INTERPERSONAL PSYCHOLOGY
final end of our
cures.
But the groundwork he has laid is full of
ethical connotations that go far beyond this adjustment fallacy.
A psychology of the total self brings up countless questions which
ultimately transcend the range of that psychology. A
few
of these are:
the nature of a commitment to
oneself
(his self-awareness, responsi–
bility, self-esteem) and to his situation (involving, as it does, some
absolutizing of one's choices) ; the place of one's projects as de–
terminants of his commitment and, to some extent, of his view of
the world; the discovery and maintenance of an identity of self
despite a multiplicity of evidence which cannot be added up to this
identity or which may even be of a contradictory nature; the nature
of an anxiety which cannot logically be always
ill
anxiety but must
also
be
a motive-force for the unification of self and for its commu–
nication; the role of others as determinants of, or occasions for, one's
activity and identity (what one
is, has
and
does
with them).
As
can be seen, a psychology of the total self becomes much
more intimately bound to moral philosophy and to philosophy proper
than the psychology which sprang from and maintained the basic
practices of medical science.
As
a moral philosophy, the psychology it–
self
formulates grounds for action and commitment which become, in
tum, values of ethical significance.
(As
an example, psychological for–
mulae-"inferiority," "castration complex," "sublimation,"-are in
fact widely used at the present time to explain our relations and to pro–
vide the incentive for certain orders of action within them.) This being
the case, the most we can ask is that the practice of psychiatry be in
the nature of a communication which attempts to show the workings
of our commitments without making absolute judgments on their
factual content. The tie with critical philosophy
comes
with the
formulation of assumptions of the nature of consciousness, of the
substantive continuant known as the self, of an hypothesis that a
certain kind of world
(e.g.
the schizophrenic's or manic-depressive's
world) is given
with
certain kinds of action. It is apparent that logical
descriptions are necessary here, if not a metaphysical basis, for the
assumption of identities.
Some of these questions have been dealt with by French and
German phenomenologists and existentialists. They, however, tend
to construct largely
a priori
systems on the basis of formal propositions
about the nature of existence. I believe that in coming to these ques-
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