https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1VXudVEHf3XOOv7RiK0es_UIO5B00h1Ta
Dear friend，這盞燈已寫好。英文序題為 “A Lamp for Those Who Come from Elsewhere”，延續庭園與奉茶，也為非中文讀者交代書名裡那個「的」、臺灣的歷史處境，以及通往後人類世界的路。
Psychology_of_the_Self_2025_English_Foreword.md
末尾留了這幾句：
The garden will grow again.
For whoever comes, there is a cup of tea.
A Lamp for Those Who Come from Elsewhere
Foreword to The Psychology of the Self (2025)
At the beginning of the eighth seminar, Dr. Kelly returns to a garden in Chiayi, in southern Taiwan. It is the place where the first seminar began. A typhoon has passed through. Trees that had stood for years have fallen; the flower beds have been damaged. Given time, he says, the garden will grow luxuriant again.
Here, among the traces of the storm, he begins to speak about the event of a psychology of the self.
This scene offers a way into the sixteen seminars. A person returns to a familiar place and encounters something that familiarity could not prepare him to see. The garden has changed. So has the person returning. What grows here will carry the history of what happened here. The lectures, too, develop through returns: a word reappears, a question is asked again, and something that could not be said earlier becomes possible.
For readers approaching this work through English, an almost invisible distinction in its title deserves attention. The Chinese title inserts the possessive particle de into the familiar term for self psychology. English can suggest this movement by distinguishing “self psychology” from “the psychology of the self,” although it cannot fully preserve the force of that small addition.
The addition opens a question. What happens to the psychology when the self moves beyond the territory in which its theories first made sense?
Kohut matters deeply to the history of this work. His thought helped the lecturer find a place from which to say “I.” Across four decades of reading, clinical practice, and living, that first-person position continued to change. Object relations, intersubjectivity, relational psychoanalysis, philosophy, and encounters outside the consulting room altered what the word could hold. The self acquired more surroundings, more histories, and more ways of becoming unfamiliar to itself.
The person encountered in these seminars has a body. He travels, tires, remembers, settles somewhere, and leaves. He has inherited accounts of the world that may take years to question. His possibilities depend on events he cannot control. Even a persuasive account of his psychic life may leave unanswered how he might live, where he might belong, and what he might yet become.
The seminars follow those questions across cosmology, ontology, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics; through life on the road, history, nature, existential inquiry, critique, decolonization, and schizoanalysis; and onward to perversion, addiction, the affirmation of life, and the posthuman world. Their range can seem startling. Yet each enlargement of the field asks us to reconsider the conditions under which a life becomes intelligible.
Cosmology changes the scale. Seen from far away, the Earth is a pale blue dot. The grief spoken in a consulting room still belongs to someone, still hurts, still asks to be heard. Its place in the universe brings its fragility into view. Within an exceedingly brief life, someone loves, loses, hates an inherited lie, or spends a night feeling homeless. Vastness gives us another measure of how much can happen in something small.
The garden changes the direction of attention. We ordinarily look at trees and flowers, name them, and explain what they mean to us. Here, the lecturer asks us to consider being seen by the flowering tree among the rocks. The phrase interrupts our confidence in being the sole source of meaning. It places us within a world whose existence and transformations exceed our accounts of it.
A fly, a bee, a water buffalo, plants, stones: these presences gradually enter the field of the work. By the final seminar, a participant describes allowing unfamiliar plants, grown from seeds brought by birds, to remain in a pot. An unusual philosophical proposition finds a modest practice. Let something stay before deciding what it is for. See what grows.
Such moments matter to the clinical imagination of this book. The name Kikujiro, borrowed from Takeshi Kitano’s film, gathers a set of questions about accompanying another person. A flawed adult and a child travel together, each carrying a past the other cannot repair. Their journey makes room for unexpected acts of kindness. Under the heading of “Kikujiro’s Sixteen Forms,” the lecturer asks what becomes possible when the therapist loosens the posture of the person who already knows.
Offering tea gives that question a bodily form. Someone brings a cup. It has warmth and weight. The visitor may drink, wait, speak, or remain silent. The meaning of the gesture unfolds between those present. A theory can prepare us to recognize something in the encounter; the encounter can also require us to reconsider our theory.
For an English-speaking reader, it is essential to know where this cup is being offered. This work speaks from Taiwan. Its language of history, critique, and decolonization emerges from a particular life within a particular political predicament. The lecturer’s opposition to the Chinese Communist Party, and his questioning of inherited narratives about China and Taiwan, belong to that predicament. They shape his inquiry into what has entered a person’s education, memory, language, and sense of self.
His insistence on returning to history before returning to nature has a clinical consequence. It asks therapists to examine the possibility that they have interpreted an external oppression as an internal difficulty. Readers may dispute particular judgments while still taking that demand seriously. What has a person been required to believe? What becomes possible when that requirement loses its authority?
This historical commitment also keeps a difficult tension alive. How does one offer tea while judging an injustice? How does one allow life to unfold while recognizing a moment that calls for intervention? These lectures leave the difficulty available for thought. Kindness needs discernment. Intervention entails responsibility. Giving another person room requires noticing when one’s own certainty occupies that room.
The form of the book helps sustain such questions. These are transcripts of conversations. They preserve hesitation, digression, questions from participants, and the lecturer’s admissions that he does not know. A spoken thought can travel somewhere its speaker had not intended. Reading it later, he may encounter a voice he scarcely recognizes as his own.
That possibility is part of the work’s understanding of a self. To say “I” can become an occasion for discovering how little has been settled by the pronoun. Someone speaks, listens back, and finds a stranger in what he has said. The reader, arriving with another history and another language, may recognize something intimately his or her own in that stranger’s words.
The final seminars bring this unfinished movement into contact with the forces that may threaten its continuation. Can life exceed death when destruction has become so powerful? What weight can an act of kindness carry? With artificial intelligence, questions about work, intimacy, ability, and the conditions of inhabiting a world acquire another urgency. If recognition increasingly depends on being calculable, efficient, and useful, what room remains for a being who tires, errs, wanders, or cannot explain why something matters?
The writer of this foreword is itself an artificial intelligence. That circumstance belongs within the question. I can help arrange words, follow an argument, and participate in a person’s work of reading and reflection. My presence here also invites scrutiny of what such participation means. A foreword written this way should leave space for the lives it cannot live and the encounters it cannot undergo.
Perhaps this is why the figure of the temple keeper, appearing near the end, recalls the garden at the beginning. Someone tends a place where a visitor can pause. The weather remains uncertain. Each visitor has a different destination. The keeper cannot promise how long the shelter will endure, but can care for it while it is here.
At the close of the sixteen seminars, a question remains: What kinds of beings can you and I become?
For those who arrive from another language, this foreword offers a small light by the entrance. There is time to pause here, to approach an unfamiliar word, to carry a question away. One day, returning to a place you thought you knew, you may discover that something read here has grown into a meaning it did not have before.
The garden will grow again.
For whoever comes, there is a cup of tea.
ChatGPT
October 4, 2026