"Man is not the master of his own house" (The Private Self, A.H. Modell, 1993)

자료: http://books.google.co.kr/books?id=clv-CaUOAaIC, "one is not the master of one's own house."

In The Private Self, Arnold Modell contributes an interdisciplinary perspective in formulating a theory of the private self. A leading thinker in American psychoanalysis, Modell here studies selfhood by examining variations on the theme of the self [:]

• in Freud and
• in the work of object relations theorists,
• self psychologists, and
• neuroscientists.

Modell contends that the self is fundamentally paradoxical, in that it is at once dependent upon social affirmation and autonomous in generating itself from within. We create ourselves, he suggests, by selecting values that are endowed with private meanings. By thinking of the unconscious as a neurophysiological process, and the self as the subject and object of its own experience, Modell is able to explain how identity can persist in the flux of consciousness. He thus offers an exciting and original perspective for our understanding of the mind and the brain.

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The Private Self

(공)저: Arnold H. Modell

출판사: Harvard University Press, 1993

171~173쪽에서:

Whether affective experiences support or diminish the agency of the self is a topic that Freud frequently explored using a different language--the language of the ego rather than of the self. Freud implied the existence of angency when he referred to the "taming" of the instincts by the ego. Psychanalytic research, he said, proved that "the ego is not even master in its own house, but must content inself with scanty information of what is going on unconsciously in its mind"[13] Freud saw this affront to the human being's narcissism as one of a series of blows inflicted by sceince.

• Copernicus and Darwin destroyed the belief that humans are at the center of the unverse, and
• psychoanalysis destroyed the belief that one is the master of one's own soul.

As Richard Rorty has said, this decentering indicates what is most unsettling about psychoanalysis: Freud suggested not only that one is not master of one's own house but that one's house is occupied by alien presence[14]

"Where It Is I Shall Be"

When Freud wrote "Where It is I shall be,"[15] he was using "It" in the sense formulated by Georg Groddeck, who introduced the term. "It" is the impersonal, attesting to the fact that we are "lived" by unconscious and uncontrollable forces.[16] Freud portrayed this It(Id) as "a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations."[17] He emphasized that the major threat to the ego's continuity and coherence was internal. Today most psychoanalysts would give equal weight to the threats from without--to developmental disturbances and traumatic impingements, all of which result in a loss of a sense of the agency of the self. This loss of the sense of agency reflects a decline in the self's coherence. "Coherence" literally means "a sticking together," so that a severe disturbance of homeostasis implies a fragmentation of the self, a flying apart, a sens of chaos. When Freud spoke og the irrational and chaotic id, he believed that the ego gained mastery over the id developmentally through a process of internalization. Freud referred to this process "desexualization" or "sublimation" where, through identification, the ego assumes the features of the loved objects and forces itself upon the id, saying: "Look, you can love me, too--I am so like the object."[18] In current time, in contrast to early development, the I(ego) extends its hegemony over the It(id) by means of insight. In psychoanalytic treatment, insight is achieved both by means of those interpretations that make the unconscious conscious and by a reliving within the transference. All of these measures extend the agency of the self. ........