consciousness we know today, where people experience themselves as ‘separate’, and in
which the ‘private space inside the head’ is experienced as under the control of the
individual, and inaccessible to other individuals except under certain conditions. John
Fowles’s extraordinary novel A Maggot (1985) presents one of the best descriptions of
this shift from pre-modern to modern consciousness.
There are some grounds for believing that the concept of ‘private thoughts’ was
actually assisted by the development of diary-writing among the Protestant middle class
in the seventeenth century (Stone 1976). Private writing enhanced the individual’s
awareness of his or her own uniqueness, just as the private documentation of the
development of one’s own children, which seems to have commenced during the
nineteenth century (Steedman 1982), enhanced parental consciousness of those
children’s individuality. Simultaneously, an increasing life span, and a better standard of
living (including the possibility of a ‘room of one’s own’) for a larger proportion of the
population in the centuries following the industrial revolution supported the movement
to value the lives of individual human beings other than the famous and powerful.
The Romantic movement, coinciding as it did with the first phase of industrialisation,
was a powerful cultural stimulus to the emergence of the individual sensibility, setting
the tone for almost two centuries in which the individual mind, personality and
emotions would become the central subject for poets, novelists, dramatists and
(ultimately) film makers. As human beings increasingly experienced themselves as
separate and even isolated (‘I am a rock, I am an island’, sang Paul Simon in the 1960s,
explicitly contradicting Donne’s seventeenth-century ‘No Manne is an Islande’), it
became doubly important for literature to offer validation for that individuality, by
opening windows into the private worlds of other individuals, and by increasingly
portraying a whole range of highly specialised subjects, which would of necessity appeal
only to particular audiences who could identify with them. ‘Bardic’ literature had by
contrast offered only matter that appealed to the common denominator, and had spoken
only to the values which all its listeners possessed in common. Thus highly
individualised fictions support and extend the development of highly individualised
consciousness.
The emergence of individual psychotherapy as practised by Freud, and as elaborated
vastly throughout this century, can also be seen as part of the development of an
individualised consciousness, setting up a relationship similar to that of the confessional,
but extending its scope to deal with the entire realm of emotional, existential and
behavioural distress, now conceived in more secular than spiritual terms.
Psychotherapy at its inception and still predominantly today deals explicitly with the
inner world of the individual. It is commonly assumed that a highly individualised
relationship must be established between client and therapist in order for any
intervention strategy to work. The client or patient must first feel understood, valued
and empowered before he or she is likely to accept challenge to existing habits of thought
and feeling.
The encounter between a modern reader and a printed text is similar in many ways to
the therapeutic encounter we have just examined. What happens between reader and
printed text is a mystery—unless the reader chooses to tell us about it, and even then,
there will be much that has occurred in the reading process that will have been below
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