The Naked Heart by Peter Gay
The 19th century was intensely preoccupied with the self, to the point of neurosis. During the decades of the most sustained campaign for mastery of the world, the bourgeois devoted much time to introspection. This book, fourth in a series of five, deals with the inner life and charts this struggle for inwardness. Philosophers from Hegel to Nietzsche, psychologists like Wundt and Charcot, and Marx and Freud are included, but it is the ordinary bourgeois who occupy centre stage.