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Review Essay: We Are all Unique but Never Alone

In his seminal paper ‘On Arrogance,’ the noted psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (1958, p. 144) insightfully suggests that ‘in the personality where life instincts predominate, pride becomes self-respect, where death instincts predominate, pride becomes arrogance.’ In other words, arrogance has a positive aspect of pride as well as a destructive dynamic. This insightful analysis may be extended beyond the psychology of the individual to the cultural realm of critique. The dynamics of critique, as Latour (2004) and others have poignantly illustrated, have an aggressive and destructive aspect that doesn’t settle for self-respect but seeks to annihilate its ‘non-self.’ Modern critical psychology is clearly arrogant in the sense that it seeks to destroy modern, individualistic, and cognitive psychology. As such, critical psychology has a self-destructive aspect that cannot easily be avoided. As a result of its destructive dynamics, critical psychology is blind to its own roots and difficulties, and represses its history in order to become ‘unique’ and ‘individualistic’ no less than its hated ‘non-self’—cognitive mentalist psychology. In this context, Billig’s book may be described as a therapeutic exercise in modest criticism. In his well-articulated, reflective, and scholarly treatise, Billig reveals the hidden roots of critical psychology by reviving the memory of Thomas Reid (1710–1713) and the third Earl of Shaftesbury