‘Self-Made’ Review: The Path to Perfection

‘What a piece of work is a man!” said Hamlet. “In apprehension how like a god!”—yet also the “quintessence of dust.” Hamlet is both full of himself and a “king of infinite space,” lost in his own imagining. No wonder Shakespeare’s melancholy prince fascinated Freud. The search for that elusive modern ideal, the true self, generated what the historian Christopher Lasch called “the culture of narcissism.” Today the big businesses of self-care and self-indulgence fill the infinite space of the digital kingdom.