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In her collected essays, spanning a number of topics that are both related and disparate, Pamela Cooper-White draws on her background and interest in theology, pastoral counseling, psychoanalysis, and anthropology, to offer a scholarly and creative approach to the concept of self from a primarily theological/psychoanalytic perspective. That the topics are both related and disparate mirrors her exploration of unity and multiplicity.
Her fundamental thesis, unifying the nine, independently written, collected essays first published between 2002 and 2011, is that “both persons and God are multiple, [italics in original] and that this multiplicity, although intuited in past generations, needs to be foregrounded in ways that were unthought and perhaps even unthinkable until the postmodern era” (p. 2). She draws upon a dialectic of one and many, referencing the vast heritage of Western culture and thought, from the Biblical era, Greek philosophy, the Enlightenment, and psychoanalysis, to explore how Western thought moved away from a sense of multiplicity to a sense of unity, and back again— an oscillation of the one and the many.
Cooper-White is an expert braider, an expert weaver, moving among disciplines, drawing together a range of ideas, to support and explicate her thesis. While she is a proponent of multiplicity, her scope of mind and openness of thought allows her to appreciate the value of unity, identifying, for instance, the American Civil War for the preservation of the Union and the abolishment of slavery as an example of meaningful unity.
It is a rare experience to enjoy reading a book while disagreeing with its basic premise, and I found myself totally engaged, indeed, enthralled, by the richness and profundity of her ideas and the depth and breadth of her knowledge, while constantly arguing with her fundamental notion, that we are not a single self, but rather are braided selves, a multiplicity of selves. She explores what it means to be an “I”—that understandi