The self in personality structure and human interaction: Developing a Christian rapprochement of personhood in object relations theory and narrative clinical psychology. Toward a critical conversation in the context of culture

In a recent article in the American Journal of Psychiatry, psychiatrists and mental health specialists argue that we need a new integrative framework for understanding people and their problems. Of the over four hundred current models of personhood available today in the psychological marketplace, scholars plead for a comprehensive theoretical framework to freshly emerge that integrates and explains subsequent models of Selfhood and psychopathology.;For Christians in the field of psychotherapy, Selfhood and personhood must be examined in the light of the current accepted canons of psychological evidence and biblical research. We discover that narrative and relationship provide the most comprehensive approach for understanding the human psychology. Finally, the closing chapters expand the author's transcendent vision of people as built for relationship within a narrative world and life view.;More than ever, therefore, a social crisis has arisen that is Copernican in terms of understanding people. Proponents of Judeo-Christianity have also felt this void. From a survey preview of existing perspectives of object-relations, Freudian psychology, the brain-mind debate, and the emerging trend toward narrative psychologies, the author tackles the philosophical and psychological problems of justifying the need for a new and more focused integrative framework of Selfhood and personhood to emerge. The author argues that Selfhood is properly understood through the integrational framework of relationship and narrative, i. e., Self models of people and their struggle for relationships. The author concludes the final section by developing a framework for understanding people through relationship and stories.