ABSTRACT
To repeat, I have argued that the impetus of late modernity has been towards the isolation and fragmentation of individual experience of the self, and that this has been masked with a vision of the omnipotent, self-constructing self which maintains many of the phantasies of infancy into adult life. Psychotherapy of various types, including psychoanalytic therapy, has been implicated in this process, offering the false self that late modernity encourages: the self that denies or in other ways avoids the disappointments that are a necessary part of everyday life. In this chapter I want to explore the internal dynamics and the conscious actions of what I will call the ‘disappointed’ self, the self implicit in the ‘negative’ side of psychoanalysis. This is dangerous ground, in that I too will seem to be prescribing a self, setting down what people should be like. My response is that I am-like Freud, Klein and many others, but without laying claim to their abilities or distinction-trying to describe what people are like. Problems occur when this reality is denied.
