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Philip Cushman’s Travels With The Self is a well integrated and compelling collection of journal articles and presentations that serves as a much anticipated follow-up to his monograph Constructing The Self, Constructing America: A Cultural History of Psychotherapy (Perseus Publishing, 1995). Tracing the parallel development of culture, psychotherapeutic practices, and concerns, and the paradigm of selfhood, Travels With The Self picks up more or less where his much more ambitious Constructing The Self left off – that is, it begins with the “empty self” of the 1980s and early 1990s and builds towards what he calls the “multiple self” of today. The texts brought together here follow chronologically, opening with an account of the “empty self” and the George H.W. Bush era published in 1990, and concluding with a paper that deals with post-Trump America and the “multiple self” for a 2017 APA conference. Just a glance at the table of contents draws us into Cushman’s basic concern with shifts in our sense of self, which are only brought into greater relief by the disorienting increase in the speed of events, information, and trends that we begin to suspect might be somehow located within this very time frame. While it does not always feel like a cohesive journey, with moments of too much or too little overlap between chapters, it is not quite fair to insist that a collection ought to read like a book. In fact, it is a testament to the thoughtful, passionate, and by-and-large coordinated analyses Cushman offers here that I am left wanting – or rather, needing – such a book.
Overall, Cushman offers a coherent, persuasive, and at times truly inspired interpretation of the underlying connections between the social, political, and economic situations in which we currently find ourselves and define the self. But this book is also, and most importantly, an urgent warning: If psychotherapists don’t consciously attend to the deeper structures of our existence, they are colluding i