Autonomy and the problem of suffering
tragedy and transcendence in psychoanalytic discourse
pp. 181-198
in: Man Chung, Colin Feltham (eds), Psychoanalytic knowledge, Berlin, Springer, 2003Abstract
Scholars have long attempted to place autonomy in context, demonstrating that the autonomous person has been produced in particular sociohistorical (Mauss, 1985; Taylor, 1989; Cushman, 1990) and cultural (Weber, 1958; Doi, 1973; Gaines, 1982; Bellah et al., 1985; Dumont, 1986; Kurtz, 1992) environments. Some theorists have also found him to be, to some degree, a gender specific type (Chodorow, 1979; Gilligan, 1982). Still other scholars go so far as to assert that the autonomous person may not even exist, that he is a modern European invention in an even more radical sense — that of being fabricated, a lie, an illusion (Gergen, 1991, 1994).