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This book carefully examines the fate, stability, coherence and status of ‘the self’ n a world of accelerating change, of ephemerality - the postmodern world of exhilaration and violence.
If human identity is constructed in a social milieu through object relating, then clearly the quality of that environment, the existence or not of essential supportive conditions, will be reflected in the stability of that selfhood. And what most theorists of modernity agree on is that the achievement of some coherent selfhood has become increasingly problematic and, for some theorists, even undesirable. Psychoanalysis, however, is well placed to show how, firstly, social conditions structure internal states and, secondly, to supply criteria by which modern social experience can be evaluated.
Contradiction, fluidity, multiplicity, plurality describe both the terror and the excitement of modernity. Frosh contrasts well modernism and postmodernism. Modernism proclaims the need for the self to express itself over and against the crushing forces of repression and alienation, whereas postmodernism, at least in its post-structuralist guise, undercuts what it regards as the illusion of selfhood and its belief in its capacity to resist oppression. There is no refuge because this self is so permeated by culture that there can be no way of resisting on the individual level at all. Postmodernism (Frosh cites Hedge, Lyotard and others) abolishes any large-scale theorising or metanarrative - the notion of wisdom or received knowledge or social norms - in favour of a ‘subjectivity infused with the particularities of position, especially gender and race’ (p. 24). It negates also any possibility of discovering ‘deep causes’ or ‘origins’, in favour of a view of culture as a series of random events all of equal value, a surface-centredness where everything is permitted. Gone also is the modernist notion of progress, any idealistic or Utopian visions of a better society.
The central conundrum posed by t