Some definitions

I shall be employing a number of terms that have a variety of usages as in other contexts. The definitions I shall be using in this article are given below.

Psyche

By this I mean the field of the mind of a human being. It includes conscious and unconscious mental contents, and items which the self endorses and owns; but it also includes items which it does not own, and which are experienced as alien.

Person

This I understand as the centre or epicentre from which the various contents of the psyche appear to emerge, get organised, develop and change. There are many ways in which this happens, but I shall concentrate on two distinctive and complementary functions of the person in this paper: the individuating and the participative. The former crystallises out and separates subjects and objects from experiential life, while the latter unites and reconnects them. On this account a person is an achievement rather than something that is given; there can thus be both pre-personal states of the psyche, and also relatively well developed and relatively undeveloped persons.

Personal integrity

By the above definition persons are processes. The integrity of these processes can then be understood in terms of: (i) the well-connectedness of its parts and functions, (ii) their success in mediating an optimum relationship between self and environment.