, I emphasize both how Astell's Christianity shapes her view of the individual's relation to society and how Masham's contrasting views can be analyzed through the lens of her charge that Astell is an “enthusiast.” In late seventeenth‐century England, “enthusiasm” was a term of abuse that, commentators have recently argued, could function polemically to dismiss those deemed either excessively social or antisocial. By accusing Astell of enthusiasm, I claim, Masham seeks to marginalize the relational self that Astell imagines and to promote a more instrumental view of social ties. I suggest some aspects of Astell's thought that may have struck contemporaries as “enthusiastic” and contrast her vision of the self with Masham's more hedonistic subject. I conclude that, although each woman differently configures the relation between self and society, they share a desire to imagine autonomy within a relational framework.     

Hannah Arendt,Feminism, and the Politics of Alterity: “What Will We Lose If We Win?”

Hannah Arendt's early biography of Rahel Varnhagen, an eighteenth-century German-Jew, provides a revolutionary feminist component to her political theory. In it, Arendt grapples with the theoretical constitution of a female subject and relates Jewish alterity, identity, and history to feminist politics. Because she understood the “female condition” of difference as belonging to the political subject rather than an autonomous self, her theory entails a “politics of alterity” with applications for feminist practice.     

Alexithymia and the reflexive self: Implications of congruence theory for treatment of the emotionally impaired

Abstract

This paper attempts to articulate a so far neglected dimension of congruence theory, the reflexive self to self transaction. My claim is that self reflexivity is a tacit but fundamental assumption behind Carl Rogers’ formulations of the relationship—what he refers to as “congruence” or “incongruence"—between experience and its symbolization in awareness. Gendlin's elaboration of the congruence theory in terms of “experiencing” and “inward sensing” has made clear and explicit the important role self reflexivity plays in the relationship between symbols and “unformed emotional experience.” A case vignette of Focusing is used to demonstrate the relevance of self reflexivity to our understanding of verbal expression of emotions, and by extension, to our understanding and treatment of alexithymia and related conditions of emotional impairments.     

Envy and us

Within emotion theory, envy is generally portrayed as an antisocial emotion because the relation between the envier and the rival is thought to be purely antagonistic. This paper resists this view by arguing that envy presupposes a sense of us. First, we claim that hostile envy is triggered by the envier's sense of impotence combined with her perception that an equality principle has been violated. Second, we introduce the notion of “hetero‐induced self‐conscious emotions” by focusing on the paradigmatic cases of being ashamed or proud of somebody else. We describe envy as a hetero‐induced self‐conscious emotion by arguing (a) that the impotence felt by the subject grounds the emotion's self‐reflexivity and (b) that the rival impacts the subject's self‐assessment because the rival is framed by the subject as an in‐group member. Finally, we elaborate on the asset at stake in envy. We contend that this is esteem recognition: The envier covets the esteem that her reference group accords to the rival. Because, in envy, the subject conceives of herself as member of a group to which the other is also understood to belong, we conclude that envy is a social emotion insofar as it presupposes a sense of us.     

Brand switching and consumer identification with brands in the smartphones industry

Brand loyalty literature has mainly focused on how brands perform under normal market conditions. As the business environment grows more complex, globalised, and innovative, market disruptions become more prevalent. Taking a cognition‐based approach, this paper proposes that customers identify with brands to satisfy self‐definitional needs. A social constructivist perspective, using an inductive and case study strategy, was used. Data generation was based on purposeful sampling, and participants were chosen on the basis of their “lived” experience with the use of smartphones. Four major themes were identified in the purchase of smartphones: identity, satisfaction, brand loyalty, and brand switching. Participants' views suggested that this provides them with a sense of purpose and meaning, defining who they are and why they behave in specified ways in society, which increases their self‐esteem. Brand switching occurs when customers are motivated to review available alternatives in the marketplace due to a change in competitive activities. Socially, switching occurs when a customer's belief in a brand is externally influenced within the social setting. When the boundary between the “in‐group” and the “out‐group” is impermeable and changing, group membership is not realistic; social mobility is not a viable strategy to cope with identity threats.     

To Have and to Hold: Thoughts on Admiration/Envy: Commentary on Paper by Joye Weisel-Barth

Using the author's definition of “envy,” I try to separate out fleeting feelings of envy that lead to “admiration” from very disturbing feelings of envy that have to remain hidden because they are so shameful. I try to explore the reasons why it is so unlikely that analysts will feel envy of their patients no matter how rich and famous they may be. Instead, I try to show that this really is a paper on “admiration” and quote the relevant literature on how to distinguish these two affects. A careful reading of the case material shows that the analyst's admiration of her patient's artwork served a very positive role in the treatment of a severely narcissistic man whose self-esteem had plummeted after suffering several losses. It seemed that by being a “container” and “self-object” for a long period, the analyst was able to rescue pieces of the patient's self that he felt were falling through a “colander.” The case is also used as an example of some of the work that started in the 1970s about how to work with narcissistic and nonclassical cases in a noninterpretative manner.     

Self psychology and projective identification—whither shall they meet? a reply to the editors (1995)

The concept of projective identification continues to be viewed as alien, even dangerous, by self psychologists. Six aspects of self‐psychology/intersubjectivity theory are explored in an attempt to understand the presumed incompatibility of self psychology and projective identification: 1) the empathic vantage point; 2) the focus on subjective reality; 3) the emphasis on the analyst's personal contribution; 4) the focus on selfobject experience; 5) the disruption—restoration process; and 6) the defining of transference and countertransference as “organizing activity.”; The self‐psychological/intersubjective concepts that come closest to describing the phenomenon of projective identification—that is, empathic immersion, affect resonance, and reciprocal mutual influence—fail to capture at least three of its essential elements 1) the patient's persistent, unconscious intent to communicate certain unformulated aspects of self through the other; 2) the analyst's sense of being “taken over”; by the patient's experience; and 3) the intensely visceral quality of the analyst's experience. It is argued that self psychology ignores this important form of patient communication to its own detriment and that the concept of projective identification needs to be reformulated in terms that are more experience near to self psychologists. It is suggested that there exists a normal, developmental need, a selfobject need, to communicate intolerable, unsymbolized affective experience through the other's experience—a need that remains more pervasive and intense in some of us than in others—and that the longed‐for selfobject response is to have one's communication received, contained, and given back in such a way that one knows the other has “gotten”; it from the inside out.