The text analyzes a founder category of psychology - the “ individual “ -, privileging a historical contribution. Firstly, recognizing the ideological effects of the individual’s representation as value, in the ambit of the modern western culture, it analyzes the formation of that subjectivity individualized in the modernity, with the definition of some basic characteristics that gave it outline and density. It presents the modernity as a specific moment of hegemony of the individualistic ideology, through the implantation of political institutions, increasingly committed with the values of freedom and equality, or as global cultural space of their statement. It discusses the processes that have been marking individual’s concept in this century, its consolidation in the organized capitalism and, more recently, in the neoliberalism, highlighting the impoverishment of the civic life and the development of a narcissistic culture.
Modernity; Production of subjectivities; History