The desire for self-creation

Some people feel that aspects of their past or limitations of their present prevent them from living a life they experience as worth living. They embark on the project of fully re-creating themselves. This article traces various manifestations of the desire for self-creation. An extended clinical example shows how this project led a patient to the brink of death, because it was more important for her to feel that she had authorship over her life than to be alive. The desire for self-creation has found cultural expression in the Cartesian program of cleaning the mind from any external influence. In less sublimated forms, this desire can be found in bodybuilding and certain forms of sexual fantasy. This article ends by discussing psychoanalytic and existentialist approaches to the protest against fatedness, which motivates the project of self-creation.