Below is a scholarly, journal-ready version of your text.
I have preserved your conceptual architecture and cosmic-philosophical voice, while elevating the style to meet academic standards in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and posthuman studies.
If you wish, I can also format it according to APA/Chicago style, or adapt it for a specific journal.
**Philosophy of the Psychology of the Self:
Metaphysical Foundations for a Posthuman Clinical Vision**
(Scholarly Version)
Abstract
In the emerging posthuman condition of 2025—an era in which non-human agencies have asserted their force and the human subject has been displaced—the classical paradigm of Self Psychology proves insufficient for describing contemporary forms of subjectivity. Over the past decade (2015–2025), my work has shifted from Kohut’s psychoanalytic model toward what I call the Psychology of the Self: a framework that cannot be contained within psychoanalytic discourse alone but must engage philosophical reflection at the levels of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. This essay outlines the philosophical foundations of this transition and proposes a cosmological, ontological, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic reorientation for a clinical theory adequate to the Anthropocene and post-anthropocentric worlds.
1. Introduction: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Paradigm
Classical Self Psychology, emerging in the intellectual milieu of the mid–20th century, responded to the fragmentation of the subject produced by modernity. Yet the 21st century presents a qualitatively different situation—ecological collapse, technological acceleration, and the reconfiguration of agency among human, non-human, and non-living systems. In this context, the “self” can no longer be theorized as a purely intrapsychic formation. The Psychology of the Self must become an inquiry into the ontological and ethical standing of beings in a universe where the human is no longer central.
This necessitates a turn toward philosophy—specifically, a life-philosophy that encompasses cosmology, ontology, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics.
2. Cosmology: The Rarity of Matter, the Rarity of Life
Recent astronomical findings (including Webb Telescope observations) reveal a cosmos that is neither singular nor anthropocentric. Matter constitutes approximately four percent of cosmic composition; the remainder is dark matter and dark energy. Life, arising from this sparse material substrate, is thus an improbable event within an already improbable configuration.
For clinical theory, this cosmological perspective decenters the human: the self must be understood not as a sovereign entity but as an emergent, contingent, and fragile phenomenon—one expression among many within a vast material field.
3. Ontology: Becoming as the Condition of Being
While being is precious, an ontology adequate to the Psychology of the Self must reject the reification of being. In alignment with traditions from Heraclitus to Bergson, from Nishida to Deleuze, becoming is not secondary to being; it is the generative condition of all existence. The self is not a stable substance but a processual emergence—continuous, relational, and porous.
This ontological stance dissolves the implicit essentialism within classical psychoanalytic thinking and opens space for a dynamic, world-embedded model of selfhood.
4. Epistemology: From Dualism to Non-dual Relationality
Western philosophy, grounded for two millennia in mind–world, subject–object, and self–other dualisms, has contributed to the modern ecological and existential crises. Dualism shapes not only metaphysics but clinical practice—its diagnostic gaze, its stance toward the patient, its assumptions about interiority.
A post-dualist epistemology becomes necessary. Non-dual frameworks from Advaita Vedānta, East Asian Buddhist thought, and the phenomenology of Zen offer conceptual resources for rethinking relationality:
- Subject and object co-affect: they sense and transform each other.
- Subject and object dissolve: boundaries are not erased but reconfigured as permeable and co-constituted.
For clinical work, this reframes therapy not as an encounter between two discrete psyches but as a relational field in which self, other, world, and phenomena arise co-dependently.
5. Ethics: After the Collapse of Grand Narratives
In the ruins of the Anthropocene, grand ethical narratives—whether civilizational, national, or theological—have largely devolved into hollow rhetoric. What remains ethically viable is what I call the kindness of strangers: small, uncoerced gestures of recognition that affirm the vulnerability and finitude shared across beings.
This minimal ethics does not replace broader moral systems but grounds them. It resonates with Levinasian responsibility, yet extends beyond the human to encompass animals, plants, and even non-living entities. In this sense, ethics becomes a response to the call of the more-than-human world.
6. Aesthetics: Life as Action-Performance
If life is to remain livable, it must be—at least intermittently—interesting, vivid, and exuberant. Aesthetics therefore becomes existential rather than ornamental. Life unfolds as action-art, a mode of enactment through which beings express, transform, and situate themselves.
This aesthetic orientation demands that clinical life not remain confined to interpretation or symbolization but engage with movement, rhythm, gesture, and world-making practices.
7. Conclusion: Returning to Dust, Returning to the River
Taken together, these cosmological, ontological, epistemological, ethical, and aesthetic considerations converge on a simple principle:
Do not abandon this briefly-appearing body.
Do what must be done; act without proprietorship; return to dust.
In this vision, all beings—flies, bees, water buffaloes, flowers blooming from rock, grasses, trees, tiles, stones—are not merely companions but co-expressions of the same material event.
Thus:
Things recover their place. The human recovers its place.
And we return, finally, to the river of Boatman Déchéng—
a metaphor not of withdrawal but of flowing-with, attuned to the world that exceeds us.
If you wish, I can also prepare:
- a shorter 1,500-word condensed version for journal submission
- a more explicitly comparative version (linking your claims to Heidegger, Levinas, Nishida, Simondon, and posthumanist thought)
- a clinical application section, illustrating how these metaphysical principles reshape therapeutic practice
Just tell me what direction you prefer.
