Who are you?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© May 31, 2014

“To thine own self be true” – with what a promise that phrase sings in our ears!

Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (1980)

In the social jungle of human existence there is no feeling of being alive without a sense of identity. 

Erik H. Erikson, Identity, Youth, and Crisis (1968)

In healthy people (motivation) usually is autonomous of its origins.  Its function is to animate and steer a life toward goals that are in keeping with present structure, present aspirations, and present conditions. 

Gordon W. Allport, Personality and Social Encounter (1955)

To see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening.  To see others as sharing a nature with ourselves is the merest of decency.  But it is a far more difficult achievement to see ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds.

Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge (1985)

This is a society in which the individual can only rarely and with difficulty understand himself and his activities as interrelated in morally meaningful ways with those of other, different Americans.

Robert Bellah, et. al., Habits of the Heart (1985)

Asked but how answered?

It would be so easy to be overwhelmed with this question.  Man throughout the ages has been asking himself this question, invariably coming up with an answer not terribly different from his predecessors.  This should not be surprising as we are all working with the same machine, our brain.  But is that true?  What of the body’s role?  We shall explore this.

What is unfortunate is that most of us have allowed someone else to consider the question of our identity and we have accepted their rationale as being our own.  This is especially true of academics and researchers who devote their lives to this question, persons who are exposed to the same vicissitudes as we are and are equally subjected to the same contradictions.  Just as you cannot separate me, the person, from what I write here the same is true of whatever you read on the question of identity. 

This is not to disparate genuine researchers into this Briar’s Patch of sticky inconsistencies when it comes to the question, but only to give proper perspective to the reader.

Marshall Berman writes of Erik Erikson, the famous psychotherapist:

His (Erikson’s) systematic constructions are arbitrary and unwieldy at best because he really has a fundamentally different cast of mind. What Erikson brought to America was not a body of German ideas by a distinctively and deeply German experience: the experience of adolescent elation and anguish and yearning. the elation and despair, the beauty and tragedy of adolescence, had rarely been confronted in American literature or culture before the 1950's, but they have been at the very heart of German imaginative life for the last two hundred years -- from Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther" and "Wilhelm Meister" to Holderlin's "Hyperion" to Mann's "Tonio Kroger" to everything by Hermann Hesse to Kafka's "The Judgment" and "Amerika."

Erikson's sensibility has always been wrapped up in the storms and stresses of adolescent crisis. But he understood (as he would later explain) that, in German literature and life alike, those crises tended to end disastrously, with youth's abject submission or self-destruction or both.

When Erikson left Europe at 31 in 1933, German youth was throwing itself into what would turn out to be the most disastrous ending of all. In America, Erikson must have hoped, adolescent visions and longings, including his own, could find far happier endings: the youthful energy and open expansiveness of American society and culture might give youth a chance to fly freely at last.

Thus, of all the thousands of men and women who crossed the Atlantic in the 1930's, Erikson was uniquely open and receptive to the promise of American life. His creative powers seem to have taken wing from the moment he arrived here, and in forty years he has not looked back. It is as if he needed to make the passage to America in order to resolve his own youthful "identity crisis" and become himself.

Erikson's path of development has led him to a remarkable personal cultural fusion: he has managed to unite the German evocation of youthful longings and despair with the typically American faith in improvement, progress and happy endings. His beautiful essay, "The Problem of Ego-Identity" (1956), argues that some of them so desperate and terrifying crises of adolescence can turn out to be ultimately creative. Thus youthful acts of leaning out over any number of precipices" may be modes of "playful experimentation" with experiences that are actually "becoming amenable to ego control." The most total forms of physical, mental and emotional paralysis may reveal -- if only we know how to "read" them -- "a wish to be born again, to learn the first steps toward reality and mutuality." The most devastating self-destruction may actually be "a radical search for the rock-bottom -- both the ultimate limit of regression and the only firm foundation for renewed progression."  (New York Times, March 30, 1975).

We process information from “experts” as self-evident and accept it without question as self-understanding. 

It is as if we think philosophers and theologians, psychiatrists and psychologists, priests and nuns, educators and pundits, gurus and mystics hold the keys to source material unavailable to us in our confusion.  It never occurs to us that they may be using us as laboratory to get through their own.

We look out of our cage for answers to our conundrum instead of in our own hearts.  The irony is that many of those we elevate to such authority status are like us, lost men looking for an audience for authentication.  Nigel Dennis writes in Cards of Identity (1984):

"On all matters of fact I am perfectly honest: I can state dates, acts of reason with absolute veracity.  But once I start confessing the why-and-wherefore of my behavior (as one is expected to do in a book), I become so entertained by the personal drama of it all that everything I put down has a wonderful ring of truth: I feel myself growing from a particular person into a universal design."

Now, before we congratulate Nigel Dennis for his disclosure, let us not be confused.  As sincere as this utterance may be, it is meant to capture the attention of the reader and to relax that reader’s suspicion that it may be self-serving, which clearly it is.

The shadow play of self-help books has a wide market and mass appeal.  As Berman points out in his piece, Erikson latched on to our American desire for self-improvement, our belief in progress and happy endings, and perceived a clear need, but a need with someone else other than ourselves having the key to bringing that state about.  We seldom wonder at the genius of those who claim to have answers for us.  So, we are disinclined to ask them to take off their masks.

Donning the Mask

Erik H. Erikson, the foremost clinical psychologist of his day on matters of identity, was not there for his daughter when she was going through a mind wrenching divorce.  She had to turn to her mother for her sanity who had no credentials at all. 

It gets even murkier.  Erikson, the identity architect, wasn’t Erikson at all, but rather Erik Homburger.  In his youth, he was as uncertain about his religion as about his parentage.  His observant Jewish family was jarred when he formally broke off relations with the rabbi at the local synagogue.  He began to study the Christian Gospels and was electrified one morning when he heard the Lord’s Prayer spoken in Luther’s German. 

Without any formal training or credentials, a Freudian group hired him on the basis of his way with children.  What is ironic is that Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud’s daughter, found him personally appealing and professionally useful.  She was happy to welcome a handsome, talented young man of Gentile appearance who was attracted to their revolutionary enterprise. 

Erikson’s genius lay in his extraordinary clinical insights, not in academia.  A clinical artist if anything, he kept journals since a young boy.  These are full of insights that reflect his troubled childhood.  With Anna Freud’s blessing, in any case, he came to America and assumed clinical positions at Harvard, Yale, and the University of California at Berkeley.  In 1939, he became an American citizen, changed his name to Erik H. Erikson and launched a most successful literary and academic career (see Lawrence J. Friedman, Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson, 1999).

Bruno Bettelheim, for more than four decades, was regarded by the public-at-large as one of the world’s most important and influential psychotherapists, a Viennese intellectual who stood as “one of Freud’s few genuine heirs of our time.” 

In fact, Bettleheim was a lumber dealer who grandly invented himself with a faked set of academic credentials after immigrating to the United States in 1939.  In the years that followed, deception followed deception as Bettleheim claimed that he had traveled in Freud’s circle, had treated autistic children in Vienna, had interviewed 1,500 fellow prisoners for his famous psychological study of concentration camp behavior, and had been freed from Buchenwald through the intervention of Eleanor Roosevelt.

A gifted writer if also fabricator, he headed the Orthogenic School for Emotionally Disturbed Children at the University of Chicago for three decades.  There he continued his fabrications, maintaining that he had treated “hundreds” of schizophrenic children who feared for their lives at the hands of their parents, shaping pseudonymous case histories to enhance his reputation, and claiming, with concocted statistics, that he was returning 85 percent of his young patients to normal lives. 

Popularly known as “Dr. B,” he often spun angrily out of control and abused the children both physically and emotionally, all the while insisting in his books and from the lectern that such punishment was absolutely verboten. 

Autism that he insisted in such books as The Uses of Enchantment (1977) could be treated successfully with psychotherapy has proven wrong as well as ill advised.  Autism has proven to have a physiological origin in the brain.

Bettleheim won the National Book Award for this book that dealt with the psychological meaning of fairy tales.  Later, parts of this work were discovered to have been plagiarized.  In 1990, he died by his own hand by asphyxiation his head covered in a plastic bag.

Biographers relate that Bruno Bettleheim was a boy who grew up in a home darkened for years by his father’s struggle with syphilis, a son who felt ugly, loathed his poor eyesight, and resented having to drop out of the University of Vienna at age twenty-three to take over the lumber business after his father died.  He was plagued with depression all his life and felt constantly the outsider, a self-hating Jew who compensated by noisily blaming the Jews of Europe for walking into the ovens of the Holocaust without a fight (see Richard Pollak, The Creation of Dr. B: A Biography of Bruno Bettleheim, 1997).

Werner Hans Erhard, the founder of est (Erhard Seminar Training), the most popular guru style system of self-discovery of the 1970s, left a wife and four children and his original name, John Paul Rosenburg in Ohio, slipped off to California, created a new identity and persona.  He advertised himself as a critical thinker with transformational models for people to rebuild their lives.   He and est became the rage of Hollywood’s tinsel town set, which in turn spread across the United States and Western Europe. 

Erhard created a mix bag of disciplines, consciousness techniques, religions, and systems to wow his devotees.  His story is an American soap opera of American will and Oriental intellect journeying inward in a smorgasbord of half-baked intellectual appetizers.   It is also the story of a rogue genius who struggled mightily for self-mastery and fulfillment, making his devotees feel that their struggle matched his own (see W. W. Bartley, III, Werner Erhard: The Transformation of a Man, 1978).

Identity and authenticity at root spring from the loneliness and anxiety our secular society has produced.   It was comforting when there was God to turn to because turning to God was, in fact, turning to one’s inner self for peace, solace, renewal and hope.  The men profiled here are essentially God’s replacements in the modern world.  If it were not them, it would be others.  They came into being because we willed it to be so.  They took on a role and responsibility that we gladly gave them because it meant that we didn’t have to assume that role ourselves.  We are always at the ready for palliatives packaged to meet our insatiable need for reassurance.  Like hyenas out in the bushveld, looking for an easy meal another predator has killed, we have entrepreneurs. 

Living in Ibsen’s Doll House

Several observers in the nineteenth century saw this coming, this splitting up of the personality as the Industrial Revolution fragmented society with the individual collateral damage.  Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen wrote about it, French painter Paul Cézanne captured it in art, and Austrian psychoanalyst Freud developed a nomenclature for human nature and called it science. 

Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House (1879) shows a husband who keeps his work and family in separate compartments, and treats his wife as a doll in a house that is empty of love, caring and intimacy, and therefore cannot but collapse.  Cézanne treats art in realistic rather than nineteenth century sentimental terms, believing beauty has more to do with integrity than prettiness.  Freud points out that people repress emotions and try to act as if sex and anger do not exist, and consequently end up as neurotics.

Friedrich Nietzsche is best known for saying “God is dead!”  What he actually proclaimed in the late nineteenth century was that society was becoming a factory.  He feared, and as history has shown rightly so, that man’s great advances in techniques would unlikely generate parallel advances in ethics and self-understanding.  He saw this would all lead to nihilism and the “death of God.” 

It is a haunting story of a madman who runs into the village square shouting, “Where is God?”  The people around did not believe in God.  They laughed and said perhaps God had gone on holiday.  The madman then shouted: “Whither is God?  I shall tell you!  We have killed him, you and I!”

Nietzsche is not calling for a return to the conventional belief in God, but is pointing out what happens when a society loses its center of values, its compass, alas, its guidance system.  This loss, this fragmentation and separation has gravitated to the loss of the sense of self, and the reason for the question: Who are you?”

A variation of this dilemma, and continuation of Ibsen’s “doll house” theme is presented in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1976).  Willie Loman is portrayed as a man very much like the rest of us common people – neither alcoholics nor psychotics – who make up the social situation in this country out of which most of us have sprung. 

Willie Loman was a man who took seriously the programming of his society, that success should attend hard, energetic work, that economic progress is a reality and that if one has the right “contacts,” achievement and salvation should inevitably follow. 

The one thing that matters with Willie is that he believes.  He takes seriously his own existence and what he had been taught he could rightly expect from life.  “I don’t say he is a great man,” says his wife in describing Willie’s disintegration to their sons, “but he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him.  So attention must be paid.” 

The tragic fact is not that Willie is a man of the grandeur of King Lear or the inward richness of Hamlet.  “He’s only a little boat looking for a harbor,” his wife says.

But the tragedy is historic if you multiply Willie by the tens of millions of fathers and brothers who believe what they are taught only to find in the changing of times that it does not work, that society is a “doll house” empty of promise, a place separate from the reality of experience, compartmentalized in increasingly intricate fashion so that the original ideas upon which it was all built seem to be a mirage.  It is betrayal of the most egregious kind, but no one knows who the betrayer is. 

“He never knew who he was,” his wife concludes, “and he took seriously his right to know.”

The flaw in the tragic character, Arthur Miller writes, is really nothing but his inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status.  Only the passive, only those who accept their lot without active retaliation, are flawless.  Most of us to some degree are in that category.

Miller goes on to say the quality that shakes us derives from the underlying fear of being displaced, torn away from our chosen image of what and who we are in the world. 

Far from being a pessimist, the tragic view Miller asserts, indicates we take seriously our freedom and need to realize ourselves.  It is significant there is little sense of tragedy today.  In our age of emptiness, tragedies are relatively rare as playwrights are more concerned with sexology than psychology.  There is no Oedipus, Agamemnon, or Orestes; no Othello, Lear, Hamlet or Macbeth, only the personification of screaming hormones.

Search for Identity

In achieving personal identity, most of us must start back at the beginning and rediscover our feelings.  The tendency, when looking back, often is one of self-pity blaming parents, peers, circumstances, teachers, preachers, coaches, or partners for our lot in life.  Even then the inventions are often wide of the mark as Freud shows in his many studies.

There may be precedence in our histories of physical, psychological or sexual abuse, as these do occur, but the mind is imperfect.  My middle aged daughter was recently retelling me of a favorite vacation of her childhood, and in the retelling involved the juxtaposing of times, places and happenings, which were incongruous with that one event that she was remembering seemingly so vividly.  This happens.  

Likewise, it is surprising how many of us have only a general sense of what we feel.  We say I feel “fine” or “lousy” or “okay,” as if we have no actual idea.  It is just a mechanical response.  Our connection with what we feel is as remote as Ibsen’s “doll house” is to familiarity.  In T.S. Eliot’s “Hollow Men,” we experience ourselves as

Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralyzed force, gesture without motion.

For many of us, it is hard work to feel.  We have little intuitive sense of who we are, where we are or what we are because of this sensory deprivation.  However, if we would “listen to the body,” we would know when to work, when to rest, when and with whom to engage in relationships, and with whom not to trust or go near.  We would also feel what situations create the premonition of danger and the ones that give us a sense of safety. 

The body knows and is ever alert if we would but listen to it.  So, the first step is to welcome the body back into union with the self.  It means experiencing the body from the pleasure of eating and resting to a sense of when to withdraw and regroup, indeed, when to call “a time out!”    

Awareness of one’s feelings lays the groundwork for the second step: knowing what you need and want.  Again, most people cannot identify needs or separate them from wants.  Life can so easily fall into the cage of routine. 

You need a job to provide for yourself and family, but what do you want?  A career?  A college education?  The luxury and freedom to be able to write a book?  What?  The adolescent disposition, which can grab hold of a person in his youth and hold on for a lifetime, represents a failure to understand and realize the difference. 

An obsessive-compulsive person, or even a person who is primarily of an impulsive nature, is unlikely to have a firm grasp of his feelings.  Feelings are his master rather he is theirs.  

A popular limerick of Freud’s fits this dilemma:  The ego has no lid and the id.  Stated another way, reason has no control over our impulsive nature.  In transactional analytical (T/A) terms, it would suggest the child has control over the adult and there is no parent around (see Eric Berne, Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships, 1964, and John M. Dusay, Egograms: How I See You and You See Me, 1977).

The third step in this process of rediscovering our feelings and their relationship to our needs and wants is to recover our relations with the subconscious.  This has been deemed an alien force in modern man.  We are programmed to think, not feel; to be objective, not subjective; to be “value free” in our observations, not conscious of the unconscious side of our personality. 

Consequently, most of us are skin-deep personalities.  We suppress the irrational as if it does not exist to insist on being fully conscious of ourselves as rational beings in a rational ordering society where there is a place for everything and everything knows its place.  

You only have to look around you at the chaos of contemporary life to see how absurd and counterproductive this is.  It is one of the reasons we have been attracted to Eastern thought, and why people such as Werner Erhard hit upon transformational models for est.  Eastern religions, including Buddhism, Shintoism, and the ethics of Confucius, leave room for dreams, myths, fairy tales, and unhurried insights:

There is no place to seek the mind; 

It is like the footprints of the birds in the sky.

Above, not a piece of tile to cover the head;

Beneath, not an inch of earth to put one’s foot on.

Sitting quietly, doing nothing,

Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.

The water before, and the water after,

Now and forever flowing, follow each other.

One word determines the whole world;

One sword pacifies heaven and earth.

If you do not get it from yourself,

Where will you go for it?

(Robert Sohl, Audrey Carr, The Gospel According to Zen, 1970)

We look for authorities to interpret our life so we will understand its meaning.  Erich Fromm insists in The Forgotten Language (1957) that no such expertise is needed, that we are part of a universal language shared by all mankind.  It is the language of the subconscious that we have forgotten, but have the ability to relearn if so moved. 

But to do this we must get beyond our passive state, the part of us that allows the deterministic forces in experience to take the place of self-awareness.  Equally damaging is activism, the part of us that uses activity to substitute for awareness. 

Aliveness often means the capacity not to act, but to be creatively idle.  This is more difficult than to do something.  Doing something wins approval in our times, while doing nothing raises eyebrows.  Robert Louis Stevenson puts it this way, “To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.”  Self-awareness brings into focus a quiet kind of aliveness where contemplation and meditation and prayer bring a new appreciation of being something rather than merely doing something.

Who are you?

It is hoped that this discussion proves helpful.  That said obviously no one else can drive you to your destiny than you.  It is a solitary journey and made more difficult with the loss of a center of values along with a reliable moral compass.  You can ask yourself some questions that might prove useful:

Did you throw away your career as a musician because accounting was more practical?

Do you pay close attention to fashion trends to see what you should wear?

Are you obsessed with being “in”?

How important are other people’s opinions to you?  More than your own?

Do you follow celebrity activities more than you pay attention to yours?

Do you have a true, trusted, loyal friend?  Is it you?  If not, why not?

Are you caught up in other people’s lives and worried about what is best for them?

Are you lonely when alone?

Are you anxious when there is no distracting noise?

Are you uncomfortable in your own skin?

Many of us need to get in touch with who we are and not what our parents, teachers, preachers, friends and bosses tell us we are, or worse yet, how they tell us we should be. 

We grow from the outside in, not the inside out, subject to all these influences in our impressionistic years.  A time arrives when we must set our own agenda, when we need to find a way to accept who we are and where we are, and to understand how we got there rather than somewhere else. 

If we can manage that, if we can be kind, caring and accepting of ourselves as we are, it is an easy move to accept others as we find them.  We can then enable others to be what they would be by listening to them empathetically.  We cannot, however, rescue them from self-deceit, self-indulgence or self-destruction any more than they can rescue us from ours. 

There is one person we need to satisfy in order for everything else to fall into place, and that is ourselves.  The more you try to be everything to everyone else, and never learn to say “no” and mean it, the further you retreat into the darkest corner of your own cage.  That “no” of course also extends to you when on a self-indulgent path.  Generosity of spirit is derived from a self-satisfied heart that also understands the wisdom of self-restrain.

If the way you behave fails to serve you and is inconsistent with what you say you value, you are out-of-step with yourself.  You are an accident waiting to happen, vulnerable to the inexplicable, blind to who you are and where you are going, poised to be unhinged, disappointed, embarrassed, and to spin out of control. 

No one can do for you what you refuse to do for yourself.  If your life is out of sync, only you can restore the balance to its desirable rhythm.  In the end, we are all left with ourselves.

Rollo May in Man’s Search for Himself (1953) writes:

Man must make his choices as an individual, for individuality is one side of one’s consciousness of one’s self.  We can see this point clearly when we realize that consciousness of one’s self is always a unique act – I can never know exactly how you see yourself and you never can exactly know how I relate to myself.  This is the inner sanctum where each man must stand alone.  This fact makes for much of the tragedy and inescapable isolation in human life, but it also indicates again that we must find the strength in ourselves to stand in our own inner sanctum as individuals.  And this fact means that, since we are not automatically merged with our fellows, we must through our own affirmation learn to love each other.

To that end, I wish you well.

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