Here is my model for my inner self.
When I turn inward, I see two individuals. Call them whatever: left and right, doer and dreamer, Frankie and Johnnie…it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that they are very different. They see themselves differently relative to the rest of the world. They want different things, and they go after them in different ways.
Frankie is rigid and disciplined. He’s always masculine, and has a binary sense of the world: done/not done, this/that, right/wrong, strong/ weak, win/lose. He is a builder…of structures, of devices, of the perfect paragraph. He is a hater of routine and repetition. And he is predictable: fixed, purposeful, protective of our image, a seeker of recognition who sometimes sees embarrassment as humiliation.
In the dorm room of my soul, Frankie shares space with the changeling, who is anything but absolute. “He” one day and “she” the next, young and old, weak and strong, needy and nurturing, child and adult. He/she is the artist and designer, the visionary, the cowboy drifter, the lover of words and imagery more than of form. Descriptions are pointless because the images are endless and malleable.
And then there is “Bob.” He drives the bus…the navigator, the mediator, the peacemaker, the disciplinarian. He is the “I” and the “me” of everyday speech. He gets groceries bought, bills paid, lawns mowed, and dinner on the table. He is the decision-maker, the arbiter, the mom and dad… because his two charges seem always to want different things and have different ideas of how to get them.
My preoccupation for the last 25 years has been to recognize these different selves, to value them, to help them value and support one another, to allow each to flourish and contribute. In the course of all this work what I’ve learned is that the free expression of all dimensions of my personality has calmed me. Inner conflict has dissipated because the various “parts” of me no longer feel suppressed. In a sense, each gives room to the others because each knows its turn will come. In that sense, they mutually recognize and support one another.
.
our model is a construct through which you have organized and interpreted the data supplied by introspection. You have chosen to embrace the age-old concept of personification to order the data, as if there were an executive Self monitoring the doings of two subordinate selves. That is a perfectly legitimate strategy for achieving self-knowledge. Socrates interrogated his fellow Athenians regarding definitions of character traits like courage, piety and virtue. Plato used the image of a charioteer driving horses; Freud used the tripartite structure of ego, super-ego and id; Jung used the concept of archetypes that pervade a collective unconscious; Yalom used anxieties regarding death, responsibility, isolation and meaning to access interiority; other personality theorists employ other conceptual means. All of these are modes of interpretation, the technical term for which is hermeneutics. Interpretation is a kind of settling for less where the sort of knowledge yielded by physics, chemistry and biology is not really possible. Asking which interpretive scheme is “true” is to misconceive the fluid nature of the data to be grasped and understood and therefore of the entire quest for self-knowledge; the choice of any particular scheme will determine the pattern of self-discovery. Existentialism emphasizes the role of choice in human life and the crucial element of personal responsibility in deciding to employ any given interpretive scheme that yields an interpreted result. There is no interpretation without presuppositions. There is for us no God-like perspective from which we can survey our interiority without employing some schematic to begin and carry through the work. This fact is a consequence of our radical finitude.
You say that, “The secret to contentment is the free expression of all dimensions of our personality. And the only way to achieve that is to get them to mutually recognize and support one another. . . The result will be cessation of inner conflict, the end of striving, and rest….” I must point out that your recipe for contentment flows from your chosen schematic and is therefore not “the secret” but merely one among many avenues to the goal of inner peace. My personal view is that “self-hood” of any sort involves the reification of behaviors — both inner and outer — and that a concentrated focus on the behaviors themselves, the raw data yielded by investigation, can withstand meticulous analysis by itself without invoking theoretical constructs until later, much later. Marshal the data of introspection, analyze it on its own terms insofar as that is possible and then invoke theory. Find out if that procedure eventuates in the “cessation of inner conflict, the end of striving, and rest….”
Thanks, Michael. This is why I asked for your thoughts. The breadth of your knowledge always keeps me from getting to full of myself. I’ll be in Texas this summer and we’ll talk about this.
I realize that my chosen construct is one among various others, and should have pointed that out. Same in the closing, that contentment for me is “xyz…” I will edit accordingly.
You realize that I mostly keep this site as a journal. That’s why I don’t pursue followers. It has proven useful to me as a way to articulate abstractions. The transformation of thoughts into a paragraph creates something solid to reflect on. This is an example.
It’s follows your point about considering behaviors and data first. The mechanistic model I’ve settled on is not a beginning but an endpoint after a couple decades of self observation and questions. I finally chose it (or maybe it chose me) because it has become a highly effective means of self dialogue.
The post ultimately was about contentment, a very difficult topic to both understand and address because it is so nebulous. I think of it as a state of mind,not an ephemeral emotion…synonymous with “happy” in that longer-term sense. But “happy” also has a more ephemeral, emotion-based meaning, so I avoid it.
Thinking about it as I write, I will just do a post on contentment later, rather than make this response any longer. We’ll talk more about this in summer. I’ll be passing through.