I have to admit, LLMs can be very good at suggesting where to go for deeper reading on a topic.
For example, this interview in the New York Times with Scottish writer and performer Richard Gadd (who wrote the semi autobiographical Baby Reindeer, which I haven't watched but it sounded interesting) dealt a lot on his self questioning of his masculinity and sexuality. His sexual assault happened fairly young, and it's summarised here:
When Richard Gadd wrote Monkey See Monkey Do for the Edinburgh fringe in 2016, he says, “it was pre-#MeToo; sexual assault wasn’t really in the public consciousness, and male sexual assault particularly wasn’t”. He was 27 and catastrophically anxious, and his flatmates were worried, asking him: “What are you doing? No, like, really what are you doing?”
The show – you’d struggle to call it standup, though it won the Edinburgh comedy award that year – is a personal and harrowing account of being raped by a manipulative older man he met earlier in his career. It’s extremely painful to watch, as Gadd’s nascent professional hopes and fantasies are traded on and exploited, leaving him isolated and hollowed out.
In the New York Times interview, he says:
The journey of life is trying to come to terms with yourself. I’ve always been quite confused sexually. Even as I sit here, 36 years old, I still sometimes feel confused. I’ve tried many labels in my life, and the labels never brought me any sort of comfort. Comfort comes from within. No external answer exists to an internal conflict, in my opinion. Inconsistency is the confusing nature of life. Accepting that I might never stand on solid ground is a form of acceptance. Some people just wrestle existentially, and that’s the way it is.
But he also says he didn't feel same sex attraction until after the assault:
I read in an interview that you hadn’t had same-sex attraction until after your assault. Is that right? Yeah, that is true. I know that’s a controversial idea. I’ve never said it’s because
of that. I’d never say that. I say that perhaps it forced me to look at
myself, to re-examine myself. Maybe I was strutting from A to B,
repressing myself in such a way that I never looked before. I’m not
sure. All I know is that I went through a period — this is radically
honest — of almost feeling asexual and then getting very confused and
then exploring that and realizing that I’m fine both ways. Even now, I’m
still a little bit lost. I do think that abuse of that nature can leave
you uncertain in your body, but I’m not saying that abuse makes you
gay. My truth, which nobody can take from me, is that I didn’t question
myself until that happened.
Those two answers sound a tad inconsistent, if you ask me. He's also reminding me of Hannah Gadsby, who turned her true life assault directly into performance art on Netflix.
Anyway, the whole question of the (relatively modern, and Western) "turn to the inner self" has long interested me. It's been somewhat piqued by the transgender culture wars, as well thinking from time to time about Buddhist conceptions of no self, which scientific materialists can readily go alone with, and (one would think) could render a lot of Western reflection on internal states of mind a tad...redundant?.
I asked Perplexity for some leads on this topic, and here is it's answer:
There is a substantial body of work on exactly this turn toward the inner
self, especially the move from a person understood through roles,
duties, and social place to a person understood through feelings,
authenticity, sexuality, and identity. A good way to frame it is that
several modern writers describe a shift from a public, relational self
to an inward, self-interpreting self, with sexuality and gender later
becoming especially central markers of that inward truth.
Major authors on the shift
Charles Taylor is one of the best starting points. In Sources of the Self, he traces the making of modern identity and the rise of authenticity, inner depth, and self-articulation as moral ideals.
-
Philip Rieff
argued earlier and more sharply that modern culture moved from
“religious man” to “psychological man,” with therapy and
self-realization replacing older moral frameworks.
Robert Bellah and co-authors in Habits of the Heart describe expressive individualism, the view that each person has an inner core of feeling that should be expressed rather than disciplined by inherited social forms.
Carl Trueman directly connects this to contemporary sexuality and gender, arguing that the modern self is defined increasingly by inward feelings and desires, and that this sets the stage for identity to be located in sexual and gender experience.
Michel Foucault is essential for a different angle: he shows how confession, psychiatry, and sexual discourse made sex something to be dug out, named, and interpreted as an inner truth.
......
If you want a reading path
A sensible sequence would be:
-
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self.
-
Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic.
-
Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart.
-
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1.
-
Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.
Of those authors, I only know of Michel Foucault.
Perplexity then commented on each of them:
How these writers differ
Taylor
is more genealogical and philosophical, trying to reconstruct how
modern authenticity became plausible. Rieff is more polemical and
cultural-critical, seeing therapy as a civilizational replacement for
religion. Foucault is the most radical in method, treating sexuality and
confession as products of power/knowledge rather than timeless truths
waiting to be found. Trueman is the most directly relevant to your
sexuality/gender question, because he explicitly ties modern identity to
inward feelings and the plausibility of claims about “being in the
wrong body”.
Perplexity suggested possible further questions it could answer, and I chose the one about why expressive individualism became the dominant view in the 1980's. Here are its comments about that:
By the 1980s, “expressive individualism” had become dominant because it fit hand‑in‑glove with postwar affluence, therapeutic psychology, consumer capitalism, and rights‑based law in a way that traditional religious and philosophical critiques did not, and often could not, match institutionally or imaginatively. Even where churches and philosophers opposed it, they were frequently forced to speak in its language of inner authenticity, psychological wellbeing, and personal choice, which blunted their resistance and helped normalize the very outlook they criticised.
What “expressive individualism” means
Writers
following Charles Taylor and Robert Bellah use “expressive
individualism” for a view of the self in which identity is discovered in
one’s inner depths and must be outwardly expressed to be authentic. On
this view the individual, understood as an “atomized self,” is the basic
unit of reality, bound mainly by freely chosen commitments that serve
their self‑realization. By the late twentieth century, Taylor and others
argue, this had become the “default conception of the self” in Western
social imaginaries.
Postwar prosperity and social change
Bellah
and colleagues explicitly connect the prominence of individualism by
the early 1980s to rising prosperity from the 1950s onward, which
loosened dependence on family and local community and made
self‑fulfilment a plausible life project for many more people. In Habits of the Heart
(1985) they argue that “the language of individualism” had become
Americans’ primary language of self‑understanding and that this
individualism had grown “cancerous,” threatening the social tissues that
once moderated it. In such a context, a self that sees its task
as realizing interior desires rather than conforming to external roles
or sacred orders felt natural rather than ideological.
The triumph of the therapeutic
Philip
Rieff’s account is that a “therapeutic” culture displaced a religious
one: we increasingly interpret our lives through the lens of
psychological health, inner conflict, and self‑acceptance instead of
sin, duty, or objective moral order. He describes a cultural revolution
in which traditional “controls” weaken and “releases” (permissions)
expand, yielding a “psycho‑therapeutic civilization” where the wisdom of
society consists in doctrines that permit each person “to live an
experimental life.” By the 1960s–70s this therapeutic vocabulary had
percolated into counselling, education, and popular media, so that even
religious practice was often reinterpreted as a resource for personal
wellbeing rather than a binding authority.
And so on.
OK, maybe one more paragraph:
Why philosophical and religious opposition didn’t stop it
Several
lines of critique existed—Rieff’s warning of cultural collapse,
MacIntyre’s diagnosis of modern “emotivism,” Taylor’s concern about
relativism and isolation, communitarian critiques like Bellah’s—but they
were largely diagnostic rather than
institution‑building. Their influence was strongest in intellectual and
religious circles, while everyday experience in workplaces, schools,
media, and courts kept training people to think in individualist and
therapeutic terms. Moreover, as one sympathetic critic notes, even
theological accounts of salvation and forgiveness were often reframed in
therapeutic language, blurring the line between gospel and self‑help
and thereby conceding much of Rieff’s point about the “triumph of the
therapeutic.”
This gives me plenty of leads.
I think I mentioned this before, and perhaps not so long ago, but I do remember a pleasant enough priest who took over my childhood Catholic parish but left the priesthood, saying it was not "authentic" enough. I spoke to him as a young teenager, and he was into some popular psychology books that did exactly what is described in that Perplexity summary: framed the Catholic faith as something that would make you understand yourself better - or framed it as a "therapeutic" enterprise. (I can't remember who wrote them - I'm pretty sure it was an American Catholic, and the books were heavy on graphic design. I had the impression they may have been popular in Catholic high schools, but I could be wrong.) As well intentioned as the priest was - I had one or two counselling style discussions with him, and this was in the days (long ago!) when people didn't worry about a priest seeing a teenager alone, at night - I did not feel drawn to that framing of religion at all; and still don't to this day.
Anyway, I am impressed with the summaries on topics you can get from LLMs, and how you can direct them to more specifically relevant leads.
Update: Gosh, Perplexity just helped me track down the 1970's books the priest recommended:
The books you’re describing sound most like John Powell, SJ—an American Jesuit priest who wrote popular Catholic/self-understanding books in the 1970s, especially Fully Human, Fully Alive
(first published in 1976), which was explicitly about negative
emotions, self-perception, and becoming fully human. That title is also
listed as an illustrated edition, which fits your memory of graphic artwork.
Strongest match
Fully Human, Fully Alive: A New Life Through a New Vision
is the best fit because it combines Catholic spirituality with a
therapeutic, psychologically oriented view of the self and God, and it
dates exactly to the period you remember. The summary description says
Powell argues that fears and complexes come from a faulty perception of
ourselves and our surroundings.
Other Powell books
Other
John Powell titles from roughly the same era also match your
description of Catholic self-understanding and relationship with God,
including Why Am I Afraid to Tell You Who I Am? and The Secret of Staying in Love. Powell’s books were widely read in Catholic circles and often framed faith in terms of growth, identity, and emotional healing
I did ask another AI about this a couple of months ago, and it didn't find it. Maybe I gave better clues this time.
And, what do ya know! I thought "I hope the author wasn't caught up in sexual abuse cases", Google it, and yes he was:
Powell was accused of abusing of at least seven female students in the
1960s and 1970s. He was first sued in 2003 and again in 2006. Six of
his alleged victims settled their litigation with the Jesuits in 2005.[1]
Ugh. Female students, though; so sounds like not a case of suppressed homosexuality, which would be particularly ironic for the author of a book "Why am I afraid to tell you who I am?".
Update 2: This site gives a better idea of the creepiness of John Powell's abuse:
In court documents, interviews, as well as a lightly fictionalized
account of the abuse by one of Powell’s survivors, I learned of an
incident when Powell told a young victim that he had received direct
confirmation from Jesus that their “relationship” was blessed. He said
that during private prayer, Jesus had come off the cross in front of him
and sanctioned what he was doing with the victim. Drawing on long
traditions in the formation of priests, Powell authorized himself with
reference to clerics’ special, even mystical bond with Christ. All the
leveling and humanizing of his psychological reasoning paled in
comparison to the power of this notion of priests’ special access to
divine realms of secrecy and mystery. It is interesting to me that the
lay people in his orbit did not regret or lament this kind of clerical
elevation, but seemed to long for it, embrace it, even need it, just as
much as they relished his humanistic language about self-acceptance and
authenticity.
Isn't this ironic! The parish priest I knew who left the priesthood because he found it "inauthentic" (I think I later heard he married, so perhaps being in love on the quiet was what led to it?) was likely heavily influenced by a psychologising Jesuit who himself was being "inauthentic"....
