ABSTRACT
A lecture given in several cross-disciplinary humanities settings, this chapter argues that “individuology” is a missing academic field. This field would theorize individuals and individuality and develop methods for studying affect, conflict, senses of self and other, the transferential creation of personal meaning, etc. It would interest undergraduate and graduate students. Psychoanalysis is currently our major theory of individuality, and individuology would begin from a psychoanalytic premise: there are many processes that comprise individual psychology and subjectivity, but each individual is unique. Individuology could draw initially from psychoanalytic concepts–affect, conflict, transference, countertransference, dynamics, and defense, etc. Such a field would invite theoretical expansion and research. It would be a qualitative field relying on intersubjective methodologies, following the Geisteswissenschaften rather than the Naturwissenschaften. It would complement current academic fields: social sciences that study collective political and social processes and culture; economics; academic psychology. Methods, theory and an epistemology must be developed for this new field. Though the unconscious cannot be directly observed, many fields, from astrophysics to psychology and the social sciences, are not condemned for being inferential. The chapter describes graduate and undergraduate courses taught by the author that brought theory and research to engage students about the individual and individuality.
