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Consider yourself. The invitation to do so is made both by Buddhism and by psychoanalysis. Each, in its own way, proffers a technique of examination, and each, I propose, encounters an elusiveness central to the nature of human being. What on closer examination disappears is self, self itself.
As Mitchell (1993) says, “The most striking thing about the concept of self within current psychoanalytic thought is precisely the startling contrast between the centrality of concern with self and the enormous variability and lack of consensus about what the term even means” (p. 99). Mitchell's overview of the current theoretical ferment discerns two main metaphors of self: the spatial and the temporal.
The spatial is familiarly Freudian: The self is like a structure in space, perduring through time, modifiable, but essentially the same unto itself. The self is the bedrock of “I.”
The temporal metaphor, on the other hand, construes self as multiple and discontinuous. In line with Bergson's (1912) argument that “I” now am different from the “I” of a moment ago because “I” now subsume a moment's more experience, the temporal self is ever in flux, malleable as Proteus (Langan, 1995, 1997a), as impossible to grasp as an indivisible moment in time. Rather than bedrock, the self is quicksand, its solidity illusory.
Instead of arguing for one metaphor over the other, Mitchell rightly recognizes that both describe plausible aspects of experiencing oneself, and that a dialectic tension exists between them. For a dialectical metaphor, Mitchell (1993, p. 115) suggests thinking of self-experience as a cinematic film. Each frame of the film is discrete and discontinuous, like the self one might experience at a given time in a given circumstance. Yet the frames