Power Fictions Pt. 3: The Self

The Self is the most personal, profound, and complex Power Fiction there is. I’m not even totally sure how to start talking about it. The self is maybe like a bridge that you spend your whole life building over this vast, cloudy chasm. And your bridge twists and turns and changes and falls apart. You build it and rebuild it. And you don’t really know where it’s supposed to go. You’re trying to build a bridge to somewhere that connects you to someone or something, a bridge that matters. You just don’t know where it’s going and whether or not you’ll ever get there. Are you trying to connect to God, to other people, to the universe?

When you’re a newborn, you experience life as little explosions of random thoughts, feelings, pains, anxieties, memories, and sensations. And this is life. French Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would say it is the “Real” – this sort of unspeakable beingness hidden at the very center or in the deepest part of you. But then…Lacan says we recognize ourselves in the mirror for the first time (at like 9 months or so), and that’s when things start to change. We see that we actually aren’t just fragmented bursts of awareness; we are a complete, whole object that other people can see. We are not just this shimmering, bubbling, subjective brew. According to Lacan, that is the moment when you first start to construct your Self. You build the Self, because even though you experience life in fragments, the mirror convinces you that you’re a complete thing. So you take it upon yourself to create the story of a whole self, a sort of tapestry that weaves all the shards and swatches of reality into one complete product that you can show to the world.

So that’s the self. It’s like a lifelong craft project or a fictional story that you constantly tell yourself and the world around you. The Self is sort of a self-created projection of who you think you are. Lacan (I think this is right…he’s pretty hard to interpret) calls this the “Imaginary.”

Now, the unconscious then (I think), is whatever is left in that bubbling, subjective brew that the created Self can’t account for or doesn’t weave into your tapestry. It’s the cloudy chasm that you’re trying to build your bridge across. Maybe I used a few too many metaphors. But we always have this feeling like we’re lacking something, like we need something else in order to become whole and complete, because no matter how elaborately and thoroughly we build our bridge or weave our tapestry, there is no way for us to work the entire universe of our being into the creation of our Self. And so we are left with drives and desires, addictions and ambitions. And we are never satisfied, because we can never make ourselves feel whole.

Anyway, once you create a sense of yourself as a whole being, you start to work out how you fit into the world around you. Lacan calls this the “Symbolic.” You use language, reason, logic, emotion, ethics, values, etc to create a framework or lens through which to see and understand the world. It’s how you determine right and wrong, good and bad. The Symbolic works to further underscore the lack you experience in your Self, because the “Real” is not structured like a language at all. It does not operate symbolically and cannot be understood using a symbolic, syntactical, or linguistic model. It cannot be mapped in the same way that the external world can be mapped. It is a totally separate world. So your attempt to find your way in the external world, makes your inner life feel even more fragmented and unfulfilled.

And then there’s the Jungian idea of the unconscious, authored by Swiss Analytic Psychologist, Carl Jung. He adds another element to the bubbling, subjective brew --to the cloudy chasm, which he calls the “Collective Unconscious.” This is sort of like – as you’re building your bridge of Self across the cloudy chasm of your mind, you come across these ancient ruins just hanging there in the clouds. These ruins are maybe fragments of someone else’s bridge from long ago or they were placed there by God. You don’t know. It’s a mystery. But you can build these ancient ruins into your bridge. You can learn from the craftsmanship of these ruins, and they can change the future designs of your bridge. Oooooh. This metaphor’s wearing itself out.

The Collective Unconscious is full of archetypes or ancient patterns, images, and myths: the shadow, the persona, the hero, the trickster, the flood, the mother, the father, etc... I don’t know. It’s a little difficult to really pin down what these archetypes are exactly. And they manifest so differently for each person. But what is clear is that they can make their way into your conscious mind, and they create binaries of order and chaos, light and shadow, masculine and feminine, etc. If you can strike a balance between these binaries in your life, you can create a stable Self. If not, then you will continue to experience the same lack of Lacan’s model. For Lacan, there is no escaping the lack. You have to just learn to live within it.

Ok. Then there’s the Piagetian model, originated by Swiss thinker, Jean Sebastian Piaget. Piaget was a Development Psychologist, so he wasn’t really concerned with the unconscious in the same way that Lacan and Jung were. But he was concerned about the construction and development of the Self, and he also accounted for the lack that Lacan and Jung explained in their models. He called the lack, “disequilibrium.” For Piaget, the lack isn’t caused by a disconnect between the constructed Self and the subjective inner world, like it is for Jung and Lacan. Instead, disequilibrium is caused by a disconnect between the constructed self and the objective, external world. There are 2 ways to respond to this disequilibrium: 1) You can continue to use your same Self to interact with a changing world or 2) You can revise your sense of Self, create a new iteration of your Self in order to navigate the changing world.

For Piaget, you are always constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing your Self in order to create your best possible Self to face the external world at any given point and time. To return to the bridge analogy, you are continually building, detonating, and rebuilding your own bridge over the cloudy chasm. So your best Self is iterative, creative, adaptive, and nimble. It’s the mythic hero, constantly venturing out into the unknown, dying, and being reborn into a better, stronger version of you.

For Lacan, Jung, and Piaget, the human is a creator, the author of the Self. The Self is not something in your DNA. You’re not born with it. You don’t inherit it from your parents. You construct it for yourself. It’s a fictional story that you’re writing throughout your whole life, but you think it’s real. And it has real consequences on your life. It’s a Power Fiction. But there’s also something inside you that knows it’s a fiction, and that realization causes sadness, anxiety, restlessness, and despair.

Lastly, I want to introduce you to one other psychologist. He may have more clout than any of the others we’ve discussed so far. He was a Jewish thinker named Solomon Ben-David. He was king of Israel around 950 BC, and he wrote a book called “The Teacher” or “Ecclesiastes (in Latin).” The first line of the book is, “Meaningless, meaningless, says the Teacher. Everything is meaningless. Utterly meaningless!” The word translated as meaningless here is the ancient Hebrew word “hevel,” which means breath. But it’s not breath like in your lungs. It’s spent breath, like if it’s cold outside and you can see your exhaled breath dissolve and unravel into the air. That’s hevel (I don’t speak Hebrew. That’s just what I read). He goes on to say that labor is hevel, wisdom is hevel, pleasure is hevel, and everything under the sun is hevel. Everything that people typically build their Self around is nothing but spent breath. So it’s like he’s saying, the Self is meaningless. It’s a fiction. It only distracts you from the fact that life is meaningless – life is just a cloudy chasm swirling with wind…a bubbling, subjective brew.

Later in the book, he says, “What a heavy burden God has laid on humankind. I have seen all things that are done under the sun. All of them are hevel, a striving (or grasping) after the wind.” Ok. Now the word translated wind here is the ancient Hebrew word “Ruah,” which means wind or spirit – or the invisible force of the wind. But it is also the word to describe the breath that sustains you, like God breathing life into your lungs.

So these are the words Solomon uses to describe psychological states of humankind. Breath and Wind. I think that breath, which is often translated in this passage as “meaningless” is meant to describe the lack that is prevalent in Lacan, Jung, and Piaget’s models. A sense of wanting, a desire for more. But the interesting thing about Solomon’s model is that I believe the breath also refers to the Self. The Self is that lack. The act of creating the Self is the lack. The labor of creating the Self is nothing but wasted breath. It is meaningless. It is a grasping after the wind. And the Wind is sort of like Lacan’s “Real,” this whirling changeling that we could never possibly grasp completely. So the bridge analogy for Solomon’s model is: as you build your bridge across the windy, cloudy expanse, your bridge disappears into a vapor. All of your work goes up in smoke right before your eyes, and all you have is the one of chunk of rock under your feet. You are stranded on this floating rock as the wind flails and beats against you. And there is nothing as far as the eye can see. Meaningless.

So there it is. The fiction of the Self. Immensely powerful. Immensely confusing. And ultimately it leaves you completely unfulfilled. Haha. That’s fun!