Abstract

This dissertation examines two basic, widely influential, and conflicting views of human selfhood and their implications for the theory and practice of psychotherapy. ;The first, or "objectivist" view of the self has motivated a value-neutral, natural scientific view of psychotherapy that has been in ascendancy since the days of Freud. But, recent increasing concerns with the relationship between human emotional and mental maladjustment and larger existential issues of value and meaning have thrown this view of psychotherapy and the "objectivist" view of the self it implies into radical question. ;Drawing on the works of the philosophers Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, this dissertation delineates a holistic and "historical-dialogical" view of the self, whose identity, integrity, and authenticity is facilitated through its appropriation of beliefs and values of its cultural-historical heritage or tradition. It is suggested how this "historical-dialogical" view of the self may assist in resolving long-standing, widely noted, and seemingly intractable conceptual dilemmas and confusions afflicting attempts to give a satisfying and coherent account of modern psychotherapy. ;The possibility of the "historical-dialogical" view of the self resolving confusions in the theory of psychotherapy is explored through an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the psychoanalytic theorist Roy Schafer's proposal for "a new language for psychoanalysis" and radical reconceptualization of traditional psychoanalytic theory and its implied account of human action. Schafer's proposals are found to be deficient in several key respects. First, while Schafer understands psychotherapeutic cure in terms of the narrative re-telling of the patient's life-story, the context of such a re-telling is arbitrarily limited to the "psychoanalytic vision of reality", running the risk of imposing an alienating mythos on the patient. Secondly, Schafer's approach neglects patients' connections with the evaluative and moral continuities in their personal histories, thus limiting the development of some dimensions of authentic selfhood and certain apparent features of deep personality change in psychotherapy