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'… self exiled in upon his ego …'—J. JOYCE, Finnegan's Wake.
In most evaluations of Freud's work it is customary to trace his debt to the tradition and methods of medicine, psychiatry and neurology at the end of the nineteenth century (cf. Zilboorg, 1941). My argument here is that Freud arrived at a critical point in the evolution of Modernism in European cultures. Trilling (1955) has pertinently remarked:
The first thing that occurs to me to say about literature, as I consider it in the relation in which Freud stands to it, is that literature is dedicated to the conception of the self … In almost every developed society, literature is able to conceive of the self, and the selfhood of others, far more intensely than the general culture ever can.
Since Freud was to concern himself almost exclusively with the fate of self-experience in the individual, he was by the very nature and material of his researches, clinical as well as metapsychological, enmeshed in the tradition of Modernism in European cultures.
Modernism is a historical process that took more than three centuries to crystallize its identity towards the end of the nineteenth century.
T. S. Eliot, in his famous essay 'The Metaphysical Poets' (1921), has argued: 'In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered.'
Foucault (1966), the French historian-philosopher, concludes his book on the epistemology of 'the subject':
One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge. Taking a relatively short chronological sample within a restricted geographical area—European culture since the sixteenth century—one can be certain that man is a recent invention within it.
Trilling launches his book Sincerity and Authenticity(1972) with the assertion:
at a certain point in its history the moral life of Europe added to itself a new element, the state or quality of the self which we call sincerity. Th