This is a virtually rewritten second edition of New York University Professor Paul Vitz's profoundly important analysis of modern psychology. Vitz maintains that psychology in our day has become a religion, a secular cult of self, and has become part of the problem of modern life rather than part of its resolution.

The peculiar dilemma of the self in our era has been noted by a wide range of writers, even as they have emphasized different aspects of that dilemma, such as the self’s alienation, disorientation, inflation, or fragmentation. In The Self: Beyond the Postmodern Crisis, Paul C. Vitz and Susan M. Felch bring together scholars from the disciplines of psychology, philosophy, theology, literature, biology, and physics to address the inadequacies of modern and postmodern selves and, ultimately, to suggest what an alternative, (...) “transmodern” account of the self might look like. The transmodern self, the editors argue, acknowledges meaning and purpose transcending the individual. In other words, it reflects an understanding of the human person that is not only intimately connected with the Judeo-Christian tradition but also rejects the twin delusions of absolute autonomy and cosmic meaninglessness that mark the present age. (shrink)

The next levels in the hierarchy are epistemological. At level 3, he presents a very general epistemological model; at level 4, an explanation of how the validity of what we can generally know takes place. He develops at level 5 what he calls a field-specific epistemology that addresses the problem of how we can learn and know in a specific field. He then describes how a field-specific epistemology can be validated. At the last and highest level—level 7—he deals with psychological (...) knowledge directly. (shrink)