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

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

According to current thinking, anyone who fails to succeed must have something wrong with them. The pressure to achieve and be happy is taking a heavy toll, resulting in a warped view of the self, disorientation, and despair. People are lonelier than ever before. Today's pay-for-performance mentality is turning institutions like schools, universities, and hospitals into businesses - even individuals are being made to think of themselves as one-person enterprises. Love is increasingly hard to find, and we struggle to lead meaningful lives.

In What about Me?, Paul Verhaeghe's main concern is how social change has led to this psychic crisis and altered the way we think about ourselves. He investigates the effects of thirty years of neoliberalism, free-market forces, privatisation, and the relationship between our engineered society and individual identity. It turns out that who we are is, as always, determined by the context in which we live.

From his clinical experience as a psychotherapist, Verhaeghe shows the profound impact that social change is having on mental health, even affecting the nature of the disorders from which we suffer. But his book ends on a note of cautious optimism. Can we once again become masters of our fate - if we accept the challenge.

Clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst Paul Verhaeghe is the chairman of the University of Ghent's psychoanalytical department. He achieved international prominence as a Freud and Lacan specialist with his books Between Hysteria and Woman (1996) and On Being Normal and Other Diseases (2002). In Love in a Time of Loneliness (1998, revised 2011) and The End of Psychotherapy (2009), he gained a wide readership, while The Impacts on Identity of a Neoliberal Meritocracy got him a prize from Liberales for the best article of 2011. The Goethe Prize was given to the American edition of On Being Normal and Other Diseases (2002).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781922070906
ISBN 10	1922070904
Title	What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society
Author	Paul Verhaeghe
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Scribe Publications
Year published	2014-03-26
Number of pages	272
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.