ABSTRACT
A woman: severely suppressed in childhood and never fully knowing the right to a mind of her own, she was always suspicious facing the world at large. She had survived growing up by living as if in the underground, and it took years of arduous analytic work before she could begin to consider risking open engagement with a world that loomed always dangerous. The matter of otherness came late to analytic attention, discoveries of depth psychology having been found so engaging that their exploration long preoccupied analytic minds. Otherness is a broad concept, one that includes the sense of distinction between self and nonself. It has so central a presence in the functioning of the human mind as to be relevant to all psychic activity. Outsiderness, by comparison, is much more narrow and specific, an aspect of personal strangeness ever there in an individual’s sense of self.
