The Private Self. Arnold Modell, Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1993,  250 pp. (including index).

The Private Self is about two powerful and important sets of ideas which are fundamentally separate, and which Arnold Modell has devoted enormous energy to combining. The first set of ideas is, essentially, a study of self experience and structure, ranging from philosophical, epistemological, and historical considerations to questions of the nature of development and psychopathology. It is consistent with and extends his previous considerations about self experience, but emphasizes a fundamental “paradox”: that “the self is an enduring structure and at the same time nearly coterminous with an ever-changing consciousness” (p. 3). This point, of course, addresses a long-standing debate within psychoanalysis in general and self psychology in particular: to what extent do structural elements of the mind determine the nature of present experience versus the impact of the “inter-subjective” context and the (potential) for new object relations? However, for Modell, the “paradox” of self structure versus consciousness-in-time leads, after numerous side excursions into the work of such luminaries as William James and Hegel, to a different universe of meaning: neurophysiology and the work of Gerald Edelman.

For the elaboration of his second set of ideas, Modell leans heavily on Gerald Edelman's The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness in the attempt to tie what he has elaborated about self experience and structure into a biological matrix. Clearly he feels very strongly that