What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society

In the classical world, ethics was rooted in immanence, the notion that everyone carries within them the seed of norms and values. By contrast, Christianity gave rise to the idea of transcendence, originally meaning to ‘climb beyond’ or ‘surmount’. Everything that is good belongs to the domain of God, who stands above everything.

Depending on what you were told when you were assembling your identity, you are either certain of yourself, confident in your dealings with others, and sure of your own superiority; or, conversely, you are timid, ashamed of yourself, and shrink from interaction with others, convinced that they think you worthless. To use psychiatric jargon, people

we live in an extremely controlling society in which authority has disappeared.

At present, there is a growing demand for moderately educated but not overly critical individuals as job fodder. In a neo-liberal society, the function of education is not so much to train individuals to a high level as to select youngsters and mould them to fit a certain profile that will guarantee the highest productivity. What they actually do i

The postmodern individual suffers from a strange type of dissociation, a new form of split personality. We condemn the system, are hostile to it, and feel powerless to change it. Yet at the same time we act in a way that reinforces and even extends it. Every decision we make — what to eat and drink, what to wear, how to get about, where to go on ho

Strikingly, every single one of today’s ‘right’ characteristics has to do with contemporary professional identity, and the same applies to the interpersonal characteristics we are expected to possess.

The various stereotypes have one thing in common: they serve to make us feel superior. We are more civilised, more intelligent, work harder, and so on.

Societies exist by virtue of the gift — otherwise there would simply be no community — and each culture can be typified, among other things, by the way in which exchanges take place. A notion from chapter one can thus be taken a step further: identities are determined by the community in which they are formed and consequently by the method of excha

‘Mental health is produced socially: the presence or absence of mental health is above all a social indicator and therefore requires social, as well as individual solutions … A preoccupation with individual symptoms may lead to a “disembodied psychology” which separates what goes on inside people’s heads from social structure and context. The key t