In this article, the author raises a number of interesting and highly important issues. His primary hypothesis—which he pursues in a study of Gothic and Renaissance art, Shakespeare, and a fairly brief consideration of contemporary psychoanalytic theory and postmodernism—is that what he calls the autochthonous self arose in the Renaissance and is currently in decline, a manifestation of the issues raised by in The Decline of the West. An additional and very appealing hypothesis has to do with the idea that psychical structure and function have developed historically over the ages and that changes in art can serve as an index of that development.

By the autochthonous self, Chessick wishes to signify roughly a combination of discrete, indigenous, private (Modell, 1992), and true self (Winnicott, 1965) as formulated by a number of psychoanalytic authors.