Abstract
One of the distinctive features of European culture is the practice of " telling the truth about yourself ", which has been practiced in learned circles since early Christianity. From this point of view, Europe can justifiably be called an autobiographical continent, and even a continent of confessions. Authors such as Augustine, Petrarch and Rousseau will be mentioned as paradigms in this lesson. The characteristic feature of the physiognomy of European culture is that confessions are not made privatim and pro domo, but also in the name of the human race as a whole. If Europe has become the home of psychology, it's also because the French moralists of the 17th and 18th centuries, with their doctrine of all-pervadingself-love , had set in motion the conversion of confessionals into literary stages. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the art of self-accusation expanded to become a critique of culture. Henceforth, it was mainly poets and philosophers who confessed, by delegation from their contemporaries, the shortcomings and aberrations of Western civilization as a whole.
