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The subjective experience of identity and its psychopathology
The Subjective Experience of Identity and its PsychopathologT By EDITtI r~VEIGERT,M.D. HE CONCEPT of identity appears in modern psychoanalytic literature (Erikson, 3 \Vheelis TM) as a descriptive term designating a subieetive experience that reflects the success of the "synthetic function of the ego," a psychodynamic term introduced by Nunberg. r The synthetic function integrates the dependencies of the ego on the instinctual impulses of the id, the exigencies of reality, and the demands of the superego, the internalized authority. Before the dawn of self-consciousness the synthetic function of tile ego works automatically, the infant fits into his world as the animal during his life span is directed by the instinctive reactions to his environment. But tile human child out of his original symbiosis, still embedded in the security of the family develops the freedom of consciousness. Consciousness is always selective, it is consciousness of something, intentionally directed towards an obiect of pleasure. But the pleasurable is not only the soothingly familiar that alleviates the tensions of need and induces sleep. As Jean Piaget TM and Ernest SchachteP (whose recent, excellent book helped me to organize my thoughts) have pointed out, consciousness is from the start also directed towards exciting new stimuli. The child is eager to discover the world and new ego functions. Consciousness mobilizes activity, it is open to the world and to the future. The child first discovers the continuity of the you, the trustworthiness of a mother who returns after each failure to gratify. The experience of continuity in the care of the you leads to the discovery of the I. The child speaks of himself in the first person usually in the third year, in some cases already in the second year. Before this time the child cannot well be called good or bad, his aggressive expansive action, biting, kicking, tearing, and screaming cannot yet have a destructive motivation as long as the wholeness of the you and the I are not yet discovered. The earliest subiective experience of identity is still rooted in the symbiotic union and the clfild's first outlook on the world is autocentric in this embeddedness, as Schachtel has put it? but tlle developing ego-functions, distance perceptions, skills of motility, verbal communication, and the beginnings of abstract thinking shift the emphasis from autocentricity to allocentricity. The child is eager to encounter the allon, the other, the new, the unfamiliar. The insecurity of identity "who am I, where are the boundaries of I and you?" marks tile overreaching demands of the Oedipus conflict with doubts in masculine and feminine identity reflected in castration anxieties and penis envy. Introiections and proiections keep the boundaries of identity fluid. The superego, according to Freud, the heir of the Oedipus conflict, combines two main trends: (1) archaic introjections, dictated by anxiety-arousing prohibitions and regressive clinging to the symbiotic union. Particularly in an anxious family atmosphere this superego trend may lead the child to shrink
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into a protective mimicry and may hamper his growth potential by rigidity. (2) In the atmosphere of trust the progressive trend of the ego-ideal or superego expands the child's horizon of consciousness by the encounter with new possibilities of identification which set limits in tune with his growing potentialities of ego master},. Immersed in the study of the manifold chains of causality which we trace back to the wellsprings of unconsciousness, we psychoanalysts sometimes lose sight of the wonder of consciousness. Daily man awakens from sleep, from the regressive diffusion of identity in his dreams, where he appears in various roles, in fragmented scenes of the past, the present and the future. Is it not a miracle that he awakens in one piece with the sense of continuity in his uniqueness, encountering the now and here as a wholeness, though his awakened sense perceptions give him only fragmentary surface aspects of the world into which he is thrown? The wholeness of his identity and the wholeness of his world belong together, they are not static, but in a flux of change. The achievement of a continuous identity open to the world and to the future results from a creative process on the level of preconsciousness where, according to Kubie, c the shuffling and sampling of perceptions and thoughts, memories of the past and imaginations of the future converge to a unity under the guidance of affects, which crystallize into values shared with others. When a person lives in harmony with himself and his world, his subjective sense of identity scarcely emerges from preconsciousness, but when he doubts his own value and the value of his world, a painfid self-consciousness arises. He follows his behavior and activities as if detached from himself with disapproval and apologies, which indicate the lost sense of wholeness. In the crisis of identity in adolescence (Erikson :~) the creative process of ego identity is put to a hard test when the young person leaves the embeddedness in his family, searching new pathways for his potentialities, new opportunities for work and pleasure in exacting competition, reconciling them with the need for a secondary embeddedness in the hierarchy of job positions, new allegiances and family ties. The enormous labor of integration that reconciles the introiects of the past with broadening present experience and imaginative anticipations of the future on the preconscious level is mostly taken for granted when it is successful. But an emotional crisis may indicate the failure of synthesis. A loss of identity with symptoms of depersonalization and derealization emerges painfully into consciousness. A few quotations from an interview with a young schizophrenic patient may illustrate the subiective experience of lost identity. A 25 year old student of chemistry, very well endowed and praised for scholastic performances, yet without self-confidence, stood in his childhood between a violent alcoholic father and a doting mother whom he had to protect against tile father's physical assaults. From early days, I assume, he had to repress the impulses of murderous rage. Near his 20th year he broke down on the shooting range in military training and this experience may have triggered off the danger of dercpression. He described the onset of his illness with his own
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words: "It was terrifically frightening. It was as if I was being abandoned, lost all friends and everything. It was as if everything was closing in all of a sudden and then I removed myself from it. I practically forced them to put me in the hospital, because I could not go lmme." What preoccupied him in this recorded interview was the sense of time. "I can't get time straigbtened out. It seems to me, there is no such thing as a yesterday or a tomorrow or a future. Time is like climbing upstairs, literally--and that you reach a certain point and then you fall down. It is all confused. One day I live one experience and then it seems that I go way back to an early point in my life. I suppose, physically I am here, but I don't lmve a feeling that this is today and that there will be a tomorrow. It is as though when I think of time that I revolve around. I am not moving forward, it seems. ~ There is a great discontinuity between my mind and my body. My body is some sort of thing, it has not any practical purpose. I can't get it into my head that there arc things and people. They appear like cardboard cutouts. I feel, they are going around in the same confusion I am in. I look at the patients as being little people and the attendants as being terrifically large in comparison to file patients. I did not even know that I was taller than nay mother until the other day, and yet actually I have always had the feeling that I was looking up at her. ~ I can tell you facts all day. You can ask me anything you want to know and I can tell you the right answer, but I can't feel it. When you ask me who am I and what significance have I, then I don't know, because I can't feel any sucb thing as being a person, a human being. Motions don't seem to have any significance. One object is farther away, I can tell that, than another. I can't seem to feel that it has any depth. There is nothing which I do that has any significance. I guess, I should not use the word I. There is no suda thing as a distinct person--I--as being one separate individual. When I go out with a group of men, then I do not exist. I am a part of them. Even now I see people and I think that makes me part of them, I listen to them, I become like that, too." W h a t in this e x c e r p t c h a r a c t e r i z e s t h e l u c i d d e s c r i p t i o n of lost i d e n t i t y is t h e loss of w h a t S c h a c h t e l calls " a c t i v i t y affect '''~ w h i c h f o l l o w e d a n unb e a r a b l e p a n i c - - " a n d t h e n I just r e m o v e d m y s e l f f r o m it." W i t h this r e m o v a l t h e p r e c o n s c i o u s l a b o r of i n t e g r a t i o n s e e m s to h a v e s t o p p e d , a m e a n i n g l e s s e x i s t e n c e is r a t t l i n g o n . T h e p a t i e n t feels t h a t his i n n e r g r o w i n g has c o m e to a stop, t h e r e is no f u t u r e , a s t r o n o m i c t i m e floats b y , t h e p a t i e n t c a n n o t find his p l a c e in s p a c e a n d time, s u b j e c t i v e e x p e r i e n c e of t i m e a n d s p a c e is u n s t r u c t u r e d . His w o r l d is a l t e r e d in t h e s a m e sense as his o w n p e r s o n a l i t y , p e o p l e a r e c a r d b o a r d c u t o u t s in confusion. S c h r e b e r ~ s p o k e of " f u r t i v e l y f a b r i c a t e d little m e n . " T h e r e a r e no b o u n d a r i e s b e t w e e n h i m a n d others, h e feels like a p a s s i v e victim. M o v e m e n t s a r e a u t o m a t i c , aimless, t h e p a t i e n t is d e p r i v e d of t h e e x p e r i e n c e of living his o w n life. Loss of i d e n t i t y a n d loss of reality, d e s c r i b e d b y s o m e s c h i z o p h r e n i c s as w o r l d c a t a s t r o p h e , b e l o n g together. H a r o l d Searles H in his e x c e l l e n t p a p e r on " A n x i e t y C o n c e r n i n g C h a n g e " has d e s c r i b e d t h e s l o w recovery, of tile sense of i d e n t i t y in s c h i z o p h r e n i c p a t i e n t s u n d e r p s y c h o a n a l y t i c t r e a t m e n t . T i l e e m o t i o n a l e x p e r i e n c e of m u t u a l i t y r e d i s c o v e r s t h e i n t e g r a t i n g p o w e r of t r u s t a n d t r a n s c e n d s t h e a n x i e t y a b o u t t h e u n p r e d i c t a b i l i t y of c h a n g e . P s y c h o a n a l y t i c t r e a t m e n t g r e w o u t of t h e c a t h a r t i c m e t h o d w i t h t h e a i m of s h a k i n g u p r e p r e s s e d e m o t i o n s a n d t h e r e w i t h i n i t i a t i n g r e i n t c g r a t i o n . F r e u d a m p l i f i e d this m e t h o d b y t h e e l u c i d a t i o n of r e s i s t a n c e a n d t r a n s f e r e n c e , b u t g e n u i n e e m o t i o n a l e x p e r i e n c e , t h e p r e c o n d i t i o n of t r u e insight, r e m a i n e d t h e c o r n e r s t o n e of t h e c u r a t i v e p r o -
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cess. The patient whom I quoted before complained that a loss of feeling accompanied his sense of lost identity, while his cognitive functions remained intact. I want to devote the second part of nay paper to the discussion of emotions in relation to the subjective experience of identity. Every strong emotional experience, particularly a sudden emotional upheaval due to an external event that breaks through the stimulus barrier or a sudden derepression threatens the individual with a loss of identity and a collapse of his reality structure. The emotional upheaval elicits dissociating anxieties, but also the spontaneous reconstructive labor of trust. We are paying more attention to the anxiety effect of emotions than to the reconstructive side of affect. In every day language we speak of emotions that sweep a person off his feet; he loses control; is beside himself or goes to pieces. Strong emotions have a pathological connotation. The heroes o f Homer raved and roared in tile grip of emotions. But in modern Western culture man tries to hide his emotions shamefacedly. He puts on a conventional front. But self-control , particularly when dictated by an unbending, archaic superego can become a compulsive habit, lead to self-deception and estrangement from the self under the pressure of emotions. Jean-Paul Sartre asserts that emotion is an attempt to transform the world by magic when it becomes too dilIicult to cope with in a rational way. s Similarly pessimistic is T. S. Elliot when he says:"Human kind cannot bear very much reality.'"-' In Freud's early theories 4a he gives a signal function to emotions that elicit the discharge cf tensions. The reconstruction in face of dissociating discharge is the outcome of a taming, controlling and restricting, countercathectic process imposed by the ego on the instinct-engendered affects that upset the homeostasis. Sullivan emphasized the regressive search for security that tames emotional beliavior. ~"- In Freud's latest instinct theory 4~ the tendency towards homeostasis and subjective security is attributed to the death instinct, but Eros is not seen by Freud onl)" as a disturbing, confusing force; it is also the integrative power of construction and reconstruction. Eros implies the strength of trust which gives the lead to the ego functions in the striving for what Hendrick calls the "instinct to master. ''z Let us look at some descriptive impressions of emotional behavior in relation to the experience of identity. ~* A sudden experience of danger has a startling effect. Fear shakes man lcose frcm the famil.:ar sense of identity and his habitual grasp of the reality scene. As long as the cause of fear can be faced, trust or what Schachtel calls the "activity affect":' mobilizes unusual physiological and psychological energies, respiration and circulation are accelerated, alertness quickens reactions, ingenious ideas of rescue crowd into consciousness and inspire rapid decisions that are pursued with clarity and concentration. In face of the unknown and unknowable the trusting attitude inspires awe which is different from passive, blind submission to fate. But when fear opens up into anxiety, when man passively succumbs to danger, when he in Bibring's 1 words "lets the ego die," he detaches himself from the realistic encounter with danger by repression or denial. He shuts his eyes to
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reality and leaves tlle field of vision to autocentrie or autoplastie imagination that protests and transforms magically the unbearable reality in the sense of illusional security, preoedipal dependency or embeddedness. The mobilized emotions are wasted in aimless agitation. Future loses its meaning when the now and here is no longer encountered. In a given danger situation there will always be a mixture of alloplastic fears and autoplastic anxieties depending on the gravity of danger and the stamina of ego strength. Hatred tlmt does not take the risk of encountering the adversary deteriorates into smoldering resentment. Rage repressed by anxiety leads to a shrinking of identity and falsification of reality. In autocentric imagination hostility grows into fantastic proportions. The typically angry young man may become addicted to the magic power of explosive rage reactions. He maintains a negative identity in continuous protest against his reality scene. This habit of hating engenders self-hatred that paralyzes the forces of active transformation. But tile enemy can be encountered, rage can be channelized into communication by words and actions appropriate to tlle now and here. The air can b e cleared of falsifying products of an autocentrie imagination. The adversaries can arrive at liberating decisions and a strengthening redefinition of their differences of identity. The emotional upheaval of grief a~ the loss of a beloved partner may deteriorate into passive resistance and wasteful protest reactions against fate in a depression. The imagination holds on to the status quo in autocentrie withdrawal. Addicted to the magic power of self-torment the ego shrinks into impoverishment, the world becomes bleak, time seems to slow down, future loses its meaning. But the encounter with bereavement also mobilizes an active emotional response. The labor of mourning gradually arrives at an 'acceptance of painful reality and creative transfiguration of identity. The bereaved person need not dismiss the beloved partner in bitterness or bury him in hateful identification. The departed can remain present to the mind. The awareness of his personality may even grow into a deeper understanding and inspire the growth potential in tlle bereaved person. The emotional experience of guilt or failure also mobilizes two trends of emotional response. A passive wallowing in guilt feelings holds on to the self-image of success, of righteousness by magic atonement gestures of selfjustification that distort identity and reality. On the other hand the experience of guilt or failure that can be faced squarely initiates the active labor of genuine regret which opens up sobering insight, acceptance of realistic limitations and reorganization of identity with new alternatives of development. Even a sudden joyful experience of success or triumph shakes the subjective sense of identity by its newness. The ego feels lifted to unknown heights. Unlimited horizons of hopeful possibilities arouse a kind of vertigo, when the ego passively yields to the accelerated pace of autocentric imagination. The ego is swept off its feet by a flight of ideas and a turmoil of overstJmulation. There is anxiety in this passive response to a joyful experience. The
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bright magic transformation of identity and reality may suddenly collapse, if there were not the growth potential represented in the spontaneous trusting labor of adaptation which patiently, step by step, restrtlctures the sense of identity and the image of reality on the basis of the new challenge. In tile same sense we might look at the passive intoxication and infatuation of a new love experience which can lead to a ruiaaway ego-inflation due to autocentrie imagination. A strawfire that is fed onesidely by narcissistic supplies burns out quickly. Anxieties smother tile potentialities of mutual erotic adaptation. On the other hand the creative labor of love in the spontaneous mutuality of allocentrie orientation gradually broadens the horizon and deepens the sense of identity in both partners. Every emotional upheaval elicits a mixture of active and passive responses. The passive response leads to a withdrawal from the challenge of reality into the realm of autocentric imagination, falsifying reality in the sense of magic transformation, most outspokenly in hallucinations and delusions, or falsifying identity by passive surrender or illusional ego inflation. But the active response remains in close contact with reality in the labor of mutual adaptation. These sketchy examples show the fluid boundaries between pathological and so-called normal emotional behavior. The time factor seems to be an important element. The young schizophrenic whom I quoted marveled about the discrepancy between subjective and objective time. Particularly in view of the sudden onslaught of an emotional crisis man needs a moratorium, as Erikson has put it. 3 He needs time for the labor of mourning, for the labor of remorse, for the rcadaptation of identity and reality, for the shift from autocentric to allocentrie imagination. One could speculate why the problem of identity concerns us so much in our time. It concerns not only the psychiatric patient who is particularly inflexible or helplessly volatile in the face of change--there is a general insecurity about identity in our time. Existentialist philosophers have pointed out the loss of authenticity of man thrown into a mass society. The German sociologist Max Scheler wrote: "We are in approximately ten thousand ),ears of history the first generation in which man has become completely and without residue problematic to himself, in not knowing an), more what he is, at the same time, however, knowing that lie does not know it. ''I~ It is possible that the pace of technical progress and the complexity of living has become too rapid for man's potentialities of emotional adaptation. There is not enough time for meditation and reoricntation. Psychoanalysis is timeless, it takes the patient partially out of the flux of time. It represents a therapy of working through conflicts particularly needed in our time. For the lonely, uprooted patient it oilers in the participant observer an opportunity to regain the allocentricity, the flexibility in the experience of identity, the openness to the world and the future in a constant flux of transfiguration. Ever), emotional crisis elicits a double movement in response to the challenge. The passive autocentric movement could be compared to a
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withdrawal into a circle, the center of which is the identity with the ego of the past. Autocentrie imagination dictated by anxieties holds on to the illusion of magic transformation within the unchanging circumference of a static reality horizon. The circular movement in this static arrangement must lead to stagnation, boredom, and ultimately to a loss of identity. The active allocentric reaction to emotional experience permits a change of the reality horizon similar to the movement of a double focused elliptical structure; the ego in one focus and the allon, the other, in the second focus are moved by the dynamic tension between closeness and distance, commitment and freedora. In psychoanalytic treatment the therapist enters into the neighbor focus, attracted and repelled by positive and negative transference. The other one, the therapist, is simultaneously a stimulus and a threat to the patient, he gradually dissolves the magic images of his autocentrically oriented transference. The analyst can appear as the personification of the powers of evil which the patient tries to exclude from his circular system, stretching the inner distance to the breaking point. He can become for the patient the dangerous seducer or the vindictive competitor, the punishing authority or the possessive mother. But when the patient focuses his attention long enough on the other one, the therapist, he discovers that there is no impulse either in his partner or in himself which is so completely destructive, no wish so onesidedly egocentric tha.t they could not be redeemed and enter into a broader ego integration by a deepening understanding. The acceptance of the self and the other opens the wider range of interpersonal relations. Every emotional crisis in the treatment shakes the patient's and frequently also the therapist's subjective experience of identity. There grows the awareness of the you and tire I; tire I can be discovered most saliently through the awareness of the you in a dynamic encounter. The I takes the risk of a transient loss of identity in every step that transcends its previous boundaries, but the endurance of the anxieties mobilized by the risk opens the potentialities of creative transfiguration. REFm~Er,'CES 1. Bibring, Edward: Das Problem der Deibid., Vol. XVIII (pp. 3-64). pression (The problem of depression). 5. Itendrick, Ives: Tile discussion of tile Psyche 6:82-101, 1952. "instinct to master." A letter to tile 2. Elliot, T. S., as quoted by Rt. Rev. editors. Psychoanalyt. Quart. 12:561Angus Dun: "'Caught in a Ilurricane," 565, 1943. Washington Post, Nov. 15, 1959 (pp. 6. Kubie, Lawrence: Neurotic Distortion E 1 and E v). of the Creative Process. Lawrence, 3. Erikson, Erik H.: The problem of ego University of Kansas Press, 1958. identity. J.Am.Psychoanalyt.A. 4:567. Nunberg, Hermann: The synthetic func121, 1956. tion of the ego. Internat.J.Psycho4. Freud, S.: The Case of Schrebcr (The Analysis. 12:123-140, 1931. Standard Edition) Vol. XII. London, 7a. Piaget, Jean: The Origins of Intellitlogarth, 1955 (pp. 3-82). gence in Children, New York, 1952. 4a.--: Three Essays on Sexuality, ibid., 8. Sartre, J. P.: Existential Psychoanalysis, Vol. VII (pp. 125-244). New York, 1933; L'hnagination, Paris, 4 b . - - : Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1948.
E9X P E P , I E N C E O F I D E N T I T Y
AND ITS PSYCI1OPATIIOLOGY
9. Sehaehtel, Ernest G.: Metamorphosis, passim. New York, Basic Books, 1959. 10. Schelcr, Max: l~hilosophische Weltanschammg. Miinehen, Bern, Lehnen Verlag, 1954, p. 62. 11. Searles, Harold: Anxiety concerning change. Paper given at the Winter Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, New York City, 1959.
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i o. Sullivan, Harry, S.: Conceptions oJ
Modern Psychiatry. (William Alanson White Memorial Lect,res). Psychiatry 3:vii, 1940; 8:147, 1945. 13. Wheelis, Allen: The Quest for Identity. New York, Norton, 1958. 14. Zutt, Jucrg: Vom aesthctischen im Unterschicd zum affektivcn Erlebnisbereich. V~'icn.Ztschr.Nervh. 10:163, 1955.
Edith Wcigert, M.D., Chairman and Director o[ thc Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, 1951-1959; Member, Psychoanalflic Training Committee of American Psychiatric Association and American Psychoanalylic Associalion; Faculty Member, The Washington School o[ Psychiatry, Washington, D. C.
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into a protective mimicry and may hamper his growth potential by rigidity. (2) In the atmosphere of trust the progressive trend of the ego-ideal or superego expands the child's horizon of consciousness by the encounter with new possibilities of identification which set limits in tune with his growing potentialities of ego master},. Immersed in the study of the manifold chains of causality which we trace back to the wellsprings of unconsciousness, we psychoanalysts sometimes lose sight of the wonder of consciousness. Daily man awakens from sleep, from the regressive diffusion of identity in his dreams, where he appears in various roles, in fragmented scenes of the past, the present and the future. Is it not a miracle that he awakens in one piece with the sense of continuity in his uniqueness, encountering the now and here as a wholeness, though his awakened sense perceptions give him only fragmentary surface aspects of the world into which he is thrown? The wholeness of his identity and the wholeness of his world belong together, they are not static, but in a flux of change. The achievement of a continuous identity open to the world and to the future results from a creative process on the level of preconsciousness where, according to Kubie, c the shuffling and sampling of perceptions and thoughts, memories of the past and imaginations of the future converge to a unity under the guidance of affects, which crystallize into values shared with others. When a person lives in harmony with himself and his world, his subjective sense of identity scarcely emerges from preconsciousness, but when he doubts his own value and the value of his world, a painfid self-consciousness arises. He follows his behavior and activities as if detached from himself with disapproval and apologies, which indicate the lost sense of wholeness. In the crisis of identity in adolescence (Erikson :~) the creative process of ego identity is put to a hard test when the young person leaves the embeddedness in his family, searching new pathways for his potentialities, new opportunities for work and pleasure in exacting competition, reconciling them with the need for a secondary embeddedness in the hierarchy of job positions, new allegiances and family ties. The enormous labor of integration that reconciles the introiects of the past with broadening present experience and imaginative anticipations of the future on the preconscious level is mostly taken for granted when it is successful. But an emotional crisis may indicate the failure of synthesis. A loss of identity with symptoms of depersonalization and derealization emerges painfully into consciousness. A few quotations from an interview with a young schizophrenic patient may illustrate the subiective experience of lost identity. A 25 year old student of chemistry, very well endowed and praised for scholastic performances, yet without self-confidence, stood in his childhood between a violent alcoholic father and a doting mother whom he had to protect against tile father's physical assaults. From early days, I assume, he had to repress the impulses of murderous rage. Near his 20th year he broke down on the shooting range in military training and this experience may have triggered off the danger of dercpression. He described the onset of his illness with his own
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words: "It was terrifically frightening. It was as if I was being abandoned, lost all friends and everything. It was as if everything was closing in all of a sudden and then I removed myself from it. I practically forced them to put me in the hospital, because I could not go lmme." What preoccupied him in this recorded interview was the sense of time. "I can't get time straigbtened out. It seems to me, there is no such thing as a yesterday or a tomorrow or a future. Time is like climbing upstairs, literally--and that you reach a certain point and then you fall down. It is all confused. One day I live one experience and then it seems that I go way back to an early point in my life. I suppose, physically I am here, but I don't lmve a feeling that this is today and that there will be a tomorrow. It is as though when I think of time that I revolve around. I am not moving forward, it seems. ~ There is a great discontinuity between my mind and my body. My body is some sort of thing, it has not any practical purpose. I can't get it into my head that there arc things and people. They appear like cardboard cutouts. I feel, they are going around in the same confusion I am in. I look at the patients as being little people and the attendants as being terrifically large in comparison to file patients. I did not even know that I was taller than nay mother until the other day, and yet actually I have always had the feeling that I was looking up at her. ~ I can tell you facts all day. You can ask me anything you want to know and I can tell you the right answer, but I can't feel it. When you ask me who am I and what significance have I, then I don't know, because I can't feel any sucb thing as being a person, a human being. Motions don't seem to have any significance. One object is farther away, I can tell that, than another. I can't seem to feel that it has any depth. There is nothing which I do that has any significance. I guess, I should not use the word I. There is no suda thing as a distinct person--I--as being one separate individual. When I go out with a group of men, then I do not exist. I am a part of them. Even now I see people and I think that makes me part of them, I listen to them, I become like that, too." W h a t in this e x c e r p t c h a r a c t e r i z e s t h e l u c i d d e s c r i p t i o n of lost i d e n t i t y is t h e loss of w h a t S c h a c h t e l calls " a c t i v i t y affect '''~ w h i c h f o l l o w e d a n unb e a r a b l e p a n i c - - " a n d t h e n I just r e m o v e d m y s e l f f r o m it." W i t h this r e m o v a l t h e p r e c o n s c i o u s l a b o r of i n t e g r a t i o n s e e m s to h a v e s t o p p e d , a m e a n i n g l e s s e x i s t e n c e is r a t t l i n g o n . T h e p a t i e n t feels t h a t his i n n e r g r o w i n g has c o m e to a stop, t h e r e is no f u t u r e , a s t r o n o m i c t i m e floats b y , t h e p a t i e n t c a n n o t find his p l a c e in s p a c e a n d time, s u b j e c t i v e e x p e r i e n c e of t i m e a n d s p a c e is u n s t r u c t u r e d . His w o r l d is a l t e r e d in t h e s a m e sense as his o w n p e r s o n a l i t y , p e o p l e a r e c a r d b o a r d c u t o u t s in confusion. S c h r e b e r ~ s p o k e of " f u r t i v e l y f a b r i c a t e d little m e n . " T h e r e a r e no b o u n d a r i e s b e t w e e n h i m a n d others, h e feels like a p a s s i v e victim. M o v e m e n t s a r e a u t o m a t i c , aimless, t h e p a t i e n t is d e p r i v e d of t h e e x p e r i e n c e of living his o w n life. Loss of i d e n t i t y a n d loss of reality, d e s c r i b e d b y s o m e s c h i z o p h r e n i c s as w o r l d c a t a s t r o p h e , b e l o n g together. H a r o l d Searles H in his e x c e l l e n t p a p e r on " A n x i e t y C o n c e r n i n g C h a n g e " has d e s c r i b e d t h e s l o w recovery, of tile sense of i d e n t i t y in s c h i z o p h r e n i c p a t i e n t s u n d e r p s y c h o a n a l y t i c t r e a t m e n t . T i l e e m o t i o n a l e x p e r i e n c e of m u t u a l i t y r e d i s c o v e r s t h e i n t e g r a t i n g p o w e r of t r u s t a n d t r a n s c e n d s t h e a n x i e t y a b o u t t h e u n p r e d i c t a b i l i t y of c h a n g e . P s y c h o a n a l y t i c t r e a t m e n t g r e w o u t of t h e c a t h a r t i c m e t h o d w i t h t h e a i m of s h a k i n g u p r e p r e s s e d e m o t i o n s a n d t h e r e w i t h i n i t i a t i n g r e i n t c g r a t i o n . F r e u d a m p l i f i e d this m e t h o d b y t h e e l u c i d a t i o n of r e s i s t a n c e a n d t r a n s f e r e n c e , b u t g e n u i n e e m o t i o n a l e x p e r i e n c e , t h e p r e c o n d i t i o n of t r u e insight, r e m a i n e d t h e c o r n e r s t o n e of t h e c u r a t i v e p r o -
E X P E R I E N C E O F I D E N T I T Y A N D ITS P S Y C H O P A T I I O I . O G Y
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cess. The patient whom I quoted before complained that a loss of feeling accompanied his sense of lost identity, while his cognitive functions remained intact. I want to devote the second part of nay paper to the discussion of emotions in relation to the subjective experience of identity. Every strong emotional experience, particularly a sudden emotional upheaval due to an external event that breaks through the stimulus barrier or a sudden derepression threatens the individual with a loss of identity and a collapse of his reality structure. The emotional upheaval elicits dissociating anxieties, but also the spontaneous reconstructive labor of trust. We are paying more attention to the anxiety effect of emotions than to the reconstructive side of affect. In every day language we speak of emotions that sweep a person off his feet; he loses control; is beside himself or goes to pieces. Strong emotions have a pathological connotation. The heroes o f Homer raved and roared in tile grip of emotions. But in modern Western culture man tries to hide his emotions shamefacedly. He puts on a conventional front. But self-control , particularly when dictated by an unbending, archaic superego can become a compulsive habit, lead to self-deception and estrangement from the self under the pressure of emotions. Jean-Paul Sartre asserts that emotion is an attempt to transform the world by magic when it becomes too dilIicult to cope with in a rational way. s Similarly pessimistic is T. S. Elliot when he says:"Human kind cannot bear very much reality.'"-' In Freud's early theories 4a he gives a signal function to emotions that elicit the discharge cf tensions. The reconstruction in face of dissociating discharge is the outcome of a taming, controlling and restricting, countercathectic process imposed by the ego on the instinct-engendered affects that upset the homeostasis. Sullivan emphasized the regressive search for security that tames emotional beliavior. ~"- In Freud's latest instinct theory 4~ the tendency towards homeostasis and subjective security is attributed to the death instinct, but Eros is not seen by Freud onl)" as a disturbing, confusing force; it is also the integrative power of construction and reconstruction. Eros implies the strength of trust which gives the lead to the ego functions in the striving for what Hendrick calls the "instinct to master. ''z Let us look at some descriptive impressions of emotional behavior in relation to the experience of identity. ~* A sudden experience of danger has a startling effect. Fear shakes man lcose frcm the famil.:ar sense of identity and his habitual grasp of the reality scene. As long as the cause of fear can be faced, trust or what Schachtel calls the "activity affect":' mobilizes unusual physiological and psychological energies, respiration and circulation are accelerated, alertness quickens reactions, ingenious ideas of rescue crowd into consciousness and inspire rapid decisions that are pursued with clarity and concentration. In face of the unknown and unknowable the trusting attitude inspires awe which is different from passive, blind submission to fate. But when fear opens up into anxiety, when man passively succumbs to danger, when he in Bibring's 1 words "lets the ego die," he detaches himself from the realistic encounter with danger by repression or denial. He shuts his eyes to
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EDITtI ~,VEIGERT
reality and leaves tlle field of vision to autocentrie or autoplastie imagination that protests and transforms magically the unbearable reality in the sense of illusional security, preoedipal dependency or embeddedness. The mobilized emotions are wasted in aimless agitation. Future loses its meaning when the now and here is no longer encountered. In a given danger situation there will always be a mixture of alloplastic fears and autoplastic anxieties depending on the gravity of danger and the stamina of ego strength. Hatred tlmt does not take the risk of encountering the adversary deteriorates into smoldering resentment. Rage repressed by anxiety leads to a shrinking of identity and falsification of reality. In autocentric imagination hostility grows into fantastic proportions. The typically angry young man may become addicted to the magic power of explosive rage reactions. He maintains a negative identity in continuous protest against his reality scene. This habit of hating engenders self-hatred that paralyzes the forces of active transformation. But tile enemy can be encountered, rage can be channelized into communication by words and actions appropriate to tlle now and here. The air can b e cleared of falsifying products of an autocentrie imagination. The adversaries can arrive at liberating decisions and a strengthening redefinition of their differences of identity. The emotional upheaval of grief a~ the loss of a beloved partner may deteriorate into passive resistance and wasteful protest reactions against fate in a depression. The imagination holds on to the status quo in autocentrie withdrawal. Addicted to the magic power of self-torment the ego shrinks into impoverishment, the world becomes bleak, time seems to slow down, future loses its meaning. But the encounter with bereavement also mobilizes an active emotional response. The labor of mourning gradually arrives at an 'acceptance of painful reality and creative transfiguration of identity. The bereaved person need not dismiss the beloved partner in bitterness or bury him in hateful identification. The departed can remain present to the mind. The awareness of his personality may even grow into a deeper understanding and inspire the growth potential in tlle bereaved person. The emotional experience of guilt or failure also mobilizes two trends of emotional response. A passive wallowing in guilt feelings holds on to the self-image of success, of righteousness by magic atonement gestures of selfjustification that distort identity and reality. On the other hand the experience of guilt or failure that can be faced squarely initiates the active labor of genuine regret which opens up sobering insight, acceptance of realistic limitations and reorganization of identity with new alternatives of development. Even a sudden joyful experience of success or triumph shakes the subjective sense of identity by its newness. The ego feels lifted to unknown heights. Unlimited horizons of hopeful possibilities arouse a kind of vertigo, when the ego passively yields to the accelerated pace of autocentric imagination. The ego is swept off its feet by a flight of ideas and a turmoil of overstJmulation. There is anxiety in this passive response to a joyful experience. The
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23
bright magic transformation of identity and reality may suddenly collapse, if there were not the growth potential represented in the spontaneous trusting labor of adaptation which patiently, step by step, restrtlctures the sense of identity and the image of reality on the basis of the new challenge. In tile same sense we might look at the passive intoxication and infatuation of a new love experience which can lead to a ruiaaway ego-inflation due to autocentrie imagination. A strawfire that is fed onesidely by narcissistic supplies burns out quickly. Anxieties smother tile potentialities of mutual erotic adaptation. On the other hand the creative labor of love in the spontaneous mutuality of allocentrie orientation gradually broadens the horizon and deepens the sense of identity in both partners. Every emotional upheaval elicits a mixture of active and passive responses. The passive response leads to a withdrawal from the challenge of reality into the realm of autocentric imagination, falsifying reality in the sense of magic transformation, most outspokenly in hallucinations and delusions, or falsifying identity by passive surrender or illusional ego inflation. But the active response remains in close contact with reality in the labor of mutual adaptation. These sketchy examples show the fluid boundaries between pathological and so-called normal emotional behavior. The time factor seems to be an important element. The young schizophrenic whom I quoted marveled about the discrepancy between subjective and objective time. Particularly in view of the sudden onslaught of an emotional crisis man needs a moratorium, as Erikson has put it. 3 He needs time for the labor of mourning, for the labor of remorse, for the rcadaptation of identity and reality, for the shift from autocentric to allocentrie imagination. One could speculate why the problem of identity concerns us so much in our time. It concerns not only the psychiatric patient who is particularly inflexible or helplessly volatile in the face of change--there is a general insecurity about identity in our time. Existentialist philosophers have pointed out the loss of authenticity of man thrown into a mass society. The German sociologist Max Scheler wrote: "We are in approximately ten thousand ),ears of history the first generation in which man has become completely and without residue problematic to himself, in not knowing an), more what he is, at the same time, however, knowing that lie does not know it. ''I~ It is possible that the pace of technical progress and the complexity of living has become too rapid for man's potentialities of emotional adaptation. There is not enough time for meditation and reoricntation. Psychoanalysis is timeless, it takes the patient partially out of the flux of time. It represents a therapy of working through conflicts particularly needed in our time. For the lonely, uprooted patient it oilers in the participant observer an opportunity to regain the allocentricity, the flexibility in the experience of identity, the openness to the world and the future in a constant flux of transfiguration. Ever), emotional crisis elicits a double movement in response to the challenge. The passive autocentric movement could be compared to a
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EDITII ~,VEIGERT
withdrawal into a circle, the center of which is the identity with the ego of the past. Autocentrie imagination dictated by anxieties holds on to the illusion of magic transformation within the unchanging circumference of a static reality horizon. The circular movement in this static arrangement must lead to stagnation, boredom, and ultimately to a loss of identity. The active allocentric reaction to emotional experience permits a change of the reality horizon similar to the movement of a double focused elliptical structure; the ego in one focus and the allon, the other, in the second focus are moved by the dynamic tension between closeness and distance, commitment and freedora. In psychoanalytic treatment the therapist enters into the neighbor focus, attracted and repelled by positive and negative transference. The other one, the therapist, is simultaneously a stimulus and a threat to the patient, he gradually dissolves the magic images of his autocentrically oriented transference. The analyst can appear as the personification of the powers of evil which the patient tries to exclude from his circular system, stretching the inner distance to the breaking point. He can become for the patient the dangerous seducer or the vindictive competitor, the punishing authority or the possessive mother. But when the patient focuses his attention long enough on the other one, the therapist, he discovers that there is no impulse either in his partner or in himself which is so completely destructive, no wish so onesidedly egocentric tha.t they could not be redeemed and enter into a broader ego integration by a deepening understanding. The acceptance of the self and the other opens the wider range of interpersonal relations. Every emotional crisis in the treatment shakes the patient's and frequently also the therapist's subjective experience of identity. There grows the awareness of the you and tire I; tire I can be discovered most saliently through the awareness of the you in a dynamic encounter. The I takes the risk of a transient loss of identity in every step that transcends its previous boundaries, but the endurance of the anxieties mobilized by the risk opens the potentialities of creative transfiguration. REFm~Er,'CES 1. Bibring, Edward: Das Problem der Deibid., Vol. XVIII (pp. 3-64). pression (The problem of depression). 5. Itendrick, Ives: Tile discussion of tile Psyche 6:82-101, 1952. "instinct to master." A letter to tile 2. Elliot, T. S., as quoted by Rt. Rev. editors. Psychoanalyt. Quart. 12:561Angus Dun: "'Caught in a Ilurricane," 565, 1943. Washington Post, Nov. 15, 1959 (pp. 6. Kubie, Lawrence: Neurotic Distortion E 1 and E v). of the Creative Process. Lawrence, 3. Erikson, Erik H.: The problem of ego University of Kansas Press, 1958. identity. J.Am.Psychoanalyt.A. 4:567. Nunberg, Hermann: The synthetic func121, 1956. tion of the ego. Internat.J.Psycho4. Freud, S.: The Case of Schrebcr (The Analysis. 12:123-140, 1931. Standard Edition) Vol. XII. London, 7a. Piaget, Jean: The Origins of Intellitlogarth, 1955 (pp. 3-82). gence in Children, New York, 1952. 4a.--: Three Essays on Sexuality, ibid., 8. Sartre, J. P.: Existential Psychoanalysis, Vol. VII (pp. 125-244). New York, 1933; L'hnagination, Paris, 4 b . - - : Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1948.
E9X P E P , I E N C E O F I D E N T I T Y
AND ITS PSYCI1OPATIIOLOGY
9. Sehaehtel, Ernest G.: Metamorphosis, passim. New York, Basic Books, 1959. 10. Schelcr, Max: l~hilosophische Weltanschammg. Miinehen, Bern, Lehnen Verlag, 1954, p. 62. 11. Searles, Harold: Anxiety concerning change. Paper given at the Winter Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, New York City, 1959.
O_,~
i o. Sullivan, Harry, S.: Conceptions oJ
Modern Psychiatry. (William Alanson White Memorial Lect,res). Psychiatry 3:vii, 1940; 8:147, 1945. 13. Wheelis, Allen: The Quest for Identity. New York, Norton, 1958. 14. Zutt, Jucrg: Vom aesthctischen im Unterschicd zum affektivcn Erlebnisbereich. V~'icn.Ztschr.Nervh. 10:163, 1955.
Edith Wcigert, M.D., Chairman and Director o[ thc Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, 1951-1959; Member, Psychoanalflic Training Committee of American Psychiatric Association and American Psychoanalylic Associalion; Faculty Member, The Washington School o[ Psychiatry, Washington, D. C.