The self you seek is the self you find: recent works on the empty, satiated, and/or transformed self.

Abstract

In the past two decades, theorists from a variety of disciplines have written and spoken volumes about what they call "the self." Psychoanalytic theorists, drawing on British object relations, American ego psychology, and Kohut's self psychology have elaborated various sets of schemas of the development of both the healthy and the pathological self and its relations to others; postmodern theorists, drawing on Lacan and Derrida, have elaborated quite different schemas. Feminist theorists, using the lens of gender to focus on the self, have discovered still other possible schemas, even as they acknowledge a debt either to the postmodern or to the object relations tradition. The authors under review here all take as their topic current problems in selfhood and how they affect our relations to others. Most have discovered that contemporary psychoanalytic theory illuminates in new ways our vision of other fields of human activity, such as our relation to the sacred and our relation to literary texts.