Rewriting the Self-----

New Enlightenment individuality climaxed in the American Constitution and in the 'Liberty, Equality and Fraternity' of the French Revolution itself (its outcomes, the Terror and the Napoleonic Empire, betrayed the aspirations). The revolutionary era moreover inspired Sturm und Drang and Romanticism in literature and the arts, pitching individualism on to even higher planes. Rejecting the cash nexus and the despotism of polite conventional taste Romanticism idealized the outsider, the Bohemian artist, the Byronic rebel, bardic visionaries - and even victims like Dr. Frankenstein's monster. Romantic social critics loathed bourgeois respectability; the world was too much with us, Wordsworth complained; urban man was alienated; and communing with nature was the way to get back in touch with one's self. Life must be a journey of self-discovery. That could be a bitter - a Winterreise; but the road was not to be refused. In the comparable ways, Schiller and Shelley, Coleridge and Chateaubriand, Holderlin and Hazlitt each espoused a creed of the sacredness of individual development, in pursuit of what Keats called the holiness of the heart's intentions. Self-development was thus assuming a religious ethos, while in the philosophy of Hegel, the dialectical strivings of mind or spirit (Geist) towards autonomy or full self-awareness fused personal development with spiritual destiny; Goethe's Faust (1808) offers a dramatic parallel.

Through the nineteenth century, romantic drives to self-understanding and realization found further expression. Bleak philosophers like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche entered their tragic visions on the lone individual, solipsistically enduring or enjoying utter isolation from the universe and society. Decadent fin de siécle poets dwelt upon their inner consciousness, often stimulated by dreams, drugs or drink. Academic psychology meanwhile turned the subject into an object for scientific investigation and, through the invention of systematic testing, focused attention upon the meaning of individual differences.

Above all, the quest for the ultimate self seemed to make a crucial breakthrough with the 'discovery of the unconscious.' The upstaging of the Cartesian cogito was not a new thing with Sigmund Freud, but it was he who actually theorized the unconscious. Psychoanalysis argued that the rational understanding proudly cultivated by the Renaissance humanists, Descartes' prized ego cogitans, was not after all a master in its own house, not the real thing. What truly counted was what had hitherto lain concealed, an unconscious profoundly repressed and hence expressed only in foreign tongues or obliquely and painfully by means of illness, hysteria and nightmare. Neurotics especially needed to be put in touch with this repressed self, re-integrating it within a healthy whole.

Freud thereby opened up new horizons of selfhood, or rather delved into the psyche's ocean depths, uncovering a submarine population of dark desires and dangerous drive. Self-discovery had become a journey into inner space. Exploration of this seemingly alien realm was to have the profoundest implications for modern psychiatry, art and literature - think of surrealism or the stream-of-consciousness novel. And, crucially important, Freud claimed he had hit upon a crucial new truth (or one long silenced): the self's ultimate secret was sexuality. Depth psychology thus gave new edge to Polonius' advice. Because the Freudian psyche might not be very pleasant to behold, ruthless honesty became more essential than ever, nothing should be concealed or rationalized away. This imperative of truth was no less fundamental to existentialism, whose oracle, Jean-Paul Sartre, stressed the paramount need to combat the 'bad faith' of the unexamined life, and all its duplicitous deceptions. The movement beginning with the Renaissance autobiography culminated, it thus appears, in existential angst, the finest hour of subjective individualism. Meanwhile, on a less exalted plane, the present century was spawning scores of creeds and cults, building on Freud and similar experts, and claiming to help people to understand themselves, maximize their potential, like themselves, express themselves and, of course, be themselves. Ours is the age of the 'me generation,' doing your own thing.