Review: 'My Self and I' by Constance A. Newland

Originally published in 1962 'My Self and I', by American Thelma Moss, was released pseudonymously under the name Constance A. Newland. One of a number of books that came out of the psychotherapeutic application of LSD in the 1950s and also, in part, as a reaction to Aldous Huxley's 'The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell', the text reads like an idealised Freudian analysis. A case history that displays all the key signifiers of a Freudian model like the Oedipus complex, castration and penis envy, to name but a few but that recognises the value of LSD as reaching beyond the psychotherapeutic framework.

In his foreword Dr. Harold Greenwald casts the author (hereafter referred to as Newland) as being the stereotyped American woman as perpetuated by the media "misogynists" of the 1950s and early 60s. She is, in his terms and her own, "balanced" socially but she is also the "model of the frozen, ruthlessly efficient American career woman" (New 7). He see's her as typical of the "baffling problem of frigidity in the liberally educated modern woman" (New 9). The problem of 'frigidity' is described as being a neurosis that, for a psychoanalyst, represents certain blocks in the Unconscious. Having undergone numerous years of unsuccessful psychoanalysis, this book chronicles her sessions of drug therapy, under which she receives successful analysis while under the influence of LSD-25.