O/T: Psychologist Nick Duffell on the dominance of false identities
Posted by Ian M on July 1, 2022, 6:59 pm
Currently reading Nick Duffell's book, 'The Making of them: The British attitude to children and the boarding school system'. Lots of fantastic insights applicable outside of the subject of boarding schools, but this passage stuck out in particular for the description of how incredibly malleable identities can be, when artificially constructed in order to survive and fit in to the insane social system we find ourselves in. Really smashes to pieces any notion that we live in free societies allowing the spontaneous growth of people and the free play of ideas shaping our collective destinies. Everyone is playing a part! None of it is real!
I
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From Survival to Self-betrayal
In order to survive and stay loyal to our caretakers on whom we are both entirely dependent and genuinely attached, we unconsciously design the most workable personality which our assessment of the environment suggests to us. Where physical survival is the imperative, our two basic instincts are Flight or Fight. When our psychological survival is at risk the two basic mechanisms are Protection and Control. Protection of the self is required against the outside. If this fails, control is applied internally on the self, for the self's vulnerability is now deemed a threat. To satisfy the need to survive we need to be sage. To be safe we need protection; if protection does not provide safety, we try control. Let us see how these instincts operate.
When we are very young the world is exciting - but frightening, and very new to us. Our instincts tell us that we need to be protected - wee look to our parents. As we grow we may discover that we need protection not only from the outer world but also from our imperfect caretakers. If they seem not to want out 'bad' emotional states, we have to protect ourselves also from what is happening inside. This involves some control. Emotions may be overwhelmingly powerful when we are little: unless they are split off we will frighten ourselves. When a woman in my practice relives her abandonment by her parents she disappears into herself. She can't look up. I try to make eye contact, but she refuses. Later she says: "I don't exist if I feel rage".
We unconsciously try to protect our vulnerable self in many ways: by our behaviours, for example, by withdrawing or creating a diversion. Or we can even develop a body shape, for example, armouring ourselves with fat or becoming spare and insignificant. Otherwise we may try to control the world outside, for example by developing our aggression, by mastering what seems to be required, by finding ways of wielding power, or by puffing ourselves up with pride - all ways of attempting to assert our influence on the environment.
Where the environment is too powerful for us to exert our influence on it, this tendency to control turns back onto the self, and the mechanisms to protect become defences to hold us in and the world out. We inhibit all kinds of aspects of ourselves, for example our feelings, our power, our spontaneity, our trust, our desires. We control the self. A man I was working with described this perfectly. He said that there was a layer around his self. When he felt in charge of it, it was a semi-porous membrane, flexible, and open to friendship. Whenever he felt he was in defensive control: it was like being embraced by a rigid calcified membrane.
In an environment like a boarding school where the necessary protection is lacking, we may design a personality to be socially capable and attractive, or one which is in retreat. In the former case, a useful way of achieving control of the outside world is by the over-rapid development of competency. Such a self-reliant 'false self' may be one which is apparently confidently aggressive. In a boarding school the fear-of-failure driven winner is, as we know, socially desirable. Another variation of this is to develop a personality which is terribly nice, but inexhaustibly placatory, designed to satisfy and ward off those who have the power.
If this is not possible, for example in a very hostile or neglectful environment, extra control of the self will be needed. The threat of annihilation will be present until we build a defensive structure, with walls facing both outside and inside. Towards the outside they will protect us against potential danger, and on the inside against overwhelming emotions. I remember a boy in my school who was like this: he had no friends and was obviously an outsider, but no one even bothered to bully him, because nothing got through.
But the tragedy of a personality defended by protective/controlling psychic walls is that while it shields the creator from danger it also shuts out intimacy. If no one gets in to reach us we become players of the 'game of one'. We can remain safer on the inside but unable to function relationally. Many boarding school survivors have learned to create defensive structures which are impenetrably private, alongside impressive and competent false selves. Even when the environment is no longer a threat the defences tend to stay up. It is a matter of habit, and an attestation to the need to put them up really firmly in the first place.
Whatever style we choose, the result is inevitably a self-negation. Every self-negation, even when done in the cause of survival is a self-betrayal. Even the creation of a competent but inflated personality, though socially sanctioned, is a strategy that is ultimately self-betraying. The establishment of an adapted, or compensated, survival personality, is a great achievement, for without it there is annihilation or madness, but it is also a parody of the process towards self-affirmation which we seemed implicitly to expect.
I trained with Nick after reading one of his other books, Wounded Leaders. The training gave me some real understanding of what boarding school does to those apparently priviledge children who attend them.
@Trader1 - cool that you trained with him. Agreed it's v useful to have some understanding of what shaped most people in positions of power during their early years. I think similar dynamics operate in most institutions that offer a sense of belonging to emotionally crippled children and pseudo-adults, from the army to the church, political parties, even NGOs and lefty organisations. It might be indulgent of middle/upper-class privilege to focus just on boarding schools (that might explain why Duffell could get his work shown on the beeb) but it helps to illustrate problems across class divides, and as he says we're talking about children here, so you can't just dismiss it as toffs getting what they deserve...
@Mark - nice article, thanks, though he gives the likes of Merkel, Obama and even Major (!) too much credit for my liking. This part:
'the history of British elitism and the negative attitude towards children to colonial times and what I call the "rational man project", whose Victorian boarding schools were industrial power stations churning out stoic, superior leaders for the empire.'
reminded me of another strong section of the book where he points to the role of boarding schools creating the emotionally distant, self-reliant English Gentleman ideally suited for callously ruling over the colonies. A poem describes a (fictitious?) matron being fired for being too affectionate with an unhappy child because they were supposed to be 'turning out soldiers', and I thought that summed it up nicely. I've known quite a few of the type described who move from one institution to another, relying on the surrogate family feeling it gives them (up to a point) and putting up with all manner of exploitation to get it.
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.
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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.
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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)
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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.
Boarding schools seem good at producing spies and actors as well.Both careers where you put on a role I remember reading that Rachael Stirling found solace in drama at her boarding school. A chance to let those emotions show in a safe place whereas it would be dangerous to let them show elsewhere.
One of the bits of the TV programme that remains with me is of the little boy talking about his birthday where,it seemed at least to me, you see him go from the little man to the little boy he actually was when talking about his clown birthday cake.My supervisor during training,who had not been to boarding school himself, always said that whatever one thought of the adult we had to see the child of possibly 8 years old who was sent away from home.What was it like for them?
on July 1, 2022, 6:59 pm