What About Me? · the Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society

‘Paul Verhaeghe brilliantly captures the long-term impact that living in a profit-obsessed society has had on our psychology. An excellent book.’

HANIF KUREISHI

‘A remarkable book… What About Me? The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society is one of those books that, by making connections between apparently distinct phenomena, permits sudden new insights into what is happening to us and why.’

GEORGE MONBIOT, The Guardian

In What about Me?, Paul Verhaeghe’s main concern is how social change has led to this psychic crisis and altered the way we think about ourselves. He investigates the effects of thirty years’ acceptance of neo-liberalism, free-market forces, and privatisation, and the resulting relationship between our engineered society and individual identity. It turns out that who we are is, as always, determined by the context in which we live.

From his clinical experience as a psychotherapist, Verhaeghe shows the profound impact that social change is having on mental health, even to the extent of affecting the nature of the disorders from which we suffer. But his book ends on a note of cautious optimism. We can once again become masters of our fate — if we accept the challenge.