How Do We Know Who We Are?: A Biography of the Self

by Arnold M. Ludwig

Book Overview

"The terrain of the self is vast," notes renowned psychiatrist Arnold Ludwig, "parts known, parts impenetrable, and parts unexplored." How do we construct a sense of ourselves? How can a self reflect upon itself or deceive itself? Is all personal identity plagiarized? Is a "true" or "authentic" self even possible? Is it possible to really "know" someone else or ourselves for that matter? To answer these and many other intriguing questions, Ludwig...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195095731
• ISBN13: 9780195095739
• Release Date: May 1997
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.3" x 9.4"

Customer Reviews

How to make your self into the story of your life

This book should have been far more interesting than it is. Can there be a more interesting subject than understanding who we really are, and if we discover that? I had hoped that this book would give real insight into the way we know and define ourselves. From the chapters I read and admit not to having read the whole I did not have a sense that there was any development toward ' real understanding of the impossibly difficult and insoluble perhaps question'. What the book does have is a number of distinguished biographers telling something about the way they understand biography. There is also Ludwig's conception of biographical freedom and the way each of us may construct the narrative of his own life. I connect this with an idea in Judaism in which each great sage makes through the story of his life a Sefer Torah that can be read by the generations to come. I think that there is much more to this book than I have indicated. And I certainly would recommend that anyone interested in the subject of self - definition through biography have a look at this book.