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In fields asdisparateas cognitive-behaviour therapy (DuBois et al. 2004; Foa et al. 1999) and neuroscience (Kircher & David 2003), researchers have increasingly addressed a key question: What constitutes the ‘self’? It is a crucial research domain, central to understanding psychopathology. In keeping with this trend, the various schools of analytic thought utilize neuroscience, complexity theory, philosophical ideas, and relational perspectives to revise their views of the self to attain a more processual and dynamic conception.
In this article, Douglas Hollan—an anthropologist and psychoanalyst—addresses the question of what constitutes the self, and provides insights about how healing may occur. He uses his theoretical formulation of how the self comes to be constituted to address a very basic question: Does childhood suffering shape future development in a fairly direct way, ‘or are the effects of such suffering more variable, depending on how childhood and youthful experiences are later evaluated and given meaning?’ (p. 62). Using examples from the Toraja people of Sulawesi as well as his own psychotherapy practice in Los Angeles, he describes how cultural idioms of distress channel psycho-bodily attention, and how those idioms of distress and their enactment give meaning to illness and distress. Hollan defines cultural idioms of distress as ‘shared, culturally distributed sets of symbols, behaviours, language, or meanings that may be used by people to express, explain, and/or transform their distress and suffering’ (p. 63).
Hollan refers to Hallowell's famous definition of the self as a ‘psychocultural phenomenon found among all humans that allows one to take oneself as distinct from other objects in the world, and that enables one to evaluate one's thoughts, feelings, behaviours, and intentions (and those of others) relative to some standard of conduct’ (p. 64). He defines psychopathology as the self's inability to navigate successfully its culturally constitute