The depleted self : New Age spirituality in the late-modern age : an exploration

This thesis has been an explorative attempt to study the popularity of the New Age in the context of late modern culture. In doing so, I have tried to construct a broad and multidisciplinary framework of analysis in which the New Age could be located. Positioning the New Age in a larger discussion on late-modern subjectivity, I have tried to argue that the emergence and popularity of the New Age seems to correspond to certain significant changes within late-modern subject formation. I have argued that the socio-psychological conditions of late-modernity seem to have generated some existential anxieties that could have major implications for the construction of subjectivity. In order to gain more insight into the way these tensions and anxieties are played out on a psychological level, I have argued that the psychoanalytic discussion on narcissism could provide a valuable framework of analysis through which these processes could be studied. Narcissism, in this sense, refers to a psychic defence mechanism that produces an ill-supported and thoroughly fragmented constitution of self, in which the subject is submitted to a permanent quest for self-affirmation to cover over his disintegrated and depleted self-identity. As such, one could argue that the narcissistic personality disorder could be understood as a psychopathological symptom that could indicate and describe certain significant features of late-modem culture. Furthermore, I have argued that the social production of narcissism in society may have engendered the emergence and popularity of the New Age in late-modern culture. Employing a customized form of 'self-religiosity', the New Age seems to be tailored to address the needs and anxieties of a particularly narcissistic subject, by offering an alternative therapeutic discourse that could not only support this subject in the process of self-definition, but also provide him with a (fleeting) sense of ontological security, so desperately needed in the uncertain environment of the late-modern age. As such, I have argued that the emergence of the New Age could be understood as a defence against the anxieties that late-modernity generates. However, this thesis has merely been an explorative one, highlighting a broad range of questions, themes and discussions in which the New Age could be located. With this thesis, I thereby hope to make a small contribution to the study of the New Age as a burgeoning field of cultural analysis