The work tries to find cultural and theoretical clues that constitute our concepts of the self. It focuses on nuances in our understandings and behaviours of human beings, that made us the kinds of people we are today. The analysis is mostly focused on the immanent antithetic human existence, the necessity of self-reflection and the interpretative voids, which occur in this fragile space of self-actualization and might be filled up by different authoritative discourses. All this leads to one end: our contemporary self understood primarily in the sense of a psychologic interior is basically an ever changing, historycally specific form of subjectivity, dependent on a variety of social forces and contexts. The becoming of this psychological self is actualised in the context of therapeutic society, which is understood as one of many contemporary phenomenons in a long history of the self. “Psy” discourses help move all the big notions, with which we understand and describe ourselves – like freedom, responsibility, self-fulfilment, the power of change and achieving happiness – from the domains of politics and social competences into our most intimate sphere of self-analysis and help create the anxiety filled existence of contemporary individuals. In the moment we almost unconsciously accept the ethics of psychological health understood in terms of freedom, we become ontologically bound to the systems of choice and management of our identity framed in the context of discursive and technological practices of power and knowledge, in our case of “psy” discourse.
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