Creating Subjects

Abstract

Self-creation has been held up as the fundamental task of modern man. We are repeatedly encouraged to discover our authentic selves or cultivate our individuality in order to win health, happiness, romantic fulfillment, or career success. It is a task that psychologists have been eager to take on, offering up competing pathways toward self-realization. At the same time, however, critical historians and sociologists have accused the discipline of psychology of fostering the creation of particular kinds of self. This article outlines debates about self-creation among psychologists and their readers from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 21st. It takes as its focus Western psychology and the ideas developed by its academic practitioners in laboratories and universities across Europe and North America, but it acknowledges that these ideas were often developed in dialogue with, or in reaction to, versions of the self articulated in other cultures and traditions across the globe. The opening section, “Creating Subjects and Making Selves,” discusses the ways that conventional ideas of selfhood have been challenged by developments in anthropology, philosophy, and the history of psychology, before going on to look at the ways that new religious movements and globalization challenged familiar ideas of the self in the 19th century. The first generation of professional psychologists (notably William James; see Section 2, “William James and Late 19th-Century Self Making”) recognized this challenge and used it to ground new theories of self-improvement and self-creation. These projects were deepened by the “discovery” of the subliminal or subconscious mind, which was portrayed to the public as a source of hidden potential (see Section 3, “The Subliminal: New Sources of Self-Creation”) or unconscious restrictions (see Section 4, “The New Psychology and the Discovery of Constraint”) to be unleashed or overcome. By the early 20th century, the discipline of psychology was offering manifold paths to self-creation: Behaviorism (Section 5, “Behaviorism and the Experimental Creation of Selves”), psychoanalysis (Section 6, “Psychoanalysis: New Paths to Self-Creation”), and social psychology (Section 7, “Social Psychology and the Sources of Self-Creation”). The various theories and practices put forward gained enthusiastic adherents but by the middle decades of the 20th century, this pursuit of the self was being met with growing skepticism. Existentialist philosophy (Section 8, “Selves as Prisons: Existentialism and Self-Creation”) claimed that the conventional faith in selfhood and psychology blinded people to their absolute freedom, but by the 1950s and 1960s this critique would be recuperated by psychologists, with existential analysts and humanistic psychologists celebrating the move beyond the everyday identity as a potential foundation for personal growth. At the same time, the rise of information technology and cybernetics supported the idea that the self was little more than a code or pattern of signals, encouraging the belief that it could be transformed through integration into new systems of information. At the beginning of the 21st century, the self-skepticism that had animated 19th-century schemes of self-building had become an academic commonplace. This is celebrated as a radical position, but in fact, this sense that individuals are not subjects but projects undergoing continual revision is the same sense that animates the growth of therapy and the self-help industry in the modern era.