By now it should not surprise the reader to learn that the psyche or self of the individual remains one of the least examined categories of historical analysis, a kind of black box with nothing visible inside. Is selfhood a universal category with no variation throughout history and therefore something like a mathematical constant? Most historians would probably agree that cultural and social, and therefore historical, differences have some kind of impact on the experience of selfhood, but there is no consensus about how best to discern or measure that impact. Scholars have traced the emergence of individualism as a political and social doctrine, often finding it more prevalent in Western cultures than non-Western ones, more characteristic of modern times than earlier ones, and accepted in Protestant countries before Catholic ones – though each of these conclusions has aroused considerable controversy and charges of Eurocentrism. In one of the most ambitious attempts to uncover the historical meaning of selfhood, the philosopher Charles Taylor endeavored to untangle the “making of modern identity” (the subtitle of his book) in Sources of the Self (1989). He defined modern Western selfhood as a belief in a human agent with a sense of inwardness, freedom, individuality and embeddedness in nature. Taylor's analysis, which ranges from Plato to post-structuralism, definitely puts some content into the box of the self and offers a fascinating account of how the self came to be viewed in this fashion. Yet even Taylor, for all his philosophical and historical acumen, fails to define the self itself. He seems to equate it with personal identity and individual agency but says much more about the moral qualities various thinkers associated with selfhood than about the thing itself. His focus is moral rather than psychological.
Taylor's book still counts as one of many encouraging signs, however, that historically-minded scholars are no longer satisfied with treating the psyche or the self as a black box. In an article published in Febvre's Annales the same year as Taylor's book, Gérard Noiriel urges the development of a “subjectivist” paradigm to counter the long predominance of the “objectivist” paradigm in history. A subjectivist paradigm could be based, he argues, on “lived experience,” which derives from both “objectification” and “internalization.” He defines objectification as the sedimentation or crystallization of past lived experience into material forms, rules, words, and mental structures and internalization as their incorporation into individual personalities.27 Noiriel wants to return to the approaches first suggested by the founders of social theory and social history and then elaborated further by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. He thus supplements the cultural historians' and post-structuralists' emphasis on the social, cultural, and linguistic determinants of experience with a revived concept of individual subjectivity which incorporates those determinants but also presumably acts upon them.
With similar intentions but propelled in the first instance by their dissatisfaction with the results of gender history, some feminists advocate a reevaluation of psychoanalysis. Lyndal Roper argues that gender has failed to realize its full potential as a category of historical analysis because it has been understood too exclusively as a social or discursive construction; as a result, gender historians lack an account of the connections between the social world and psychic experience and thus cannot adequately explain change. Too often gender historians assume that psychic experience follows automatically from social factors, as if the psyche or self were just a miniature version of the social world. Roper calls on psychoanalysis for help in analyzing the processes of individualization and gender differentiation.28
Discontent with the predominance of social explanations or “social constructionism” has helped fuel a revival of interest in the emotions, a topic first urged by Febvre and Elias sixty years ago. Much of the research undertaken in the 1980s on “emotionology” remained within the social and cultural history approach, but more recently, advocates such as William Reddy have aligned their work with new trends in anthropology and psychology. Reddy vigorously criticizes “emotional constructionism,” that is, the idea that the individual is absolutely plastic, that sexuality, ethnicity, and identity are entirely determined by culture or society.29 Reddy uses recent research in psychology to claim that there are universals in emotional life, whose expressions are shaped by culture and history through what he calls “emotives.” From this point of departure, Reddy aspires to redefine power as control over the expression of emotions rather than control over the means of violence. This emphasis on the emotions resembles in some, but certainly not all, respects the analysis proposed by Elias.
Taken together, these new approaches and others like them adumbrate an ambitious agenda for recovering the self as an object of historical investigation. Following Noiriel's suggestion, historians could rekindle the keen interest shown by the founders of social theory and social history in psycho-social linkages, in what Febvre termed “the mental equipment” of people in the past, and seek new ways of understanding the individual's negotiation with the social and cultural world. Following Roper's example, they might reread Freud in the same spirit, not as the founder of a therapeutic school with scientific pretensions, but as a pathbreaking, yet often tentative thinker about the individ-ual's insertion into society. And finally, responding to Reddy's cue, they can use the recent research of cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, and evolutionary anthropologists to help fill in the outlines of a new heuristic model of the self.