A broad expansion of a series of social representations and practices that call for looking at contemporary social events through a psychological lens has led to a sociology of the individual that resorts abusively to psychology. It is in the reciprocal motion between the «sociological» and the «psychological», rather than by way of a psychologized reading of the social or a sociologized reading of the psyche, that we can grasp the features of the contemporary individual's own subjective domain. As legitimate as may be a purely psychological understanding, it has to resort to a widened and plural register of interpretation. We are thus obliged to: widen the theme of psychological privatisation to understanding culture's new function; move from an analysis informed by relational troubles to a study taking into account the changes that have taken place on the side of civility; show, behind the rise of emotions and appeals to strong experiences, a deep-seated structural process proper to modernity; resist to an excessive pathologisation of social life and to consider new forms of domination, and, finally, to depart from a psychologising and sub-political reading of today's ailments, to go towards the diagnosis of a historical crisis of our political rhetorics.