You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In a provocative article entitled “Why the Self Is Empty,” Cushman (1990) argued that a particular configuration of the self—the empty self—became dominant in the West, especially among middle-class Americans, after World War II. Building on Kohut (1977), Cushman explained that the empty self is characterized by deficits in personal meaning, conviction, and worth caused by the decline of family, community, tradition, and shared meaning. Consequently, the empty self experiences a chronic emotional hunger that it attempts to satisfy by indulging its impulses and acquiring and consuming such objects as goods, experiences, romantic partners, advertisements, celebrities, and drugs. The empty self contrasts sharply with the previously dominant Victorian self, which was defined by the restriction of sexual and aggressive impulses and by a deeply felt need to save money. The Victorian self began to decline in the late nineteenth century and was eventually eclipsed by the empty self after World War II because of increasing capitalist industrialization, urbanization, secularization,