The Private Self

be achieved through one's role in the family and in the larger society. In non-Western culture the coherence of the self seems to be provided for by a transpersonal awareness. Sudhir Kakar, an Indian psychoanalyst, suggests that the idea of separateness and individuality is a Western value. ⁵⁰ In India the emphasis is on the transpersonal nature of man: the body is considered to have intimate connections with nature and the cosmos. This cultural relativism does not, I believe, negate the biological thesis that pervades this book. Given the enormous biological diversity of individuals, the diversity of cultures is not in itself an argument for nurture as opposed to nature.

The process of psychoanalysis extends the agency of the self through the creation of new meanings. "Meaning," in the lexicon of psychoanalysts, denotes personal--that is, private--meaning. This contrasts with the usage of some linguists and philosophers of language, whose concern is the understanding of public and shared meanings. In this chapter I have marshaled some of the evidence for the embodiment of meaning. This differentiates my position from that of researchers who see meaning in psychoanalysis as analogous to a literary text; for I believe that what is meaningful in psychoanalysis can ultimately be traced to affective memories. The psychoanalyst can observe embodied meaning, since a patient's communication is meaningful only if it carries with it some affective charge. The coherence of the psychoanalytic narrative is ultimately derived from the bodily self and its affective memories. This embodiment of meaning is supported by Edelman's theory of Neuronal Group

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