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Rewriting the Self
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Rewriting the Self
von: Roy Porter
Routledge, 1996
ISBN: 9780203747391
296 Seiten, Download: 1900 KB
 
Format:  PDF
geeignet für: Apple iPad, Android Tablet PC's Online-Lesen PC, MAC, Laptop

Typ: B (paralleler Zugriff)

 

 
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14 ASSEMBLING THE MODERN SELF by Nikolas Rose

In the first volume of The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil remarked upon the way in which ‘experiences’ seemed to have made themselves independent of individuals, to have gone on to the stage, into books, into exhibitions and the reports of scientific institutions, into communities based upon religious conviction. Once having achieved their independence, they return with a new authority. ‘Who today can still say that his anger is really his own anger,’ Musil wrote, ‘with so many people butting in and knowing much more about it than he does?’ (1979, pp. 174–5).

Musil’s words capture something fundamental about our contemporary experience of ourselves. Our feelings, beliefs, desires, hopes and fears are suffused with the descriptions, injunctions and evaluations of those who claim to know more about what is good for us than we do ourselves. Most of those who Musil mentions still chatter in our ears. But over the last half century, they have been overpowered by new ‘experts of experience’. These experts rest their authority upon claim to truth, to science and objectivity, to facts, experiments, findings and statistics, to long hours in the consulting room and the hospital.

They impress us because their advice seems to rest on evidence within reality itself, although evident only to those who know how to look. These are the specialists of psy: psychologists, psychiatrists, psychotherapists, psychiatric social workers, management consultants, market researchers, opinion-pollers, counsellors. Their murmerings into our outer and inner ears are not confined to our periods of frank madness or despair. They accompany us from the moment of our conception and birth through all the phases within which they have framed our lives: childhood, adolescence, sexual desires, relationships, mid-life crises, illnesses, old age, mourning, even death.

They have shaped the vocabularies and activities of all those other authorities who now seek to manage human conduct: our judges, doctors, policemen, prison officers, managers, economists, investment consultants, politicians, pundits, talk-show hosts and soap-opera scriptwriters have come to speak in psychological dialects. These specialists of psy have enmeshed themselves inextricably with our experience of ourselves. Musil writes of these authorities ‘butting in’. But their intrusion can take many forms.

There are, indeed, many times when it is a matter of the knock at the door, the uninvited presence, the demand for admission: the social workers descending upon those suspected of abusing their children, the industrial consultant ‘enriching’ the working routines of labourers in factories and offices, the psychiatrist assessing the defendant before charge, verdict or sentence or running ‘therapeutic groups’ in prison or reformatory; the doctor evaluating a disturbed individual with a view to compelling them to receive psychiatric treatment. But, eagerly or reluctantly, we all too often ask them in, seek out their knowledge in books and magazine articles, listen to them on radio phonein programmes and confessional television talk shows, take ourselves to counsellors, therapists and marriage guidance.

And the presence of psy in our contemporary experience is not limited to our encounters with the experts. When we speak to our friends and acquaintances about the ills that trouble us or the hopes that animate us, our conversations will be studded with psychological terms—stress, anxiety, motivation, personality, self-esteem and so on. Even when we are alone, in our most intimate experiences of ourselves, psy allows us to understand the actions of those around us, to describe our personality, passions and hopes, to understand our sorrows and calibrate our disappointments, to project and embark upon a future for ourselves. In being acted upon and acting upon ourselves in these ways, modern human beings (in different ways for women and for men, for the young and the old, for the rich and the poor) have become psychological selves.



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