This lecture will suggest that the contemporary university is missing a field whose main focus is the study of individuality and the self. The presenter conceptualizes this field, provisionally named individuology, as on a continuum with the qualitative social sciences, and she sees psychoanalysis as providing a major theoretical grounding. Psychoanalysis gives us a comprehensive theory of individuality, and its methodologies could be and have been extended to non-clinical work. Although individuology overlaps with psychology, and several fields in the humanities draw upon psychoanalysis, the study of individuals requires on the one hand a more qualitative, interactive and intersubjective methodology than we find in contemporary psychology and on the other the study of people, not texts.
