The self is a concept that we are more than we appear, and that the self is a singular concept which is either a spiritualistic entity such as a soul, a purely biological and physical entity such as the human anatomy and body or that we are a mental kinetic force that transcends full understand such as the human mind and personality.
In this project various opinions will be gathered to try and form a cohesive argument for why the self is the latter of the three above options. Using theories of celebrated great minds and an analysis on radical social change in the modern era the self should be dissected and analysed to be the personality and not the other two entities with reasons provided.
With insights and evidence combined there will be a detailed explaination for why the human race acts certain ways in relation to certain things and an observational point of view on what has got us this far to the current stage in our mental and sociological development.
Multiple factors will be taken into account, and the final question should be is the self the mind or something else?
It is a common concept within our society and culture that we are all known to wear masks. These masks are often a result of pressure from outside sources such as what society expects from you or what exposure to those who push their opinions vehemently upon one who has a differing stance on that or relating issues. While one aspect of human nature is self-preservation and that aspect does trickle down into making us avoid conflict in our lives. This avoidance is where the mask becomes an invaluable tool, the project an altered state of opinion to protect one’s self from threats.
The masks we create for ourselves within social situations are called personas; they have been a heavily debated topic by psychologist, sociologists and philosophers over the years. Naturally and rightfully so the word persona is a descendant of the latin word for mask or character.
Certain individuals have also tried to argue that concept of the self is not mental but physical or spiritual, while arguing against spiritualistic objects we are said to possess is somewhat difficult to provide evidence for, arguing against that our body is purely our selves is somewhat easier. While the self (this interpretation which believes it to be the personality) is contained within the brain and it’s cocktail of hormones and chemical makeup, the rest of our body does not constitute the self. In a hypothetical and tragically sometimes actual circumstance individuals suffer head trauma and this can radically change a personality, those associated with said person then relay concerns that the injured acts like a completely different person.
In few to no instances do people recognize the person to be the same based on their physical condition if the way they speak, behave and socialize has radically changed. In the same instance twins do not act the same way because they are physically identical, they have different personalities because a personality is unique to a person’s own existence, the same cannot be said for the body. In labs across various continents doctors and scientists are capable of growing skin for those who are burned, surgically altering our internal organs in theatre, while the list of examples could go on the point is you cannot create a personality in a lab unlike the life that is the physical body.
Donald Winnicott introduced a theory of the person consisting of a true self and a false self, the true self being the core of the person and the false self being the exterior projected persona. While Winnicott’s own theory was based in the behavior of infants it is perfectly feasible that these qualities demonstrated within human infancy did not dissipate and remained within us all and most likely helped the establish parameters in which our personalities grew and developed.
The false self can be described as a mirror personality that absorbs pressures from social influences and reflect those that it finds important to portray for it’s own self-preservation. While these aspects may contradict with the beliefs or behavior of the true self they still remain, it also can manifest in creating false relationships. The false self is created from compliance with outside rules such as conforming to social actions for example having to be polite, it does not imply that the true self might not naturally be polite just that by forcefully steering developed in another direction a tear can be created and the two pieces with the rip in them become the true and false selves. While the false self has nothing but good loyal intentions it can have negative effects on the person as other people can come to believe that this false self exterior is a person’s true self and this result in them being treated as such which can damage the true self as it is often oversensitive. The purpose of the false self is to defend the true self from threats, these threats are sometimes illogical but are always outside forces that could have a lasting effect on the state of the true self.
The core of a personality according to Winnicott is the true self. It is established that the true self is a lot less complex than that of the false self because the true self is simply purity. The characteristics related are usually that of integrity, compassion and over all goodness or as Winnicott puts it “Only the true self can be creative and only the true self can feel real”[1], the type of characteristics that require fierce protection other they could be compromised or even destroyed.
As previously mentioned this theory of the true and false self was originally written in context to a baby’s stages of development but they do resonate rather brightly within theories of others such as Sigmund Freud, based on this comparison Winnicott’s theories should be relevant to the analysis of what the true self is considering he not only helps detail an answer but also help to pinpoint some of the overwhelming complexities of what that task entails.
Freud developed a three piece theory that is supposed to explain human personality, using these three pieces and the relation of Donald Winnicott’s the two selves theory it should hopefully be easier to distinguish between if one singular of the three or if all or none of them are what we would consider the self.
The easier metaphor for understanding Freud’s theory is an iceberg (pictured right) and it has been included for that such purpose.
The ego is described as the control factor of the three factors, it tries to balance the wants and needs of the triumvirate. It is similar to Winnicott’s false self but the difference is Freud’s ego is committed to pleasing and protecting the other two simultaneously, which Winnicott’s false self is not do for the true self, it merely acts as a defense mechanism.
The ego is the most conscious aspect of the personality as it’s ability to balance the other aspects requires both deliberate and unconscious factors to work correctly, so it is the most stable but complex of three aspects.
The ID is the motivation for our actions and often has little to no explanation for why want said thing, it is completely unconscious such as our preferences of colour of food, they have no reasoning they just are the way they are. In more popular culture ID has been described as respecting our inner desires, portraying them as an unrestrained reservoir of ambition and talent that is harnessed by the ego for our life and all it’s purposes.
The Superego acts as our tie to internalized morals and ethics, whether we consider something wrong or right is created the superego, our actions based on this information could also constitute where guilt comes from for when we commit the wrong action.
There is also a strongly implied sexist connotation that the superego also created a sense of gender based rivalry with our parents but this is only amongst sons and fathers in which the son sees the father as a threat and seeks to overthrow them. It is widely called the Oedipus complex but it appears to have more basis in animalistic tendencies we have exhibited from our evolution since the Oedipus complex demonstrates a rather large pack animal like theme which most human beings do not share anymore. So it is possible this aspect is either blown out of proportion or is simply a residual remainder of a time in which we were at a lesser stage in our species evolution.
In regards to women it labels them castrated and thus consisting of weaker superegos and as a result being inferior as a result.
As times have changed and technology has evolved, we have become adapt at more creative and powerful ways to communicate. The internet is such as a creation but one aspect of the internet has helped greatly in it’s popularity for collecting popular opinion and that is the anonymity it can grant users when they were wish to share their opinions.
There are several theories that revolve around the process of masks playing a part in the freedoms we allow ourselves to revel in, Oscar Wilde once said “"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." and this would feed directly into the repeating factor of how social physical interactions can limit how much of our own selves or opinions we express. The mask or persona we use in real life need not apply online as we do not have a preset hierarchy of friends and acquaintances or family, without having to account for their influence in our lives it is almost as if we are given a new identity and with it a feeling of freedom to express whatever we desire because the risk of being found out and having it effect our waking live is minimal. [2]
A minority percentage of this freedom has been used to express all out hatred and negativity for certain things, the website youtube.com is famously known for having less than welcoming commenters but all communities have this same tiny surge of negative people, but as the popularity of the internet and the website itself the numbers have become quite different rational and more polite minds outnumbering those who actively hate on everything and anything. One of the few downsides of the internet is that the pure freedom that it has led people to commit illegal acts such as identity theft or intellectual property theft.
This begs the questions is what we say online supposed to be considered our true self or is it another factor such as the superego, id or false self simply regurgitating its behaviour for social life for the online medium. The clear difference between the two worlds of real life and online is that real life has a lot of factors that filter into our persona and actions, such as parents and their opinions, friends and theirs, the place in which you live, for example those who live in America’s bible belt (a group of southern states) would be more likely to weigh their actions against the overall temperature of the community they live in because said community would live according to the biblical commandments and the teachings of the bible. The same is true for those that live in heavily religiously influenced countries such as Saudi Arabia or Israel, these outside influences do not exist online because the internet is a metaphorical buffet with an endless selection for you to choice which information which you devour or reject. The contrary is real life, which has a mix of buffet restaurants and certain singular cuisine type restaurants.
Due to the clash of real life culture and internet culture, the aspects of self and freedom have been spiraling into chaos but they also have allowed it to reach new levels of freedom that our species has never witnessed before. It is arguable that because of the direct influence of the internet world culture has fast tracked and due to the information now readily available it is killing off institutes that were before sought after for this insight such as churches and religions.
As the old idols die off, new liberation centric idols have risen to attempt and bring about a larger social change such as equality for all. One such person is pop star Lady Gaga who herself is a success story because of the internet and her adaptability to embrace new things rather than resisting them which has damaged the reputations of previous institutions and figureheads when they were seen as out of touch. One of Lady Gaga’s core philosophies that she goes out of her way to get across is that everybody is Born This Way and that all outside influences that have a negative impact of the self should be rejected.
“I was never a brave person… but now I’m going to be brave for you. Tonight… I want you to free yourselves, I want you to let go of all of your insecurities. I want you to reject any person, anything or any law that has ever made you feel like you don’t belong.”
- Lady Gaga
While in general it sounds cliché, if you couple it with the previously mentioned theories of Winnicott and Freud it would imply that she would seek to change social norms so that we do no longer require the service of a false self/ego and that would imply that our ID/Superego or true self is the most important aspects of our personality and thus the true meaning of self.
Maybe say the concept of self is overanalysed and that things such as mob mentality could completely strike against our own individualism but our concept of self is shaped by our personal actions and views (when free of influence) and not the primal instincts we still retain from lower stages of our species' evolution.
conclude inconclusive because the concept of self is too narrow to cater for how three dimension the human personality is, we are not one dimension and thus we cannot fit into the box concept of what a self is.
There are various contradicting theories from various sources in regards to what the self may be and to go through them all one by one would simply be arrogance since there is no actual authority on what the self is or if it exists beyond wishful thinking. But an argument can be made to contend with those theories by compiling the theories of others and attempting to make them work together in a cohesive fashion to try and from some kind of interpretative answer.
Winnicott’s true self and false self theory is an incredibly interesting and intuitive read, it resonates a lot within various people who feel like they sometimes act one way out of peer pressure or forces they can not find a good enough name for. It also inspires various feelings of wanting to do away with the false self to be a whole true incarnation of the true self but Winnicott accounting for people only as rational beings, he does not entertain the concept that we are not one hundred percent rational. So when you bring aspects such as mob mentality or deindividuation there are no answers within the two selves to account for what sometimes drives people to become purely instinctual primal beasts when faces with times of life or death or extreme rage.
Freud’s triumvirate like theory gives the best understanding of the human personality to date, which explains why he is still held in such high regard in relation to human psychology. It could be argued that our inner desires are our true selves and that everything else has created layers that has been piled on by the exposure to society and the opinions and misconceptions harboured as a whole, which we may have internalized. In regards to a definitive answer to what the self is, Freud seems the closest to the true, while Winnicott has some really relatable rhetoric, Freud gives an almost airtight set of premises for his conclusion and there seem few to none reasons to suspect that this couldn’t be true.
On a larger scale it is my personal opinion that the self is simply a concept, while it may have been able to partially unearth part of what makes human beings who we are it appears to be merely a piece and the entire package of what makes a human being tick is a concept too big for the term of self. Our opinions, morals and judgements are all relative aspects of our existence but there are certain things such as natural goodness, the ability to repeatedly be scorned but not change having good intentions these aspects have been unaccounted for in the majority of theories on the self (apart from the few which categorise it as a response to severe abuse, which has almost become a universal answer for something there is not an in-depth answer for). Freud appears the closed but there is still a lot of pieces to the puzzle still to be found and put in the right order but the information we have so far does provide a fascinating insight into how people interpret the human mind to work, evolve and develop from infancy to adulthood. But as too the larger question of what is the self, it is our opinions, our actions and our behavior but to address the underlying aspects of that concept the answer is inconclusive because we are simply too complex for such terms in this period in our psychological and philosophical understanding of how we work and what makes us more than simple animals aka human.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Theory of Personality: Psychology of Personal Constructs (The Norton library)
by George Kelly (1 Apr 1963)
BBC Four Documentaries - The Century of the Self
Adam Curtis (April 2002)
Two Essays on Analytical Psychology
C. G. Jung, (1953)
An Experimental Test of Processes Underlying Self-Disclosure in Computer-Mediated Communication
Amsterdam School of Communications Research ASCoR, The University of Amsterdam (2009)
http://www.cyberpsychology.eu/view.php?cisloclanku=2009111601&article=3
The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: In the Wake of Klein
Mary Jacobus (Dec 2005)
[2] An Experimental Test of Processes Underlying Self-Disclosure in Computer-Mediated Communication by the University of Amsterdam.
This essay was written for my university course and is protected by copyright, do not copy or replicate any part of this text without my express permission unless you mean to copy one of the works i cited, then by all means knock yourself out.
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