The Pursuit of the Fictional Self

The paper begins by examining The Seeker, a novel by Allen Wheelis, that addresses “the aims and implication[s] of psychological treatment.” In his novel Wheelis dramatizes two questions: “Can psychoanalysis enable the person being analyzed to live life fully and well or is psychoanalysis simply a reparative treatment that at best heals mental illness?” “Can the analyst’s knowledge and training be sufficient to guide the patient to an enlightened existence that may have eluded the analyst his [/her] self?” The paper then engages in a brief discussion of Freud’s pursuit of inner truth and his detection of self-deception. It goes on to discuss reaching personal enlightenment, finding the way to the “undiscovered self” and the feelings of fraudulence experienced by Wheelis’s disillusioned analyst protagonist. After investigating different views of Western and Eastern psychology, the paper explains that in Western psychology a person creates a fictional version of his/her identity and sees it as a real self that he or she perpetuates at all costs, even if it puts others at risk or the natural world at risk. The paper concludes that while psychoanalysis has no vision with which to guide us, it does offer the chance to pursue inner truth and self-examination, and can also help clients recognize that none of us exists alone.