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What is personal identity? What forms its nature? Is there a difference between identity and personality? What makes a ‘person’ an individual, and what exactly is the person? What role is played by character, nature, environment, society, values and destiny in defining and substantiating a personal identity?

The dialectics of different disciplinary approaches and knowledges, as well as different theoretical-speculative perspectives and traditions, can be more productive in deepening and readdressing problems concerning human identity. It is by following this line of reasoning that the Authors have decided to analyse and discuss the above questions from the dialectical perspective of psychoanalysis, psychiatry and philosophy. They want to offer a new point of departure for theoretical-scientific and speculative advancement. They will be reconsidering the fundamental characteristics of a dynamic and hermeneutic vision of identity, tracing a middle-way perspective and, at the same time, absorbing Wilfred Bion’s idea of transformation and Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of translation.  

CONTENTS 

Presentation

Chapter 1: Personal Identity: A Persistent Dilemma

Chapter 2: The Deconstruction of Identity

Chapter 3: The Narrative Reconstruction of Identity

Chapter 4: Corporal Identity

Chapter 5: Identity and Time

Chapter 6: To Translate the Suffering

Conclusion: A New Perspective on Personal Identity between Translation and Transformation

Bibliography