Self
The Ford Lectures - The Language of Social Science in Everyday Life
These lectures chart the spread and use of the language of social science into everyday life in twentieth-century Britain. As a religious language for orienting the self and its relations to others went into decline, and as modern life became more mobile and complex, new tools were taken up to meet the challenges of everyday life: to anatomize and characterize the self, to chart its progress across the life-course, to make palpable modernity's many ‘invisible structures’ and ‘imagined communities’, to compare personal experiences to the experiences of others, and to address private problems with new concepts, new devices, new therapies. Psychology, Sociology, Economics and Politics will feature prominently, alongside consideration of Anthropology, Social Medicine, Literature, History and Philosophy.
Lecture Three: Self
In the first half of the 20th century, the ‘New Psychology’ – in which Freudian psychoanalysis played only a minor role – offered people a new vocabulary for understanding the self in modern conditions, in what has been called a transition ‘from character to personality’. Ideas about the unconscious, personality types, the developmental self, sex and intelligence reached unprecedentedly large audiences.
