Introduction

This volume celebrates the first conference of the International Association for Psychoanalytic Self Psychology to meet outside of North America: the 33rd annual international conference on “The Psychology of the Self: Self Psychology Across the World in Theory and Practice,” held in Antalya, Turkey, October, 2010. It seeks to make available to a larger audience a number of voices that, in our opinion, represent alternative philosophical and cultural points of view in self psychology. This is not to say that the ideas presented here have not been heard before, but that they have been rethought, reformulated, and contextually interwoven in ways that we hope will evoke innovative thinking in self psychology, challenging and expanding some of our more familiar perspectives.

Frie and Coburn (2011) recently published a valuable synthesis of challenges to individuality in theory and practice from philosophical, biological, cultural/political, and developmental contextual views, thereby definitively situating us in a world in which clinicians can no longer consider their patients or themselves in isolation from the contexts in which they live. This special issue of the journal continues to expand contextual ways of thinking, affirming that psychoanalysts and psychotherapists cannot do without the concept of an individual self any more than they can the notion of that individual self as inevitably connected with others.

In Part I of this issue, “Voices of the Other,” Riker, Brothers and Lewis, and Swartz show, through specific case vignettes, how even people who are prone to think of themselves as sharing common contexts and similar views veer into error if they stray from their alertness to the other's difference, or if they fail to recognize the true meaning of empathy as the ability to search into the radical otherness of others in order to bring mutual recognition and a sense of underlying connection with them at the deepest levels of being human.

Riker's mu