Quotes from Philip Cushman

The message is constantly displayed on television commercials, where the motive of keeping up with (rather than cooperating with) the Jonses is treated as an unquestioned value.

He accepted without question the notion that there is such a thing as 'normal,' that most people have attained it, and that it could be achieved by his patients if only they would have a successful therapy.

The self embodies what the culture believes is humankind's place in the cosmos-- its limits, talents, expectations and prohibitions... There is no universal, trans-historical self, only local selves; there is no universal theory about the self, only local theories.

We in the West are accustomed to thinking that humans are all basically the same underneath our different cultural clothing, that the concerns the middle class struggles with in contemporary society are at bottom the same concerns with which all other classes societies and cultures struggle. To glimpse the possibility that that is not so comes as an unwelcome surprise.

In the West, there have been many pre-twentieth century configurations of the self...Each of these selves are part of the heritage of the West. Each of these selves, all sure that they were the one, proper way of being human, all sure that their way of arranging power relations of gender, race, community and age was the one natural arrangement, all sure that their God was the only true God, are the antecedents of our current self. It is a humbling, disorienting vision.

Vast historical changes in the last 500 years in the West have slowly created a world in which the individual is commonly understood to be a container of a 'mind' and more recently a 'self' that needs to be 'therapied,' rather than, say, a carrier of a divine soul that needs to be saved, or simply an element of the communal unit that must cooperate for the common good.