Unity Is Plural 1—A Review of “Persons in Context: The Challenge of Individuality in Theory and Practice” Edited by Roger Frie and William J. Coburn

The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs [Kushner, 1993, p. 289].

In the early 1990s, a sociological study on excessive individualism, “Bowling Alone” (Putnam, 1993), reflected the changing American social landscape in the final decades of the last century. The commentary shed light on America's gradual decline in civic-mindedness and “social capital” (what happens to others affects us all),

which Alexis de Tocqueville identified as the foundation of a participatory democracy. Putnam's research initiated questioning and dialogue among social scientists on the de-democratization of American life (e.g., Coleman, 1993; Etzioni, 1993; Fukuyama, 1995), examining issues such as trust, choice, social engagement, and shared values. At the core of the discussion, owing to a discernable transformation in thinking from Cartesian dualism to that of a systems sensibility, was the emergence of a new paradigm for structuring human experience. Notably, the concept of the individual, as seen through a systems lens perspective, was viewed not as separate from the world, but inextricably connected to it (Senge, 1994).

Nearly two decades after Putnam's (1993) commentary, Roger Frie and William Coburn's (2011) scholarly book, Persons in Context: The Challenge of Individuality in Theory and Practice, asks essential questions about a parallel phenomenon germane to psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic discourse: the false dichotomy between the self and the world. According to Frie and Coburn, a narrow interpretation of individuality as a reified, decontextualized concept of the human being fails to take into account the essential situatedness of existence. A distinguished group of philosophers and psychoanalysts speaks to Frie and Coburn's pluralistic, contextualized concept of individuality. What unifies each separate essay is that “individuality, no