More thoughts from the past | Basic Research On the Self

When I was originally thinking of writing this blog, it didn’t occur to me to include chapters from my 1981 book on anxiety. But as I was writing the last post, I saw a connection between my past and this blog. I’m still intensely interested in the things I wrote about over 30 years ago. I hadn’t realized until just now how much I’ve wanted to get back to those ideas. It seems surprising to me, actually, to find that I am still that same person.

The next two posts are additional chapters from that book. The first post, a chapter I’ve renamed The flexible self and the inflexible individual, applies social construction to identity formation, the illusion of self-creation (the belief that who we are comes from within, not without), and the belief that identity persists over time. The point I was trying to make relates to what I find liberating about social construction: that despite socially shared beliefs on what is socially acceptable, there is no one way to live that is correct, permanent, or guaranteed to be satisfying. Our self-concept is more flexible than the scientific studies of research psychologists might lead us to believe. (I discuss this in another chapter of the book, The Problem is You). I also briefly relate all this to anxiety, which, after all, was the subject matter expected by the book’s publisher.

The second post, You are what you think, touches on the experience of consciousness in daily life, describes Aron Gurwitsch’s model of awareness with its center and margins (Gurwitsch was a phenomenologist and gestalt psychologist), and relates this back to identity. “The ingredients that go into a self-image come from the world we encounter. But our formulas for putting these ingredients together are not original prescriptions we’ve written by ourselves. ‘Identity’ is a full-blown idea we encounter readymade in the world.”

I notice there are a few obscure allusions in this second chapter to the music I was listening to at the time – “Station to Station” (Bowie), “Editions of You” (Roxy Music). There are more of these throughout the book, disguised as innocent prose: “undercover Sigmund Freud” (John Cale), “before and after science” (Eno), “the problem is you” (Sex Pistols), “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine” (Patti Smith), “boat made out of ocean” and “I love disaster and I love what comes after” (Tom Verlaine). In my household, I’m still known as a punk rocker.

The ideas in these chapters come from Berger and Luckmann, Alfred Schutz, Aron Gurwitsch, and others. The particular attitude expressed in applying these ideas is mine. It turns out that thirty years later I still recognize that attitude as the essence of who I am.

Image source: i’m waking up to

References:

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge

Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, The Structures of the Life-World

Aron Gurwitsch, Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology