Inventing our selves

the long version

Inventing Our Selves provides a radical new approach to the analysis of our current regime of the self, and the values of autonomy, identity, individuality, liberty, and choice that animate it. It draws upon the work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and recent feminist scholarship on the body and the self to propose a novel genealogy of subjectivity. It argues that the "psy" disciplines - psychology in particular - have played a key role in "inventing our selves," making visible and practicable certain features of persons, their conducts and their relations with one another, inventing new forms of expertise, transforming authority in a therapeutic direction, and changing the ethical techniques by means of which humans have come to understand and act upon themselves in the name of their truth. This is illustrated through studies of "psy" disciplines in factories, schools, clinics, the military, public opinion, and therapy. Nikolas Rose argues that the proliferation of "psy" has been intrinsically linked with transformations in "governmentality," in the rationalities and technologies of political power in contemporary liberal democracies. The aim of this critical history is to diagnose our contemporary condition of the self, to destabilize and denaturalize what seems immutable, to elucidate the burdens imposed, the illusions entailed, the acts of domination and self-mastery that are the counterpart of the capacities and liberties that make up the contemporary individual.