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Inventing our selves: Psychology, power, and personhood [book

review]

Article  in  Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences · January 2000

DOI: 10.1002/(SICI)1520-6696(200024)36:1<92::AID-JHBS40>3.0.CO;2-W

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secondary literature, also in French, and the few excerpts presented at the end of the volume), Base of text
and a convenient and accessible guide for new readers and nonspecialists.
Reviewed by VINCENT GUILLIN, a Ph.D. student at the University of Paris I, 75014 Paris,
France.

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 36(1), 92–93 Winter 2000

2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Nikolas Rose. Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996. 222 pp. $49.95. ISBN 0-521-43414-9.

Inventing Our Selves is one of the most valuable studies of the techniques of government
and self-government available in the English language. This collection of essays analyzes the
conditions under which our present ways of thinking about and acting upon our selves and
other people have taken shape. The author starts by setting up ways of tracing a critical history
of the self, or “genealogy of subjectification,” a term that designates “all those heterogeneous
processes and practices by means of which human beings come to relate to themselves and
others as subjects of a certain type” (p. 25). This history of the self paves the way to the more
specific quest of how to do a “critical history of psychology.” If the genealogy of subjecti-
fication shows “the diversity of strategies and tactics of subjectification” (p. 37), and the ways
in which these strategies are bound to wider sociopolitical interests, a “critical history of
psychology reveals the privileged position of psychology, and in particular social psychology”
(p. 41).
But “what is it that is specific about psychology in the societies of the West?” (p. 86)
Rose dispels the myth that psychology is the science of the individual. Psychologists have
always been eager to lend their vocabulary, explanations, and types of judgments to other
professional groups (p. 33). This is clearly epitomized by the preoccupation of social psy-
chologists since the early 1920s with social attitudes (rather than the “administration” of
individual tests). These new interests resonated with those of the liberal democracies, who
like social psychology, were more concerned with the way in which “conducts, desire and
decision of independent organization and citizens could be aligned with the aspirations and
objectives of government” (p. 122). Thus, social psychology invites us to “rethink the con-
stitutive links between psychology [ . . . ] and the dilemmas on the government of subjec-
tivity that confront liberal democracies today” (p. 66).
In addition, what accords psychology such a central part in contemporary sociopolitical
life is the ways in which it simplifies the complex task of authority, the way in which it
confers scientific value to programs for the efficient functioning of individuals and social
systems, and ethically legitimizes translations of authority. Rose highlights the increasing
impact of the therapeutic culture in this axis of ethicalization. “Therapeutisation” is the most
versatile and transferable credential for a person’s thinking and acting upon himself or herself
as a socially fabricated being possessing individual, interior, and coherent true selfhood, and
thus, in the most economic and effective way, mobilizing and perpetuating the liberal dem-
ocratic discourse of freedom, choice, and identity. As Rose notes, “Therapeutic ethics prom-
ises a system of values freed from the moral judgement of social authorities. It governs while
allowing to construct ourselves through the choices we make, and to shape our existence short
according to an ethics of autonomy” (p. 97). Therefore, “Freedom is not the negation of standard
power but one of its vital elements” (p. 98). long
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What is the uniqueness and novelty of these essays that allows them to be presented as Base of text
“a radical new approach to the analysis of our regime of the self”? (promised in the cover
description of the book). Perhaps one of the novelties is the way in which Rose this time
engages with “other” studies of subjectivity and power, mainly those developed by feminist
scholars, and Gillis Deleuze and Felix Guattaris’s ideas on the topographic un/folding of
subjectivity. Nevertheless, there is the danger that these incorporations could perpetuate the
hegemony of Foucaultian-style accounts.
What is arguably more “radical” is that, first, Rose challenges sociological accounts that
suggest a single model of appropriate subjectivity (e.g., Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1991) and,
second, the way in which this critical history of psychology can make us aware that liberal
democracies, the New Left, and the discipline of psychology are now, more visibly than ever,
allied (see for instance the partnership between Anthony Giddens and Tony Blair in the UK).
Nevertheless, what this book shares with the author’s previous writings (Rose, 1985; 1990)
is a partial and limited “display” of the genealogical approach, which in our view, has nothing
to do with any methodological standards. Rather, it is founded upon an ethical commitment
to retrieve past struggles, tensions, and memories into our accounts of the present, so provid-
ing the basis for establishing links between, on the one hand, specialist and local, discontin-
uous or nonauthorized knowledges, as well as with other modes of subjectification and in
accord, therefore, with other social programs (see Foucault, 1971 [1991]). In this way, we
can also use our retrievals of the conflict-ridden past in our present strategies of resisting,
reinventing, or unbecoming selves (see Burman et al., 1996).
Finally, the most “radical” message of this book may be summarized as follows: “No
theory of the psyche can provide the basis for a genealogy of subjectification, precisely
because the emergence of such theories has been central to the very regime of the self whose
birth must be the object of our inquiries” (p. 10).
One concern is that, as with other critical analyses, these essays seem to be too preoc-
cupied with the forms of regulation that psychology feeds upon and maintains. The very
activity of focusing our critique on the very real centripetal forces might also drive our
analysis into the mistaken endeavor of trying to know more fully and authentically our own
disciplinary real “selves.” This would be an endeavor that, as argued elsewhere, would all
the more thoroughly mask the way psychology repeatedly throws out ideological conceptions
of the self into the psychological culture (Gordo-López and Parker, in press).

REFERENCES
Beck, U. (1992). Risk society: Towards a new modernity. London: Sage.
Burman, E., Aitken, G., Alldred, P., Allwood, R., Billington, T., Goldberg, B., Gordo-López, A. J., Heenan, C.,
Marks, D., & Warner, S. (1996). Psychology discourse practice: From regulation to resistance. London: Taylor
& Francis.
Foucault, M. (1971[1991]). Nietzsche, La Genealogı́a, La Historia. In J. Varela & F. Alvarez-Urı́a (Eds. & Trans.),
Michel Foucault: Microfı́sica del poder (pp. 7– 29). Madrid: La Piqueta (3rd edition, 1992). (Originally pub-
lished as: Nietzsche, La Genealogie, L’Histoire, in Hommage a Jean Hyppolite (pp. 145– 172), Paris: PUF).
Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Gordo-López, A. J.,& Parker, I. (in press). Cyberpsychology: Postdisciplinary contexts and projects. In A. J. Gordo-
López & I. Parker (Eds.), Cyberpsychology. London: Macmillan.
Rose, N. (1985). The psychological complex. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Rose, N. (1990). Governing the soul: The shaping of the private self. London: Routledge.

Reviewed by ANGEL J. GORDO-LÓPEZ, lecturer in sociology/social psychology at Bradford

University, Bradford BD7 1DP, UK, and MAITE MARTı́NEZ RODRı́GUEZ, a Ph.D. candidate short
in the Departamento de Sociologı́a VI, Facultad de Ciencias de la Información, Universidad standard
Complutense de Madrid, Spain. long

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