SOURCE: Carveth, Donald L. “The Borderline Dilemma in Paris, Texas: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Sam Shepard.” Mosaic 25, no. 4 (fall 1992): 99-120.

In the following essay, Carveth explores Shepard's examination of the human “self” in Paris, Texas.

As early as the 1950s, psychoanalysts began to report significant changes in the forms of psychopathology that appear to have emerged in response to a sociocultural situation characterized by Martin Buber as one of metaphysical “homelessness” and by Peter Berger and other sociological descendants of Emile Durkheim as one of an increasingly pervasive “anomie.” In contrast to the intrapsychic or neurotic conflicts of the relatively structured personality of an earlier era, the variety of psychic suffering typical of our postmodern condition takes the form of the sense of fragmentation, estrangement and emptiness characteristic of what Christopher Lasch has called “the narcissistic personality of our time.”

The preoccupation with the personal and interpersonal dilemmas of...