Reason, Desire, and Selfhood: The Sources of Normativity by Christine M. Korsgaard, Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1996

Christine Korsgaard's The Sources of Normativity is a book about moral philosophy that should be of great interest to contemporary psychoanalysts. As its title suggests, it is a book about how moral principles come to be normative for us, how they come to have a grip on us and make claims on us—how they guide, oblige, and command us and thereby motivate our decisions and actions. To be able to appreciate the importance of Korsgaard's account of the sources of normativity, we must first briefly review some relevant history of philosophy.

Descartes' (1641) metaphysics divided the finite world into two distinct basic substances—res cogitans and res extensa, thinking substances (minds) and extended substances (such as bodies). This metaphysical dualism spawned a number of closely interrelated bifurcations that contributed to the evolution of the scientific world view and that came to pervade both Western folk psychology and academic psychology, including psychoanalytic theory (Stolorow,