that patients bring to the consulting room have changed." Why do you think that the concerns of patients have shifted to these more existential questions? People's experience of themselves is different in different social periods. To be young now is a very different matter from being young 50 years ago for example. As someone who was young in the 1960s I suppose I've witnessed this shift from a world of relatively stable social roles and expectations to one characterised by fluidity and uncertainty. The questions: "Who am I? What do I want to be?" wouldn't have made sense to my parents, were novel and exciting to my generation, and are commonplace and the stuff of endless self-help books today. Sociologists like Zygmunt Bauman and Anthony Giddens describe this late modern period as one where questions of anxiety, choice and identity dominate personal life. The solid reference points of the modern period, defining role, place, rights and responsibilities have been replaced by a myriad of competing and confusing choices. You don't grow up knowing where you fit in and what the future holds for you. Identity is no longer a given, something which people are born into, but something to be constantly constructed and in particular to be shopped for, whether the shopping is for actual material objects, or for lifestyle, career or relationship. One can be, or aspire, to anything, while human bonds are provisional, temporary and contingent. Even people whose lives are in reality very constricted are encouraged to