Section II: introduction

This chapter is an introduction to Section II of the handbook, its main connecting themes and its individual contributions. How does the individual experience the external domains of society and culture? What is the nature of power in this relationship? There is the structural power by which a sociocultural environment endeavours to define and categorise, channel and contain individual life, but there is also the existential power whereby a free-ranging, authorial intellect defines its own objectives, and projects these into and as the world, without being subject to, determined by, external circumstance. While social structures may aim and claim to constrain, even mould, individual expression, nevertheless individual consciousness remains a manifestation of uniqueness and a means of transcendence.