What Is the Self? A Philosophy of Psychology. A. P. Craig

Abstract

What Is the Self? A Philosophy of Psychology. A. P. Craig. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2005, 171 pp., $100.00. In October 2005, my wife and I moved from our 10-room home of 36 years, now an empty nest, to a one-bedroom apartment near the ocean and beach that we so love. My wife looked at the professional books that I had collected over the decades and asked, "Where do you think they might be going?" I began going through my library and realized that many books that were once valued no longer held any special meaning for me except as historical mementos. (In fact, cleaning out the whole 10 rooms, basement and garage included, provided a kind of life review for us that was both exhausting and illuminating. Discussions with others who have traveled the same route suggest that the intellectual and emotional experience of cleaning out a lifetime of materials seems worthy of its own topic in psychology.) In any event, I reduced my library to about 60 volumes composed of two overlapping categories of books. The first of these categories consisted of books written by valued colleagues and friends, many of them personally signed. The second consisted of those books that I now carry around within my own psyche and that form a significant part of my identity as a psychologist and human being. (I am sorry that many other books important to my personal outlook, such as C. W. Mills's The Power Elite, are not part of my collection because they were borrowed from libraries or colleagues and never purchased.) Perhaps the most influential of the books in the second category were purchased during my days as a student, and they include Isidor Chein's (1972) epic work of philosophy and psychology, The Science of Behavior and the Image of Man. Almost as influential, and the book that was the first to make me question the failures of clinical psychiatry and psychology as enterprises, was The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud, by Philip Reiff (1966). Of course, it was Thomas Szasz's The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (1974) that forever transformed my identity as a clinical psychologist. Some other essential volumes now residing in a closet in my apartment are The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology, by Hans Jonas (2001); Karl R. Popper's (1966) monumental two-volume treatise, The Open Society and Its Enemies; Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life, by Daniel Dennett (1995); The View From Nowhere, by Thomas Nagel (1986); Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, by Stephen Toulmin (1990); and Mary Boyle's (2002) genuine scientific masterpiece, Schizophrenia: A Scientific Delusion? To this list of personally important books I now add the relatively short, densely argued, and beautifully written volume that is the focus of this review. I find A. P. Craig's ideas so compelling and logically drawn that if I had the power I would see to it that no one would be permitted to graduate with a degree in psychology or psychiatry without demonstrating genuine familiarity with this book. Craig's opus consists of an introduction and five generous and ambitious chapters in which she attempts (in my opinion, successfully) to define not only what she considers the proper subject matter of psychology but also the proper methodology with which to study it. Her introduction begins, "The studies presented here are about the self, which is a truly interesting way of being a biological organism in a social world" (p. 1). Throughout her book, Craig raises interesting questions about selves and their development, which she would like to see answered by a meaningful psychology. She writes, A never ending source of amazement for me is the easy credence given to beliefs with no basis in good strong supporting evidence, from what the "Stars foretell" to wild claims about men from Mars, and women from Venus, and including along the way all kinds of nonsense about human pin codes, auras, and the like! …