I Am Because You Are

"I am because you are" is a key passage in What I Loved (2003), contemporary American writer Siri Hustvedt's third novel, and a recurring motif throughout both her fictional and nonfictional work. This volume examines relational identity formation in her writing, especially the relationship between self and other in photography and painting, the transgression of corporeal boundaries in hysteria and anorexia, and the effects of losing attachment figures on personal identity. Hustvedt reveals identity as a complex product of conscious and unconscious interconnections within the social and biological environment. Through her unique investigations of these connections and the fragile boundaries between self and other, she enters new territory in the field of literary identity research. This volume further explores this territory through different discursive approaches, from philosophies of intersubjectivity to relational psychoanalysis.