What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society

by Paul Verhaeghe

  To put it another way: we don’t automatically assimilate words and ideas. For that to happen a certain relationship is needed, which comes down to a mixture of love and hate. Freud shows how those two are intertwined: we want to merge with the person we love (‘I could eat you up!’), but we’re also sometimes fed up with them. At such times we not only refuse to take the other’s lead, but we actively reject them (‘You make me sick!’).

  These two fundamental tendencies would seem to be typical of every living being: we want to be part of the greater whole, and at the same time we long for independence. As far back as the fifth century BC, the Greek philosopher Empedocles wrote of two elemental powers that held universal sway: Philia, Love, and Neikos, Strife. Freud saw these as two primal urges: the life instinct, Eros, which seeks to dissolve in love, and the death drive, Thanatos, which aggressively seeks separation. Sameness and difference, in other words.

  What about me?

  The latter drive, the urge for autonomy, is nowadays regarded as a desirable, even necessary characteristic. Dependence is spineless; you must make your mark, stand up for yourself, do your own thing. Whenever I lecture on identity and mirroring, my listeners invariably protest. I have a self, don’t I? I’m different from my brother, even though we had the same upbringing. I’m not at all like my colleague, yet we grew up in the same culture. How do you explain that? And what about heredity? What about genes? Why don’t you talk about that? Surely our brains determine who we are?

  Leaving aside for a moment the inherent contradiction in these two arguments (‘I am original and make my own choices’ versus ‘I am the product of my brain and genes’), I shall first examine the current conviction that genes and the brain determine practically everything about us, including who we are. There can be no doubt that the human brain is the most typical feature of Homo sapiens. One of its main characteristics is neuroplasticity — that is, the ability to alter in response to certain environmental factors. This trait has greatly contributed to humanity’s success as a species: put us in just about any environment, and our ability to adapt will enable us to survive. Studies show that the brain is far from ‘finished’ at birth; it still needs to develop in many ways, with environmental factors playing a decisive role in this process.

  If we apply this to psychological identity, it seems logical that the brain structures which are largely in place at birth (the hardware) determine the process whereby our identity (the software) is built up. Without mirror neurons, identification can’t take place, but what is mirrored depends on our environment. Moreover, that environment has a very demonstrable effect on the physical development of the brain, which goes on for years after birth. Your brain is important for your identity, but its content is provided by the outside world.

  The only correct scientific conclusion is that we are the product of constant interaction between our brains — or, more broadly, our starter kit of genes, neurons, and hormones — and our environment. And, right from birth, it’s very hard to distinguish the contribution made by nature from that of nurture. Even brain structures can be modified by external factors. In the final analysis, claims such as ‘we are our brains’ mean the same thing as ‘we are the product of interaction between body and environment’, but that’s somewhat too nuanced a concept for this day and age.

  In a previous book, I discussed the current tendency to ascribe everything to physiological causes, with the emphasis on genes and the brain. It offers a handy excuse in the event that we go off the rails — it succeeds the ‘unhappy childhood’ argument as a way of excusing deviant behaviour. Such excuses are indeed all too easily made, but this should not prevent us from posing a different question: why is it that now, apparently more than ever, we so very much want to be absolved of blame? In other words, why, as soon as something goes wrong, do we somehow feel accused? I shall come back to this later, when I discuss the modern myth of the perfectible individual, with the crushing responsibility that this implies.

  So ‘we are our brains’ doesn’t entirely exclude external influence, but what about our genes? Our environment can’t change them, except on an evolutionary timescale, which takes centuries at the very least. Here, too, the scientific picture is much more nuanced than people tend to think. External factors can, for instance, affect gene expression — a field known as epigenetics. Moreover, the link between genes and behaviour is extremely complex, though you’d never guess this from the newspapers. Hardly a day goes by without a jubilant announcement suggesting a direct connection between genes and traits or conditions (‘Gene for autism finally discovered!’). One gene gives you brown eyes; another, blonde hair; and yet another, schizophrenia — they are a hand of cards that determine your luck. In reality, things are somewhat less clear-cut. And when it comes to complex phenomena, a more-or-less direct causality — in, say, the case of eye colour — is completely lacking.

  Take that most studied of psychiatric disorders, schizophrenia. Current thinking is that it has a hereditary component involving a combination of at least ten genes. The presence of that combination increases the risk of this severe psychiatric disorder by 15–20 per cent; the rest is down to external factors, one of the most important of which is being born in and growing up in a big city.

  Applying this to our identity, I believe that genes can be seen as the hardware that determines and limits our software; the specific content of that software is another issue. As far as identity is concerned, the most important factor in the genetic hardware is, without doubt, language, which typifies human beings. We know that the ability to acquire language is innate, but interaction and imitation are crucial: children who grow up in isolation do not learn to speak. The language a child learns depends entirely on its environment. Moreover, the specific nature of that language (each having untranslatable concepts, from Weltanschauung to joie de vivre) and the way that language is used in the family in which a child grows up will strongly colour its thinking, including the way the child thinks about itself. Take the fact that various non-Western languages have no equivalent for the word ‘individual’ or ‘personality’: this ensures a completely different context when growing up and acquiring an identity.

  Brain and genes provide the hardware and thus set the limits within which the software is written, software which in turn has the power to influence and even modify that hardware in certain respects. Is there then nothing that is completely unique? Is a baby indeed a blank page, a tabula rasa that can be entirely moulded by its environment? Every parent knows this isn’t true. Anyone with experience of newborn babies knows that each child has something unique about it as soon as it is born. That ‘something’ is hard to define: an alert look, a sustained attentiveness, or a readiness to interact. It has much more to do with certain traits (introverted or extroverted) and tendencies (quick or slow, persevering or easily deterred) than with content. The mirroring that follows from parents (‘You’re so pigheaded, you’ll come to a sticky end!’ or ‘She’s a strong character just like my grandmother, she’ll go a long way!’) reinforces these tendencies, as do the stories that keep being repeated (‘Right after she was born, she looked at us and then round the whole room. She’s been curious about the world from day one!’). We can’t pin down those unique traits, though I don’t doubt their existence. At the same time, I’m convinced that they are moulded by the environmental response to them.

  This brings me to the individual aspect of our identity. We are indeed unique, a one-off combination of everything that has been passed on to us by our parents and our environment. And that varies considerably. Parents respond differently to different children for a whole host of reasons: a first child isn’t treated the same way as the baby of the family; parents who are busy making a career have less attention to spare; marital breakdown can skew family dynamics. Growing up in the same household doesn’t mean that children are all mirrored in the same way. On top of that, there’s the painful fact that not all children are equally loved by their parents —
something that a child is all too keenly aware of — and that, too, shapes the individual nature of each identity. Finally, there is the child’s own uniqueness: besides those indefinable inherent characteristics it starts off with, each child makes its own choices in the interplay between identification and separation, choices that have a knock-on effect on subsequent choices, and so on and so on.

  We are all unique because we have been exposed to different mirrorings and have made our own choices. And yet to a degree we are all identical, because the mirrorings of particular groups and particular cultures are to a great extent shared.

  Body versus group

  If, during a job or performance interview, we are asked to describe our identity (‘List your five best character traits’), our answer (‘Resilient, flexible, broad-minded, team player, good self-awareness’) will very much reflect the dominant expectations at a given time. A more honest answer would probably combine personality traits with social data (such as family, village, country, professional group, sport, and political affiliation). Tellingly, the former always have to do with the body, with emotions and instincts.

  Back in the first century, Galen, the most famous physician of antiquity, concluded that temperament and health were influenced by an excess or deficiency of bodily fluids. His theories about the four different ‘humours’ or temperaments are still reflected in our language, and thus in our thinking: choleric (too much yellow bile) stands for hot-tempered and irritable; sanguine (too much blood) for fiery and energetic; phlegmatic (too much phlegm) for calm and unemotional; and melancholic (too much black bile) for sombre and pessimistic. Temperament is viewed in terms of characteristics, which tend to describe the way in which people react to others (such as obstinate, dutiful, accommodating, rebellious, exploitative).

  When all is said and done, we are divided between our body and that of the other. Our body generates impulses relating to pleasure and pain, but it is others who teach us how to deal with them — partly because they are the focus of very many of those impulses (such as sex and aggression). This starts when we are cared for during infancy, with our mother, or more generally, our parents, as the first speaking and correcting mirror. The identity of a newborn baby is bound up with the fantasies and fears of its mother, provoking in her a constant flow of identity-conferring messages, even before her child is born. Compare the two following reactions. A pregnant woman who often feels her boy kicking inside her can either think, ‘Seems like a lively little chap, that’s good!’ or ‘He never lets up — he must already have ADHD! What on Earth will he be like when he’s older?’ As soon as the baby is born, his behaviour will undoubtedly have similar labels slapped on it, shaping his identity and self-image.

  Messages of this kind don’t just spring from nowhere. The expectations that parents have about their children are also obtained from mirrors: those of their family and the culture in which they live. In the first instance, this is the family narrative, which often takes on mythical proportions — Freud speaks in this context of a ‘family novel’. Most of us grow up with stories about grandparents or even great-grandparents, whose successes and failures are frequently linked to family secrets that can only be spoken about in whispers. In this way we not only learn our origins, but also hear about the hopes for our own future — even the tasks we are expected to fulfil — and we are given a place in the line of generations whose story we will later pass on to our own children. Children have an appetite for such stories, and from an early age are fascinated by the links between generations (‘Yes, your granny’s my mummy; I’ve got a mummy too, you know! And Uncle Mark is my brother, just like Philip’s your brother’) — connections that they are very keen to comprehend. When parents or grandparents get out the family album and start to tell stories, children are riveted. (‘Tell me again about when Grandpa was a soldier.’) And this fascination isn’t confined to children, as the popularity of genealogical research shows. We might just as well call it ‘identity research’.

  Family stories are embedded in a wider culture and history that shape our identity yet further, in terms of both form and content. And form, here, has to do with the body. Three generations ago, a love of sport meant watching bicycle races or football matches, pint in hand and cigar in mouth. (It was seen as a largely male hobby.) These days, we all go to the gym, and men are expected to preserve a youthful physique, while women are supposed to look anorexic, but with breasts. A government job used to be highly prized; these days, it’s looked down upon, but one day it will no doubt become attractive again. Our appearance, self-perception, and social mores are entirely determined by the messages we receive.

  The stories and ideas that are passed down to us by our families, the social class to which we belong, the culture of which we are a part — all these things combine to form a symbolic order, the Great Narrative shared by a larger group, resulting in a more-or-less common identity. More or less, because as soon as you enlarge or reduce the size of the group (family, village, province, nation) identity shifts. It is always underpinned by a ‘true’ story, whose origins are vague and mythical. Dutch identity, for instance, is traced back to the tribe of Batavians who pluckily resisted the Roman invaders, while the roots of Flemish identity are associated with the civic guilds that defeated the French nobles in 1302. The lack of historical evidence for these stories, which are largely romantic fiction, does little to undermine their strength. Quite the reverse, in fact. They are just that: stories that colour our identity.

  The importance of these shared stories is great, because it is through them that we obtain answers to existential questions. What is a ‘real’ man or a ‘real’ woman? What should their relationship be? What is the place and significance of career and parenthood, and does that differ for men and women? What should our attitude to authority be? How do we deal with physicality, sex, illness, and death? In our search for answers — which are of course never definitive — we have recourse to the symbolic order, what I call the ‘narrative whole’. This encompasses religion, art, and science, each of which informs those answers in its own way — ways that are often mutually contradictory.

  The fact that there are many answers, often very different in nature, means that different identities are possible. Ideas about what manhood or womanhood entails vary greatly, depending on whether you grow up in Amsterdam, Mumbai, or Tokyo. But even youngsters who come from the same city will receive quite different answers, depending on the neighbourhood and social class in which they are raised, and therefore develop different identities. The fact that there are different narratives, producing different answers, introduces a certain element of individual choice. And the richer the culture, the more answers — and thus identities — people can choose from.

  Self-confidence, self-respect, self-hatred

  The way in which we acquire our identity (identifying with and distancing ourselves from the other) explains certain experiences that initially seem curious. Take that unsettling feeling which we sometimes have of suddenly wondering, Is that really ‘me’? Am I ‘real’? Do I match with ‘myself’? Those moments of self-alienation betray a deep realisation that our self is indeed of external origin. Arthur Rimbaud expressed this in a line of verse: Je est un autre, which literally means ‘I is another’. There are also times when we feel very torn and inconsistent: we think this, but also that, and we are troubled by the way our actions can seem at odds with our picture of ourselves. Taking over identity-conferring messages from different others invariably creates a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces don’t quite match up. That’s why we are perfectly capable of having a dialogue with ‘ourselves’. I can be angry, pleased, or disappointed with ‘myself’, because the ‘I’ that is judging ‘me’ is based on a different identification from the ‘me’ that is being judged.

  Anger or satisfaction with ‘ourself’ can become lasting, leading to self-hatred or self-love, low or high self-esteem and self-respect, and so on. The fact that all these words incorporate the word ‘self�
�� supposedly indicates that the self comprises certain essential, innate characteristics. ‘That man has high self-regard; he’s very sure of himself’, we say, or, ‘His wife has low self-esteem; that’s always been her problem.’ We forget that such characteristics are determined by the way others observe us and interpret our behaviour — they determine the way in which we think about ourselves. Characteristics such as self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-respect are better understood in their original context of ‘other-confidence’, ‘other-esteem’, and ‘other-respect’. That is to say, the extent to which others trusted, esteemed, and respected you as a child is reflected in your self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-respect as an adult. And this in turn determines the way in which you relate to others. Depending on what you were told when you were assembling your identity, you are either certain of yourself, confident in your dealings with others, and sure of your own superiority; or, conversely, you are timid, ashamed of yourself, and shrink from interaction with others, convinced that they think you worthless. To use psychiatric jargon, people in the latter category suffer from pronounced social anxiety.

  In social relationships, we assign higher status to certain others, notably authority figures and people of the opposite sex. The latter even shape the way we develop our gender identity. My masculinity is determined by how I have learned to perceive femininity. If I see women as the source of all evil, bent on tempting me to sin, I will become a fearful, severe man who projects the battle to overcome his own lust on womankind. If I perceive women as soft and caring but dominant beings, I will become the man-son forever striving to escape their clutches in a bid for autonomy. And so on. This ‘and so on’ demonstrates the doomed nature of efforts to define the essence of ‘man’ and ‘woman’. They mainly serve to preserve a certain social order and are no more than a collection of prejudices. Women are supposedly stupid and weak, men are intelligent and strong, so women don’t need to go to university and certainly aren’t capable of holding positions of authority — it isn’t so long since this definition of womanhood and manhood was generally held to be valid.