Psychoanalytic developmental theory takes as its premise that the central thrust of human development is movement from a state of dependence and merger to a state of independent, differentiated selfhood. When we think about the self, or identity, we are inclined to envision a person standing alone, somehow being what he or she is, apart from all others. Our quest as theorists has similarly been for a conceptualization of selfhood as a purely internal function, as though one can have selfhood, or identity, independent from embeddedness in a social matrix.