Selfie: How the West Became Self-Obsessed

by Will Storr

after all, was the beginning of the age of modern psychology. But for me, although Freud and his colleagues prepared essential ground for the next chapter in the story of the Western self, theirs only really constitutes a shift in perspective. Humans were still bad. They still needed to be fixed. The cure remained an eternal war with the inner self, which was morally polluted, purely by dint of birth. Freud was really just a self-hating, sex-afeared, secular reinvention of St Benedict. The actual revolution happened out west, in the United States of America. It was there that our view of who we are, and how we ought to be, underwent a true metamorphosis and gained an armoury of new characteristics, a great many of which we still carry with us today. In 1936, in an incident that surely seemed to him of little consequence, Freud was visited by an emissary of this revolution. Fritz Perls was a German-Jewish psychoanalyst who’d discovered