Discussions

Usually the birth of a science can be dated to the debut of a new idea, which, like a lusty infant who developed into an adult conquistador, now dominates a sphere of interest. Freud's original idea was that psychology, like physiology, was rooted in and determined by the total biological organism and that its mechanisms

could be studied scientifically in analogy to other biological sciences. One hundred years later it still is a truly revolutionary idea that the mind is not coextensive with consciousness but encompasses a vast realm of conscious, preconscious, and unconscious mental activity that is intimately bound up with the body. Indeed, it is so revolutionary that 100 years after Freud there are as yet few people to whom the unconscious mind is a reality as alive as the unconscious functioning of their bodies. Perhaps we should console ourselves by remembering that it took a couple of hundred years after Copernicus before the roundness of the earth replaced its former flatness for most people. Freud's idea has not conquered yet, but in the wake of Freud's death, and even before, there emerged a litter of related but sometimes incompatible propositions, each of which is claiming the imprimatur of being the exclusive bearer of Father Freud's heritage. To tame his babel of tongues Mitchell has set himself the daunting task of extracting a unifying vision of psychoanalysis by comparing and relating various perspectives on self in contemporary psychoanalytic thought. Alas, in the end he has to tell us that a neat and precise model of the self and its development have eluded him but that the array of ways of thinking about the generation of subjectivity enriches our participation in the infinite complexities of the psychoanalytic process.

Upon first reading Mitchell's “Contemporary Perspectives on Self,” I was overwhelmed by the richness and complexity