By the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of a “true self’—a self that existed behind the roles that persons performed in their changing daily lives, roles that existed somewhere between the self and the demands and confusions of social life—was in the preliminary stages of intellectual articulation and existential diffusion. Particularly critical to an aspiring urban middle class was a heightened awareness of the need to self-consciously create their own social lives and personal destinies, to become something other than what they were. The presenting symptom of this profound shift was the growing number of individuals experiencing desires seemingly distinct from the materials of existing cultural scenarios or conventional interpersonal scripts. The response frequently was, and still is, the frightening notion that they were exceptional in not being at one with the world. What they could not anticipate was that they were merely the vanguard of entire classes or social groups for whom not being at one with the world would approach being the normal condition.
It is not surprising that much of this distress should be experienced as being part of the domain of the sexual among socially mobile, middle-class groups. During this period, the sexual was probably the most vividly advertised and, more importantly, the most vividly imaginable occupant of what cultural discourse created as the badlands of desire, though the sexual was hardly its sole occupant. Nor was the sexual necessarily its most compelling occupant. Thus constituted, the badlands of desire afford rich opportunities for crossfertilization, in particular the opportunity to provide human sexual behavior with the meaning it otherwise seems to lack. And this might be only one of the several competing claims upon the desires of the sexual.
The pivotal misconstruction in Freud’s model of the intrapsychic is in his conceptualization of the id as the embodiment of the sexual and, consequently, as the expression of nature. The confusion of the sexual with the natural can be understood easily as being typical of the historical context. The more instructive error, however, is that of misunderstanding the problem of desire and locating it at the boundaries between the id (natural forces), the ego (self-control), and the superego (the internalized version of cultural scenarios). From my perspective, the problem of desire is not that of a conflict between nature and civilization;
rather, it is a problem of the emergence of the intrapsychic as an autonomous domain following the experience of living in modern civilizations. The id, then, is the product of the “civilizing” process and not the most archaic, but the most modern of psychic functions.
To use the less emotionally enriched language of Meadian symbolic interactionism, the impulsive I (only partially analogous to Freud’s id) may become a meaningful possibility only when confronted by alternative and potentially manipulatory versions of the reflexive me (loosely analogous to Freud’s ego). An impulsive I, one that draws many of its powers from the mediating role it plays in managing what often are the conflicting and competing mirroring responses of the others, is clearly a more complex and powerful aspect of the self than that developed by individuals contextualized by highly consensual others. Moreover, the generalized other (analogous in the same partial way to Freud’s superego) must shift from being an agency of judgment reflecting shared meanings to being one of rationalization in the absence of an overriding community consensus at most primary levels, including the family
It is this increasing lack of consensus within the social order, as experienced by the individual, that encourages an empowerment of the domain of the intrapsychic. The disorders of social life do not remove the barriers restraining the primal chaos of the inner self, but rather it is the disorder of social life that creates the chaos of inner life. The sexual becomes a thoroughly democratized attribute that can shake the social world, rattle the heavens, and make visible the human soul.