Every one has a story, the story of himself, that he continues to revise and tell, pretending there’s only one story.
In modern times it has felt new to think that we might have not just one, but two or more, probably inconsistent narratives about ourselves running simultaneously in the same life. No, not dissociative identity disorder (formerly known as multiple personality disorder); rather, a looser, more conscious assortment of ways of being. You know, the way you are with your mother as against the way you are with your hooker. Those two selves know each other, they just don’t play well together.
Some say we need to have multiple narratives because of the complexity of modern life; we need to have flexible, mobile concepts of ourselves in order to respond to social circumstances, to both give and get something new and assimilable in each situation. Just look around you; shape-shifting is the new black.
Joe and I were talking last night about memory and change. In the old days, right up to, say, 20 years ago, the deepest story-telling was done in a chair or on a couch in the quiet of a consulting room. It might also have been composed at a typewriter, easel, or piano, etc., but the point is that it was the lone wolf who went to the effort, the individual who had enough patience and courage to tangle with a jumbled internal state, day in and day out and despite the loneliness and confusion, to bring the narrative along, reckon with inconsistencies and then to come to some sense of … arrival.
What we were doing alone then or with a helpful listener was the mediation among many voices inside ourselves, the remnants of incomplete conversations with loved ones or encounters with passing figures who stood out against the blur of events. Those memories somehow crystallized our internal struggles toward a coherent self and stuck with us.
We may not be quite conscious of the conclusion we’re drawing from a memory or how we’re using it but most of us replay those squibs of mind and seek stories to tell them through. Maybe it’s just to tidy up inside so the rest of our thinking is uninterrupted.
The processes of deep psychology – a Jungian or Freudian analysis, for example – were for knitting those pieces together, first, as we say in the mind biz, by unpacking them for all the associated meanings, deconstructing the meanings (another post), and then reweaving them into a tale of our lives. More recently, analysts have acknowledged that that tale could turn out to be somewhat different depending on which analyst was conducting the treatment. But the underlying effort is the same (to be explored in another post).
Without some kind of psychological work, many of us find it difficult to silence certain voices. Instead, we track the sound of those voices, trying to win arguments or at least to agree. At the psychotic worst, we hear an unintelligible cacophony or one or more voices that may overwhelm.
As a culture, we’ve seen doing the psychological work as a heroic journey taken alone or with a guide. We come out at the top of the mountain or back at the gate of our Smial in the Shire with a story to tell, or maybe just the koanic answer to a question that has lost its urgency and relevance. We’ve reorganized our experience into a manageable package and now we’re off to the next, more modest task.
We’ve expected to do the hard work as a personal project. We’ve valorized or demeaned the project, alienated the doers, or told heroic legends about them, but anyone emerging from this internal maelstrom with anything close to a coherent, vivid, and emotionally persuasive account is considered a victor, a dragon-slayer. It’s because we’ve all got dragons, beasts that won’t stay in the cages to which we repeatedly remand them and it’s just too distracting and frightening and messy to let them run loose around the house.
My colleagues and I sat in clinical meetings years ago, talking about the widely rumored death of psychoanalysis, a conversation we dared not have too often. We would ask ourselves what had changed, what was still changing. The question was, “Why do so few people these days feel the urgency, why are most no longer willing to make the sacrifices to take on this personal work?” or, more simply, “Where the hell did most of our patients go?”
There are political and philosophical factors intrinsic to psychoanalysis that account for some of these changes. And I do believe that one factor contributing to the loss of those patients is the evolution of the practice of psychoanalysis itself. Our own growing skill has been doing us out of our jobs as analysts. But those are subjects for other posts.
My question here relates to more extrinsic factors. What if it’s not just too little money or time that keeps people away? Not just the attraction of pills? Or even the medical or genetic explanations for why people suffer? What if the way we think of our Selves and the way our Selves think has changed? What if some kind of Shared Mind, Shared Self processes are evolving?
To Be Continued.
Meanwhile, thoughts or questions on this? Please, do share them here.
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