Decentring the self: a journey or the 'I' becoming universal

Abstract

This thesis follows a journey through a changing relationship to self over the four years of study. I consider this journey from an individual, social, political, and theoretical perspective. I consider the interrelationships between these perspectives. I have chosen an eclectic ontology of becoming and epistemology of the encounter, a challenge the Cartesian structure of more classical ontologies and epistemologies. By choosing an ontology of becoming I consider the possibility my ontological position can be overthrown or challenged in a face-to-face encounter. Associated with the ontological position is an epistemology of body, I challenge the societal centring of cognitive and representational knowledge. This ontology and epistemology are unpredictable and unintentional. Unlike representational structure and knowledge, they allow for spontaneity, transgressing norms and forming new meanings.

I adopt a ‘method’ called thinking without method which supports the spontaneity and the possibility of new knowledge and the decentring of ontologies to be produced in the relational encounter. This method doesn’t follow any specific procedures, instead it aims to engage in the writing process without form or idea of where the work will end. The reason for choosing this method is to allow whatever arises from the process of writing as I register my thoughts, feelings, and actions. The decentring of self aims to listen to the otherness of the other more profoundly. This is the thesis’s relevance to the field of psychotherapy. The first step was to come to terms with my own energetic knots in order to prevent my practice from becoming ‘translating my own old translations’. I explore how I can listen, construct a container that can provide a Copernican openness, that supports a container that can hold the client’s material to make possible a working through. I must ‘abandon understanding, preoccupations, memory’, the abandonment is only possible after coming to terms with my own energetic knots.

Part I considers the themes produced above in relation to my personal history and present reality. I consider times I have been silenced, times I have had to disavow femininity at school to be accepted and the attempts to escape or destroy my emotional suffering rather than work through it. This is part of the journey to reclaim my ‘I’ and take ownership of the traumatic elements of my history. Part II considers my work as a therapist. I explore how the structures can silence the voice of the those they seek to help. I explore my gender in relation to my psychotherapeutic work with the aim of producing a therapeutic container that holds the conditions for change. Part III registers the movement on from my past traumas in the decentring of the self, a return from an inward protective world back to society. In the reduction of a separation of self and word binaries are deconstructed. This clears a path for the ‘I’ that was reclaimed in Part I becoming universal, this makes possible the plural expression of ‘heterogeneity in itself’. I explore the idea of the ‘feminine sublime’ and in reconnecting with femininity a movement beyond my-self into a different kind of knowing and sensing.

In the Narrator’s Conclusion I summarise the thesis, registering the journey that has taken me from one place to the other. Just as important to where I end up, the ‘I’ becoming universal and the connection to the feminine sublime is the journey through the writing. This journey made possible a changing relationship to my suffering, moving from self-hatred towards self-acceptance.