[Review of the book What about me? The struggle for identity in a market-based society, Paul Verhaeghe, 2014]

In his book What about me? The struggle for identity in a market-based society, clinical psychologist and psychotherapist Paul Verhaeghe tries to elucidate the link between neo-liberal society, identity, and mental health. Verhaeghe starts from the observation that our identity is shaped by the norms and rules of the society we live in; in short, “our self is…of external origin” (page 22). What kind of identity do people acquire in modern western society? According to Verhaeghe, a competitive, meritocratic society that is focused on maximizing material consumption confers the ideal of individual success and perfection on people, combined with an individual responsibility to achieve these goals. In his view, this combination is toxic for mental health. The rat races that we are exposed to from the earliest school days and throughout our work lives have only a few winners, but many losers. Moreover, individualized notions of responsibility for success and perfection put the burden of failure firmly on the individual. In the past, people might have been worse off in many ways, but expectations and interpretations of success in terms of individual effort lead to novel “disorders,” often directly defined in terms of failure to perform according to standards of success (e.g., ‘attention deficit’). Subsequently, as Verhaeghe argues, current ideology attempts to lift this burden by falsely interpreting many of these disorders in genetic or biological terms. In contrast, Verhaeghe claims that these disorders display abnormality only from the vantage point of neo-liberal norms of success and responsibility, which he describes as the new “Social Darwinism in economic guise” (page 119).