Zeitgeschichte des Selbst: Therapeutisierung – Politisierung – Emotionalisierung

Abstract

Subjectivity is a concept that has been successfully applied to historical cultural studies, yet it still poses profound methodological challenges to scholars of contemporary history. Despite the discipline’s considerable attention to the study of the self over the past decade, thus far approaches from the social sciences, especially sociology, have defined this field of inquiry. As a result, German genealogies of the self (see for example Das unternehmerische Selbst (2007), Das schöne Selbst (2009) and Das beratene Selbst (2011)) have mostly failed to link up to some of the larger socio-economic questions that contemporary German history engages. With Zeitgeschichte des Selbst. Therapeutisierung – Politisierung – Emotionalisierung the editors Pascal Eitler and Jens Elberfeld seek to provide a much needed heuristic tool to refine historians’ understanding of poststructuralist conceptions of the self in the second half of Germany’s twentieth century. Moving beyond traditional history of science interpretations of subjectivity closely linked to discourse in psychology and psychiatry, the volume suggests to examine practices and self-techniques, contextualized in contemporary discourse, to gain a better understanding of the self. ‘Managing the self’, ‘jogging for personal enlightenment’ and ‘old-age sex and the culture of life-long learning’ are only a few of the intriguing chapter titles that remind the reader of big-lettered, colourful book covers to be found in the self-help department of every well-sorted neighbourhood book store.