The Person: A Conglomerate of Selves

I

 think even the concept of ‘person’ is so vague and ambiguous that it should be left alone, and a fresh start to the whole project is called for, say, starting with myself as including my body.  I see two different angles to approach the body-as-self from: 1) the body as I experience it, i.e., as body.  And when I think or feel anything as ‘I’, it is part of what I am which is thinking and feeling.  In my responses to the world, the sense of self is automatically implied.  We cannot react or respond to anything without the sense of self.  That is why, for instance, when someone passes a judgment at what I have said or done or written, it my self which reacts.  You cannot separate the self from the reaction or what is heard.  In the very hearing there is the self and its reaction as well projecting into future possibilities.  And 2), there is the body as a living thing, to be observed, dissected and so on.  The first of these can be termed subjective and the second, objective.

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Many Selves: It is, of course, tempting to think there is one unitary self around which all the contents of consciousness are more or less loosely organized.  But that doesn’t quite explain our behavior on different occasions.  Although the feeling of ‘I’ or myself seems to be present ubiquitously in all our conscious mental life, we not only shift from one point of view to another, depending on our current desire or fear or identification, but we are also detached from our past selves from time to time, not always consciously connecting one item or experience of consciousness with another.  To allude to our common divisions like our ‘office self’ from our ‘home self’, we also have loyalties divided between people, depending on to whom we currently feel we owe our allegiance to.  This division in our self-structure also explains how there is a gap between our resolutions and actions, but also the unawareness of some of our actions done quite automatically, without our knowing that we are even doing them or have done them. The only way all this multifarious self-structures can be explained is by assuming there are many selves, each of which is organized around a group of thoughts, experiences, desires, intensions, fears and so on, and connected with each other more or less loosely through our memory.

Roles and Role-Playing:  As civilization becomes more complex, there is a need for specialization.  It’s the specialization that assigns a role for individuals.  A person while at home is a parent, a husband, a son, a wife or a daughter, and while at work, he or she is an office-worker, a business man or woman, a doctor, an engineer, and so forth.  And each of these roles specifies different behaviors appropriate to the role.  Our thinking process is dictated more or less by the role.  And each role we assume is our self for the moment.

When, for some reason or other, I find myself out of one of these roles which I consider as ‘essential’ to myself, say because I have retired from my job, or am divorced or what not, I feel as if I am lost.  Just like when my basic beliefs are questioned by another, I feel a loss of myself, or feel that I am groundless, at least for the moment, and quickly try to fortify my beliefs if possible, or substitute them with others.  The same goes with loss of a role: I find a hobby, volunteer work, another partner, and so forth, and then I am identified with them.

Yet, I feel all these selves are in some sense or other are myself, or part of myself, at any rate.  To be sure, there is a feeling of ‘I’ attached to not only each of these selves, but indeed, to each element of these selves, inasmuch as we are conscious of them.  And each of these selves operates as though they are an independent person

Although these personalities, each having its own traits or character, character being a set of traits, consistent and constant within that self, is more less connected with the other persons in us.  And each can look at the others from its own point of view.  When we look at an issue from the perspective of different selves, as the points of view being different, the responses may conflict.  We may thus have a dilemma to resolve.  In cases of intense dilemmas or conflicts, we may become wavering, ambivalent or totally inconsistent in our responses and behavior.  Then the personalities or selves may eventually end up in being dissociated with each other.  The inconsistencies may indeed be a consequence of the temporary forgetfulness stemming from the temporary dissociation.  When such inconsistencies are point out to us, we tend to brush away those remarks, justify our behavior, feel guilty or respond in others ways.

When the dissociation between the selves is complete, i.e. when there is no linkage between them through memory, we have the abnormal case of dissociated or multiple personality.

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In further and further reflections I find myself as a person with a past, a present and a future.  All my many selves may be more or less organized through my life ambitions, goals or desires; the more capable I am of reflection, the higher the integration.  I now have a destiny to fulfill and I spend my lifetime achieving my goals, overcoming the many obstacles that may present themselves on my way.  This life also implies worrying about my future, my relationships with other people, my likes and dislikes of them, my loves and failures, as well as my fear of death, as the final end of my life. 

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The problem of the illusion of the self is that when I look into myself, I am trying to catch myself as an object, which I can never find.  But that doesn’t gainsay the importance of all the integration that goes on within my psyche which lends itself to the ‘I’ notion, i.e. a notion about myself as a unitary person.