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Traditionally psychoanalysis has not taken self-realization as an immediate goal and, rooting itself in the opposition between self and world, it has tended to regard adaptation as a more valid objective. At best psychoanalysis provided a way to achieve the elimination of neurotic, self-defeating mechanisms which would leave the patient freer to pursue self-development, but self-development per se was not an intrinsic aspect of the psychoanalytic work. With the growth of phenomenological approaches it is now possible to draw self-realization into the psychoanalytic process.
David Shainberg has written a rich, erudite, and imaginative book on this subject, in the course of which he delineates a concept of self, the processes leading to self-realization, the pathological obstacles to it, and finally the therapeutic approach that may enhance it. The book is divided into five major sections each of which considers a stage of the emergence of self; each stage itself being a complex process.
Self is defined not as structure, but as process, and process, in turn, emphasizes forming, transforming, ordering, and patterning. Drawing upon newer biological experiments, Shainberg documents that fact that the nervous system is not a mere receiver and transmitter of stimuli, but that it possesses its own source of energy and is in constant process of repatterning itself. Thus its condition at any moment imposes decisive influences upon its perceptual and cognitive processes. Using this evidence from biology and other sciences that the organism is in process, or to be more accurate, that the organism is process, the author builds the thesis that the self, analogous to the nervous system, is process. Mental illness, including neurosis, precludes participation in “the forming process which is the self in the state of realizing itself. Forming is the play of life as it manifests itself in the play of nature, in organisms unfolding and expressing their flow of being in the universe.”
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