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K. Popper and J. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain. New York, Springer International, 1977.
THERE IS, IN TRUTH, STILL NO ROYAL ROAD to the makings of psychoanalytic self-knowledge. It is not at all like the status acquired by familial, cultural, or social inheritance; it is far more like a way station along a disciplined, caring, and deeply vital journey within. And now: the quest for any such royal road obviously a failure; the promise either of biology or of sociology, or of both together, to pave that road no longer rational; a psychology of self-knowledge guaranteed by the sciences external to its experience but a pleasant dream of yesteryear's enlightenment. A psychology of self-knowledge, it is becoming increasingly clear, may be reached only through the direct psychic effort of the individual who seeks it—first-personal, singular, active, and fundamentally original—that is to say, necessarily originating—from within the resourceful conditions of that individual's own uniqueness.
For a learned and richly documented, if somewhat rambling, philosophical discourse on this new and increasing regard for the psychology of the self, emerging as a subject matter from its own roots as distinct from the adjacent conditions of its bordering sciences, see the work under review, Popper and Eccles's The Self and Its Brain. But, here, note how, even in their title, they manage to ascribe a position of primacy to the self, and to emphasize, also, the primacy of its inherent capacity to possess a brain, which, of course, as part of a larger movement in recent philosophical psychology, represents a one-hundred-and-eighty degree reversal of the relation of the id, as elaborated within the classical psychoanalytic