ABSTRACT
Consciousness of the self as a living continuity in time is ob viously a major form of our contemporary awareness. Be we devotees of psychoanalysis or merely dilettantish psychic ex plorers with a taste for thoughtful reminiscence, we tend to share a typically, modern interest in the interrelation of our early experience and our adult selves. We collectively cultivate it: it is part of our intellectual culture, or rather, the bourgeois intellec tual culture of the West. In our more detached moments we think of ourselves as the ‘products’ of our formative years, on the analogy of ‘the way the twig is bent’ . More intimately, we sense the relation as more threateningly, or more vivifyingly, mobile, as a matter of the past living actively on into the present, either nourishing it or tyrannising over it, or perhaps both. The very idea of the adult self as autonomous we now know to be hubristic, courting retributive invasion from the more archaic depths of the psyche. We are more likely to conceive the self in the terms in which the transactional analysts have elegantly formulated it, as an arena in which ‘child’ and ‘adult’ selves act out a neverending drama of warfare and alliance.
