Publications

This chapter discusses the different concepts and theories historians have used to discuss the reflexive relationship between the human sciences and the self, that is to say, how the human sciences have altered human selves and vice versa. It highlights both applications and critiques of these theories. The chapter begins with the Erving Goffman’s and Mary McIntosh’s sociological theories on the presentation of self, labelling theory and role ...

This article argues that psychology gained prestige as a useful and practical science in Germany in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on discussions of the practice of criminal interrogation, the article shows that around 1800, legal scholars increasingly turned to psychology as a solution to practical problems of criminal justice that had arisen with the abolition of judicial torture. Whereas up to the eighteenth ...

The history of the self studies continuities and changes in ideas about and experiences of the individual mind through time, attending to questions of individuality, identity, stability, self-possession, and interiority. Traditionally, this subject has often been approached as an intellectual history, analyzing philosophers’ explicit writings about the self. Through the work of people such as René Descartes, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant, ...