ABSTRACT
In my account of the conflicting trends of late modernity I have referred several times to Anthony Giddens. Giddens (1991,1992), is the sociologist who has gone furthest in systematically exploring contemporary notions of the self, drawing on the ideas and prescriptions of various types of psychotherapy. Although he identifies a number of problems and contradictions in what is happening to personal life, and he is aware of the double-edged nature of late modernity, he seems to see these developments primarily as a ‘good thing’, involving an increasing freedom and autonomy and intimately bound up with the possibilities of a democratic society. I want to reverse his emphases: there are certainly elements of increased freedom in current developments, but there is much that is illusory and socially dangerous. My argument is that psychotherapy, to the extent that it is an ‘abstract system’ of social control, can prescribe a ‘false self’, in effect an illusory self, an illusory way of living. On the one hand, this illusion takes the form of making a virtue out of a disturbing necessity, turning fragmentation into a ‘good thing’; on the other, it suggests, often implicitly and against its own explicit statements, that there are certain areas of our existence where we can find a coherent or real identity. The statement ‘I have a right to do what I want to with my own life’, for example, carries elements of both-I can control my self (identity), and I have a right to do what I want to without restriction, to ‘actualise’ myself in all the ways I desire (fragmentation),
NEW CONCEPTIONS OF THE SELF AND RELATIONSHIPS
To begin with I will simply present Giddens’s arguments. Some of the therapies he employs to illustrate his argument are closer to psychoanalysis than others. The crux of his argument is that in the modern world, the self is not something that is consistently rooted in the surrounding community; we each have to find our self, and given the speed of social change we have to do so regularly. Relationships have to be rationally justified; they are no longer sanctified by tradition. We have to have a reason for what we do. Giddens refers to this as reflexivity-we are constantly justifying and reworking ourselves. In this context, he offers two views of the role of therapy: one he calls the ‘negative’ view, in which psychotherapy is an attempt to compensate for the loss of community; the alternative is that therapy is intimately bound up with the opportunities offered by the modern world for selfreconstruction and change, and it is with this latter view that I take issue.
