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Contents
- Abstract
- The Emergence of the Empty Self
- The Self Is a Social Construct
- The Many Shapes of the Western Self
- The Sexually Conflicted Victorian Self
- The Early 20th Century American Self
- The Post-World War II Era and Its Economy
- The Post-World War II Era and the Empty Self
- Psychoanalytic Theory and the Empty Self
- Advertising and the Life-Style Solution
- Psychotherapy and the Life-Style Solution
- Abuse in Psychotherapy
- Conclusion
Abstract
This article presents a contextualized treatment of the current configuration of self, some of the pathologies that plague it, and the technologies that attempt to heal it. Of particular interest is the historical shift from the Victorian, sexually restricted self to the post-World War II empty self. The empty self is soothed and made cohesive by becoming “filled up” with food, consumer products, and celebrities. Its historical antecedents, economic constituents, and political consequences are the focus of this article. The two professions most responsible for healing the empty self, advertising and psychotherapy, find themselves in a bind: They must treat a psychological symptom without being able to address its historical causes. Both circumvent the bind by employing the life-style solution, a strategy that attempts to heal by covertly filling the empty self with the accoutrements, values, and mannerisms of idealized figures. This strategy solves an old problem but creates new ones, including an opportunity for abuse by exploitive therapists, cult leaders, and politicians. Psychology’s role in constructing the empty self, and thus reproducing the current hierarchy of power and privilege, is examined.
From its beginnings, modern psychology has had difficulty developing a historically situated perspective on its discourse and practices. Nowhere is this ahistorical tendency more obvious than in the debate on individualism. Many researchers have treated self-contained individualism as an unquestioned value and the current concept of self—the bounded, masterful self—as an unchangeable, transhistorical entity. In opposition to a decontextualized approach, I will argue that cultural conceptualizations and configurations of self are formed by the economies and politics of their respective eras. By studying the self in this way, psychologists will be better able to understand the current era and psychology’s place within that era.
I have drawn from the insights of hermeneuticists such as Faulconer and Williams (1985), Gadamer (1979)