ABSTRACT
This chapter explores psychic unity, fragmentation, and ways of knowing emptiness through a different lens, with contrasting assumptions and speculations about the interrelationship of the states. It examines the issues in the context of the rapidly expanding dialogue surrounding postmodern relativism and constructionist points of view on the self, a dialogue to which psychoanalysis has contributed richly, rather than ignored, been blinded to or subverted, as some contend. The chapter suggests that attempts to deconstruct the self go too far to dismantle, even deride, conceptual possibility of 'universal' commonalities and syntheses operative in human consciousness. The deconstruction of the self goes far beyond the bounds to which Gergen, Cushman and other postmodern writers venture. Unnervingly, deconstructive hermeneutics dismantle cherished modern ideas of self that are deeply ingrained in Western consciousness. Few Western theories sufficiently define the complex variations in states of emptiness known to human consciousness that are considered non-pathological - for example, those in which clarity and luminosity permeate.
