WHERE IS MY AUTHENTICITY GONE? Pt. 2

It’s the environment that really does the switching, not us. And it’s mostly unconscious.

It was in the 1920s that Carl Rogers, after spending five months in China as a theology student and witnessing the dreadful child labour conditions of the time, had his first major paradigm shift. Frustrated by his faith’s inability to explain and deal with what he had witnessed in China,  he had walked away from his theology education and straight into the department of psychology. A decade later, while he was working in an institution for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, he came to an important conclusion, one that would begin to lay down his psychoanalytic philosophy. Children, was the idea, rather than being considered sick, dirty, and sinful by nature, should be regarded with dignity, and an unconditional view of them as positive and good natured: “the base of his animal nature is basically socialised, forward moving, rational and realistic”, and therefore, in order to be happy, they needed to be set free of society’s disdain, and perceived with “unconditional positive regard”.

Some thirty years later, extending his core belief to the adult population, Rogers created ‘encounter groups’. These therapeutic spaces were intended for adults he now called clients, and not anymore, patients. Here, freed of the usual expectations of therapists and permitted to interact in an atmosphere of trust and daring “radical authenticity”, clients would borrow through each other’s perfect core, and achieve breakthrough and transformation.

It was the famous decade of the 1960s, the same decade when four African-American college students had made history just by sitting down at a whites-only lunch counter of a Woolworth's shop in North Carolina, and around this same time, the author, and Human Potential Movement’s pioneer Aldous Huxley, had given a lecture at the University of California that would continue to propel this positive view of human nature: “In front of us”, Huxley argued, “are the incredible and rapid changes that have taken place over the recent decades, and a demonstration of the awesome potential that lies dormant in every human”. There, he was to pronounce an utterly false assertion that still echoes uncritically among us: “neurologists have shown us that no human being has ever made use of as much as 10 per cent of all the neurons in his brain”, so if we set about it the right way, we might be able to produce extraordinary things, he added.

By this time American culture was bubbling with optimism, Carl Rogers and Huxley were converging towards a Nietzchean superman view of human nature, while beyond the ivory towers of academia, beliefs spiraled in the direction of a perfect Self, a long awaited secular soul freed of its Judeo-Christian sins. Fritz, one of the most famous residents of the spiritual center Esalen institute, operated a Gestalt encounter group, and warned his students daily that: “any escape into the future or to the past is to be examined as a likely resistance against the ongoing encounter with one’s true self”. The godlike authentic self whose thoughts and feelings should never be repressed, could, in Fritz’s view, be brought into the light of the day. Attendees would be expected to ‘own’ the truth of their self-deception in front of everyone, and take radical risks and responsibility for it. Fritz, it seems, was true to his word, his erection arriving before him as he strode naked around the hot spring baths of the institute.

These ideas, which seemed so radical in the 1960s, have become completely normalized in our Western individualistic societies today, but as with all good narrative twists, the problem with them, explains author Will Stor, is that their premises were false. What Carl Rogers, Huxley and the Esalen’s explorers of the soul couldn’t contemplate 60 years ago, was that there is no authentic self at all within us, let alone a godlike one. Instead, science holds today, we contain a collection of barking antagonised selves that become dominant in different environments, and even, different states.

Although we obviously have some awareness of our shifting behaviours, we’re usually only conscious of them when another person points them out, or when the shifts are so flagrant they can’t be ignored.

In its simplest definition, a Self is a way we make sense of the things that happen to us, an organising principle that gives meaning to our stories. But it is not a soul, a magical centre, a special core in which our moment-by-moment life is expressed in a God like manner. This means that who we are and how we behave, has much less to do with our inner Godly nature, than it has to do with the shifts that occur depending on where we are, who we are with, and even the chemical hormonal balances that navigate within us.

 In an unforgettably dark experiment on twenty-five male undergraduates, the psychologists Dan Ariely and George Loewenstein set out to demonstrate this. Wondering if people’s moral standards were really set in stone, they designed an experiment to see if morally dubious behaviors became more acceptable under sexual arousal. In one condition of the experiment they asked their participants to answer straightforwardly whether they would be willing to have sex with an animal, slip a drug in a woman’s drink to increase the chances of having sex with her, experience attraction for a twelve-year-old, and get spanked by an attractive woman, and in another condition they asked the very same questions while the undergraduates masturbated and reached peak sub-orgasmic arousal. The results were difficult to digest. When aroused, their predictions to engage in immoral or unusual practices, were twice as high.Complex thought patterns like those related to our moral standards are therefore more vulnerable to internal and external pressures than we often suppose. And all of this, needless to say, happens below our conscious awareness while our internal sense of Self reassures us that we are freely choosing to do so. We are not! And the people we are, can be even strangers to one another,  one of them arguing for sex with a sheep, whilst the other screams death for even thinking about it.  

If there is any trace of an authentic self therefore, that self is highly reactive to its social milieux and other temporary factors like state, developing into a self for work, one for home, one for expensive restaurants, one for the sexy electrician that comes at midday, one for Monday, another for Friday, and of course, without exception, one for Twitter, Instagram, and all the Selfies we take. The principal guiding principle? Mostly people around us! Those who create a kind of psychic mould that incites us to read from others, just like we did when we were babies, the cues and judgments for how who we should be.

Authenticity of character is therefore whoever you are, but in the context of who you are expected to be. Our central ideas of ourselves are not only flexible and fluctuating, but highly structured by the expectations of those around us. Having said this, is there a way to be free of the molds and stereotypes we have been educated into? In Part 3 of this article I explore how we might provoke an illuminating shift in our perceptions of our selves, and how this might even become therapeutic.

Wishing you Well,

Your Shrink in Bansko