Identity and the New Psychoanalytic Explorations of Self-organization

Mardi Horowitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317700388
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Advances in science and the humanities have demonstrated the complexity of psychological, social and neurological factors influencing identity. A contemporary discourse is needed to anchor the concepts required in speaking about identity in present day understanding. In Identity and the New Psychoanalytic Explorations of Self-organization, Mardi Horowitz offers new ways of speaking about parts of self, explaining what causes a range of experiences from solidity in grounding the self to disturbances in a sense of identity.

The book covers many aspects of both the formation and the deconstruction of identity. Horowitz examines themes including:

-The sense of identity

-Social learning

-Biological learning

-Identity and self-esteem

- Levels of personality functioning and growth

The book clarifies basic questions, defines useful terms, examines typical identity disturbances and presents a biopsychosocial theory which indicates how schemas operate in conscious and unconscious mental processing. The answers to the basic questions lead to improvements in psychotherapy practices as well as teaching and research methods.

Identity and the New Psychoanalytic Explorations of Self-organization will prove fascinating reading for those working in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and the social disciplines.

Chapter 1

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Questioning identity

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Societies that surround individuals define the identity of a person as being the fact of being that person, usually as a bodily entity, perhaps as that person’s perceived roles within the society. If the police heard that someone reported that I stole money from the market, I would say it was a case of mistaken identity. I am innocent, a respected professor, and not the perpetrator whom I must admit looked like me on a surveillance camera.

In the social system, I am that body that contains just me and no one else. My DNA can prove it. But inside my mind I am not always so clear about my sense of identity. It is this inner variation of multiple self-states that leads us to analyze parts of self and, as teachers or clinicians, to seek effective ways to help people toward greater coherence between them.

Self-esteem, identity diffusion, and lifetime efforts at self re-definition are common issues. During the 1992 U.S. Presidential election, Vice-Admiral James Stockdale was a largely unknown Reform Party candidate for Vice President. In his televised debut, he was to debate Republican and Democratic opponents. Stockdale introduced himself with the opening remark “Who am I, and why am I here?” and, to his visible embarrassment, the audience laughed.

What he may have meant to say was, “When I tell you my history, you will know who I am and you will know the principles on which I stand.” The big surprise was that some—those who laughed at his comment—understood his remarks as meaning “I stand before you, uncertain about my identity and my worthiness.” Why did he get that response from the audience? Some felt an empathetic resonance, because most people have moments of uncertainty and discomfort about their personal identity.

Identity is questioned biologically, socially, and psychologically as in studies of blood-lines, ethnicity, and internal sense of cultural belonging. The political and often economic problem is this: are you the person you say you are or the person we say you are? A case in point is a recent debate concerning Native American heritage and a personal sense of identity as being rooted in a traditional culture. The case was that of a candidate for a Massachusetts Senate seat, Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard Law School professor. She was listed as a Native American in several law school directories. Her opponent’s campaign used this fact to attack her character by implying that she was an opportunist who lied about her indigenous people’s identity, since, the opponent said, Warren was not a blood-line Native American. Warren’s “proof’ of her identity was,” My mother told me so,“ a family legacy of meaningful connections with traditions and certain cultural values.

Some tribal registries require a “blood quantum” of ancestry, but other tribes indicate that Native American identity is something a person can claim for him- or herself, that one may choose how to relate oneself to a sharable culture. Warren was not seeking social advantages for herself on the basis of her Native American identity claim. However, her place of employment—Harvard University School of Law—did seek advantage, counting Warren as a Native American lent the department a legitimacy in conforming to requirements to show faculty diversity (see the stories in the Washington Post and the New York Times, 2012).

Oscillating external and internal points of view

Suppose a man identifies himself, and is identified by others, as “a writer” and as one who has written many things over a long time. Many critics and his family have called him: “a fine writer.” He liked that role for his identity and self-definition: he said within his mind, enjoying a bit of self-esteem, “I am a fine writer.”

He had published a prize-winning short story a few years ago. Now he was writing another short story, but this time it was not going well. He felt that the short story in process would be rejected unless he received better inspiration and wrote better sentences. Because he is a fine writer—that is, his sense of identity in some self-states—he expects that he might eventually have such inspiration and revise the current mediocre draft into an excellent short story. If he possesses a solidity and continuity of his sense of identity that sustains him through his work, he will rise to meet the challenge, feeling self-confident.

In contrast, consider the commonplace self-doubts of creative people. Perhaps this writer has so much doubt that he can no longer hold onto this identity commitment of having been, being, and becoming once more, a fine writer. He always wondered where his inspiration came from. He felt that he was not in control of “his muse.” He wondered: does his creative part even reside inside his mind? If inside, why is “it”—that part of himself—sometimes uncooperative? Was he in different states of mind—inspired and not inspired, for example—sometimes brilliant, sometimes competent, sometimes sluggish and incompetent?

The doubts of the writer help me to illustrate how self-states can fluctuate from time to time. Metaphorically, the fluctuation is also from place to place, as if complexes of self-beliefs occupy different spaces in the theater of his mind, looking out at his drafts and imagined readers from different points of view, arriving at different appraisals, from promising to dooming. The important additional factor is his level of reflective self-observation. The writer may or may not have an over-arching view of multiple selves, fluctuating in time and mental space, all as parts of his overall self-organization and ongoing identity. If he has an overarching, supraordinate self-schema, and it is activated, then a consciously self-reflective agency helps him understand his fluctuations of mood and attitude. This higher capacity for self-reflection on aspects of self can ameliorate the sense of doubt, preserving morale and energy over times of critical appraisal of his productivity. The higher capacity regulates attention, and that control of attention ameliorates self-conscious emotional potential such as shame or fear of social embarrassment.

The self contained in and reflected by communities

Others may observe the writer. They may have their own ways to categorize his mind. They may have a theory that allows them to know that the writer may be in alternative states, and that he may even go through cycles of states, going from initial inspiration, into self-doubting, and then to exhilaration over his work product. The other persons might think the writer seemed vain and exhibitionistic in his exhilarated state and timidly uncertain, asking for guidance, in his doubting state.

Such observers might even form character judgments, perhaps gossiping at a party while he was out of earshot. They might agree that he was a charming but vain narcissist; he was a pleasure to converse with, but he could not be trusted to remain reliable as a friend. That would be different from agreeing that he was compulsively self-doubting and a very reliable friend. An acquaintance might even comment on him as having one identity, fine writer, while believing inwardly he had another identity, a has-been.

Inner identity is different from identity as reflected in the eyes of the beholders that surround the individual, actually, and in his mind. Entering the room, the writer felt like a writer because the guests knew his works and reputation, and they looked at him with respect. Before he came in, though, his self-esteem was low because he had doubts in his current skill to create future works. He anticipated he would feel embarrassed because he expected to be overlooked and ignored. He sensed the admiring looks from others and soon felt good, even excited. Little did he know that behind the smiling faces, some of the people thought the writer had become a bit foolish, perhaps to be pitied where he once was envied.

Defining our terms

The Oxford English Dictionary says the word identity comes from the Latin term identitat, which means, “It is the same.” The main definition reads “The sameness of a person or thing at all times or in all circumstances; the condition of being a single individual; the fact that a person or thing is itself and not something else; individuality, personality.” Here, the dictionary writers have emphasized identity from an external point of view, the social assessment that the identity of a person is acknowledged by how others perceive distinguishing characteristics.

Of course, people often worry, when they think about their identity, how they are perceived and interpreted by others. And their mind has been formed in social frameworks, even their brains were formed from social evolutionary forces and epigenetics. Inside the person, self-beliefs and attributes exist, and judgments by others may be formulated. The person may vary in self-state because of which others are now reflecting, or perceived as reflecting, the self. That person’s internal formulation may not match what other people actually think and feel. People vary in degrees of accuracy in their appraisals of what others are thinking about them. Projective errors are rampant. And people vary in their reflective self-appraisals, their ability to comprehend discords, to harmonize them, and to re-define self.

These ambiguities in observing identity are noted in the subordinate definitions of the Oxford English Dictionary. OED notes self as, “a permanent subject of successive and varying states of consciousness. Self also signifies a collection of traits and dispositions that constitute one of various conflicting personalities within a human being.” We will address those conflicting personalities. We are going to consider parts of the self and how well they do or do not cohere or configure together as central, organizing schematizations (Harter, 2012).

We’ll need some words to think of components—parts of self that may be configured together or not—rather than of one bodily entity as seen externally. That is why hyphenated words about self are often found in cognitive science. One such term is self-schema, which means unconscious as well as systematized generalizations about the self. Related terms are self-belief, or self-concept, but these terms imply consciousness and schemas operate pre-consciously to organize mental states. This book will tend to use the word self-representation to refer to conscious and communicative expressions.

The word schema implies a kind of cognitive map, so that a self-schema is an organized configuration of information coded in memory, probably as associa-tional linkages across many modalities of the brain’s memory encoding systems. A self-state is a condition organized by the activation of a particular self-schema, leading to self-representations, and so, to a sense of identity in consciousness and how one is separate from while attached to others.

Self-organization refers to the overall assembly of self-schemas. Self-representation refers to a conscious belief about the self. This terminology allows us to examine complex and hierarchical organizations of self-states.

Self-schemas are configurations of subordinate meanings, and self-organization is a larger linked configuration of self-schemas. Between self-schemas and self-organization might be several supra-ordinate self-schemas that cluster a group of self-schemas but perhaps are dissociated from other supra-ordinate configurations. Self-coherence is a quality of overall functioning of self-organization in that an individual may associate or segregate (dis-associate) multiple self-schemas.

Conscious and unconscious mental processes

A conscious sense of identity, the self-observing processes of self-appraisals, and the values used to contrast an ideal with an actual here-and-now self, these are all determined by unconscious mental processes, which in turn depend on brain capacity and activity as well as social contexts of immediacy. These processes are organized by unconscious meanings such as schemas of self and others, which in turn depend on what has been learned and socially reinforced or at least reflected back on the person in past experiences, experiences now deposited and generalized in many memory systems. Identity to be sensed as a self, as a me, as an I of continued vitality, requires complex connectivities of memory systems.

There is a lot that can “go wrong.” That is why identity is sometimes disturbed, fragmented, or absent in an alarming sense of depersonalization. A person may, socially, fake self-presentation as if feeling competent and confident, while inside feeling like an imposter.

Self-observation

With self-reflective awareness, a person may notice that some self-states feel discordant with other self-states. These differences in the sense of identity are usually due to some kind of mismatch between sets of information pertaining to the self. The mismatch may be within unconscious mental processing, assessing contradictions between associational networks. The result of a mismatch can activate emotional systems, and these self-conscious emotions may be felt without clear reasoning about why they have arisen, or why a mood may persist in spite of efforts to rouse oneself from it.

Research indicates that the most frequent mismatch is in the contents of appraisal of the physical self. When looking in the mirror one may feel that one’s skin color, hair quality, or a facial feature is not in accord with expectation. This mismatch, if negative in emotional response says, in effect, I don’t like my looks. The degree of experienced disturbance in these self-appraisals is variable. Consider the difference between unconscious appraisals that might be put down as words such as, “Oh, I am having a bad hair day” and “I will forever have substandard hair because of my genetic inferiority.”

Any mismatch between real and “ought-to-be” self-images can give rise to complex feelings such as shame. For example, looking in my mirror, I could think, in effect, “Because my head is bald, I am ashamed that people might perceive me as old and unattractive.” If I expected to see an ugly old guy in the mirror and that expectation was mismatched with a perception that I actually looked pretty good, then I could feel consciously proud that I have aged gracefully and have remained attractive but in a different way than when I was younger. If I unconsciously expected to see a handsome young man, and I see a bald guy with a lot of wrinkles, then I might feel dismay. A positive mismatch leads to positive feelings, augmenting self-esteem, “Wow, I look better than I anticipated,” and a negative mismatch leads to distress, diminishing self- esteem: “Wow, not as attractive as I expected.” The feelings may be conscious, and at least some of the reasons may be unconscious.

Enhancing self-observational capacity allows some people to think more broadly and openly about what they want, what they value, what they could do, and what they fear. Such self-observation is a common tool for personality growth. It allows a person to compare and contrast beliefs, modify attitudes, and bring conflicting parts of se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Psychological Issues Book Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword by Robert S. Wallerstein, MD
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Questioning identity
• 2 Identity disturbances
• 3 Learning self, psychologically
• 4 Social learning and identity formation
• 5 Biological schematization: Networks and modular brain connectivity
• 6 Personality functioning: Levels of person schematic organization and variations in psychotherapy technique
• 7 Identity sense and personality disorders
• 8 Identity and self-esteem
• 9 Identity change during mourning the loss of a loved one
• Appendix: Lines of research on self-organization
• Glossary
• Bibliography and further reading
• Index