Psychoanalysis is Self-Centered

Psychoanalysis is arguably the preeminent discourse in the 20th century for investigating the nature and vicissitudes of self-experience. From Freud's account of self-unconsciousness, to Jung's description of self-division and self-integration, to Winnicott's depiction of compliance and authenticity, to Kohut's discussion of self-depletion and self-restoration, psychoanalysis has explored various facets of self-experience with lapidary precision.

The vast majority of psychoanalysts—except for Lacanians—agree that a fundamental aspect of analysis is an expanded and nuanced experience and understanding of “I-ness.” In his synthetic overview of postclassical psychoanalytic views of the self, Mitchell (1991) suggests that each school of psychoanalysis illuminates a different aspect of selfhood. Mitchell distinguishes three views of the self—the Freudian view of the self as separate and integrated, the object relations and interpersonal view of it as multiple and discontinuous, and the self psychological view of it as integral and continuous.

The dialogue between Freud and his friend Romain Rolland concerning religion implicitly suggests that there is more in the nature of selfhood or “I-ness” than these accounts of subjectivity imply. Responding to Freud's (1927) critique of religion in The Future of an Illusion, Rolland, a poet and student of the Indian saint Ramakrishna, indicated that the critique had much merit but that it neglected the most important source of the religious sentiment, a sensation of “eternity, a feeling of as something limitless, unbounded” (p. 64). In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud (1930) admitted that he could not discover this “oceanic” feeling in himself and voiced discomfort in coping with these “obscure modifications in mental life” (p. 73). Subsequent psychoanalysts, with rare exceptions like Loewald and Kovel, have followed Freud's lead and also neglected and pathologized this facet of self-experience.