Clinical Encounters with the Entrepreneurial Self
College students today are engaged in a relationship with their own objectified image of themselves.
As a psychologist working in a college counseling center, I encounter many talented, industrious, and high-achieving undergraduates. But many, as successful as they are, are self-reproachful in the extreme about their performance. No matter their good grades nor their accolades, they feel that they just aren’t doing enough, aren’t achieving enough. They believe they shouldn’t need as much sleep or downtime as they do, and ask me if I could somehow help them become more efficient, more productive. They seem to exude what the philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes in The Burnout Society as “autistic productivity,” a chronic, frenzied productivity that is aimed at producing little else than a more productive self.
And no wonder. Their pursuit of productivity for productivity’s sake would seem to be an anxious adaptation to our aggressively deregulated economy, which burdens the individual with the brunt of enterprise’s risks. Thrown back solely on our own resources in making a way through the world, we become entrepreneurs of ourselves, trying to make ourselves endlessly flexible, and endlessly accruing marketable talents, skills, and experiences to prepare for the violent fickleness of the market. Today’s undergraduates have had much practice in such self-investing, many having exploited their breaks and their pastimes—areas of living previously considered irrelevant to educability or employability—to cultivate their marketing package to college admissions officers. They have been socialized into an entrepreneurial outlook on self and world, which reimagines living as resume-building activity.
In my work with such entrepreneurial students, I often found myself appealing to the psychoanalytic notion of the fetish. Not because they shared the psychodynamics of a fetishist, of course, but rather because the metaphor helped me wrap my head around the way the students seemed to relate to themselves and to others.
Instead of relating robustly to another person, the fetishist relates to an object. Putting an object between the self and other serves to disempower and de-animate the other, containing and disarming them. The fetishist may animate an inanimate object with libidinal charge, but it is in the service of de-animating a living other. Similarly, the entrepreneurial self is so self-critical and so anxiously self-monitoring that they are most intensely related to themselves rather than the outside world. My students seemed predominantly engaged in a relationship with their own objectified image of themselves; in a way, they were self-fetishizers. The clinical material I use to illustrate this self-objectification has been disguised and amalgamated to protect client confidentiality.
