The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

by Carl R. Trueman

In terms of the overall argument of this book, Freud occupies a pivotal position. In the introduction, I stated that the rise of the sexual revolution was predicated on fundamental changes in how the self is understood. The self must first be psychologized; psychology must then be sexualized; and sex must be politicized. The first move is exemplified by Rousseau and his Romantic heirs. The second is the signal achievement of Sigmund Freud. Of critical importance to the modern age is his development of both a theory of sexuality that places the sex drive at the very core of who and what human beings are from infancy and the theories of religion and of civilization that he connects to that theory—and that he does so through the scientific idiom of psychoanalysis, an idiom that makes his theories, like those of Darwin, inherently plausible in a modern social imaginary in which science has intuitive authority. And the result is that, before Freud, sex was an activity, for procreation or for recreation; after Freud, sex is definitive of who we are, as individuals, as societies, and as a species.