Conclusion: The Crisis of Identity

Abstract

Under modern conditions, the construction of a self is a struggle at best won only provisionally and always entailing expenditure of considerable amounts of psychological energy. Contemporary cultural theories and psychoanalysis, with their differing but intersecting planes of investigation, attest to the intensity and pain of this struggle, which is opposed at every point by the structure and dominant forces of modernity. The consequence of this state of affairs is that the self is never secure, requires unremitting protection and nurture, is always in danger of being undermined, of withering away or exploding into nothingness. With every move that is made, every step taken to encounter or withdraw from the world, some new turmoil is embraced, some new source of fragmentation unearthed. The problematic of modernity for its individual subjects lies largely in precisely this condition: that there is no absolute stability, no still point from which bearings can be taken.