baal’s Reviews > The Reenchantment of the World > Status Update

If Freud’s line of reasoning is correct, then the ego, which we take for granted as a given of normal human life, is not only just a cultural artifact, but—in its contemporary form, at least—actually a product of the capitalist, or industrial epoch. The quality of ego rigidity, which modern society regards as a yardstick of mental health, is a mode of being-in-the-world [...] only since the Renaissance.