What do you think?
Rate this book
Enigmas of Identity
From eminent critic Peter Brooks, an exploration of the modern preoccupation with identity"We know that it matters crucially to be able to say who we are, why we are here, and where we are going," Peter Brooks writes in Enigmas of Identity. Many of us are also uncomfortably aware that we cannot provide a convincing account of our identity to others or even ourselves. Despite or because of that failure, we keep searching for identity, making it up, trying to authenticate it, and inventing excuses for our unpersuasive stories about it. This wide-ranging book draws on literature, law, and psychoanalysis to examine important aspects of the emergence of identity as a peculiarly modern preoccupation.In particular, the book addresses the social, legal, and personal anxieties provoked by the rise of individualism and selfhood in modern culture. Paying special attention to Rousseau, Freud, and Proust, Brooks also looks at the intersection of individual life stories with the law, and considers the creation of an introspective project that culminates in psychoanalysis.Elegant and provocative, Enigmas of Identity offers new insights into the questions and clues about who we think we are.
238 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2011
5 people are currently reading
58 people want to read
About the author
Peter Brooks
114 books62 followersPeter Brooks is the author of Henry James Goes to Paris, Realist Vision, Troubling Confessions, Reading for the Plot, The Melodramatic Imagination, and a number of other books, including the historical novel World Elsewhere. He taught for many years at Yale, where he was Sterling Professor of Comparative Literature, and currently is Andrew W. Mellon Scholar at Princeton.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 29, 2012
In Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (1994) Peter Brooks wrote of “..that desired place where literature and life converge, and where literary criticism becomes the discourse of something anthropologically important-where it teaches us something about the nature of human fiction making, of both the banal everyday kind and the artistic sort” .
It seems like a strikingly old fashioned idea if you’ve been wading through “modern” ‘theoretical’ versions of literary criticism. The idea that literature has something to say about human anything seems dodgy…and yet Brooks’ latest book “The Enigma of Identity” inhabits “that desired place” and does it very convincingly.
His basic premise is that the problem of identity is in some ways the defining characteristic of modernity. On the one hand a deeply personal inward search for self; on the other a self viewed from the outside “as merely the point of intersection of impoverished data”. Identity vs identification with what Brooks calls The Identity paradigm as crucially important throughout modern Culture.
Although the book reaches no fixed conclusion other than that it, explores the contours of that paradigm. Brooks writes in a relaxed informal style, which again feels almost old fashioned. A writer with ideas he wants to share. How quaint. Nor do you have to agree with everything he says, or accept everything he claims, but at least in this book, you’re going to understand his argument well enough to feel confident of negotiating your way through it.
Because his basic premise is that identity is something that is created in narration, it is logical that he looks at literary examples. The evidence he uses and the examples he discusses are drawn from fiction, autobiography, law and psychoanalysis. His main sources are Rousseau, Proust and Freud, though along the way he uses Stendhal, Balzac, Conan-Doyle Joyce, Yeats and others. The depth of his critical engagement with Freud’s work provides a ground for the discussion.
But in an odd way, Brooks' treatment invites or suggests a different reading of Freud. Although I suspect he might not agree, it challenges the status of Psychoanalysis as a privileged, non-literary discourse and reinserts Freud and his writing and thinking into what might loosely be described as the humanist tradition. Privilege revoked, Freud becomes another writer, but oddly a far more fascinating, provocative writer.
What makes the book so entertaining is its range. Along the way one picks up fascinating bits of information: fingerprinting has been challenged as a reliable source of identification in American courts: narrative theory is inexorably creeping into legal discussions of evidence.
The book is thought provoking and entertaining. And like most good literary discussions an incentive to go back and reread, or read for the first time, some of the authors he uses as examples.
It seems like a strikingly old fashioned idea if you’ve been wading through “modern” ‘theoretical’ versions of literary criticism. The idea that literature has something to say about human anything seems dodgy…and yet Brooks’ latest book “The Enigma of Identity” inhabits “that desired place” and does it very convincingly.
His basic premise is that the problem of identity is in some ways the defining characteristic of modernity. On the one hand a deeply personal inward search for self; on the other a self viewed from the outside “as merely the point of intersection of impoverished data”. Identity vs identification with what Brooks calls The Identity paradigm as crucially important throughout modern Culture.
Although the book reaches no fixed conclusion other than that it, explores the contours of that paradigm. Brooks writes in a relaxed informal style, which again feels almost old fashioned. A writer with ideas he wants to share. How quaint. Nor do you have to agree with everything he says, or accept everything he claims, but at least in this book, you’re going to understand his argument well enough to feel confident of negotiating your way through it.
Because his basic premise is that identity is something that is created in narration, it is logical that he looks at literary examples. The evidence he uses and the examples he discusses are drawn from fiction, autobiography, law and psychoanalysis. His main sources are Rousseau, Proust and Freud, though along the way he uses Stendhal, Balzac, Conan-Doyle Joyce, Yeats and others. The depth of his critical engagement with Freud’s work provides a ground for the discussion.
But in an odd way, Brooks' treatment invites or suggests a different reading of Freud. Although I suspect he might not agree, it challenges the status of Psychoanalysis as a privileged, non-literary discourse and reinserts Freud and his writing and thinking into what might loosely be described as the humanist tradition. Privilege revoked, Freud becomes another writer, but oddly a far more fascinating, provocative writer.
What makes the book so entertaining is its range. Along the way one picks up fascinating bits of information: fingerprinting has been challenged as a reliable source of identification in American courts: narrative theory is inexorably creeping into legal discussions of evidence.
The book is thought provoking and entertaining. And like most good literary discussions an incentive to go back and reread, or read for the first time, some of the authors he uses as examples.
August 20, 2020
The argument about the centrality of identity is convincing, as is the argument that despite its centrality, identity remains a conundrum that is unsolvable. I found the slipping between examples that were literary and legal to be a strength of the book, and the threads around Rousseau, Proust, and Freud keep things focused despite the breadth and number of examples.
November 11, 2025
This is a difficult, demanding book pivoting around three literary centers: Rousseau, Proust, and Freud. He treats these introspective men as marking out the map of modernity, as they worked from the assumption that the most important task a person confronts in life is discovering who they are, and they showed that the task is deeply paradoxical and essentially impossible. Hence the word "enigmas" in Brooks' title.
Brooks also reaches out to the field of law, where identifying a criminal is crucial to finding them guilty or innocent. Modern society wants to identify its citizens.
I read the book because the issue of identity has always been an interest of mine, though I looked at it from the outside, as it were, as a sociological matter, not as a psychological, philosophical matter. Unlike Rousseau and Proust, I was never troubled by wondering who I was, and I was never drawn to psychoanalysis either in theory or in wishing to undergo it, though I have friends who have been in analysis for decades. Perhaps this means that I'm a shallow person, but I'm not deeply troubled by the idea.
Obviously it's impossible to determine in what way the child one was, long ago, as one remembers it, is the same person as one is at present, but Freudian analysis insists that it is so. Contrary to that, Buddhist thought denies identity completely, as a mental construct to which one must learn not to cling.
Brooks is extremely erudite, a fine interpreter of difficult texts, and his book is one that should be studied, not simply read.
Brooks also reaches out to the field of law, where identifying a criminal is crucial to finding them guilty or innocent. Modern society wants to identify its citizens.
I read the book because the issue of identity has always been an interest of mine, though I looked at it from the outside, as it were, as a sociological matter, not as a psychological, philosophical matter. Unlike Rousseau and Proust, I was never troubled by wondering who I was, and I was never drawn to psychoanalysis either in theory or in wishing to undergo it, though I have friends who have been in analysis for decades. Perhaps this means that I'm a shallow person, but I'm not deeply troubled by the idea.
Obviously it's impossible to determine in what way the child one was, long ago, as one remembers it, is the same person as one is at present, but Freudian analysis insists that it is so. Contrary to that, Buddhist thought denies identity completely, as a mental construct to which one must learn not to cling.
Brooks is extremely erudite, a fine interpreter of difficult texts, and his book is one that should be studied, not simply read.
November 6, 2017
Quite good although occasionally just a bit repetitive. Above all the tension between the self as we (the self) defines ourselves in all our hesitant complexity and how the world attempts to identify and control the self; the sections on the law are quite good. I liked the earlier essays better: especially those on fingerprinting, imposters, Balzac and masturbation. The latter sections are heavily focused on Freud and seem a bit sketchy to my inexpert eye: Freud and identity is a book or books in itself. The essay on Balzac is suggestive but again the subject is gargantuan! What comes through is just the slipperiness of identity: even fingerprints don't prove the case.
A small point: it's Tom Sawyer, not Huck Finn, who attends his own funeral, in the novel named after him, not Huck. An error which inadvertently underlines the difficulty in ascertaining identity. A Freudian slip perhaps!
A small point: it's Tom Sawyer, not Huck Finn, who attends his own funeral, in the novel named after him, not Huck. An error which inadvertently underlines the difficulty in ascertaining identity. A Freudian slip perhaps!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews