Outside the Arch Kohut and Five Modern Writers

Outside the Arch reverses the convention of measuring literature against psychoanalysis by using the work of five modern writers to suggest modifications to Heinz Kohut's self psychology if it is to become the paradigm to replace Freudianism. Catharine Rising applies the positions taken by Conrad, Forster, Lawrence, Joyce, and Woolf to point out Kohut's failure to provide an origin for the superego, his arguable faith in empathy as panacea, his stress on human dependency instead of autonomy, his demand for sympathetic self-objects to form and maintain the self, and his norm of a cohesive, conscious self, which undercuts the basis of human creativity. She proposes modifications, some of which have been discussed by followers of Kohut, but points out that no theory or paradigm solves all problems, though it may clarify some. In this case, self psychology provides a workable theory that undoes Freud's affronts that accounted for his own discoveries and those of Copernicus and Darwin. Rising argues that the theory of self psychology becomes much more pervasive when the works of the five writers assess the effects of the radical discoveries that proposed that man was not the center of the universe, that man was descended from apes, and that man lacks control over his own mind as Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud proposed.