A Place Called Self

Name: A Place Called Self
Author: Stephanie Brown

A Place Called Self is a work by Stephanie Brown (2004).

Core claims

Brown redefines “self” in recovery not as a pre-existing entity to be uncovered but as a developmental achievement that emerges only through the sustained collapse of the addictive identity — making sobriety itself a form of individuation rather than a precondition for it.
The book’s title operates as a quiet inversion of depth psychological convention: “a place called self” is not Murray Stein’s transcendent Self or Hillman’s imaginal perspective, but a literal, embodied location constructed through the daily practices of recovery — closer to Kohut’s relational self than to Jung’s archetypal one.
Brown’s developmental model of recovery implicitly challenges the heroic ego of classical Jungian thought by insisting that surrender, not conquest, is the mechanism through which the ego-Self axis reconstellates after addiction’s systematic destruction of it.

How does Brown’s developmental model of surrender in recovery compare to Neumann’s account of the ego’s “heroic birth” from the uroboric unconscious in The Origins and History of Consciousness — and does Brown effectively reverse Neumann’s sequence?
In what ways does Brown’s conception of “a place called self” challenge or complement Murray Stein’s exposition of Jung’s transcendent Self in Jung’s Map of the Soul, particularly regarding the clinical utility of the “little-s” versus “big-S” self distinction?
How might Hillman’s critique of ego-centered psychology in Re-Visioning Psychology — his argument that “ego has become a delusional system” — apply to Brown’s description of the addictive ego, and does Brown’s recovery framework inadvertently restore the very heroic ego Hillman sought to dismantle?