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To Start, Three Quotes; the first is from Winnicott's 1945 paper ‘Primitive emotional development’:
Primarily interested in the child patient and the infant, I decided that I must study psychosis in analysis. I have had about a dozen psychotic adult patients … This happened during the war, and I might say that I hardly noticed the blitz, being all the time engaged in analysis of psychotic patients who are notoriously and maddeningly oblivious of bombs, earthquakes and floods (1958, p. 145).
The second is from Adam Phillips:
There is no future for psychoanalysis if it doesn't want to look in other places for regeneration, and particularly if it doesn't look to the places it wants to exclude. By its own logic, that's where the life is, that's where the action is (1997, p. 164).
The third is from a review of Katherine Mansfield's Notebooks. She noted jokingly around 1920 that:
nowadays selves are two a penny, we seem to have hundreds of selves. What with complexes and suppressions, and reactions and vibrations and reflections there are moments when I feel I am nothing but the small clerk of some hotel without a proprietor who has all his work cut out to enter the names and hand the keys to the wilful guests.
However, the reviewer notes, this means that the quest for the elusive one true self is becoming more urgent than ever before: