DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY OF MODERNITY VS. FLEXIBLE LABOUR OF POSTMODERNITY

Juha Siltala, Dept. of History, Helsinki University,

Modern self resulted from market economy which tore apart tradition ties of kinship, estate, religion and community and obliged common men to evaluate themselves as individual subjects against others. It created a cleavage between social roles and experienced innermost. This is the creative tension of Western culture but, simultaneously, the burden of modernity pressing towards various regressive escapes (fundamentalism, political totalitarianism, homogenised market individuality).

Psychoanalysis flourished as middle class enlarged after WW II. Emotions were democratised: not until the welfare state could common people afford asking, if they were sacrificing their lives for meaningless causes or actualising themselves. Now, western middle class is returning to immediate economic dependency. It has lost the ontological support of permanent, decent jobs, of own houses and a predictable carrier. There is no longer time to interrogate one's innermost. Because people have to justify their existence for economy and not vice versa (as in politically regulated Keynesian states), authorities do not need information about human needs.

In postmodern theories of personality and society, the problem of suffering is eliminated by reducing personality entirely to culture. In postmodern discources the existing reality cannot be criticised on the basis of human potentials. Elastic mind is endlessly malleable. It is nor shadowed by childhood traumata or economic inequalities. One can construct or deconstruct one's identity as if it were a sample of interchangeable components. Human beings are modelled/patterned on computers; mind is programmed positively by changing the bytes in it. Mind is handled as a cognitive algorithm.

Modern personality developed historically through conflicts and qualitative leaps. Postmodern personality develops spatially, by adding parts to it. Postmodern theories condemn continuity and coherence and praise decentredness, as it schizophrenia were equal to creative mental space, grounded on predictable relations.

When people are equated to society without creative tension between inner and outer realities, outer realities become overwhelming and culture will be petrified in the sense of Max Weber.