Publisher's Synopsis
Many scholars consider The Reveries of the Solitary Walker a continuation of the Confessions. In my view, the Reveries is a serious study of the problem of human identity. The ancient Greeks pointed the way with the sign we find at Delphi's Temple of Apollo: "Know thyself." Rousseau's tortured obsession with the inner core of his soul -the self or selfhood- is a fascination with personal identity, its authentication, and its validation. In brief, he inaugurated a new category of learning: personal psychology. In his own informal way Rousseau anticipated not only Freudian psychology, but also the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Structuralism, Deconstruction, the linguistic turn, and other theorists.
