Selfie: How the West Became Self-Obsessed

by Will Storr

Freudianism as boy after becoming terrified that masturbation was ruining his memory. After fleeing the anti-Semitism of Europe, he’d found safety and professional success in Johannesburg. Perls was a rather self-important man and, being a disciple of Freud and finding himself in Vienna for a conference, had decided to arrive unannounced in order to pay his respects. He’d presumably expected to be welcomed in and for a great meeting of minds to take place. But when Perls found his master’s house, Freud only opened his door a crack. ‘I came from South Africa to give a paper and see you,’ Perls explained. There was a silence. ‘Well,’ said Freud. ‘And when are you going back?’ It was a...

snub and would eventually disown him completely. Decades later, and many miles to the west, his new ideas on what a person is and should be would become so influential he’d earn his own place, alongside Fre...

Remember when the ‘geography of thought’ expert Professor Richard Nisbett told me, ‘the further west you go, the more individualistic, the more delusional about choice, the more the emphasis on self-esteem, the more the emphasis on self-just-about-everything, until it all falls into the Pacific’? This

is where it falls into the Pacific. It was on these cliffs that the Esalen Institute helped rewrite our sense of who we are. Whilst the causes of any specific change in the culture tend to be myriad and are often impossible to isolate, it’s clear that much of who we are today has been influenced by what happened here, back in the 1960s.

So much of the twenty-first-century self finds a path back to this hundred-and-twenty-acre patch beneath Highway One, from our fetishization of personal authenticity and ‘being real’ and its concomitant hatred of ‘fakeness’, to the normalization (not least on social media) of living the intimate details of our private lives as public, to our deep interest in concepts such as ‘mindfulness’ and ‘wellness’ – new, secular retellings of Christian narratives of conscience and soul...

USA. For many years America remained a nation under the oppressive grip of the old-world God. It had been settled by Calvinists who, writes Barbara Ehrenreich, lived under ‘a system of socially imposed depression’ in which ‘the task for the living was to constantly examine “the loathsome abominations that live in his bosom” seeking to uproot the sinful thoughts that are a sure sign of damnation.’ But when it finally severed its cord with that old world, it became a radically new kind of place. Its founding document, the Declaration of Independence, stated that ‘all men are cr...

These were the starting conditions for what would become an American revolution of the self that would infect us all. It was a vision, unlike that of Freud or the European Christians, that saw the human as something inherently deserving of good and that contained within it everything it needed to make itself healthy and wealthy and smiling. This was, of course, a partial revival of Ancient Greek ideas of the perfectible human self, with its focus on the all-powerful ‘I’. What the two countries shared was their unusual compartmentalized structure: where Greece was a civilization of ‘city states’, America was a collection of ‘united states’, their independence

from centralized authority, except where explicitly granted, being enshrined in its Bill of Rights. And, suitably enough, it was in this new particulate landscape that individualism would become supercharged.

Of course, it wasn’t only in America that these changes were taking place. Back in Europe, this economic environment was also creating a new form of ideal self. In 1859, a former journalist, railwayman and political activist (and also, as it weirdly turns out, my great-great-uncle), Samuel Smiles, published Self Help, the first book of its kind and a surprise bestseller. His wish in writing it was ‘to stimulate youths to apply themselves diligently to right pursuits –

sparing neither labour, pains, nor self-denial in prosecuting them – and to rely upon their own efforts in life, rather than depend upon the help or patronage of others.’ For someone living in Britain before the Industrial Revolution this would have seemed an impossibly optimistic message. No longer were you obediently stuck in your place – now, with hard work and character, you could improve your lot spectacularly. This new idea of self spoke of a new world and the new dreams of the individuals living in it.

But over in America, at first in the margins, something unique was stirring. Modernity was influencing the Christians in a way that was wholly characteristic of their more optimistic, I-centred sense of self. In this magical time of invisible forces such as the electric light and the telegraph there developed a craze for faith healing, in which it was thought a believer’s maladies could be cured by the touch of a preacher – as long as they had sufficient

faith. To be healed of all that ailed them, all they had to do was believe. One of its most famous practitioners was an expat Yorkshire plumber named Smith Wigglesworth who once tried to cure a man of stomach cancer by punching him in the stomach. The man flatlined. On another occasion, he kicked a crippled child off the stage. Those who complained that they hadn’t been healed were admonished for having insufficient faith. The key to the cure – to happiness, to health, to salvation – lay within them. All they had to do was believe. Adherents of what psychologist William James termed ‘the mind-cure movement’ thought similarly. James defined mind-cure as the ‘intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded attitudes’. Mind-cure’s forefather was a clockmaker from New England named Phineas Quimby who’d become fascinated by ‘magnetic healers’ who claimed to have access to quasi-magical

magical powers. But Quimby decided that, actually, their patients only felt better because they believed in the authority of the healer. ‘The cure is n...

confidence of the doctor ...

For Samuel Smiles, achievement and wealth had been a product of toil and self-denial. For Lord, all you had to do was believe.

Then, in the first half of the twentieth century, came the Great Depression. This utterly catastrophic event was to trigger a series of enormously significant changes to the economy that would alter the selves of the people for decades. This was the first of two crises that would lead to a dramatic reaction against untrammelled individualism. It was the crash, and then World War II, that brought about a new, collective era of ‘class compromise’ between rich and poor. A series of state interventions led to an extraordinary narrowing of the income gap that economists sometimes

call the ‘Great Compression’, a period that lasted roughly between 1945 and 1975. And, sure enough, out of this new kind of economy hatched a new kind of self. It all began with the ‘New Deal’ of the 1930s, which brought tough regulations on banking. Then there was the Social Security Act and the introduction of the minimum wage. Unionization became popular. The tax level for the nation’s highest earners was set as high as 90 per cent. The GI Bill gave millions of working-class war veterans a college education paid for by the state, a big-government act that would do immeasurable good. It was partly due to policies such as these that, between 1929 and 1945, lower incomes would grow faster than higher and, for the next twenty-five y...

Gordon, ‘who without a college education could work steadily at a unionized job and make a high enough income to afford a suburban house with a backyard, one or two cars and a life style of which median-in...

Encouraging this new collective spirit was the rise of ind...

Farm workers moved in huge numbers to the towns and cities. There, they no longer lived side-by-side with relatives and old acquaintances but with strangers, on whom you had to make a good impression. The post-war years were a time of salesman and corporation, of the company taking care of you for life. Increasingly the individual became just a small component of the larger corporate organism. And people were living that way, too, in the growing, bustling, faceless suburbs. To get along and get ...

The emphasis on hardiness of character transformed into an emphasis on maintaining a sunn...

It was around this time, as Susan Cain has famously documented, that the provost of Harvard University began instructing admissions officers to reject applications from ‘sensitive’ applicants and instead offer places to ‘healthy, extroverted’ ones. There were new runaway bestsellers, American retellings of the Samuel Smiles narrative that had arteries of Mind Cure and faith healing running deep within them: How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (‘Men and women can banish worry, fear and various kinds of illnesses, and can transform their lives by changing their thoughts. I know! I know!! I know!!!’) and The Power...

occupy and direct our minds’). They contained such lessons as ‘how to make people like you instantly’, ‘how to create your own happiness’ and how to ‘expect the best and get it’. As sociologist Professor John Hew...

and that of “personality”...

As the 1950s became the 1960s, the Great Compression created a new and distinct generation of selves. The children of Corporation Man and Woman were the even more collectively-minded hippies who changed the Western world with their ideas of community, anti-authoritarianism, anti-capitalism, pacifism and imported Eastern notions, which suddenly made much more intuitive

sense, about the general oneness and connectedness of all things. This state of mind also saw a major shift in the attentions of the political left, away from their traditional preoccupations, such as employment conditions and pay, and towards equality and rights for minorities.

a new form of individual and a new form of individualism. It would give birth to an era in which enormous expectations were placed on the self, which, it was now believed, was filled with vast reserves of incredible yet hidden potential. This revolution was led by a cultural leader who might not be as famous as Aristotle, Jesus or Freud, but who’s managed

to have an outsized influence on us all. Any story of who we are today would be absurd without his presence. His name is Carl Rogers.

In the 1960s, Rogers helped found the discipline known as Humanistic Psychology, which, in turn, inspired the Human Potential Movement, whose adherents believed in the incredible power of the individual and our almost unlimited capacity to transform into better and better versions of ourselves. Rogers and his disciples became convinced that the non-sick could benefit from psychological work.

a place where Rogers, along with most, if not all, of humanistic psychology’s most iconic thinkers and leaders held workshops and increasingly crazed sessions. It was a place that rang with ideas that would change America’s self and then the world’s. It was a place called Esalen. The Esalen Institute’s stated mission was that ‘all men somehow possess a divine potentiality; that ways may be worked out – specific, systematic ways – to help, not the few, but the many toward a vastly expanded capacity to learn, to love, to feel deeply,

to create’. Building on Rogers’ idea of ‘therapy for normals’, they believed that God lay in the deep, authentic core of everyone and what we had to do, using methods including encounter, was expose

it. Sociologist Professor Marion Goldman writes that one of the reasons Esalen attracted thousands of Americans was because it ‘fundamentally redefined psychotherapy as a context for person...

The basic assumption that God is part of all beings and that we are gods is Esalen’s cornerstone.’ This was a specific form of spirituality that placed the source of divine perfection within the self. It was an idea that would eventually swallow the world.

the woman on Esalen’s booking line had told me that this was the closest thing they had to the encounter groups that a visitor might have experienced in the 1960s. The catalogue explained that it held ‘honored status’ at the Institute and was considered a ‘rite of passage’ for staffers. It would be a ‘voyage through your own humanity’ from which we’d emerge with ‘greater authenticity’. It was, went the promise, an ‘opportunity to experience yourself in ways you may have dreamed about but never thought possible’. It was called ‘The Max’.

He was aiming for a state of radical authenticity, an unapologetic embracing of the true, core self; ‘to change paper people into real people’. A person’s principal goal, he believed, should be to ‘be what you are’.

The mid-1960s were incendiary and magnificent times for Esalen. Their 1965 brochure boasted that ‘new tools and techniques of the human potentiality – generally unknown to the public and to much of the intellectual community – are already at hand; many more are presently under development. We stand on an exhilarating and dangerous frontier – and must answer anew the old questions: “What are the limits of human ability, the boundaries of the human experience? What does it mean to be a human being?”’ In 1966 alone, around four thousand inner-adventurers – ‘doctors, social workers, clinical psychologists, teachers, students, business executives, engineers, housewives’, according to a contemporary New York Times account – made the long drive up Highway One to find out. A phrase heard often around the property was ‘Mother Esalen gives permission’ and, indeed, she did. There was nude massage, group sex, physical aggression and

colossal psychedelia; there were grown men re-experiencing their births, young women in sheer gowns playing flutes by the pool and encounters with visionaries such as Ken Kesey, Joseph Campbell and Timothy Leary.

the King of Esalen was soon to find a rival. Will

Schutz was three decades his junior, had taught at Harvard and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and had just written a book that, in his first months at the Institute, would grow into a national bestseller. Its title was Joy, a state Schutz described as ‘the feeling that comes from the fulfilment of one’s potential’. Inspired by Carl Rogers, Schutz believed that humans are born with all the joy they’ll ever need inside them, but society gets in the way of it, suppressing it as we suppress our true selves.

With this came an extreme position on self-responsibility that overturned the old Christian model, in which God had a plan for every one of us, and all we could do to influence it was be good and pray for mercy. Now that God was to be found in the self, rather than the heavens, it naturally followed that the source of all our fortunes w...

accidents, was invited by the sufferer. ‘There is no such thing as a victim of circumstance,’ he said. ‘The cause of every illness or injury is within, and only the patient can heal himself. You a...

Fritz and Schutz maintained a peace, for a while, despite their pitifully masculine interest in the size of each other’s encounter groups. But the huge national success of the Institute began drawing the big media – and they seemed interested, mostly, in Schutz. Surprisingly, a September 1967 article in Time didn’t mention Fritz or Gestalt at all. Fritz began sniping. He disparaged Schutz’s clients as mere ‘joy boys’ and would publicly insult him in the Lodge, commenting acidly that everyone in his groups seemed to be having fun. Next, a writer from the New York Times Magazine came to Esalen – to take part in a Schutz workshop. Then a Life magazine writer came to do the same. Schutz was a guest on The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson three nights in a row. In a move that must have infuriated Fritz, he named himself ‘the first

Emperor of Esalen’. But the feud that was escalating between the giants was just one of the wounds that would ultimately bleed Esalen’s glory phase to its death. Next came the suicides.

The authentic self is godlike. Our true thoughts and feelings shouldn’t be repressed behind the old-fashioned curtain of ‘manners’. We should ‘be real’ and disparage those who are ‘fake’. Our self is its own justification. What the self wants, it should have. What the self thinks, it should say. The innermost core of man’s nature, the deepest layers of his personality, the base of his ‘animal nature’, is positive in nature. These ideas, which seemed so radical in the Big Sur of the 1960s, have grown to become enormous...

is that many of today’s experts claim there is no authentic self. Rather than there being a pure and godlike centre to us all, we actually contain a collection of bickering and competing selves, some of whom, as we’ll see, are quite disgusting. Different versions of ‘us’ become dominant in different environments. It’s now often claimed t...

Professor Bruce Hood, the famous developmental psychologist at the University of Bristol. I wanted to find out what he means when he calls the self ‘a powerful deception...

‘At its very simplest, a self is a way that we can make sense of the things that happen to us,’ he told me, leaning back in his chair with his legs crossed out in front of him. ‘You need to have a sense of self in order to organize your life events into a meaningful story.’ The notion that you have a soul, he explained, is an illusion. We feel as if we have a magical centre, a special core in which our moment-by-moment life is experienced. But there is no centre. There is no core. There is no soul. We experience our thoughts as if we’re somehow listening to them, but as the philosopher Julian Baggini has observed, ‘our minds are just one perception or thought after another, one piled on another. You, the person, is not separate from these thoughts.’ According to Bruce, the illusion that we have a stable ‘authentic’ self begins with us looking out at the world and

other people, and seeing how they treat us. That’s how we build our model of who we are. This idea is sometimes referred to as ‘The Looking-Glass Self’. In his book The Self Illusion, Bruce cites its creator, the sociologist Charles Horton Cooley, who wrote, ‘I am not what I think I am and I am not what you think I am; I am what I think that you think I am.’ The illusion is thought to take form at around the age of two. ‘That’s when you start to have autobiographical memories,’ he told me. ‘Then, in most cases, at around two to three years of age, children start interacting with other children, competing with them and joining groups. To participate usefully in a social arrangement, you have to have a sense of who you are, you have to have a sense of identity, and that sense of identity is a self. That must be constructed by the contextual information – Who am I? Which groups do I belong to? – as well as the biological ones – Am I a boy or a girl? Am I black

or white? – or whatever. You then merge these and form in-groups. You start to develop prejudices and biases. You become pre-occupied with what others think about you. Your sense of self worth is a reflection of what you think other people think about you. As you spend more and more time with other children, you start to develop hierarchies.’ With these hierarchies comes our obsessional concern with status. ‘We constantly seek validation. Why do we buy the fast cars? Why do we own the big yachts? Why do we need all these things that we don’t really need? It’s because we’re signalling to others our self-status.’ If others believe we’re fancy and great, our looking-glass self interprets that as evi...

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