This book grew out of a long-standing interest in the self, its conceptual elucidations and its experiential reality. Originally that interest was philosophical and theoretical, being a topic I pursued many years ago in the philosophy department of McGill University; more recently, it has had a more directly “practical” import for me in my clinical practice as a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist. I have learned much about the vicissitudes of the self, its psychopathology, and the amelioration of that psychopathology from my patients. I am grateful to them. I have also had the opportunity to teach a course on “Theories of the Self’ to students young and old at the New School for Social Research.
My classes, with their mutually enriching mix of traditional undergraduates, adult students, and older students from the New School’s Institute for Retired Professionals, have provided a forum for multigenerational, intellectually stimulating, intense and deeply felt discussions of the self that lluminated the questions raised in this book. My students have taught me a great deal and I am in their debt.
Jerome David Levin
Publisher: International Psychotherapy Institute