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 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. He asserts 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.
His 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. 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.
The result is a picture and an experience of self that is grounded in
the active dynamics of attention, problem solving, imagination,
interpretation, evaluation, emotion, meaning-making, narration, and,
above all, relationship. By 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.
