Some complementary insights from Laing's book 'The Divided Self' about the interplay between the artificial false self and the society exploiting the 'human resources' which lie beneath. It reminded me of colonialism when I first read it, with the false self playing a sort of puppet government role in service to the external, extraction-oriented system. In order to survive, per Duffell, we have to find ways of constructing character traits that are rewarded by those who have the money which is required to access basic survival needs like food, water & shelter. These traits initially act as a kind of middle man between our authentic selves and the economic system outside, but after a while they become dominant and we might even forget that they are not our true identity. Compare the otherwise mystifying phenomenon of colonial subjects coming to strongly identify with the culture that is oppressing them: that's the 'strategic survival personality' speaking; and the real, authentic person was buried alive many years ago...

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The self [after prolonged enclosure ‘within a threatening experience from which there is no physical escape’ – p.78] then seeks by being unembodied to transcend the world and hence to be safe. But a self is liable to develop which feels it is outside all experience and activity. It becomes a vacuum. Everything is there, outside; nothing is here, inside. Moreover, the constant dread of all that is there, of being overwhelmed, is potentiated rather than mitigated by the need to keep the world at bay.Yet the self may at the same time long more than anything for participation in the world. Thus, its greatest longing is felt as its greatest weakness and giving in to this weakness is its greatest dread, since in participation the individual fears that his vacuum will be obliterated, that he will be engulfed or otherwise lose his identity, which has come to be equated with the maintenance of the transcendence of the self even though this is a transcendence in a void.

[...]

This detachment of the self means that the self is never revealed directly in the individual’s expressions and actions, nor does it experience anything spontaneously or immediately. The self’s relationship to the other is always at one remove. The direct and immediate transactions between the individual, the other, and the world, even in such basic respects as perceiving and acting, all come to be meaningless, futile, and false. One can represent the alternative state of affairs schematically as shown [above].

[...]


Objects perceived by the self are experienced as real. Thoughts and feelings of which the self is the agent are alive and are felt to have point. Actions to which the self is committed are felt as genuine.

If the individual delegates all transactions between himself and the other to a system within his being which is not ‘him’, then the world is experienced as unreal, and all that belongs to this system is felt to be false, futile, and meaningless.

[...]

Everyone is subject to a certain extent at one time or another to such moods of futility, meaninglessness, and purposelessness, but in schizoid individuals these moods are particularly insistent. These moods arise from the fact that the doors of perception and/or the gates of action are not in the command of the self but are being lived and operated by a false self. The unrealness of perceptions and the falsity and meaninglessness of all activity are the necessary consequences of perception and activity being in the command of a false self — a system partially dissociated from the ‘true’ self, which is, therefore, excluded from direct participation in the individual’s relatedness with other persons and the world. A pseudo-duality is thus experienced in the individual’s own being. Instead of the individual meeting the world with an integral selfhood, he disavows part of his own being along with his disavowal of immediate attachment to things and people in the world. This can be represented schematically as follows:

Instead of
(self/body) < > other
the situation is
self < > (body-other)

[...]

The self, therefore, is precluded from having a direct relationship with real things and real people. When this has happened in patients, one is witness to the struggle which ensues to preserve the self’s own sense of its own realness, aliveness, and identity. In the first scheme, one has a benign circle. The reality of the world and of the self are mutually potentiated by the direct relationship between self and other. In Figure 2, there is a vicious circle. Every element in this diagram comes to be experienced as more and more unreal and dead. Love is precluded and dread takes its place. The final effect is an overall experience of everything having come to a stop. Nothing moves; nothing is alive; everything is dead, including the self. The self by its detachment is precluded from a full experience of realness and aliveness. What one might call a creative relationship with the other, in which there is mutual enrichment of the self and the other (benign circle), is impossible, and an interaction is substituted which may seem to operate efficiently and smoothly for a while but which has no ‘life’ in it (sterile relationship). There is a quasi-it-it interaction instead of an I-thou relationship. This interaction is a dead process.

('The Divided Self', pp.80-82)