Beyond Individualism Toward a New Understanding of Self, Relationship, and Experience

9780881633344

0881633348

In this pathbreaking and provocative new treatment of some of the oldest dilemmas of psychology and relationship, Gordon Wheeler challenges the most basic tenet of the West cultural tradition: the individualist self.Characteristics of this self-model, which we inherit from as far back as the ancient Greeks,, are our embedded yet pervasive ideas that the individual self precedes and transcends relationship and social field conditions and that interpersonal experience is somehow secondary and even opposed to the needs of the "inner self. Assumptions like these, Wheeler argues, which are taken to be inherent to human nature and development, amount to a "controlling cultural paradigm that does considerable violence to both our evolutionary self-nature and our intuitive self-experience. By the end of the book, you will probably find yourself agreeing with Wheeler that we are actually far more relational and intersubjective than our cultural generally allows and that these relational capacities are deeply built into our inherent evolutionary nature. In a series of brilliantly crafted chapters, the argument progresses from the origins and lineage of the Western individualist self-model, into the basis for a new model of the self, relationship, and experience out of the insights and implications of Gestalt psychology and its philosophical derivatives, deconstructivism and social constructionism, both of which Wheeler presents in freshly intuitive, "experience-near" terms. From there, in a linked series of experiential chapters, each of them a groundbreaking essay in its own right, he takes up the essential dynamic themes of self-experience and relational life: interpersonal orientation, meaning-making and adaptation, support, shame, intimacy, and finally narrative and gender, culminating in considerations of health, ethics, politics, and spirit. Each of these six chapters is based on an exercise that the reader is invited to participate in, and each leads us to a wholly new way of experiencing and thinking about its subject and about ourselves. The result is a picture and an experienceof self that is grounded in the active dynamics of attention, problem solving, imagination, interpretation, evaluation, emotion, meaning-making, narration, and, above all, relationship. B the final section, the reader comes away with a new sense of what it means to be human and a new and more usable definition of health. In the words of noted author Mark McConville, "Here at last is a self model that does justice to both our unique 'inward' experience and our inherent, felt participation in the whole field of relational experience and other unique selves."