The stigma of the self

Abstract

After recounting some personal life experiences that sensitized him to the kind of stigma that Erving Goffman systematically explored in his 1963 classic, Stigma, the author, who Is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist, introduces hit concept of the stigma of the self. Paradoxically, the stigma of the self may occur when a person is treated as merely normal, and as only a social self and when, a? a consequence, there does not seem to be any recognition of what D. W. Winnicott has termed the true self. Drawing on his studies of the self [in his recently published The Singles Scene: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Breakdown of Intimacy(Alper, 1995)] the author explores the dynamics of what he calls intimacy hunger, an unappreciated but powerful need that, especially after a sufficient period of deprivation has elapsed, cannot be satuifed by a purely social substitute.