Search for Identity

Search for Identity

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2005Note


The mental process the mind goes through to escape self-awareness
can be grouped under the headings of rejection of meaning, shrinkage
of time span, focus on details and procedures, rigid thinking and banality.

Roy F. Baumeister, Escaping the Self

Linda. Are you home to stay now?
Biff. I don’t know. I want to look around, see what’s doin’.
Linda. Biff, you can’t look around all your life, can you?
Biff. I just can’t take hold, Mom. I can’t take hold of some kind of a life.
Linda. Biff, a man is not a bird, to come and go with the springtime.

Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

With the loss of reliable symbols, we have become confused identity-seekers. There was a time when a farmer’s son expected to farm the family homestead, and the farmer’s daughter was likely to marry another farmer in the community. It was the same for factory workers and even doctors, lawyers and other professionals. They followed the lead of their parents, as their parents had followed that of theirs. Consequently, the community that young people inherited differed little with previous generations.

The constant speed of technological change has fragmented this comfortable sense of community, and has led to individual confusion. The previous ease with which the individual went about “making one’s way” has been replaced by the frantic search of “finding one’s self.” Likewise, the shift has been from the common good, or from a community perspective, to personhood, or to an individual perspective. The transition has been traumatic but not necessarily apparent. It has evolved from the common identity constructs of authority, loyalty, discipline and motivation.

The Common Good versus Personhood
The common good held sway with position power for most of our social and economic history. The change started more than a generation ago, and it is still gathering momentum if without much transparency.

With the common good position power was exclusively in the hands of authority figures; with personhood it is in the process of shifting to knowledge power, which is in the hands of information specialists and knowledge workers. The irony is that position power still attempts to maintain its authority and to lead without the necessary intellectual capital to do so. Consequently, we have spun off two generations of leaderless leadership in virtually every institution of society. Meanwhile, those with the intellectual capital fail to identify themselves with the concomitant authority, and so, as the saying goes, productive effort falls between the chairs.

Loyalty with the common good has been traditionally with the family, community, church, school, and company; with personhood loyalty is predominantly to the self, and therefore to the individual, and the profession served. Loyalty represents a precarious identity as the family, church, company and community are increasingly fragmented. In one sense, the individual has been liberated from traditional loyalties, but in another, he has entered an uncertain world where old loyalties no longer apply, not even to the self. Sociologist Peter Berger writes:

Modernity has indeed been liberating. It has liberated human beings from the narrow controls of family, clan, tribe or small community. It has opened up for the individual previously unheard-of options and avenues of mobility. It has provided enormous power, both in the control of nature and in the management of human affairs. However, these liberations have had a high price. Perhaps the easiest way to describe it is to refer to it once more as “homelessness.” Demodernizing ideas and movements promise liberation from the many discontents of modernity. Again, the most economical way of describing the content of this promised liberation is to call it “home.” The demodernizing impulse, whether it looks backward into the past or forward into the future, seeks a reversal of the modern trends that have left the individual “alienated” and beset with the threats of meaninglessness.1

Ambivalence toward social and personal loyalty has created new cages of unfreedom rather than escapes from them. We see this when people sabotage their own lives and careers in obsessive personhood, demonstrating as little loyalty to self and to others.

The common good created discipline around rewards and recognition, intimidation and punishment. Personhood is unresponsive to such devices. It is more inclined to self-discipline in a climate of trust, respect with a sense of ownership.

The common good exercised motivation through fear and scarcity, competition and comparing, classifying achievers from non-achievers. Shame was a powerful device to keep people in check. Since the line between the sacred and profane has been blurred to the point of being erased, it no longer applies. Personhood, while considering shame a non-factor, is bored with this motivational rhetoric of intimidation. It is instead motivated by a climate of cooperation, where contribution is possible in an atmosphere of give and take in which the work is challenging, and the life outside of work is not routine.

Nearly one hundred years later, the individual in search for identity echoes the sentiments of William James:

A man’s character is discernible in the mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely active and alive. At such moments there is a voice inside which speaks and says: “This is the real me!”2


Obviously, it is a very different world than the nineteenth century United States of this American psychologist. There is no longer a hometown like Boston was to him in his day. Now life is played out on the run resonating with the lyrics to the Willie Nelson song, “On the Road Again.” The urgent quest in the midst of looming leisure is not “What can I do?” but “Who can I be?” It is a disconnected world of actors on a stage playing someone else’s part. Regional distinctions have become hazy, accents have disappeared, and imitation has reached the level of distinction.

Who questions has become more important than what questions, and a new right has been defined as the right to be capricious in a disposable world.

The Divided Self Between WHO I AM and WHAT I AM
There is a problem here, however, and that who I am is defined by my genetic code. It is my essence and it cannot be changed. What I am, defined by my experience, is in a constant state of change, and it is determined by my experience and how my character develops.

The problem of the divided self between WHO I AM and WHAT I AM is at least a one hundred year old problem that rotates around the axis of nature and nurture. WHO I AM I cannot change. I am stuck with it. It is my individual nature. It is what I am born with. It is my genetic code, the acorn that can produce the great oak tree in James Hillman’s language, if we but discover the code or our soul, which is our true vocation. It is our essence. It is “our real self.”

WHAT I AM is constantly changing all my life. It is my nurtured self. It is a product of my culture, my programmed conditioning, my individual experience, and my personal growth and development. It is dependent on my maturity, discipline, focus, performance, stability, and my ability to handle surprise and adversity, in other words, it is my character.

WHAT I AM is fed by WHO I AM so that there is much overlapping, and therefore identity confusion along the way. WHAT I AM is my “acquired self,” influenced by all the people and forces in my life, molding, pressing and shaping me into the person I become, which is more prosaically known as “my personality.”

The divided self between WHO I AM and WHAT I AM does not make it an easy road to becoming a human being. Indeed, it has been difficult throughout history to have WHO I AM on the same page as WHAT I AM working in consort and harmony each with the other.

Sigmund Freud recognized the problem one hundred years ago, and developed an explanatory model to define WHAT I AM. It purported to be scientific, but today is chiefly regarding for its explanatory efficacy. His model included the ego, id, and superego. Freud correctly envisioned the drive of technological society coming to dwarf and overwhelm conventional man producing palpable hysteria in individuals unable to cope with this crushing reality. His model has more relevance to anxiety than psychosis as he developed what has come to be known as the “talking cure.” Psychotherapists take clients through their pasts to unravel the psychological blinds spots and pitfalls preventing them from functioning as healthy human beings.

Freud called the ego “the reality principle,” meaning the individual viewed life in real terms and engaged experience with maturity and judgment. This would be referred to as “the adult” in transactional analytical terms by Eric Berne in The Games People Play (1964). Thomas Harris would popularize the adult in his book “I’m OK – You’re OK” (1967). John Dusay would then publish Egograms – How I See You and You See Me (1977), which further refined Freud’s model in bar graphs for greater comprehension. The ego relates to the adult or cognitive (thinking) man and provides the rational aspect to interpersonal transactions. This is the computer within us that problem solves with logic and reason. Too much adult makes us dull and boring; too little makes us irresponsible.

Freud referred to the id as “the pleasure principle,” meaning the individual would avoid pain at all cost and seek out pleasure with capricious abandon without a thought to consequences. Berne referred to this in transactional terms as “the child.” Harris saw the child ambivalently between “I’m OK – You’re Not OK” and “I’m Not OK – You’re Not OK.” Dusay broke “the child” down further to the “free child,” who recognizes no restraints and is the fun-loving part, and the “adapted child,” who demonstrates total conformity and is the repressed part. The id relates to conative (instinctive) behavior of an impulsive, whimsical and irresponsible character in interpersonal transactions. Too much id and we may be foot-loose and fancy-free; too little and we may get short changed out of life’s fun and sexual satisfaction.

Freud referred to the superego as “the morality principle,” meaning the individual was programmed by society in the shoulds and should nots of propriety. Berne referred to this in transactional terms as “the parent.” Harris added further ambivalence to the parent including the mother and father and child recognizable in transactions, and giving expression at various stages to his four life positions: (1) “I’m not OK – You’re OK”; (2) “I’m not OK – You’re not OK”; (3) “I’m OK – You’re not OK”; (4) “I’m OK – You’re OK.”

If this sounds confusing, Harris goes to great pains to explain that all these roles – adult, parent, and child – are part of the superego makeup, and can surface at any time, given the right stimulus. We never totally relinquish the role of the child, he claims, or demonstrate constancy as either the parent or the adult. In frustration, we can even fall prey to the tantrums of the child.

Dusay gives further expression to the superego in differentiating between the “nurturing parent,” the part of us that wants to see the good in others, and to make everyone feel better, and the “critical parent,” the judgmental part of us that is always looking for something to correct. With too much nurturing parent, we can create debilitating codependency with others; too little and we are likely to become heartless. With too much critical parent, we can become tyrannical; too little and people are likely to push us around.

These explanatory models, and that is all that they are, deal with WHAT I AM or my personality, examining the transitional stages of life from child to adult to parent, but not necessarily in that order. Notice all the attention is on personality in terms of thinking, feeling and behaving, as if WHO I AM is a common essence, which it clearly is not.

How the Divided Self plays out in a Macro Sense!
It is easy to confuse one’s essence with one’s personality. Essence is the reservoir of our potential and can only be mined if we go to the trouble of developing that potential. A seeker is not looking for answers within, but is searching for a new self, or new identity, a more expansive and charismatic personality.

There are many in the ready to accommodate this pursuit. Let us call them “personality gurus.” They imply they possess Holy Grail answers to life’s meaning and one’s identity. A personality palliative can be wheat germ or Zen or an explanatory model. It can also be a personal trainer or a mystic with a compelling personality. These gurus provide a service you could better provide for yourself but in all probability you lack the gumption, given the popularity of their appeal.

Identity rests as a fragile mechanism between self and others. People without identity problems have a definite style and swagger. They don’t engage in soul searching. They don’t shop for answers. They live for experience and experience living, not as a second-hand proposition but as the real thing.

The turbulence of defining the situations of life makes it harder for people to find themselves. There is the explosion of technology that displaces people from familiar roles and settings. This results in a breakup of old traditions and produces an implosion in identity needs. We see a great movement of people from one status to another in a mobile society as some climb, others fall, while still others can’t even get a grip on the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder. Then there is the proliferation of fads, fashions and styles with everyone pretending how great life is while feeling miserable. It used to be said, “Clothes make the man.” Now they hide him. Consequently, there is furious playacting in search of identity. You see this in the restless pursuit of heroes in an age that produces only celebrities. Small wonder that most feel like being small cogs in a giant machine. Now women try to behave like men, as there is a loss of femininity and masculinity in jobs as well as relationships. The loss of joy and pride in craftsmanship that disappeared a half century ago is now being felt. There is actually a need to be mediocre to fit in this egalitarian society, while the rhetoric continually proclaims a societal commitment to excellence.

Paradoxically, there is an abundance of status symbols with little status. It boils down to a meaning vacuum. This haunts us at every turn. We are not wiser and more content in our persons. The knowledge explosion has not been accompanied by a self-knowledge implosion. We are becoming increasingly strangers to ourselves, looking for answers in all the wrong places. History and tradition are becoming less relevant to what we do.

Emerson says it is not knowledge that makes for happiness but experience. In experience, we find self-understanding, which gives us a reliable compass to where we are, how we got there, and where we are going. The best adviser we know lives in our heads. Its only requirement is that we activate our brains.

Place and Space
We no longer have a hometown. A sense of place has acceded to a matter of space. A man who lives where he was born is a rare commodity and a person who is rarely alone. The voices of his youth never leave him. Every day he passes the graves of ancestors, and their aspirations have become part of his own. When the bulldozers crush landmarks, obliterate old neighborhoods to make way for industrial expansion, or new commercial shopping malls, they crush him as well. Injury to his integrity comes not from progress, as heartless as it is, but from a sweeping away of Holy Grail symbols.

One of the characteristics of our time is a reversal of roles in the usual socialization pattern. The old not only turn to the young for know-how, but they seem obsessed with mimicking them in every way, from dress to speech to manners to music to becoming likewise suspended in youthful terminal adolescence of actions without consequences. This raises the question of the dignity and integrity of our society. It implies that society has lost its moral center and its way, that the past is ruthlessly disengaged from the present, that history, tradition, cumulative values and experience have little meaning to the old and even less to the young.

If past is prologue to the future as Joyce insists, then this is equivalent to psychological blindness. We have lost our sense of place and have substituted space to fill the void. Space is human geography. Place is our moral compass. It guides us through space. Without it, we find everyone is in a hurry to go somewhere, which is often nowhere.

I sense also there is a desire to please and to be envied to feel authentic. Space – travel always being on the go – has taken over a sense of place. Fancy hotels work hard to create the ambience of the desired reality, but they are much more space than place. Place nurtures. Space collects. Place makes us feel we belong. Space exacerbates the sense of rootlessness. Place provides a moral compass, a sense of who as well as where we are. Space is a vacuum to be filled with whatever.

Physical mobility is movement in space. Social mobility is contact with groups and classes of people. Rootlessness finds us seeking signals from others as to what is important and what is not. It is being other-directed instead of self-directed, and being management-dependent rather than self-managers. Rootless in space is about being anxious about what other people think with little assurance that they are right. It is being gullible to opinion makers who have their own agendas, and who seek validity by making them yours. It is about conforming to the popular code to make it.

We are constantly bombarded with stimuli with polls, bestseller lists, in and out styles, new fads and the most desirable cliques. We are also reminded of the preferred professions, the most prestigious schools to attend, and the right credentials to attain card-carrying membership in the herd mentality. Yet self-university is a reality with the introduction of the Internet. Soon universities will go the way of the horse and buggy.

When kinship structure is destroyed, as it has been with progress and the technological explosion, mobility brings a loss of tradition, a shallowness of relationships, the inadequacy of candor and meaningful feedback, which makes for unhappiness and a pervading dullness to life.

Lack of Identity Rituals
To discover our true identity, we need to dive into the cold waters of introspection and plunge into the murky encounters found there to which we despair. We are not the image created by ourselves nor that projected into our psyches by others. Both miss our true identity by a mile. Still, without reassuring identity, we are inclined to go through life feeling lost, depressed or cheated. Identity is not what we are. Identity is what we do.

Young people today color or bleach their hair, cut it short, grow it long, or shave it all off; tattoo their bodies including their faces, and wear peek-a-boo clothing to draw attention and hopefully disgust from their elders. They drive trendy cars, switch from one fad to another, scream for heroes, and plunge into activities like surfing, scuba diving, mountain climbing, or dropping out as if they are suspended on a perpetual holiday.

Curiously, their elders are aping these behaviors. Adults are not leading. They are following. Adults are not in charge. They are in submission. Adults, rich in life and experience, should have a sense of self but to see them you would have little confidence of this being the case. They are so busy becoming they have never found time to being.

We live in a society in which sentiments are in doubt: romantic love, family feeling, collegial support, patriotism, morality, religious faith, school spirit, civic pride, intellectual curiosity, and deep-soul feelings for the rare beauty of Mother Nature.

The modern social system deprives many of identity, which has little relationship to economic achievement or reward. Identity is the sanctity of persons, a sense of connection with everyone and everything else, and the realization that there is no free lunch, ever, that everything in life is quid pro quo and all actions are subject to like consequences, and that school is never out. It is the shroud of denial that drives the devious mind to think it can get away with anything. No one ever does. All debts are paid in like kind: compassion with self-contentment; cruelty with self-contempt.

Identity dislocation may lead to hero worship wherein worshipers try to be someone else, someone unsuited for their character and circumstance. Looking up to someone of quality is one thing, trying to be them is quite another. It denies the worshiper his own unique identity, and weakens his resolve to develop his sui generis.

Ritual is not only pleasant but also necessary for giving people a full sense of themselves connected to others, of their sense of place in space, of their sense of belonging to something bigger than self. It fills the emotional void of mechanized and routinized life. Poverty of ritual is, in part, the reason for poverty of sentiment today. We have become jaded, fatigued by the constant bombardment of car commercials on TV, by the news-of-the-day presented as an entertainment, by the marketing of schadenfreude to fill our appetite for public scandal, and by working as if on a treadmill to satisfy our appetite for more. The anti-ritual of the profane has replaced the ritual of the sacred.

That is one reason why life seems empty. Sacred holidays of Christianity have become perfunctory and commercialized into pseudo-symbolic sentiments and synthetic rituals. The rites of passage that we all experience have become nonevents, for the most part, and fail to recharge our batteries as they are intended. Judaism and Islam, which are part of our culture, remain vigilant in protecting their respective cultures in this climate of indifference, but they too are not beyond harm’s way. The poverty of ritual finds we have everything we could ever imagine and that everything sometimes seems to be nothing at all.