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Logical positivism. Postmodernism. Chaos theory. What do these words mean? How are they relevant for the psychoanalyst? In Conceiving of Personality, Michael Robbins takes us back to basics and shepherds us forward to the cutting edge of the current debates in psychoanalysis. He also covers the massive territory of philosophy, history, sociology, political science, the psychologies, gender studies, and cultural anthropology. Robbins achieves his goal of surveying these disciplines from the perspective of philosophy of science through exploring paradigm shifts. He shows how the transition in these fields impacts on the psychoanalytic climate. Robbins's training as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst instilled in him a deep respect for science, a science that has now been challenged by the new philosophical currents. “As Odysseus attempted to steer a course between Scylla and Charybdis, in the pages to come I will attempt to navigate between the modern or positivist certainty that there is an essence of personality which, if not already discovered, is at least there for the taking, and the postmodern relativism, subjectivism and contextualism which in its extreme form maintains that any conception of personality is at best an evanescent contrivance and at worst an illusion.”
In taking this path, Robbins treads along the same terrain as Horney did in her critique of Freudian truths. She questioned their universality on the basis of her understanding of culture. But Robbins goes much further. He studies the sciences and social sciences, as well as other cultures, in order to comprehend the biases of our culture and discipline, and discovers that both are slanted toward the perspective of the 20th-century Western male. As a means of investigation, he classifies personality as sociocentric in which “the individual person is not clearly differentiated from the human aggregate,” or self-centric, having a separate, independent, autonomous self. For Horneyans, Robbins's considera