ABSTRACT
A number of psychoanalysts have addressed the limits to freedom of thought that arise from problems from within the person or from cultural influences. A freedom entails two preconditions: a fairly open attitude to the ownership of one's own experiences, as unhampered as possible by repression or, particularly, splitting–the "freedom to relate", in R. Kennedy's terms, to one's own mental belongings; an attitude of enquiring and knowledge-seeking about those entities. Psychoanalysis can support unwittingly that wishful illusion of an indivisible coherence. That psychoanalysis contributed to the undermining of traditional notions of identity, it also stressed the importance of the discrete individual person. Identity comprises, then, various qualities: a presence in time and space; variable clusters of contents and personality characteristics; a process of ascribing a locus of belonging; and striving for an elusive and illusory completeness, coherence, and permanence.
