How can you understand yourself? Where do your views, attitudes and values come from and why do they change? In this accessible and illuminating book Derek Layder attempts to provide a reliable guide to these complicated questions and: Demonstrates that personal identity is formed around basic needs for security and self-esteem and the personal desires that flow from them. Shows the role of the emotions in personal life. Explores the limits of approaches that deny the existence of |individuals' and |personal experience'. Demonstrates how we build on everyday problems and dilemmas of life to sh.