Invited address to the World Congress of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies Vancouver, july, 2001

The first great inheritance of modernity is the individual (fig.2). Modernism gave us a culture of personality, about the self (Lipovetsky) which is reflected in the literary works of Joyce (fig.3), Proust (fig.4), Faulkner or Baudelaire, and in paintings from Picasso (fig.5), van Gogh (fig.6) or Matisse.
They were examples of and art that mirror the inner world of the artist (fig.7). The writers challenged and sought to subvert a society that had gained the world but was losing its soul in the process. They portrayed their inner torment and uncertainty, expressed symbolically, methaphorically, and, (Joyce and Proust) minutely (Parry, 1993, p. 431) (fig.8).
The modernists were critical with what they considered (fig.9) to be the spiritual emptiness of the society's material conquest of the world, but they were very optimistics. They share their utopian faith in the coming of a better world (Parry, 1993, 431, 432) (fig.10). In the center of the modernist perspective lies the heady and optimistic romance with foundation and essence (Gergen, 1992, p. 19)(fig.11).
However, modernity was a time with a deep gap between lay and elite culture (fig.12). The penetrating diagnoses of the modern psyche and its times by the artists and writers of modernism have remained impenetrable to the general population, which prefers the shorter, sharper, kick of the arts of popular culture (Parry, p. 434).
Modernism add to the artists and writers accomplishments the development of psychology, understood as the internalization of the grand narratives (Parry, 1993, p. 432). Psychology is a project of modernity. As points Kvale (1992, p. 40), the science of psychology was founded on a conception of individual subjects, with internal souls and later internal psychic apparatuses. The concept of madness and the main psychotherapeutic systems are a consequence of modernity (Ibáñez, 1993) (fig.13).