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

by Carl R. Trueman

The individualism, the psychologized view of reality, the therapeutic ideals, the cultural amnesia, and the pansexuality of our present age are closely intertwined, and each can be properly understood only when set in the larger context of which the others are a significant part. One cannot, for example, address the issue of gay marriage without understanding the legal judgments that preceded Obergefell. And one cannot understand those without some knowledge of the wider impact of expressive individualism and therapeutic concerns on American society. Nor can one do so without reckoning with the way that sex and psychology have played a role in the framing of political issues since the 1960s. And to do any of these things properly, one must go back to the earlier influence of men such as Rousseau and the Romantics, Marx and Freud.