Customer Reviews

The Designed Self: Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Identities (Relational Perspectives Book Series)

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Strenger's book basically says that old psychoanalysis is bad because it is infected by modernism, and new psychoanalysis is good, because it is pomo, all about shifting identities and co-constructed realities.

Hmmm. I wish Strenger had written a more rigorous book. His blithe dismissals of Kleinians -- implying that science refutes their theories, without offering evidence -- confuses, especially as two of his heroes, Stephen Mitchell and Nancy Chodorow, have found much to admire in Kleinian ideas.

Strenger seems to want to dip in and out of different theories, without theorizing the theory that guides him -- or doesn't. That said, there are a few wonderful case vignettes here, as well as a lucid contrast of Michael Eigen and Adam Phillips. Still, for the radical project Strenger is undertaking, a much more thorough book is required. I believe the mildness of the back-cover blurbs reveals that his colleagues feel the same.

Volume 27 in the "Relational Perspective Book Series" from The Analytical Press, The Designed Self: Psychoanalysis & Contemporary Identities by Carlo Strenger (Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychology, Tel Aviv University) chronicles academician and psychotherapist Strenger's therapeutic encounters with five extraordinarily gifted young adults caught up in a compulsory web of experimentation in defining themselves. These perpetual self-experiments were constantly reinforced by the media and ranged from career choice to hair color to body shape to gender identity. These case studies reveal that factors in the drive for self-creating empowerment include the absence of a clearly felt authority, issues of sexual attractiveness, personal finances, demands based upon ethnic identity, and more. The Designed Self is a meticulously presented scholarly study which is especially recommended to the attention of academic library Psychology Studies reference collections and adolescent/young adult psychotherapy supplemental reading lists.