The Politics of the “True Self”

A good case can be made for calling the last 25 years the Age of Freud, for his thought has reached everywhere, reached especially to a kind of contemporary writing I would like to call—to coin an ungainly phrase—psycho-political prophecy. Even if some of these psycho-political prophets rarely refer to Freud, their basic assumptions reveal that they have been affected by Freudian modes of thought. Unlike Freud, however, these writers dwell on the need for radical psychological change. The...