ABSTRACT
In Ulrich Beck’s and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim’s (2001) recent book, Individualization, they chart a series of changing scenarios in the workplace, familial and personal relationships, health care, welfare and gender, within an argument that suggests there is an increasing trend towards individualisation within neo-liberalism. This trend, they argue, is evident in the way in which people articulate and understand their own success and failure, and take steps to maximise their success, happiness and fulfilment across a range of practices in which they are subjects. They term the narratives that have become increasingly central to how we understand our life trajectories ‘reflexive biographies’, and argue that it is how we rationalise the choices we have made in relation to our successes and failures that capture this trend. The psychological ramifications of this shift are related to the ways in which failure in the workplace, in our intimate lives, even in relation to our lived experience of health and illness, is tied to a particular economy of emotions, such as personal inadequacy, guilt, anxiety and neurosis, rather than a blow of fate, circumstance or part and parcel of what we might term the mundane psychopathology of life. This is a ‘reflexive self’ governed by an ethic of self-fulfilment and achievement that is matched by the production of a particular psychopathology that besets modern life.
