Benjamin Lee Center for Psychosocial Studies On March 29-April 1, 1979, the Center for Psychosocial Studies held a conference in Chicago on "New Approaches to the Self" in which all the authors in this volume partici pated. Over the years the Center has acted as a communica tions link and coordination point for interdisciplinary dis cussions and research. Several years ago, we discovered that there was a renewed interest among psychoanalysts, anthro pologists, and developmental psychologists in the investiga tion of the self, and the reason for this groundswell of ac tivity was the discovery...

Each of the three great schools of developmental psy chology represented in this vo1ume--psychoana1ytic, cogni tive-developmental, and Vygotskian--diverges in important ways. But more recent changes in each discipline have led to new possibilities for theoretical integrations. Each ori entation has begun to focus upon the problem of "meaning construction," that is, how a person's subjectivity and con sciousness is created through his interaction with signifi cant others. Each discipline also discovered that as it switched to meaning and interpretation as the foci of their work, they had to...