true and false self essay

True Self Vs False Self

From brokenness to wholeness healing through faith, hope, and love.

Identity and the relentless search for self in any paradigm has been a pertinent part of society since Adam and Eve chose to gain the wisdom that broke the sanctity of their child like innocence (Gen 3, NIV; Bible Gateway, n.d.b ¶1). As such, I know I for one, seek understanding in which I can conceptualise what “the self” means. From secular to spiritual philosophies, “the self” has been separated and conceptualized through its various parts for centuries. Though there is a vast array of ideas that both complement and contradict each other, one thing is certain: if my parts remain unknown to me, un- integrated as it were, I live a life in chaos and rigidity (Siegel, 2010, p. xxvi). There is a sense of uneasiness, where the “true self” and the “false self” are at war with one another (Rohr, 2013, pp. 2-3). This sense is a reality for many, including those who seek the assistance of counselling. In order to find their inner harmony, others come knowing that we have first found ours (Siegel, 2010, p. xxvii).

Therefore, when I, as a counsellor, take the time to conceptualise “the self” and its parts, I can come to integration. A sense of harmony through faith, hope, and love that encompasses the soul by the spirit and through the body, allows my “true self” to be the most dominate aspect of who I am, and as such provides a healing space for others (Siegel, 2010, p. xxvii; Marshall, 2001, p. 234; Alexander, 2007, p.22; Rohr, 2013, pp. 184 – 186; 187; 1 John 3, NIV; 1 Cor 13:13, NIV; 1 Thess 5:8, NIV).

This essay will expand on the abovementioned notions as they relate to Marshall’s (2001) model of spirit, soul, and body (see Appendix One). With a focus on understanding mind, will, and emotions, I hope to offer a self-exploratory theory of what it means to be mindfully present with my “true self” in order to provide space for others to conceptualise their own identity.

UNDERSTANDING WHOLENESS: THE “TRUE SELF”

Understanding “the self” first comes in exploring the definition of what it means to be in one’s “true self”. Personally, I had no concept of my true sense of self until the day I found myself torn in pain, screaming to the heavens in a child-like form “I want to go home”. At the time, I had no idea it was my spirit crying out for my soul to awaken and to return to who I am in Christ: He who is my source and my destiny (Benner, 2012, p.18). Without a true relationship with God (Benner, 2012, p. 83), a sense of identity was unachievable: I was oblivious that I was un-integrated (see “neural integration” Siegel, 2010, p. xii; Siegel, 2012, p. 15; Siegel, 2007, pp. 39-41). In an integrated state the “true self” comprises three sovereign dimensions of spirit, soul, and body, able to distinguish between “me and not me” (Marshall, 2001, p. 234; Abram, 2007, p. 295; Alexander, 2007, p. 19). Further, the “true self” is at peace, willing to meet God in the “depths of [the] soul” (Benner, 2015, p. 101) in order for transformation from the inside out (Bible Gateway, n.d.a, ¶Matthew Henry Commentary; Benner, 2015, p. 101; Alexander, 2007, p. 21).

Yet, how is it that I come to meet God within the depths of my soul? To transform? As abovementioned, Marshall (2001) provides a working model (see Appendix One) which incorporates the notion that we are “thinking, feeling, willing beings” (soul: see also Benner, 2012, pp. 121 -122) in which we relate to both our internal (spirit: see also Benner, 2012, p.22) and external (body: see also Benner, 2012, p. 89) worlds (p. 9). Moreover, where each of these three sovereign dimensions work together in integration to create the “true self” in which faith, hope, and love (1 Cor 13, NIV; Eph 4:4-6, NIV; Col 1:5, NIV; 1 Thess 5:23, NIV; 1 Thess 5:8, NIV) encompass the soul by the spirit and through the body (Marshall, 2011, p. 234; Rohr, 2015, pp. 16-17). However, knowledge of this concept, while holding the basis of transformation or change, is not enough. Quite often it takes an existential crisis of identity in order to accept the invitation to confront the feeling of being “false” (Benner, 2015, p. 51).

Through my own personal experience of disorganised attachments based in trauma and regressed dependence, in which I was unable to become a “person in [my] own right” (Watts, 2009, p. 149), I am able to ascertain the understanding of that which was, and can still be my “false self”. Highly defensive and reactive I sought attachments in seemingly innocent indulgences (Abram, 2007, p. 283; Benner, 2015, p. 75) such as possession, lust, and control. I created a role for myself, acting only in present moments as who others wanted and expected me to be (Alexander, 2007, pp. 121 & 123); suppressing a past filled with unresolved confusion and abandonment and ignoring what I felt, became my identity (Benner, 2015, pp. 72 & 75): there was an extreme “chasm” between my internal and external experiences (Benner, 2015, p.23).

It was only when the walls of this chasm came crashing down with the birth of my daughter, a reflection of pure love, that I realised the “false self” that had been present for so many years, and thus the invitation to acknowledge and heal my broken self came to be. Through continued open reception to the truth in mindful presence (Benner, 2015, pp. 103-104; Siegel, 2010, pp. 1-34), and through internal safety and significance (Siegel, 2012, p. 339; McCann & Pearlman, 1990, p. 158), I came to understand the parts of myself more fully and relationally. Going back to Marshall’s (2001) model (see Appendix One), it is the parts of the soul which open me to who I am in Christ – my “true self” (p. 9) when I am present and allow for receptive healing (Siegel, 2010, pp. 26 & 32).

The mind is the main frame that links the external (body) to the internal (spirit) in order to create subjective experience (Siegel, 2010, pp. 7-8; Marshall, 2001, p. 25). It regulates and interprets input from six main domains (Marshall, 2001, p. 17): our past (memories); the world (human affairs including: culture, economic systems, technology, politics); the devil (exposure to, and attacks from Satan); the flesh (desire, appetites, needs and drives made for self gratification); the human spirit (connection to conscience and intuitive knowledge); and from God (recognised or unrecognised) (Marshall, 2001, pp. 17- 23). However, without the knowledge of the power of these inputs, which is found in mindful presence, behaviours become misguided and the “false self” becomes most dominant (Marshall, 2001, p. 11; Siegel, 2010, pp. 7-9).

This is never more evident than in my own ailment, where there is a “schism” in my mind (Abram, 2007, p. 308) between the “true self” and “false self”, an un-integrated soul (Masterson, 1981, p. 133; Siegel, 2007, pp. 198-199; Cozolino, 2010, pp. 284-285). When triggered my past dominantly takes over and thrusts me into a mind frame where my spirit and my connection with God are severely severed and exacerbated by the devil. I am thrust into a child-like apparition of myself, consumed with fear, reacting in forms of “brittle, vulnerable, self-depreciative, clinging behaviour, and erratic and irrational outbursts of rage” all based in trauma (Masterson, 1981, p. 30).

With emotions in exile, I am unable to trust and am driven into a reactive state where defence mechanisms are protecting the vulnerable and “true self” (Seigel, 2010, p.70; Marshall, 2001, pp. 63 & 64). My own behaviours demonstrating how un-integrated emotions have the ability to distort reality and our subjective experience (Marshall, 2001, pp. 63 & 65). Furthermore, as per my own ailment, implicit memory can trigger emotions that the mind refuses to acknowledge, drawing a wedge between the “false self” and the “true self” into disproportionate sizes and causing a deep wound in need of healing (Marshall, 2001, pp. 65-66). Evidences of wounding can most commonly be seen in relationship, self value, spiritual doubt, despair, and the ability to be present (Marshal, 2001, pp. 66-69; Siegel, 2010, pp. 32-33; Abram, 2007, p. 308). Moreover, sources that inhibit presence and emotional growth, thus the ability to come to our “true self”, stem from trauma based in loss, fear, betrayal, or continued relational miss-attunement (Marshall,2001, p. 67; Siegel, 2010, pp. 42 & 72). Therefore, in order to become more in tune in relationship and indeed with the “true self” one must seek a place of presence where mindfulness leads to integration.

Further to this, without presence we are unable to truly understand or captivate the meaning of freedom (Marshall, 2001, p. 99; Siegel, 2010, p. 12; Abram, 2007, p. 112), and thus our will, that with which we make choices, has the power to distort or hide “true” internal values. This results in behaviours that break the boundaries of moral law and the authority of God (Marshall, 2001, pp. 101, 104 – 105, 107). As such, the “false self” draws towards existential versions of freedom and authority based in absolutes where obedience is stuck in limiting preconceptions and judgments (Marshall, 2001, p. 101; Siegel, 2010, pp. 13 -14; Siegel, 2012, p. 29).

In my own experience, it has been my spiritual connection with the internal values instilled in me, my conscience, which has drawn my mind from the grasps of the rivalry of God’s law and the law of sin and death (Marshall, 2001, pp. 104-105). The will of the flesh (Marshall, 2001, p. 111) drew me towards an un-integrated soul. Yet deep within me, my connection to the spiritual realms were so strong they allowed my will to acknowledge the “false self” and to seek authority in something grander than an existential existence where I was stuck in preconception and judgment, and where presence was unattainable.

THE WILL TO HEAL

My will was only able to acknowledge the “false self” when I met with a radical encounter with the truth (Benner, 2015, p. 72). It was from this encounter (as abovementioned, as the birth of my daughter) I came to understand the power of the conjunction between my spirit and the Holy Spirit, and as such, I gave in to the internalised values written on my heart, and offered my obedience to the authority of the Cross (Marshall, 2001, pp. 113, 117, & 127). The obedience I offered and still offer today, guides my soul to a state of receptivity where presence makes integration a trait and my “true self” becomes at peace (Siegel, 2010, pp. 31-32).

SEEKING SPIRITUALITY: HEALING THROUGH FAITH, HOPE, AND LOVE

Presence is imperative to healing and in living within our “true self”. That is to say, to truly be aware and receptive and to live in connection with God, we must first offer ourselves in obedience based in love. It is within that, the soul’s will makes choices based on values through the authority of Jesus’ sacrifice (Benner, 2015, p. 13; Marshall, 2001, pp.121-123; Alexander, 2007, p. 73; Bible Gateway, n.d.a, ¶Matthew Henry Commentary; Siegel, 2010, p. 1). With renewed regulation and interpretation through revealed knowledge received in faith, and spoken through confession (Marshall, 2001, pp. 236 & 239), the desires of the mind are reformed. Through the power of the Cross and the Holy Spirit (Rom 10:8-10 cited in Marshall, 2001, pp. 234 & 236) we may free the limitations of our minds from the input of the six main domains that reside there (Marshall, 2001, p. 11). Moreover, we can bring ourselves closer towards loving-kindness and to receive healed wholeness (Marshall, 2001, p. 239; Seigel, 2010, pp. 83-85; Bible Study Tools, 2014, ¶1-8).

With our limitations free in Christ the entanglements of our emotions are released from the pain of our past (Marshall, 2001, p.75). With hope, emotions can be expressed in the safety of the communion with the Holy Spirit, and with that joy may flow (Marshall, 2001, pp. 86, 234 & 246). The power of the Cross and the Holy Spirit creates understanding to our emotions from a new perspective. This then releases them for their intended purpose of healing (Marshall, 2001, p. 86; Siegel, 2010, p. 72). With a new understanding of our past, we free ourselves from limitations of defence mechanisms and move toward living more in our “true self”.

The abovementioned principals of harmony through faith, hope, and love that encompass the soul by the spirit and through the body are just the beginning of the journey. That is to say, the “true self” cannot be fully realised until understanding and integration through continued presence takes place in truth and through truth (Siegel, 2010, p. 91). We must actively seek presence to allow the work of the Cross and the Holy Spirit to integrate our souls, bringing us into our “true self”.

PRACTICAL CHANGE

With the concept of the “true self” in place alongside the notions of what it means to be healed: living in the self whom resides in Christ (John 15, NIV, Rohr, 2013, p. 16) and the “only self that will support authenticity… and provide eternal identity…” (Benner, 2015, p.17), we can knowingly move towards connection, security, and of truly being seen (Siegel, 2010, p. xx). Though it may be a long and slow journey in acknowledging and understanding the dark sides of ourselves (Alexander, 2007, pp. 121 – 122), when we actively seek presence, healing is differentiated, sanctified, and integrated within our lives and relationships (Siegel, 2010, p. xii; Alexander, 2007, p. 125; Collins, 2007, p. 66).

Through my own journey, I have come to understand that there is power in mindfulness through cultivating true presence. My ability to be “conscientious, creative, and contemplative” (Siegel, 2010, p. xxv) comes from focusing my mind “… in specific ways to develop a more rigorous from of present moment awareness that can directly alleviate suffering…” (Siegel, 2007, p. 9; see Mind Your Brain, Inc, 2010, ¶1-5, Wheel of Awareness Practice for “specific ways”).

In saying this there is no better way to portray the concept of healing and freedom as conceptualised in the abovementioned notions, than to come to conclusion through bringing my own journey. My hope is to demonstrate the power of the Cross and the Holy Spirit, as well as integration of mind and emotions, is led by a moral will that intuitively “knows” (Rohr, 2007, p.52; Benner, 2015, pp. 38-40; Siegel, 2007, p. 334; Marshall, 2001, p. 234).

BROKEN BY BETRAYAL; RESTORED IN FAITH, HOPE, AND LOVE

Those who have experienced trauma of any kind understand my plight. There is a desperate search of self, and a desperate need to resolve that which inflicted me and made my mind incoherent for so many years (Siegel, 2010, pp. 189-190; Marshall, 2007, p.86).

It is now, some four years after I first began my journey towards my “true self”, that I have come to somewhat understand what it meant when I was screaming to the heavens to “go home”. I have now come to understand that for the most part of my life I was living in falsity, unable to reconcile or integrate memories, emotions, values, truth, nor what I knew intuitively: it was only when I came to a breaking point that I was able to make the choice to come to truth (Siegel, 2010, p. 91).

Through making a choice, through continually making choices each and every day to be humble and to walk alongside Christ, I am able to acknowledge my fallibility and to seek that which opens me to towards my “true self”.

Although I have, and do, practice a variety of tools and techniques (such as CBT, IPT, EFT, Yoga, DBT, client-centred, and the like) there has been nothing more effective than bringing my wounded child-self filled with implicit pain memories to the foot of the Cross within a mindful state of presence (Siegel, 2010, pp. 1-33; 194-196). It is there, within my safe space, I vision the Cross and allow the Holy Spirit to wash over me. With the knowledge that I am free in the new covenant (Marshall, 2001, pp. 121-131) I am able to “be open not only to how things are, but to how they change moment to moment” (Siegel, 2010, p. 197). This allows me to honour, understand, and to be obedient toward the authority of God and to acknowledge the values I reside in and the forgiveness I must seek for that which torments me.

It is within this that I am able to further recognise the truth, and to mindfully, through written prose, spoken confession (Marshall, 2001, pp. 234-239), and with an open heart to hear, communicate with God, and to allow new thought patterns to emerge. With practice I have come to understand this process as that which instills the new thought patterns within my complete being (Siegel, 2010, pp. 259-260; see also pp. 253-260).

Furthermore, healing has not come without a sense of acceptance, security, guidance, and love from a deep connection within community; I have found a sense of compassionate understanding and relational value within the presence of God and others. And while my own healing has been a development of mindful, spiritual practice over years, I come to acknowledge that healing in others, particularly in the Christ-centered, Bible-based context, comes from my own ability to recognise who I am in Christ. That is, incorporating a sense of faith, hope, and love that encompasses the soul by the spirit and through the body, allows my “true self” to be the most dominate aspect of who I am, and as such provides a healing space for others to find freedom in their “true self”.

Abram, J. (2007). The language of Winnicott: A dictionary of Winnicott’s use of words(2nd ed.). London, Great Britan: Karnac Books.

Alexander, I. (2007). Dancing with God: Transformation through relationship. London, Great Britan: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

Benner, D. G. (2012). Spirituality and the awakening self: The sacred journey of transformation. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press.

Benner, D. G. (2015). The gift ofbeing yourself: The sacred call to self-discovery. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.

Bible Gateway. (n.d.). Gen 3:7–11 – Reformation Study Bible – Bible Gateway. Retrieved from https://www.biblegateway.com/resources/reformation-study- bible/Gen.3.7-Gen.3.11

Bible Study Tools. (2014). The humility of Jesus. Retrieved from http://www .biblestudytools.com/classics/murray-humility/humility-in-the-life-of- jesus.html

Collins, G. R. (2007). Christian counseling: A comprehensive guide. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson.

Cozolino, L. J. (2010). The neuroscience of psychotherapy: Healing the social brain(2nd ed.). New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co.

McCann, L., & Pearlman, L. (1990). Psychological trauma and the adult survivor: Theory, therapy, and transformation. London, Great Britain: Brunner-Routledg.

Marshall, T. (2001). Living in the freedom of the spirit. Lancaster, England: Sovereign World. Masterson, J. F. (1981). The narcissistic and borderline disorders: An integrated developmental approach. New York, NY: Brunner-Routledge.

Mind Your Brain, Inc. (2010). Wheel of Awareness. Retrieved from www .drdansiegel.com/resources/wheel_of_awareness/

Rohr, R. (2013). Immortal diamond: The search for our true self. London, Great Britan: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

Siegel, D. J. (2007). The mindful brain: Reflection and attunement in the cultivation of well-being. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co.

Siegel, D. J. (2010). The mindful therapist: A clinician’s guide to mindsight and neural integration. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co.

Siegel, D. J. (2012). Mindsight: Change your brain and your life. Brunswick, Australia: Scribe Publications.

Watts, J. (2009). Donald Wincott. In J. Watts, K. Cockcroft, & N. Duncan (Eds.),Developmental psychology (2nd ed., pp. 138-152). Cape Town, South Africa: UCT Press.

Appendix One

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You are a network

You cannot be reduced to a body, a mind or a particular social role. an emerging theory of selfhood gets this complexity.

by Kathleen Wallace   + BIO

Who am I? We all ask ourselves this question, and many like it. Is my identity determined by my DNA or am I product of how I’m raised? Can I change, and if so, how much? Is my identity just one thing, or can I have more than one? Since its beginning, philosophy has grappled with these questions, which are important to how we make choices and how we interact with the world around us. Socrates thought that self-understanding was essential to knowing how to live, and how to live well with oneself and with others. Self-determination depends on self-knowledge, on knowledge of others and of the world around you. Even forms of government are grounded in how we understand ourselves and human nature. So the question ‘Who am I?’ has far-reaching implications.

Many philosophers, at least in the West, have sought to identify the invariable or essential conditions of being a self. A widely taken approach is what’s known as a psychological continuity view of the self, where the self is a consciousness with self-awareness and personal memories. Sometimes these approaches frame the self as a combination of mind and body, as René Descartes did, or as primarily or solely consciousness. John Locke’s prince/pauper thought experiment, wherein a prince’s consciousness and all his memories are transferred into the body of a cobbler, is an illustration of the idea that personhood goes with consciousness. Philosophers have devised numerous subsequent thought experiments – involving personality transfers, split brains and teleporters – to explore the psychological approach. Contemporary philosophers in the ‘animalist’ camp are critical of the psychological approach, and argue that selves are essentially human biological organisms. ( Aristotle might also be closer to this approach than to the purely psychological.) Both psychological and animalist approaches are ‘container’ frameworks, positing the body as a container of psychological functions or the bounded location of bodily functions.

All these approaches reflect philosophers’ concern to focus on what the distinguishing or definitional characteristic of a self is, the thing that will pick out a self and nothing else, and that will identify selves as selves, regardless of their particular differences. On the psychological view, a self is a personal consciousness. On the animalist view, a self is a human organism or animal. This has tended to lead to a somewhat one-dimensional and simplified view of what a self is, leaving out social, cultural and interpersonal traits that are also distinctive of selves and are often what people would regard as central to their self-identity. Just as selves have different personal memories and self-awareness, they can have different social and interpersonal relations, cultural backgrounds and personalities. The latter are variable in their specificity, but are just as important to being a self as biology, memory and self-awareness.

Recognising the influence of these factors, some philosophers have pushed against such reductive approaches and argued for a framework that recognises the complexity and multidimensionality of persons. The network self view emerges from this trend. It began in the later 20th century and has continued in the 21st, when philosophers started to move toward a broader understanding of selves. Some philosophers propose narrative and anthropological views of selves. Communitarian and feminist philosophers argue for relational views that recognise the social embeddedness, relatedness and intersectionality of selves. According to relational views, social relations and identities are fundamental to understanding who persons are.

Social identities are traits of selves in virtue of membership in communities (local, professional, ethnic, religious, political), or in virtue of social categories (such as race, gender, class, political affiliation) or interpersonal relations (such as being a spouse, sibling, parent, friend, neighbour). These views imply that it’s not only embodiment and not only memory or consciousness of social relations but the relations themselves that also matter to who the self is. What philosophers call ‘4E views’ of cognition – for embodied, embedded, enactive and extended cognition – are also a move in the direction of a more relational, less ‘container’, view of the self. Relational views signal a paradigm shift from a reductive approach to one that seeks to recognise the complexity of the self. The network self view further develops this line of thought and says that the self is relational through and through, consisting not only of social but also physical, genetic, psychological, emotional and biological relations that together form a network self. The self also changes over time, acquiring and losing traits in virtue of new social locations and relations, even as it continues as that one self.

H ow do you self-identify? You probably have many aspects to yourself and would resist being reduced to or stereotyped as any one of them. But you might still identify yourself in terms of your heritage, ethnicity, race, religion: identities that are often prominent in identity politics. You might identify yourself in terms of other social and personal relationships and characteristics – ‘I’m Mary’s sister.’ ‘I’m a music-lover.’ ‘I’m Emily’s thesis advisor.’ ‘I’m a Chicagoan.’ Or you might identify personality characteristics: ‘I’m an extrovert’; or commitments: ‘I care about the environment.’ ‘I’m honest.’ You might identify yourself comparatively: ‘I’m the tallest person in my family’; or in terms of one’s political beliefs or affiliations: ‘I’m an independent’; or temporally: ‘I’m the person who lived down the hall from you in college,’ or ‘I’m getting married next year.’ Some of these are more important than others, some are fleeting. The point is that who you are is more complex than any one of your identities. Thinking of the self as a network is a way to conceptualise this complexity and fluidity.

Let’s take a concrete example. Consider Lindsey: she is spouse, mother, novelist, English speaker, Irish Catholic, feminist, professor of philosophy, automobile driver, psychobiological organism, introverted, fearful of heights, left-handed, carrier of Huntington’s disease (HD), resident of New York City. This is not an exhaustive set, just a selection of traits or identities. Traits are related to one another to form a network of traits. Lindsey is an inclusive network, a plurality of traits related to one another. The overall character – the integrity – of a self is constituted by the unique interrelatedness of its particular relational traits, psychobiological, social, political, cultural, linguistic and physical.

Figure 1 below is based on an approach to modelling ecological networks; the nodes represent traits, and the lines are relations between traits (without specifying the kind of relation).

We notice right away the complex interrelatedness among Lindsey’s traits. We can also see that some traits seem to be clustered, that is, related more to some traits than to others. Just as a body is a highly complex, organised network of organismic and molecular systems, the self is a highly organised network. Traits of the self can organise into clusters or hubs, such as a body cluster, a family cluster, a social cluster. There might be other clusters, but keeping it to a few is sufficient to illustrate the idea. A second approximation, Figure 2 below, captures the clustering idea.

Figures 1 and 2 (both from my book , The Network Self ) are simplifications of the bodily, personal and social relations that make up the self. Traits can be closely clustered, but they also cross over and intersect with traits in other hubs or clusters. For instance, a genetic trait – ‘Huntington’s disease carrier’ (HD in figures 1 and 2) – is related to biological, family and social traits. If the carrier status is known, there are also psychological and social relations to other carriers and to familial and medical communities. Clusters or sub-networks are not isolated, or self-enclosed hubs, and might regroup as the self develops.

Sometimes her experience might be fractured, as when others take one of her identities as defining all of her

Some traits might be more dominant than others. Being a spouse might be strongly relevant to who Lindsey is, whereas being an aunt weakly relevant. Some traits might be more salient in some contexts than others. In Lindsey’s neighbourhood, being a parent might be more salient than being a philosopher, whereas at the university being a philosopher is more prominent.

Lindsey can have a holistic experience of her multifaceted, interconnected network identity. Sometimes, though, her experience might be fractured, as when others take one of her identities as defining all of her. Suppose that, in an employment context, she isn’t promoted, earns a lower salary or isn’t considered for a job because of her gender. Discrimination is when an identity – race, gender, ethnicity – becomes the way in which someone is identified by others, and therefore might experience herself as reduced or objectified. It is the inappropriate, arbitrary or unfair salience of a trait in a context.

Lindsey might feel conflict or tension between her identities. She might not want to be reduced to or stereotyped by any one identity. She might feel the need to dissimulate, suppress or conceal some identity, as well as associated feelings and beliefs. She might feel that some of these are not essential to who she really is. But even if some are less important than others, and some are strongly relevant to who she is and identifies as, they’re all still interconnected ways in which Lindsey is.

F igures 1 and 2 above represent the network self, Lindsey, at a cross-section of time, say at early to mid-adulthood. What about the changeableness and fluidity of the self? What about other stages of Lindsey’s life? Lindsey-at-age-five is not a spouse or a mother, and future stages of Lindsey might include different traits and relations too: she might divorce or change careers or undergo a gender identity transformation. The network self is also a process .

It might seem strange at first to think of yourself as a process. You might think that processes are just a series of events, and your self feels more substantial than that. Maybe you think of yourself as an entity that’s distinct from relations, that change is something that happens to an unchangeable core that is you. You’d be in good company if you do. There’s a long history in philosophy going back to Aristotle arguing for a distinction between a substance and its properties, between substance and relations, and between entities and events.

However, the idea that the self is a network and a process is more plausible than you might think. Paradigmatic substances, such as the body, are systems of networks that are in constant process even when we don’t see that at a macro level: cells are replaced, hair and nails grow, food is digested, cellular and molecular processes are ongoing as long as the body is alive. Consciousness or the stream of awareness itself is in constant flux. Psychological dispositions or attitudes might be subject to variation in expression and occurrence. They’re not fixed and invariable, even when they’re somewhat settled aspects of a self. Social traits evolve. For example, Lindsey-as-daughter develops and changes. Lindsey-as-mother is not only related to her current traits, but also to her own past, in how she experienced being a daughter. Many past experiences and relations have shaped how she is now. New beliefs and attitudes might be acquired and old ones revised. There’s constancy, too, as traits don’t all change at the same pace and maybe some don’t change at all. But the temporal spread, so to speak, of the self means that how a self as a whole is at any time is a cumulative upshot of what it’s been and how it’s projecting itself forward.

Anchoring and transformation, sameness and change: the cumulative network is both-and , not either-or

Rather than an underlying, unchanging substance that acquires and loses properties, we’re making a paradigm shift to seeing the self as a process, as a cumulative network with a changeable integrity. A cumulative network has structure and organisation, as many natural processes do, whether we think of biological developments, physical processes or social processes. Think of this constancy and structure as stages of the self overlapping with, or mapping on to, one another. For Lindsey, being a sibling overlaps from Lindsey-at-six to the death of the sibling; being a spouse overlaps from Lindsey-at-30 to the end of the marriage. Moreover, even if her sibling dies, or her marriage crumbles, sibling and spouse would still be traits of Lindsey’s history – a history that belongs to her and shapes the structure of the cumulative network.

If the self is its history, does that mean it can’t really change much? What about someone who wants to be liberated from her past, or from her present circumstances? Someone who emigrates or flees family and friends to start a new life or undergoes a radical transformation doesn’t cease to have been who they were. Indeed, experiences of conversion or transformation are of that self, the one who is converting, transforming, emigrating. Similarly, imagine the experience of regret or renunciation. You did something that you now regret, that you would never do again, that you feel was an expression of yourself when you were very different from who you are now. Still, regret makes sense only if you’re the person who in the past acted in some way. When you regret, renounce and apologise, you acknowledge your changed self as continuous with and owning your own past as the author of the act. Anchoring and transformation, continuity and liberation, sameness and change: the cumulative network is both-and , not either-or .

Transformation can happen to a self or it can be chosen. It can be positive or negative. It can be liberating or diminishing. Take a chosen transformation. Lindsey undergoes a gender transformation, and becomes Paul. Paul doesn’t cease to have been Lindsey, the self who experienced a mismatch between assigned gender and his own sense of self-identification, even though Paul might prefer his history as Lindsey to be a nonpublic dimension of himself. The cumulative network now known as Paul still retains many traits – biological, genetic, familial, social, psychological – of its prior configuration as Lindsey, and is shaped by the history of having been Lindsey. Or consider the immigrant. She doesn’t cease to be the self whose history includes having been a resident and citizen of another country.

T he network self is changeable but continuous as it maps on to a new phase of the self. Some traits become relevant in new ways. Some might cease to be relevant in the present while remaining part of the self’s history. There’s no prescribed path for the self. The self is a cumulative network because its history persists, even if there are many aspects of its history that a self disavows going forward or even if the way in which its history is relevant changes. Recognising that the self is a cumulative network allows us to account for why radical transformation is of a self and not, literally, a different self.

Now imagine a transformation that’s not chosen but that happens to someone: for example, to a parent with Alzheimer’s disease. They are still parent, citizen, spouse, former professor. They are still their history; they are still that person undergoing debilitating change. The same is true of the person who experiences dramatic physical change, someone such as the actor Christopher Reeve who had quadriplegia after an accident, or the physicist Stephen Hawking whose capacities were severely compromised by ALS (motor neuron disease). Each was still parent, citizen, spouse, actor/scientist and former athlete. The parent with dementia experiences loss of memory, and of psychological and cognitive capacities, a diminishment in a subset of her network. The person with quadriplegia or ALS experiences loss of motor capacities, a bodily diminishment. Each undoubtedly leads to alteration in social traits and depends on extensive support from others to sustain themselves as selves.

Sometimes people say that the person with dementia who doesn’t know themselves or others anymore isn’t really the same person that they were, or maybe isn’t even a person at all. This reflects an appeal to the psychological view – that persons are essentially consciousness. But seeing the self as a network takes a different view. The integrity of the self is broader than personal memory and consciousness. A diminished self might still have many of its traits, however that self’s history might be constituted in particular.

Plato, long before Freud, recognised that self-knowledge is a hard-won and provisional achievement

The poignant account ‘Still Gloria’ (2017) by the Canadian bioethicist Françoise Baylis of her mother’s Alzheimer’s reflects this perspective. When visiting her mother, Baylis helps to sustain the integrity of Gloria’s self even when Gloria can no longer do that for herself. But she’s still herself. Does that mean that self-knowledge isn’t important? Of course not. Gloria’s diminished capacities are a contraction of her self, and might be a version of what happens in some degree for an ageing self who experiences a weakening of capacities. And there’s a lesson here for any self: none of us is completely transparent to ourselves. This isn’t a new idea; even Plato, long before Freud, recognised that there were unconscious desires, and that self-knowledge is a hard-won and provisional achievement. The process of self-questioning and self-discovery is ongoing through life because we don’t have fixed and immutable identities: our identity is multiple, complex and fluid.

This means that others don’t know us perfectly either. When people try to fix someone’s identity as one particular characteristic, it can lead to misunderstanding, stereotyping, discrimination. Our currently polarised rhetoric seems to do just that – to lock people into narrow categories: ‘white’, ‘Black’, ‘Christian’, ‘Muslim’, ‘conservative’, ‘progressive’. But selves are much more complex and rich. Seeing ourselves as a network is a fertile way to understand our complexity. Perhaps it could even help break the rigid and reductive stereotyping that dominates current cultural and political discourse, and cultivate more productive communication. We might not understand ourselves or others perfectly, but we often have overlapping identities and perspectives. Rather than seeing our multiple identities as separating us from one another, we should see them as bases for communication and understanding, even if partial. Lindsey is a white woman philosopher. Her identity as a philosopher is shared with other philosophers (men, women, white, not white). At the same time, she might share an identity as a woman philosopher with other women philosophers whose experiences as philosophers have been shaped by being women. Sometimes communication is more difficult than others, as when some identities are ideologically rejected, or seem so different that communication can’t get off the ground. But the multiple identities of the network self provide a basis for the possibility of common ground.

How else might the network self contribute to practical, living concerns? One of the most important contributors to our sense of wellbeing is the sense of being in control of our own lives, of being self-directing. You might worry that the multiplicity of the network self means that it’s determined by other factors and can’t be self -determining. The thought might be that freedom and self-determination start with a clean slate, with a self that has no characteristics, social relations, preferences or capabilities that would predetermine it. But such a self would lack resources for giving itself direction. Such a being would be buffeted by external forces rather than realising its own potentialities and making its own choices. That would be randomness, not self-determination. In contrast, rather than limiting the self, the network view sees the multiple identities as resources for a self that’s actively setting its own direction and making choices for itself. Lindsey might prioritise career over parenthood for a period of time, she might commit to finishing her novel, setting philosophical work aside. Nothing prevents a network self from freely choosing a direction or forging new ones. Self-determination expresses the self. It’s rooted in self-understanding.

The network self view envisions an enriched self and multiple possibilities for self-determination, rather than prescribing a particular way that selves ought to be. That doesn’t mean that a self doesn’t have responsibilities to and for others. Some responsibilities might be inherited, though many are chosen. That’s part of the fabric of living with others. Selves are not only ‘networked’, that is, in social networks, but are themselves networks. By embracing the complexity and fluidity of selves, we come to a better understanding of who we are and how to live well with ourselves and with one another.

To read more about the self, visit Psyche , a digital magazine from Aeon that illuminates the human condition through psychology, philosophical understanding and the arts.

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You Are Not What You Think You Are — The False Self, The Ego, and The True Self

Or, to be free, free yourself from your self..

Michael Burkhardt

Ascent Publication

I traveled to more than 40 countries, meditated more than 300 hours this year, fell in love, broke up, and work on an uncertain startup business.

In all of these endeavors, I thought a lot about the self.

And how it creates suffering in our lives.

Or in other words, how we create suffering.

Pain and suffering are two completely different experiences. Pain is unavoidable. Suffering is self-created. — Noah Levine

A big realization I had during my meditation practices is that we are the creators of our life experiences. It is never the outside situation or person, which is responsible for our mental and emotional state.

It is always our way of reacting to the situation.

We choose to be angry, sad, or to be forgiving, and joyful.

Our self, our sense of I, is the conscious or unconscious dirigent of our thoughts and emotions.

The less aware we are about this, the less in control we are in our lives.

Written by Michael Burkhardt

Slow Travel | Meditation | Founding Member, CMO @Omdena

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HYPOTHESIS AND THEORY article

The true self. critique, nature, and method.

• 1 Department of Psychology and Psychotherapy, University of Witten/Herdecke, Witten, Germany
• 2 Department of Psychology, Integrated Curriculum for Anthroposophic Psychology (ICURAP), University of Witten/Herdecke, Witten, Germany
• 3 Department of Medicine, Integrated Curriculum for Anthroposophic Medicine (ICURAM), Witten/Herdecke University, Witten, Germany
• 4 Department of Medicine, Institute of Integrative Medicine, Witten/Herdecke University, Witten, Germany

The history of philosophy gives us many different accounts of a true self, connecting it to the essence of what a person is, the notion of conscience, and the ideal human being. Some proponents of the true self can also be found within psychology, but its existence is mostly rejected. Many psychological studies, however, have shown that people commonly believe in the existence of a true self. Although folk psychology often includes a belief in a true self, its existence is disputed by psychological science. Here, we consider the critique raised by Strohminger et al., stating that the true self is (1) radically subjective and (2) not observable, hence cannot be studied scientifically ( Strohminger et al., 2017 ). Upon closer investigation, the argument that the self is radically subjective is not convincing. Furthermore, rather than accepting that the true self cannot be studied scientifically, we ask: What would a science have to look like to be able to study the true self? In order to answer this question, we outline the conceptual nature of the true self, which involves phenomenological and narrative aspects in addition to psychological dimensions. These aspects together suggest a method through which this concept can be investigated from the first-person perspective. On a whole, we propose an integrative approach to understanding and investigating the true self.

Introduction

Let us start with a quote: “Many people like to think they have an inner “true” self. Most social scientists are skeptical of such notions. If the inner self is different from the way the person acts all the time, why is the inner one the “true” self?” ( Baumeister and Bushman, 2013 , p. 75). This is how the notion of a true self is introduced in a recent textbook on social science. It is suggested that there is a conflict between folk psychology and science, where the true self is a notion that does not hold up to closer scrutiny. This view has recently been reinforced by a number of studies conducted by Strohminger and Nichols (2014) and Strohminger et al. (2017) , showing that belief in a true self is indeed common while questioning its actual existence. Is the view we have of our “true self” merely a reflection of the socio-cultural environment in which we exist? And can someone have a “true self” that is good, even if they continually act in ways that are harmful?

Positing a chimera of an inherently good “true self,” existing so deeply within the structure of someone’s psyche that it may never make an appearance in reality may seem completely unwarranted. Not only does this put the true self beyond scientific observation, it also makes it seem like a hopelessly optimistic dream. Hence, although it is empirically clear that people make use of the concept of a true self – in the sense of that which cannot change without someone becoming less of what they really are – there are weighty reasons to doubt whether the true self exists beyond the widespread belief in it. Since this belief is so common, could it be that it is in fact grounded in reality?

This is the question that we will explore in the following, outlining not only a suggestion for what the structure of the true self might be but also sketching out a method for investigating it. In doing this, we will also provide counter-arguments to the critique of the aforementioned true self. In our view, the true self can be viewed as having a kind of spiritual existence. It can appear in time but also exists beyond time. It may even be absent at different moments in time without ceasing to exist. Complete absence of the true self would, however, make it impossible to investigate. We take it that we are dealing with an essence of the Hegelian kind, i.e. an essence, the essence of which is to appear (and indeed, can there be an essence that never appears?). In other words, the true self cannot be so chimeric as to never enter the stage of actual life. However, such an object of study cannot be investigated adequately using conventional philosophical or psychological methods alone. We propose that the true self may be approached through a first-person method combining both philosophical reflection and introspective observation, as we will outline in section “Outline of a Comprehensive First-Person Method for Studying the True Self.” Before introducing this method, we will look into the history and nature of the self and the true self in philosophy and psychology (section “Introduction”). This will follow with a response to critiques of the true self (section “The Problem of Radical Subjectivity and Observability of the True Self”).

A Short Historical Account of the Self and the True Self

The self, one of the most central as well as critically discussed concepts in philosophy and psychology, has a long history. The idea that one has an underlying self in addition to a surface personality can be traced back to the notion that one has a soul that is potentially immortal. In the Egyptian culture, only the Pharaoh possessed an immortal, divine soul (akh) while alive. Only at the moment of death could other Egyptians gain such a soul ( Waage, 2008 ). In Ancient Greek culture, Socrates was known for having heard an inner voice that indicated to him what he should ( Memorabilia 1.1.4, 4.3.12, 4.8.1, Apology 12) and should not do ( Apology 31c-d, 40a-b, Euthydemus 272e-273a). This was part of what lead to his demise, as he was accused of following other gods. The inner voice was a daimonion , a divine being (particular) to Socrates and not one of the gods condoned by the Athenian city-state. Such a private divine being is now commonly understood to refer to conscience in the Christian tradition ( Schinkel, 2007 , p. 97), which is connected to the moral essence – the true self – of an individual. The idea of a person’s moral essence was developed further in Greek thought. For example, it was connected to the performance of specific virtues by Aristotle. Aristotle also suggested that “the true self of each” is the divine intellect or nous (NE, 1178, a2).

However, when answering the question “who are you?”, it was for a long time customary to name one’s ancestors. In ancient Rome, the firstborn son was the property of the pater familias until the death of the father. During the funeral procession, the son wore the father’s death mask ( Salemonsen, 2005 ). It may be noted that the word “mask” ( lat. persona) is related to the word “person,” suggesting that we can take on different identities but also that there is an underlying essence. Augustus is known for writing the first autobiography, inaugurating a genre defined by the idea that certain events and thoughts are more important than others when seeking to understand who someone is. Arguably, the Judeo-Christian religions also contributed to the view that all human beings have a divine core, regardless of background: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). In the Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola emphasized the notion of agency in his “Oration on human dignity”, making God exclaim that it is a matter of will whether the human being shall become animal or divine, mortal or immortal:

I have placed you at the very center of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine ( della Mirandola, 1996 , p. 7).

For Kant, the self is that which provides transcendental unity to our thoughts and perceptions, in short, to all our experiences ( Kant, 1904 ). Although the self cannot be known as it is in itself, in Kantian ethics, the individual is fully autonomous, free, when it acts according to rational principles ( Kant, 1968 ). The individual manifests the kingdom of heaven on earth to the extent that ethical principles are adhered to as if they were natural laws. As a reaction to this, some philosophers, such as Sartre, point out that this view disregards the communal and social aspects of the self as well as its individuality and authenticity ( Sartre, 2014 ). Rejecting Sartre’s notion of authenticity, Foucault denied that there is any self that is given to us; claiming that we should rather view the self as a work of art:

I think that from the theoretical point of view, Sartre avoids the idea of the self as something that is given to us, but through the moral notion of authenticity, he turns back to the idea that we have to be ourselves – to be truly our true self. I think that the only acceptable practical consequence of what Sartre has said is to link his theoretical insight to the practice of creativity – and not that of authenticity. From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art ( Focault, 1997 , p. 262).

Foucault points out that Sartre’s notion of authenticity reintroduces a given measure for someone’s true self. Foucault thinks we should be more radical in our rejection of any given content or measure of what constitutes the true self. Any such content or measure we must create ourselves. One may remark that even creative acts contain an element of or at least relate to something given, for example an inspiration or a framework of understanding. The idea of creating a self does not need to be thought of as a pure/arbitrary invention of something incomprehensible. Creative acts may be understood instead as the encounter between something given and subjective energy. In part, the subject identifies with the given, subjects itself to it, and in part, the subject recognizes the given as itself.

If we pause and summarize here, we can see that there is a whole host of ideas connected to the self in the Western canon (for a discussion of self, no-self and true self accounts in Asian traditions, see Siderits et al., 2010 ):

1. The self is a kind of essence, substance, or a soul that may or may not survive death

2. The self is the voice of conscience, the source of moral or authentic action

3. The self is divine, possibly created by God

4. The self is related to the past, to ancestry, and outward identity such as one’s work

5. The self has a story connected to it that can be represented in a biography

6. The self provides unity to cognition and experience

7. The self is a free, autonomous agent

8. The self is essentially connected to other human beings and culture

9. The self has to be created

As we can see from this short and non-exhaustive list, the self is complex and may be conceived in conflicting ways. For example: Is the self-created by God or the individual? Is the self completely autonomous or is it thoroughly culturally determined? Is the self an essence or is it a story? None of these are necessarily contradictory, but much work is required to flesh out a comprehensive conception of the self. Do all these characteristics have something in common? This question is not easy to answer. If we cannot find a common characteristic in all the different definitions, we may have to concede that the self is simply a name for a host of unrelated ideas or aspects of human existence. On a closer look, each item on the list can potentially be said to be the true self. Even one’s outward identity could arguably be seen to constitute a true self. Imagine a puer aeternus , a Peter Pan-like existence: someone who is reluctant about identifying with anything at all, preferring to stay adolescent indefinitely. For such a person, actually identifying with something could be said to be a realization of their true self (their true self would not necessarily be the specific outward identity but could be manifested by taking on a concrete and not fantastical identity). There is one way of conceiving what the nature of the true self is, which we will elaborate in the following, that does not imply that we have to make a choice about which specific self represents the true one. This is the conception of the true self as a whole that unifies the different selves. Moreover, the true self can not only be viewed as a whole but also as the manifestation of a specific moral self that has grown out of the past. The true self, on this conception, has both distanced itself from the past and integrated it, moving toward an ideal that is in one sense given, internally and from the past, but in another sense must also be created, or is only just coming into existence from the future.

The True Self in Philosophy and Psychology

Although the existence of the self is controversial in philosophy ( Metzinger, 2003 ; Siderits et al., 2010 ; Ganeri, 2012 ), there are a number of influential philosophers who claim that there at least a minimal or core self exists. Such a view can be found both among traditional thinkers, such as Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, etc., and contemporary ones ( MacIntyre, 1981 ; Taylor, 2012 ; Zahavi, 2017 ). Charles Taylor has specifically addressed the notion of a true self in the context of a discussion of negative and positive freedom ( Taylor, 1985 ; Sparby, 2014 ). Negative freedom is the idea that one can realize one’s true self insofar as there are no external restrictions on the self (and perhaps no internal restrictions such as fear). But where does the understanding of what actually counts as being the true self come from? If it comes, for instance, from a totalitarian state, then the “true self” may indeed be a false self since someone other than the self determines it. Hence it would follow that actualizing a true self is typically seen to include self-determination. It could of course be that content of a state prescribed true self accords by coincidence with the true self recognized by a person. This would not stop the person from actualizing the true self as long as the recognition is internally constituted through reflection and moral deliberation. However, if someone can determine themselves radically, does this not mean that the content of the true self is arbitrary? We believe that such problems can be solved with ideas as such “being-with-oneself in otherness” ( Sparby, 2016 ). For example, acting according to one’s true self does not exclude acting according to principles as long as these principles are recognized as stemming from the true self. Finding one’s true self may involve finding oneself in another person, community, culture, etc. This does not mean that the true self is simply something given. Even creative processes can involve something approaching the self “from the outside”, such as an inspiration. Again, the true self can be viewed as a whole, as something transcending the subject-object dichotomy, allowing for such events where something comes to the self seemingly from an external source (e.g. the voice of conscience), a source which is, however, more adequately conceived of as belonging to the self in a deeper, higher or more inclusive sense. It is of course possible that the voice of conscience might be an expression of an internalized dogmatic morality. However, this does not make it unreliable in principle. It means that what it dictates has to be viewed in light of an investigation of what its source might be, considering cultural factors specifically.

Is a person always acting in accordance with their true self if they act according to their self? The problem here is that the self is not only multifaceted but also contradictory given that different aspects are in conflict with each other. For example, the human being can act out of principle or according to their desires. Both may be viewed or at least experienced as essential parts of one’s identity, although these parts do not always harmonize. If one acts according to one’s desire, another desire may not be fulfilled. If one acts morally, desires may fail to be satisfied at all. If one acts in a case where there is a moral dilemma, the true self seems to be constituted by that act. But what if I act based on wrong information, inherited cultural views, or delusion? Indeed, as we shall see, one of the main critiques of the true self is its radical subjectivity. The beliefs and actions that we ascribe to the true self depend on our worldview that is ultimately a reflection of the culture we belong to.

The field of psychology has contributed to our understanding of the self by gathering empirical support for the view that we are indeed ruled by external forces, such as unconscious desires, bias, and social conditioning. It has been shown that the experience of living a meaningful life is associated with having cognitive access to one’s true self, and yet psychological research remains either skeptical or agnostic about the existence of it ( Schlegel et al., 2013 ) despite the belief in a true self seems to be independent of personality type and culture ( De Freitas et al., 2018 ). However, one can indeed find representatives of notions of a true self also in psychology. The true self is sometimes referred to as the I-self or self-as-process as opposed to the me-self or self-as-object ( Ryan and Rigby, 2015 ). The former “concerns the conceptions, images, roles, statuses, and attributes associated with an identity,” while the latter “concerns the inherent integrative tendencies of people to understand, grow, and create coherence in their experiences” ( Ryan and Rigby, 2015 , p. 246). The psychoanalyst Winnicott made explicit use of the concept of a true self, contrasting it with the false self ( Winnicott, 1965 ). His view of the true self can be summarized as the self that is spontaneous, alive, and creative – the false self would then be a persona that lacks those characteristics ( Rubin, 1998 , p. 102). Numerous other terms are used for the true self such as the real self, the ideal self, the authentic self, the intrinsic self, the essential self, and the deep self [see overview of sources in Strohminger et al. (2017) ]. Strohminger et al. have shown that people on average understand moral traits to be most fundamental to a person in addition to personality, memories, and desires, while characteristics related to perceptual abilities (e.g. near-sightedness) and psychical traits are perceived as having the least impact on who someone essentially is ( Strohminger and Nichols, 2014 ). The essential differences between the self and the true self according to Strohminger et al. are that the self (1) encompasses the entire range of personal features, (2) is valence independent (it is inherently neither good nor bad) but (3) is perspective (first- or third-person) dependent, and (4) is cross-culturally variable, while the true self has an emphasis on (1) moral features, is (2) valence-dependent or positive by default, (3) perspective independent, and (4) cross-culturally stable ( Strohminger et al., 2017 , p. 3).

Strohminger et al. have also provided a particularly powerful formulation of the argument against the true self, which is quoted in full since it is the critique used as the background to our suggestion of what the nature of the true self is and how it can be studied:

Is the true self also a scientific concept, one that can be used to describe how the mind actually works? Is there, in other words, a true self? The evidence reviewed here points to two properties relevant to this question. One: the true self depends on the values of the observer. If someone thinks homosexual urges are wrong, she will say the desire to resist such urges represents the true self ( Newman et al., 2014 ). And if she scores high in psychopathy, she will assign less weight to moral features in her conceptualization of personal identity ( Strohminger and Nichols, 2014 ). What counts as part of the true self is subjective, and strongly tied to what each individual person herself most prizes.

Two: The true self is, shall we say, evidence-insensitive. Resplendent as the true self is, it is also a bashful thing. Yet people have little trouble imbuing it with a host of hidden properties. Indeed, claims made on its behalf may completely contradict all available data, as when the hopelessly miserable and knavish are nonetheless deemed good “deep down”. The true self is posited rather than observed. It is a hopeful phantasm.

These two features—radical subjectivity and unverifiability—prevent the true self from being a scientific concept. The notion that there are especially authentic parts of the self, and that these parts can remain cloaked from view indefinitely, borders on the superstitious. This is not to say that lay belief in a true self is dysfunctional. Perhaps it is a useful fiction, akin to certain phenomena in religious cognition and decision-making ( Gigerenzer and Todd, 1999 ; Boyer, 2001 ). But, in our view, it is a fiction nonetheless ( Strohminger et al., 2017 , p. 7).

To reiterate, the problem facing the true self-view is that it is a conception tied to the values of a person, which are determined subjectively according to the structure of their personality, and by the culture and social environment in which that person exists. What the authors mean by “radical subjectivity” is, however, not clear. Does it mean that the values that a person uses to measure whether they live up to their true self are arbitrary, that the true self is based on a radical existential choice not grounded in anything, or that it is determined by biological, cultural, or social factors that happen to affect the person? These are issues that need to be untangled and answered. Furthermore, a good response is needed when arguing that the true self is not observable and therefore fictional. In particular, does it make sense to speak of a true self if that self never manifests? Can a person be called inherently good if they commit heinous crimes and consistently act in ways that are harmful to others, taking pleasure in their suffering?

In order to argue in favor of the existence of the true self, one must address the critique that it is a radically subjective notion and that it is unverifiable. Since we take the view that the self is not a thing with clearly defined borders but rather an organizing principle of a continual process, speaking of “the existence” of a true self can be misleading. Nevertheless, one may claim that there is such an organizing principle and that the true self is neither radically subjective nor unverifiable. Before turning to that, we will provide a preliminary delineation of the true self that we will flesh out as we address the critique above.

A Thin and Thick Conception of the True Self and Their Unity

Two conceptions of the true self are implicit in what has been said above, which we will refer to as the thin and thick conception of the true self. One way to characterize them is to say that the thin conception is static: unchangeable, timeless, always the same. The thick conception is dynamic: developing, spread out over long changes of time, and continually emerging. The current objective in the following is to unite these two conceptions (in fact, to show how they are interdependent) and to investigate how such an account may be able to respond to the critique raised against the true self that we will focus on in section “The Problem of Radical Subjectivity and Observability of the True Self”.

The thin conception of the true self is the idea that the self has a deeper and more essential nature; the true self is identical to this essential part of the self. Some of the properties attached to the self are accidental while others are essential. Someone can change their job and although they may have identified with their job, they do not really cease to be who they truly are when they change jobs. The true self as the essential self can consist of either one essential property or a set of properties. Sometimes, this is also referred to as the minimal self, which can be defined as the simple quality of subjective experience; the most fundamental experience of what it is like to be this or that subject ( Zahavi, 2017 ). However, as pointed out by Fasching, the essential self’s nature may be exactly a bare existence ; not recognizable by any property. It simply is and we know it as something that can identify itself with potentially anything but can never be reduced to any specific property ( Fasching, 2016 ). A similar view is presented by Ramm, who, using first-person experiments, argues that the self in itself both lacks sensory qualities and is single ( Ramm, 2017 ).

If we conceive of the true self along these lines, the result would be rather indeterminate. There would be nothing more to it than what is common to all other selves: a simple and unique existence potentially aware of itself as such. Any identification of the self with a particular property, such as being a human, acting morally, or having been born in a certain place, would be fully irrelevant to the true self. But this seems wrong – or at least too indeterminate. Not only would it be at odds with typical conceptions of the true self, it would also conceptualize the true self in the form of a ghost with no bearing on its environment. This leads us to the thick conception of the true self [compare Galen Strawson’s conception of the self, which differentiates between the self as a distinct mental entity and a subject of experience and the self as an agent, personality and diachronic continuity ( Strawson, 1997 )]. The thick conception of the true self connects it to certain substantial and moral properties such as being able to form memories or making an existential choice. Hence the thick conception where the true self consists of more determinate characteristics than bare existence is in accordance with how the true self is typically conceived in folk psychology. Is there a specific property or set of properties the self can identify with to become a true self or at least a “truer” self? Can one make a choice or live in a way that does not represent the ideal version of that individual? This certainly seems to be the case. But what is the measure according to which an act or a way of life can be judged as being in accordance with one’s true self? Who or what decides what counts as a proper measure? What is it based on? Where does the true self come from? It will later be discussed how the true self is essentially related to both the past and the future. It will also be suggested that a certain conception of the true self can unite both the thin and thick version of it. Before turning to that, however, we turn to some discussions surrounding the true self in philosophy and psychology.

The Problem of Radical Subjectivity and Observability of the True Self

Here we will consider the two problems connected to the idea of the true self as identified by Nichols et al. above.

Radical Subjectivity

As we have seen, the problem of radical subjectivity relates to the notion that how someone conceives of their true self is dependent on what values they have. As we have stated earlier, there are more ways of interpreting what the claim that the true self is “radically subjective” means. It can mean that the true self is based on: (1) something completely arbitrary, (2) an ungrounded existential choice or (3) external factors, such as culture and biology. Although Strohminger et al. do not state explicitly which interpretation they have in mind, we think, based on the examples they give (sexual preference and psychopathy), that the third option is more likely. A person’s sexual preference is rarely considered to be a choice but is rather understood to be based on biology and culture; psychopathy is hardly conceivable as a choice, but, again, is widely believed to be contingent upon biological, cultural or other environmental factors.

This, however, may seem surprising: Does not “radical subjectivity” mean something that involves arbitrariness or some form of creative or spontaneous choice? Since Strohminger et al. speak of the “radical subjectivity” of the true self as tied to what someone prizes or values, there might be some merit to the interpretation of it as being indeterminate in some way (not based on factors external to the self). But then again, the examples they mention point in another direction. So is the critique of the “true self” as radically subjective based on (1) the idea that it is radically arbitrary, random or contingent (what someone happens to value) or (2) the idea that the external factors that a person has happened to be exposed to due to the geographical location of their life and their inheritance has determined what they value?

It is highly unlikely that someone would hold the view that what someone values is completely arbitrary, based on something akin to the random result of throwing dice. For example, we value food because of biological needs, friendship because of social needs, and certain ideas because we find them enlightening. However, when we are presented with a moral choice or dilemma or when we are challenged with coming up with a plan for our next steps in life, our choice might seem subjective in the sense that it is creative or ultimately relies on a decision. But if it is creative, this does not mean that it is arbitrary – as we argued above in relation to Foucault. And if it is ultimately based on a decision, this does not mean that we do not have good reasons for acting the way we do, although we might have reasons to act in other ways as well. So the choice itself might be spontaneous, but that does not mean that it is arbitrary in the sense of not being grounded in reasons. And insofar as it is not clear to us what reasons are the best when considering a moral dilemma or committing to a life path, we could regard the choice as creative – but again, such creativity does not have to be arbitrary. What we are left with is the notion that someone’s idea of their true self is radically subjective because it is based on what they happen to value, which in turn is based on the features of their personality. We will consider this in more depth.

Depending on one’s sexual preference or whether one has a personality disorder such as psychopathy, one may conceive of the core of one’s personality differently. This boils down to a claim there are a variety of different conceptions of the self and that therefore how someone defines their true self is subjective. Such a view, however, fails to consider the possibility that one may be right or wrong about their true self. If there were a true self, it would indeed be possible to make such mistakes. We cannot take it for granted that there is no true self based simply on the fact that people value things differently and conceive of their true nature accordingly. Even if I value money and claim that I am affluent, I would be mistaken about this claim if I have no money. Even though people value things differently, and the specific values someone has influence how they conceive of their essential nature, it does not follow that one’s true self is merely an extension of what one happens to value.

However, it is still a significant point that one’s conception of oneself tends to co-vary with one’s cultural background. Could it not be the case that someone’s true self harmonizes with what a specific culture dictates, while someone else in that culture could have a completely different true self; one that runs counter to the common views and values? How would someone know if they were mistaken, i.e. simply influenced by their culture, when it comes to viewing what their true identity is? The true self may indeed be fully individual. How does one uncover it? Perhaps, this is possible exactly by making mistakes or taking on or trying out identities that are not in accordance with one’s true nature.

It seems strange or even wrong to say that by changing one’s identity or taking on a different role, one suddenly lives according to one’s true self. This indeed identifies the true self with the me-self – the true self would be a specific role, identity, job, etc. – which seems counterintuitive; should the true self not be a deep self, the self-as-process? If I change my identity and consider the new identity my true self, it implies that the former identity was a false self. But was it not the case that one aspect of the true self is exactly an underlying identity, one that cannot change simply by changing from one’s surface identity to another? Without such an underlying identity it would not make sense to say that the former identity was a false self, because there is nothing to connect the two identities.

Indeed, the true self may be conceived of as that which unifies different conceptions of the more concrete selves (the me-selves) through a narrative ( Polkinghorne, 1991 ; Gallagher, 2000 ; Schechtman, 2011 ), where the variations and mistakes are not necessarily plain errors, but rather essential parts of the process. By manifesting a unity within the different conceptions of the me-self, the true self is also manifested. This manifestation is not necessarily tied to a specific identify, a me-self, being right or wrong, true or false. The measure of the degree of manifestation is the degree of unity created by the processual self-conception. Since the self is also influenced and potentially challenged by different cultures, ethical norms, and worldviews, the unity increases to the extent the different cultures are encompassed, i.e. to the extent that difference is recognized and integrated in the true self.

This capacity of unity may manifest in different ways for different aspects of the true self. Take for example the ethical self, which as pointed out previously, is considered by many to be the true self. Even if one considers the true self to be the ethical self, it does not follow that the true self is radically subjective. What I value may be dependent on a whole range of factors, but that does not mean that the values cannot be judged objectively. There is a long tradition of discussion surrounding the question of whether ethics is objective. However, since there is no consensus on this issue, one cannot say with confidence that values are subjective. Does this mean that the true self is identical to a specific moral set of beliefs? Here, it is helpful to differentiate between different potential layers of the true (ethical) self: (1) the capacity of moral deliberation and action, (2) specific moral views, (3) individual moral or existential choices. At the most fundamental level, a moral self does not consist of a specific set of moral principles and beliefs, but rather of the capacity of ethics, i.e. the capacity of ethical deliberation. Even if one is mistaken about a specific ethical act, the capacity to deliberate offers continuity to the true self. Recognizing that a previous act is wrong is inherently a deepening of the capacity of morality. However, certain acts do not necessarily involve a universal ethical requirement; ethical individualism allows for certain acts being ethical measured only according to the individual ( Hegge, 1988 ). Depending on talent and interest for example might be right for one person to pursue a life as an artist, while wrong for someone else. Furthermore, there may be both general and individual patterns of ethical development that needs to be taken into account. The unity of such patterns, the connection between good and bad actions, failure and success – like the inner coherence of a drama – would be what the true self is.

Evidence-Insensitivity

Let us look at the argument against observability again:

The true self is, shall we say, evidence-insensitive. Resplendent as the true self is, it is also a bashful thing. Yet people have little trouble imbuing it with a host of hidden properties. Indeed, claims made on its behalf may completely contradict all available data, as when the hopelessly miserable and knavish are nonetheless deemed good ‘deep down’. The true self is posited rather than observed. It is a hopeful phantasm. […] The notion that there are especially authentic parts of the self, and that these parts can remain cloaked from view indefinitely, borders on the superstitious ( Strohminger et al., 2017 ).

There are two related but not identical claims that seem to be inherent in this argument: One is that the true self is in principle unobservable and hence it is an unscientific (superstitious) concept. The other is that what the true self cannot be revised based on evidence, removing it from the domain of science. Both claims will be addressed in the following.

The fact that some properties may be hidden does not in and of itself make the object connected to those properties in principle unavailable to science. Indeed, scientific activity consists of making what is hidden visible, for instance through inventions such as the microscope. However, basing the argument on a contrast hidden/visible implicitly limits the range of inquiry to what we can and cannot see , which is unwarranted. Some phenomena, specifically those that unfold in time, are indeed constitutively dependent on some related properties being unavailable (“hidden”) as the phenomenon manifests . When a phenomenon manifests, something in the previous stage must be removed for a new stage to replace it. In other words, for something to manifest, something that once was, now has to be “hidden.” For someone to say “the true self is not observable,” for example, requires the word “the” to not appear (sound) when “true” is said. In fact, all other words must be “hidden” as well. What is consistent throughout the sentence is the invoked meaning. The meaning is partially invoked by each word and only fully invoked by the whole sentence (which cannot be present as a single instance in time, though perhaps as the retained meaning, something that includes the words and their sequence in a kind of concrete universal, i.e., a concept that is a whole containing its parts in it). Studying time-phenomena such as the self hence requires different methods than those that try to find and measure it at a specific moment in time. The latter approach may find it but only parts of it. Only a narrative that takes the whole into account can be an adequate method for studying the diachronic aspects of the self.

The claim that someone is “good deep down” despite all the evidence to the contrary is harder to counter. A “good” friend who never supports their friends is not a true friend. But is there any point at which someone loses the capacity for acting morally or being a good friend? Losing this capacity would also imply a loss of agency and the eligibility to be blamed. The self would be gone or at least not manifest in a basic sense. How could someone therefore provide evidence that the capacity really is absent? If someone always acted in a morally blameworthy way, what we could say, scientifically, i.e. based on observation, is that this person’s true self is evil. However, a single good action would disprove that we have identified an essence. And a case of a person who consistently acts in a morally reprehensible way is hard to conceive. Is it someone who always acts so as to inflict the most pain possible? Is it someone not capable of any form of co-operation? Such a person would seem more like a machine than a human being. Even if we could conceive of such a person, we see no reason to reject the metaphysical possibility that such a person may change their ways. Maybe it would be possible to argue for the existence of evil true selves. Such an argument could very well be interesting but we suggest that for most persons it is possible to discover at least small acts of kindness, which would go to show the presence of a capacity for good. People who have indeed acted in reprehensible or in problematic ways and have changed provide a special area of study in relation to the true self. We take it for granted that such individuals exist. People who go through fundamental change toward good show that simple forms of observation and measurements at specific points in time are not adequate for studying the true self. An approach rather is required that takes long stretches of time into account. Given that there is a capacity for good or at least basic agency, a view that does not take this into account would be less truthful, i.e., less scientific, than a view that does take this into account.

It is still problematic that just as one can always correctly posit the capacity for good, one can also posit the capacity for evil. What is actually representative of one’s true self then would seem to depend on what tendency manifests the most. For this reason, it seems appropriate to have a more abstract conception of the true self, i.e., as something that provides unity to life, and considers the relationship between good and bad acts. Actual human beings will probably never be so bad as to exclusively manifest evil actions and probably never be so good as to never do anything blameworthy. Considering what is good and bad, in the long run, requires historical perspectives. The scientific view is therefore also a view that is continually evolving with time.

One further objection to Strohminger et al. is that reliable methods already exist that objectively measure issues relating to the true self. For example, the ease with which people describe their true self is correlated with life meaning ( Schlegel et al., 2009 ). However, such studies only assess the belief people have about the true self – not its existence. Strohminger et al.’s point is that the belief in the true self is evidence-insensitive in the sense that people are in principle unwilling to revise their view about what they believe their own or someone else’s true self to be. The belief can only be confirmed, not rejected; hence, the true self is a non-scientific concept.

Another response to Strohimger et al.’s skepticism would follow a similar line of argument as Zahavi’s response to Metzinger’s claim that the self is an illusion or a model created by the brain. Zahavi’s response is that the sense of self can be understood to constitute the self, or, in other words, the existence of the self is nothing above and beyond the phenomenal experience of the self ( Zahavi, 2005a ). We would argue similarly in relation to the true self when faced with reductive arguments. The sense that people have of the existence of a true self can indeed be taken as constitutive of the true self. However, we wish to extend the concept of the true self to include specific life moments or developmental trajectories that manifest the true self, i.e., situations or ways of acting where the true self is not just a sense, but rather something that comes into existence. One could formulate this as an actualization of the potential true self. As we will outline in the next section, the sense of the true self extends not only into the past but also into the future. The existence of the true self in this way transcends time, although it can also appear or manifest for instance during significant life events – such as during Socrates’ trial – where one’s moral character is put to the test.

Outline of a Comprehensive First-Person Method for Studying the True Self

Understanding the true self as an activity in evolution and a process in metamorphosis involves conceptualizing it in a format that is most likely difficult to be nailed down with conventional, outwardly observable research methods. It is per se a first-person phenomenon and hence also requires a first-person mode of enquiry, although it also potentially involves behavioral aspects. It may manifest in a specific behavioral and even biological instantiation. This is however only the outer signature or correlate of the qualia of the phenomenon. This signature can be studied with conventional (e.g., behavioral or even physiological) research methods; the true self in actu as a first-person phenomenon, however, cannot be studied in this way. It can only indirectly be inferred from this signature mode of appearance. The approach outlined below can be seen as an extension of first-person approaches to the self that focus on its minimal, synchronous experience as presented by Ramm ( 2017 ), who involves for example directing attention to the point from which one looks at the world and investigating this point phenomenologically. The investigation reveals that this point has no visual features, but rather is transparent, single, etc. Through further experiments, one is lead to an experience of a minimal synchronic subject. The focus here is on diachronic aspects of the self, which are essential to study in order to develop a thick account of the self.

One can suspect that the true self can be grasped more by what it can become (causa finalis) rather than by what it has become (causa efficiens). This has further implications for the way it is studied. As an analogy, take the example of climate change. A small minority of people (mostly climatologists) made the earliest indications while researching subtle and even ambiguous symptoms of complex weather phenomena. For them to persist in their claim and stick to their account, they needed a good sense of trust in their reading and interpretation of the data and early indications. Moreover, they needed a vision of a future that might unfold if things continue in the manner they have developed so far. This was highly unusual and anachronistic at a time where climate change was still outside the conventional thinking style.

In a sense, the challenge that we see in this admittedly far-fetched example is somewhat related to the case of researching the true self. We need to investigate subtle and elusive symptoms to begin with and envision how this true self might unfold if given a chance to manifest and materialize within the constellation of potentials and situational factors with which the individual is endowed. Firmness is needed in envisioning the potentiality of this true self and a sense of trust that it can metamorphose from potential to reality. The moment it manifests as a reality in which to be studied in one way or another will have already crystallized into a given form to be considered a product rather than a process in actu . This would be an indication of a sub-component of the true self, not the true self proper.

The method we outline below is an extension of first-person approaches we have developed elsewhere, consisting of small groups of researchers investigating their experience through a series of meetings, note taking, comparison of results and repeated refinement of the experimental tasks that are carried out by the researchers themselves ( Weger and Wagemann, 2015 ; Hackert et al., 2019 ). For more depth and precision of experiences involved in the descriptions of the events and tasks described below, micro-phenomenological interviews ( Petitmengin, 2006 ) or self-inquiry can be employed.

We propose that a first-person method for studying the true self would include five steps:

1. The first step is developing a conceptual understanding of different possible accounts of what the true self might be. This involves envisioning possible worlds and future realities. Can a sense of one’s true self be evoked through considering scenarios closer or further away from one’s current life and identity? The sphere of the true self is not necessarily only that which is already instantiated but that which is still to come into existence. Without such conceptual guides, we are likely to miss the more subtle traces of the true self as mere background noise.

2. The second step is to consider significant life events (e.g., decisions, moral choices, challenging situations, illnesses, accidents, etc.) where one has the sense of either living up to or failing to live up to one’s true self. Are there common markers of managing and failing to act in accordance with one’s true self? What does the exploration of the sense of living in accordance with the true self reveal about the possible nature of one’s own true self?

3. The third step is to consider the experience of the true self in the present moment. Which of my current properties and identities (gender, job, hair color, nationality, interests, philosophical outlook, etc.) relate to my true self? By employing a version of eidetic variation ( Giorgi, 2009 ), one can change any or all of these identities to see what can possibly be changed before the sense of who one is changes fundamentally. Furthermore, experiments such as described by Ramm ( 2017 ) can be employed to access the basic aspects of the synchronic subject. Is the sense of this subject similar to the sense of the true self one has developed to the present day? Additionally, different meditative techniques can be employed in order to heighten the awareness of the minimal self, for example by directing attention away from the awareness of specific thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, the sense of self, and channeling them toward an awareness of awareness itself. To what extent is the true self connected to the minimal self and pure awareness and to what is it connected to specific properties of the actual/personal self? Can the true self be understood as integrating the minimal and personal self?

4. The fourth step is observing instances during the course of several weeks where one feels more vs. less at one with oneself. How do the instances where one feels more at one with oneself differ from those in which one feels less like oneself? How do such moments relate to the significant life events connected to the true self that were explored in step two?

5. The fifth step is “trusting” the true self into becoming – or one could also say: acting it out. This acting out has both a productive and a receptive side. The unfolding of the activity and getting to know it from inside inherently involve participating in its activity as well as cultivating a sense of receptivity for the inner echo that this activity produces. This fifth step is perhaps the most unusual form of scientific enquiry. This is a reminder that any form of research ultimately strives toward insight and the capacity for action (e.g., in the form of reproducing an effect that nature has created in a scientific physicochemical experiment).

Each step also involves checking one’s understanding of the true self that was developed in the first step. Do any of the further steps lead to a deepening or change of one’s initial conception of the true self? As such, this method involves both philosophical aspects as well as first-person experiments and first-person data gathered from memory. One could refer to such a method as “comprehensive” in that it involves investigating large developmental trajectories, present moment experiences, as well as how they relate to each other. It draws on different first-person methodologies that seem to be adequate for investigating the true self in the way we have presented in the previous sections. It may be noted that the method itself not necessarily presupposes any specific conception of the true self. It is therefore part of the method to reflect continually on what the true self means conceptually. Though the nature of the true self that we have suggested served as a guideline for developing the steps of the method outlined above, it may be that the actual first-person investigations of the true self following this method outlined here will lead to refinements both of the method as well as the account of the true self that we have argued for.

The basic function of the self is unity. It connects events in time and space into a single continuum of experience. To the extent that this unity is manifested, the true self is manifested. This can happen on different levels: (1) the core self – extending the continuity of the subjective sense of being – linking together orientation in space, time, and situation, and (2) the narrative self – creating unity throughout live events. Though we can say that there cannot be a narrative self without a core self, the converse is also true: The core self cannot actually exist – be aware of itself as a unity – without different moments in time being united within a time-structure. Hence, Zahavi is wrong, in part, in stating that:

[…]…it takes a self to experience one’s life as a story. In order to begin a self-narrative, the narrator must be able to differentiate between self and non-self, must be able to self-attribute actions and experience agency, and must be able to refer to him- or herself by means of the first-person pronoun. All of this presupposes that the narrator is in possession of a first-person perspective ( Zahavi, 2005b , p. 114).

Though this is half right, one can also say the opposite: There is no self without a minimal story, a beginning, middle, and end unfolding in time and united across time. However, it is also true that there needs to be an underlying self (unity) to the story. If no time has passed, it cannot be decided whether the self is indeed a self and hence the story/narrative and the minimal, phenomenological self are co-constitutive. In other words, the narrative and core self are co-constitutive and therefore inseparable. Although the latter may become ever more specified and deepened, this cannot happen without the core self. However, as the narrative self becomes more concrete in its various differentiations, the core self expands while not losing any of its being: It is that which is capable of being manifested as all the different concrete identities while not being fully identified with any single one of them. This self, a true self, can potentially be investigated following the methodical approach outlined above.

Author Contributions

TS has written most of the manuscript. FE has taken part in conceptual development of the manuscript and commented on it. UW has taken part in the conceptual development of the manuscript, commented on it, and written parts of it.

This study received funding from the Software AG Stiftung. The funder was not involved in the study design, collection, analysis, interpretation of data, the writing of this article, or the decision to submit it for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Keywords: the true self, the self, first-person methods, consciousness, phenomenology

Citation: Sparby T, Edelhäuser F and Weger UW (2019) The True Self. Critique, Nature, and Method. Front. Psychol . 10:2250. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02250

Received: 13 May 2019; Accepted: 19 September 2019; Published: 22 October 2019.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2019 Sparby, Edelhäuser and Weger. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Terje Sparby, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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The True and the False Self

One of the most surprising but powerful explanations for why we may, as adults, be in trouble mentally is that we were, in our earliest years, denied the opportunity to be fully ourselves, that is, we were not allowed to be wilful and difficult, we could not be as demanding, aggressive, intolerant, and unrestrictedly selfish as we needed to be. Because our caregivers were preoccupied or fragile, we had to be preternaturally attuned to their demands, sensing that we had to comply in order to be loved and tolerated; we had to be false before we had the chance to feel properly alive. And as a result, many years later, without quite understanding the process, we risk feeling unanchored, inwardly dead and somehow not entirely present.

This psychological theory of the True and the False Self is the work of one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers, the English psychoanalyst and child psychiatrist Donald Winnicott. In a series of papers written in the 1960s and based on close observations of his adult and infant patients, Winnicott advanced the view that healthy development invariably requires us to experience the immense, life-sustaining luxury of a period when we do not have to bother with the feelings and opinions of those who are tasked with looking after us. We can be wholly and, without guilt, our True Selves, because those around us have – for a time – adapted themselves entirely to our needs and desires, however inconvenient and arduous these might be.

The true self of the infant, in Winnicott’s formulation, is by nature asocial and amoral. It isn’t interested in the feelings of others, it isn’t socialised. It screams when it needs to – even if it is the middle of the night or on a crowded train. It may be aggressive, biting and – in the eyes of a stickler for manners or a lover of hygiene – shocking and a bit disgusting. It wants to express itself where and how it wants. It can be sweet of course but on its own terms, not in order to charm or bargain for love. If a person is to have any sense of feeling real as an adult, then it has to have enjoyed the immense emotional privilege of being able to be true in this way, to disturb people when it wants, to kick when it is angry, to scream when it is tired, to bite when it is feeling aggressive. The True Self of the child must be granted the imaginative opportunity to destroy the parent when it is in a rage – and then witness the parent surviving and enduring, which lends the child a vital and immensely reassuring sense that it is not in fact omnipotent, and that the world won’t collapse simply because it sometimes wishes or fears it could.

When things go well, gradually and willingly, the child develops a False Self, a capacity to behave according to the demands of external reality. This is what enables a child to submit to the rigours of school and, as it develops into an adult, of working life as well. When we have been given the chance to be our true selves we do not, at every occasion, need to rebel and insist on our needs. We can follow the rules because we have, for a time, been able to ignore them entirely. In other words, Winnicott was not a thorough enemy of a False Self; he understood its role well enough, he simply insisted that it belonged to health only when it had been preceded by a thorough earlier experience of an untrammelled True Self.

Unfortunately, many of us have not enjoyed such an ideal start. Perhaps mother was depressed, or father was often in a rage, maybe there was an older or younger sibling who was in a crisis and required all the attention. The result is that we will have learnt to comply far too early; we will have become obedient at the expense of our ability to feel authentically ourselves. In relationships, we may now be polite and geared to the needs of our partners, but not for that matter able properly to love. At work, we may be dutiful but uncreative and unoriginal.

In such circumstances, and this is its genius, psychotherapy offers us a second chance. In the hands of a good therapist, we are allowed to regress before the time when we started to be False, back to the moment when we so desperately needed to be true. In the therapist’s office, safely contained by their maturity and care, we can learn – once more – to be real; we can be intemperate, difficult, unconcerned with anyone but ourselves, selfish, unimpressive, aggressive and shocking. And the therapist will take it – and thereby help us to experience a new sense of aliveness which should have been there from the start. The demand to be False, which never goes away, becomes more bearable because we are regularly being allowed, in the privacy of the therapist’s room, once a week or so, to be True.

Winnicott was famously calm and generous towards his patients when they were attempting to refind their True Selves in this way. One of them smashed a favourite vase of his, another stole his money, a third shouted insults at him session after session. But Winnicott was unruffled, knowing that this was part of a journey back towards health, away from the deadly fakeness afflicting these patients in the rest of their lives.

We can be grateful to Winnicott for reminding us that contentment and a feeling of reality have to pass through stages of almost limitless delinquent selfishness. There is simply no other way. We have to be True before we can be usefully a bit fake – and if we have never been allowed, then our sickness and depression is there to remind us that we need to take a step back, and therapy is there to allow us to do so. 

Full Article Index

• 01. Ostracism Anxiety
• 02. The Need For A Modern Monastery
• 03. Why the World Can Seem So Frightening – and How to Make It Feel Less So
• 04. Four Ways of Coping With Anxiety
• 05. Might You Be Hypervigilant? A Sombre Questionnaire
• 06. A Question to Ask Ourselves When We're Feeling Low and Paranoid
• 07. The Importance of Not Knowing
• 08. Why We May Be Addicted to Crises
• 09. The Causes of Obsessive Thinking
• 10. What Our Bodies are Trying to Tell Us
• 11. Anxiety-as-Denial
• 12. Our Anxious Ancestry
• 13. Auditing Our Worries
• 14. Why We May Need a Convalescence
• 15. Don't Hope for the Best; Expect the Worst
• 16. The Age of Agitation
• 17. How to Sleep Better
• 18. How and Why We Catastrophise
• 19. On Being 'Triggered'
• 20. OCD — and How to Overcome It
• 21. How Mental Illness Impacts Our Bodies
• 22. Signs You Might Be Suffering from Complex PTSD
• 23. On Skin Picking
• 24. Stoicism and Tigers Who Come to Tea
• 25. The Seven Most Calming Works of Art in the World
• 26. After the Storm
• 27. Thoughts for the Storm
• 28. Emotional Maturity in a Crisis
• 29. Preparing for Disaster
• 30. How to Stop Being Scared All the Time
• 31. The Ultimate Dark Source of Security
• 32. What Everybody Really Wants
• 33. Simplicity & Anxiety
• 34. A Way Through Panic Attacks
• 35. Self-Hatred & Anxiety
• 36. The Question We Should Ask Ourselves When Anxious
• 37. On Anxiety
• 38. The True Cause of Dread and Anxiety
• 39. On Being Scared All the Time
• 40. The Importance of Having A Breakdown
• 41. On Asking for Help
• 42. The Normality of Anxiety Attacks
• 43. On Panic Attacks
• 01. Might I Be Feeling Lonely Rather Than Worried?
• 02. A Place for Despair
• 03. On Being Gaslit In Our Childhoods
• 04. How to Make It Through
• 05. When Our Battery is Running Low
• 06. The Many Moods We Pass Through
• 07. When I Am Called to Die
• 08. If You Stopped Running, What Would You Need to Feel?
• 09. Can We Live With the Truth?
• 10. Five Questions to Ask Yourself Every Evening
• 11. Why Things May Need to Get Worse Before They Can Get Better
• 12. The Limits of the Conscious Mind
• 13. Why Life is Always Difficult
• 14. What is a Transcendental Experience?
• 15. Building the Cathedral
• 16. Rewriting Our Inner Scripts
• 17. What Sleeping Babies Can Teach Us
• 18. How to Endure
• 19. Everything Is So Weird
• 20. Escaping Into History
• 21. The Inevitability of Choice
• 22. What Would Jesus Do?
• 23. Stop Worrying About Your Reputation
• 24. You Still Have Time
• 25. I Will Survive!
• 26. On Trying to Control the Future
• 27. A Few Things Still to Be Grateful For
• 28. No One Knows
• 29. There is No Happily Ever After
• 30. The Catastrophe You Fear Will Happen has Already Happened
• 31. There is Always a Plan B
• 32. The Consolations of History
• 33. The Lessons of Nature
• 34. What Others Think of You - and The Fall of Icarus
• 35. On the Sublime
• 36. Gratitude for the Small Things
• 37. Why ‘Earthrise’ Matters
• 38. On Flowers
• 39. The Valuable Idea Behind the Concept of the Day of Judgement
• 40. The Wisdom of Animals
• 41. The Lottery of Life
• 42. Untranslatable Words
• 43. The Wisdom of Rocks: Gongshi
• 44. Wu Wei – Doing Nothing 無爲
• 45. The Faulty Walnut
• 46. Perspectives on Insomnia
• 47. On the Wisdom of Space
• 48. Memento Mori
• 49. On the Wisdom of Cows
• 50. On Calming Places
• 51. Why Small Pleasures Are a Big Deal
• 52. The Consolations of a Bath
• 53. The Importance of Staring out the Window
• 54. Clouds, Trees, Streams
• 55. On Sunshine
• 01. The Ecstatic Joy We Deny Ourselves
• 02. Why Illusions Are Necessary to Achieve Anything
• 03. Preparing for a Decent Night of Sleep
• 04. Returning Anger to Where It Belongs
• 05. Controlling Insomnia – and Life – Through Pessimism
• 06. How to Be Cool the Yoruba Way
• 07. Why We Should Refuse to Get into Arguments
• 08. The Perils of Making Predictions
• 09. Making Peace with Life's Mystery
• 10. The Promise of an Unblemished Life
• 11. Daring to Be Simple
• 12. Haikus and Appreciation
• 13. The Call of Calm
• 14. What Would Paradise Look Like?
• 15. How to Process Your Emotions
• 16. The Wisdom of Dusk
• 17. The Appeal of Austere Places
• 18. How to Go to Bed Earlier
• 19. Why We All Need Quiet Days
• 20. The Benefits of Provincial Life
• 21. How to Live in a Hut
• 22. For Those Who (Privately) Aspire to Become More Reclusive
• 23. The Hard Work of Being 'Lazy'
• 24. Expectations - and the 80/20 Rule
• 25. Taking It One Day at a Time
• 26. Spirituality for People who Hate Spirituality
• 27. How to Spill A Drink Down One’s Front - and Survive
• 28. How To Stop Worrying Whether or Not They Like You
• 29. On Soothing
• 30. What Is Wrong with Modern Times - and How to Regain Wisdom
• 31. The Disaster of Anthropocentrism - and the Promise of the Transcendent
• 32. On Needing to Find Something to Worry About — Why We Always Worry for No Reason
• 33. How We Are Easily, Too Easily, 'Triggered'
• 34. Hypervigilance
• 35. If The Worst Came to the Worst...
• 36. The Wonders of an Ordinary Life
• 37. In Praise of the Quiet Life
• 38. The Pursuit of Calm
• 39. Insomnia and Philosophy
• 01. African Proverbs to Live By
• 02. Why We Are Haunted by Ghosts of the Past
• 03. How to Be Cool the Yoruba Way
• 01. What Goes With What
• 02. Eight Rules to Create Nicer Cities
• 03. The Secret Toll of Our Ugly World
• 04. Henri Rousseau
• 05. Albrecht Dürer and his Pillows
• 06. On the Consolations of Home | Georg Friedrich Kersting
• 07. Francisco Goya's Masterpiece
• 08. How Industry Restores Our Faith in Humanity
• 09. Rembrandt as a Guide to Kindness
• 10. Buildings That Give Hope - and Buildings That Condemn Us
• 11. Katsushika Hokusai
• 12. Agnes Martin
• 13. The Importance of Architecture
• 14. The Secret of Beauty: Order and Complexity
• 15. Le Corbusier
• 16. Two World Views: Romantic and Classical
• 17. Oscar Niemeyer
• 18. Against Obscurity
• 19. Why Do Scandinavians Have Such Impeccable Taste in Interior Design?
• 20. Art for Art's Sake
• 21. Why We Need to Create a Home
• 22. Why You Should Never Say: ‘Beauty Lies in the Eye of the Beholder’
• 23. Andrea Palladio
• 24. Why Design Matters
• 25. On Good and Bad Taste
• 26. On How to Make an Attractive City
• 27. Art as Therapy
• 28. On Ugliness and the Housing Crisis
• 29. Johannes Vermeer
• 30. Caspar David Friedrich
• 31. Henri Matisse
• 32. Edward Hopper
• 33. Louis Kahn
• 34. Coco Chanel
• 35. Jane Jacobs
• 36. Cy Twombly
• 37. Andy Warhol
• 38. Dieter Rams
• 39. A Therapeutic Approach to Art
• 40. Christo and Jeanne-Claude 
• 41. On the Importance of Drawing
• 42. On Art as a Reminder
• 43. On the Price of Art Works
• 44. Secular Chapels
• 45. Relativism and Urban Planning
• 46. What Art Museums Should Be For
• 47. On Fakes and Originals
• 48. The Museum Gift Shop
• 01. What We Might Learn From The Dandies of The Congo
• 02. The Beauty of Komorebi
• 03. The Past Was Not in Black and White
• 04. The Drawer of Odd Things
• 05. Why Middle-Aged Men Think So Often About the Roman Empire
• 06. The Consolations of Catastrophe
• 07. What is the Point of History?
• 08. What Rothko's Art Teaches Us About Suffering
• 09. The Value of Reading Things We Disagree with
• 10. Easter for Atheists
• 11. The Life House
• 12. Why Philosophy Should Become More Like Pop Music
• 13. Why Stoicism Continues to Matter
• 14. The School of Life: What We Believe
• 15. Cultural Mining
• 16. Lego – the Movies
• 17. Philosophy – the Movies
• 18. History of Ideas – the Movies
• 19. Sociology – the Movies
• 20. Political Theory – the Movies
• 21. Psychotherapy – the Movies
• 22. Greek Philosophy – the Movies
• 23. Eastern Philosophy – the Movies
• 24. Art – the Movies
• 25. On Aphorisms
• 26. What Comes After Religion?
• 27. The Serious Business of Clothes
• 28. What Is the Point of the Humanities?
• 29. Why Music Works
• 30. The Importance of Music
• 31. The Importance of Books
• 32. What Is Comedy For?
• 33. What Is Philosophy For?
• 34. What Is Art For?
• 35. What Is History For?
• 36. What Is Psychotherapy For?
• 37. What Is Literature For?
• 38. The Joys of Sport
• 01. Following in the Buddha's Footsteps
• 02. Six Persimmons
• 03. The Four Hindu Stages of Life
• 04. Rice or Wheat? The Difference Between Eastern and Western Cultures
• 05. Eastern vs Western Views of Happiness
• 06. Four Great Ideas from Hinduism
• 07. Zen Buddhism and Fireflies
• 08. Six Ideas from Eastern Philosophy
• 09. Wu Wei – Doing Nothing 無爲
• 10. Kintsugi 金継ぎ
• 12. Lao Tzu
• 13. Confucius
• 14. Sen no Rikyū
• 15. Matsuo Basho
• 16. Mono No Aware
• 17. Guan Yin
• 18. Gongshi
• 20. Kintsugi
• 22. Why so Many Love the Philosophy of the East - and so Few That of the West
• 01. It Isn't About the Length of a Life...
• 02. On Luxury and Sadness
• 03. On Not Being Able To Cook Very Well
• 04. Food as Therapy
• 05. What We Really Like to Eat When No One is Looking
• 06. What Meal Might Suit My Mood? Questionnaire
• 01. Charles Dickens's Secret
• 02. Giuseppe di Lampedusa — The Leopard
• 03. Sei Shōnagon — The Pillow Book
• 04. Kakuzo Okakura — The Book of Tea
• 05. Victor Hugo and the Art of Contempt
• 06. Edward Gibbon — The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
• 07. How to Read Fewer Books
• 08. The Downfall of Oscar Wilde
• 09. What Voltaire Meant by 'One Must Cultivate One's Own Garden'
• 10. James Baldwin
• 11. Camus and The Plague
• 12. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• 13. Charles Dickens  
• 14. Gustave Flaubert
• 15. Fyodor Dostoevsky
• 16. Marcel Proust
• 17. Books as Therapy
• 18. Jane Austen
• 19. Leo Tolstoy
• 20. Virginia Woolf
• 21. James Joyce
• 01. Machiavelli's Advice for Nice Guys
• 02. Niccolò Machiavelli
• 03. Thomas Hobbes
• 04. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• 05. Adam Smith
• 06. Karl Marx
• 07. John Ruskin
• 08. Henry David Thoreau
• 09. Thoreau and Civil Disobedience
• 10. Matthew Arnold
• 11. William Morris
• 12. Friedrich Hayek
• 13. John Rawls
• 01. What Should A Good Therapist Do For Us?
• 02. The Usefulness Of Speaking Your Feelings To An Empty Chair
• 03. What's the Bit of Therapy That Heals You?
• 04. Why We Need Therapy When We Give Up on Religion
• 05. How Psychotherapy Might Truly Help Us
• 06. Why You Should Take a Sentence Completion Test
• 07. Carl Jung's Word Association Test
• 08. Freud's Porcupine
• 09. How Mental Illness Impacts Our Bodies
• 10. How the Modern World Makes Us Mentally Ill
• 11. Twenty Key Concepts from Psychotherapy
• 12. Why Psychotherapy Works
• 13. The True and the False Self
• 14. What Happens in Psychotherapy? Four Case Studies
• 15. The Problem of Psychological Asymmetry
• 16. Freud on Sublimation
• 17. Sigmund Freud
• 18. Anna Freud
• 19. Melanie Klein
• 20. Donald Winnicott
• 21. John Bowlby 
• 22. A Short Dictionary of Psychoanalysis
• 23. Jacques Lacan
• 01. You Are Living in the Greatest Museum in the World
• 02. When Something is Beautiful...
• 03. Albrecht Dürer and his Pillows
• 04. How Giraffes Can Teach Us to Wonder
• 05. Sun Worship
• 06. The Importance of Dancing Like an Idiot
• 07. Walking in the Woods
• 08. Getting More Serious about Pleasure
• 09. On Going to the Zoo
• 10. The Fish Shop
• 11. On Small Islands
• 12. On Stars
• 13. On Grandmothers
• 14. Up at Dawn
• 15. On Crimes in the Newspapers
• 16. Driving on the Motorway at Night
• 17. On Sunday Mornings
• 18. A Favourite Old Jumper
• 19. Holding Hands with a Small Child
• 20. Feeling at Home in the Sea
• 21. The Book That Understands You
• 22. Old Photos of One’s Parents
• 23. Whispering in Bed in the Dark
• 24. On Feeling That Someone Else is So Wrong
• 25. The First Day of Feeling Well Again
• 01. St. Benedict 
• 02. Alexis de Tocqueville 
• 03. Auguste Comte
• 04. Max Weber
• 05. Emile Durkheim
• 06. Margaret Mead
• 07. Theodor Adorno
• 08. Rachel Carson
• 01. Three Essays on Flight
• 02. The Wisdom of Islamic Gardens
• 03. A World Without Air Travel
• 04. Walking in the Woods
• 05. Why We Argue in Paradise
• 06. The Advantages of Staying at Home
• 07. The Wisdom of Nature
• 08. The Holidays When You're Feeling Mentally Unwell
• 09. The Shortest Journey: On Going for a Walk around the Block
• 10. How to Spend a Few Days in Paris
• 11. Why Germans Can Say Things No One Else Can
• 12. Travel as Therapy - an Introduction
• 13. Lunch, 30,000 Feet – for Comfort
• 14. The Western Desert, Australia – for Humility
• 15. Glenpark Road, Birmingham - for Boredom
• 16. Comuna 13, San Javier, Medellin, Colombia - for Dissatisfaction
• 17. Pumping Station, Isla Mayor, Seville - for Snobbery
• 18. Eastown Theatre, Detroit - for Perspective
• 19. Capri Hotel, Changi Airport, Singapore - for Thinking
• 20. Cafe de Zaak, Utrecht - for Sex Education
• 21. Corner shop, Kanagawaken, Yokohama - for Shyness
• 22. Monument Valley, USA - for Calm
• 23. Heathrow Airport, London – for Awe
• 24. Pefkos Beach, Rhodes - for Anxiety
• 01. On Flying Too Close to the Sun - And Not Flying Close Enough
• 02. Kierkegaard on Love
• 03. Aristotle
• 04. Baruch Spinoza
• 05. Arthur Schopenhauer
• 06. Blaise Pascal
• 07. Six Ideas from Western Philosophy
• 08. Introduction to The Curriculum
• 10. The Stoics
• 11. Epicurus
• 12. Augustine
• 13. Boethius and The Consolation of Philosophy
• 14. Thomas Aquinas
• 15. Michel de Montaigne
• 16. La Rochefoucauld
• 17. Voltaire
• 18. David Hume
• 19. Immanuel Kant
• 21. Hegel Knew There Would Be Days Like These
• 22. Ralph Waldo Emerson
• 23. Nietzsche
• 24. Nietzsche, Regret and Amor Fati
• 25. Nietzsche and Envy
• 26. Martin Heidegger
• 27. Ludwig Wittgenstein
• 28. Jean-Paul Sartre
• 29. Albert Camus
• 30. Michel Foucault
• 31. Jacques Derrida
• 32. E. M. Cioran
• 01. What to Say in Response to an Affair
• 02. How To Handle the Desire for Affairs?
• 03. What Does It Take To Be Good at Affairs?
• 04. What Ideally Happens When An Affair is Discovered?
• 05. When Does An Affair Begin?  
• 06. A Brief History of Affairs
• 07. How to Reduce the Risk of Affairs
• 08. The Role of Sex in Affairs
• 09. How To Spot A Couple That Might Be Headed For An Affair
• 10. How Can An Affair Help A Marriage?
• 11. The Pleasures of Affairs
• 12. The Pains of Affairs
• 13. The Meaning of Infidelity
• 14. Loyalty and Adultery
• 15. Why People Have Affairs: Distance and Closeness
• 01. Those Who Cannot Feel Love Until It Is Over
• 02. The Heroism of Leaving a Relationship
• 03. Exquisite Agony in Love
• 04. Why It Should Not Have to Last Forever...
• 05. When Does a Divorce Begin?
• 06. Rethinking Divorce
• 07. Three Questions to Help You Decide Whether to Stay in or Leave a Relationship
• 08. Stop Repeating the Same Mistakes
• 09. There's Nothing Wrong with Being on Your Own
• 10. The Wrong Idea of a Baddie
• 11. Finding Closure After a Breakup
• 12. Should Sex Ever Be a Reason to Break Up?
• 13. When a Relationship Fails, Who Rejected Whom?
• 14. The Fear of Not Being Able to Cope Practically Without a Partner
• 15. The Fear of Ending a Relationship
• 16. What About the Children When Divorce is on the Cards?
• 17. What If I Just Repeat the Same Mistakes Next Time?
• 18. Are My Expectations Too High?
• 19. Overcoming Nostalgia for a Past Relationship
• 20. The Feeling of Being Back in Love with the Person You're About to Leave
• 21. The Capacity to Give up on People
• 22. For Those Stuck in a Relationship
• 23. 10 Ideas for People Afraid to Exit a Relationship
• 24. People Who Want to Own Us - but Not Nourish Us
• 25. The Hardest Person in the World to Break up With
• 26. A Non-Tragic View of Breaking Up
• 27. A Guide to Breaking Up
• 28. How to Reject Someone Kindly
• 29. When Someone We Love Has Died
• 30. Why Did They Leave Us?
• 31. How to Break Up
• 32. How We Can Have Our Hearts Broken Even Though No One Has Left Us
• 33. The Psychology of Our Exes
• 34. 'Unfair Dismissal' in Love
• 35. How Not to Be Tortured By a Love Rival
• 36. Coping with Betrayal
• 37. Can Exes be Friends?
• 38. How to Get Over Someone
• 39. Why True Love Doesn’t Have to Last Forever
• 40. How to Get Over a Rejection
• 41. How to End a Relationship
• 42. Stay or Leave?
• 43. How to Get Divorced
• 44. On Forgetting Lovers
• 45. How Not to Break Up with Someone
• 01. People Pleasers in Relationships
• 02. People Not to Fall in Love With
• 03. Picking Partners Who Won't Understand Us
• 04. How Do Emotionally Healthy People Behave In Relationships? 
• 05. The Avoidant Partner With The Power To Drive You Mad
• 06. On Picking a Socially Unsuitable Partner
• 07. How to Sustain Love: A Tool
• 08. Questions To Ask About Someone We Are Thinking Of Committing To
• 09. Our Two Great Fears in Love
• 10. The Pains of Preoccupied Attachment
• 11. Are You Afraid of Intimacy?
• 12. Why You Will Never Quite Get it Right in Love
• 13. Understanding Attachment Theory
• 14. Why We 'Split' Our Partners
• 15. Why We Love People Who Don't Love Us Back
• 16. Should I Be With Them?
• 17. The Seven Rules of Successful Relationships
• 18. Why We Must Explain Our Own Needs
• 19. How Good Are You at Communication in Love? Questionnaire
• 20. Why Some Couples Last — and Some Don't
• 21. The Difference Between Fragile and Strong Couples
• 22. What Relationships Should Really Be About
• 23. The Real Reason Why Couples Break Up
• 24. 6 Reasons We Choose Badly in Love
• 25. Can People Change?
• 26. Konrad Lorenz & Why You Choose the Partners You Choose
• 27. The Stranger You Live With
• 28. The Attachment Style Questionnaire
• 29. Why Anxious and Avoidant Partners Find It Hard to Leave One Another
• 30. The Challenges of Anxious-Avoidant Relationships — Can Couples With Different Attachment Styles Work?
• 31. On Rescue Fantasies
• 32. How to Cope with an Avoidant Partner
• 33. What Is Your Attachment Style?
• 34. 'I Will Never Find the Right Partner'
• 35. Too Close or Too Distant: How We Stand in Relationships
• 36. How Are You Difficult to Live with?
• 37. Why We're Compelled to Love Difficult People
• 38. Why Your Lover is Very Damaged - and Annoying
• 39. Why Tiny Things about Our Partners Drive Us Mad
• 40. How to Love Ugly People
• 41. Why Polyamory Probably Won’t Work for You
• 42. Why We Go Cold on Our Partners
• 43. An Instruction Manual to Oneself
• 44. The Terrors of Being Loved
• 45. The Partner as Child Theory
• 46. On the Fear of Intimacy
• 47. Meet the Parents
• 48. On Finding the 'Right' Person
• 49. If You Loved Me, You Wouldn't Want to Change Me
• 50. The Problems of Closeness
• 01. How to Break Logjams in a Relationship
• 02. The Miseries of Push-Pull Relationships 
• 03. A Way To Break Logjams In A Couple
• 04. When Your Partner Loves You – but Does Their Best to Drive You Away...
• 05. A Rule to Help Your Relationship
• 06. Secret Grudges We May Have Against the Other Gender
• 07. The Demand for Perfection in Love
• 08. On Being Upset Without Knowing It
• 09. Who is Afraid of Intimacy?
• 10. Why Good Manners Matter in Relationships
• 11. A Role for Lies
• 12. The Secret Lives of Other Couples
• 13. On Saying 'I Hate You' to Someone You Love
• 14. When Love Isn't Easy
• 15. Two Questions to Repair a Relationship
• 16. Three Steps to Resolving Conflicts in Relationships
• 17. Stop Avoiding Conflict
• 18. An Alternative to Passive Aggression
• 19. Why We Must Soften What We Say to Our Partners
• 20. How to Be Less Defensive in Love
• 21. On Gaslighting
• 22. Why We Play Games in Love
• 23. On 'Rupture' and 'Repair'
• 24. Why it's OK to Want a Partner to Change
• 25. On Arguing More Nakedly
• 26. Do You Still Love Me?
• 27. Why We Need to Feel Heard
• 28. Five Questions to Ask of Bad Behaviour
• 29. The Art of Complaining
• 30. The Challenges of Communication
• 31. How To Have Fewer Bitter Arguments in Love
• 32. The Arguments We Have From Guilt
• 33. Attention-Seeking Arguments
• 34. When Our Partners Are Being Excessively Logical
• 35. When We Tell Our Partners That We Are Normal and They Are Strange
• 36. When Your Partner Tries to Stop You Growing
• 37. When Your Partner Starts Crying Hysterically During an Argument
• 38. Why We Sometimes Set Out to Shatter Our Lover's Good Mood
• 39. Why People Get Defensive in Relationships
• 40. A History of Arguments
• 41. The Fights When There Is No Sex
• 42. What We Might Learn in Couples Therapy
• 43. On the Tendency to Love and Hate Excessively
• 44. An Alternative to Being Controlling
• 45. Why We Should Not Silently Suffer From A Lack of Touch in Love
• 46. Why Anger Has a Place in Love
• 47. The Importance of Relationship Counselling
• 48. How to Argue in Relationships
• 49. Why We (Sometimes) Hope the People We Love Might Die
• 50. Be the Change You Want To See
• 51. I Wish I Was Still Single
• 52. Love and Sulking
• 53. On Being Unintentionally Hurt
• 54. The Secret Problems of Other Couples
• 55. On the Dangers of Being Too Defensive
• 56. On How to Defuse an Argument
• 57. How to Save Love with Pessimism
• 58. How 'Transference' Makes You Hard to Live With
• 59. Why You Resent Your Partner
• 60. Why It Is Always Your Partner's Fault
• 61. If It Wasn't for You...
• 62. Why You Are So Annoyed By What You Once Admired
• 63. Why You’re (Probably) Not a Great Communicator
• 01. The Need for Honesty on Early Dates
• 02. Why Dating Apps Won't Help You Find Love
• 03. Being Honest on a Date
• 04. Why Haven't They Called - and the Rorschach Test
• 05. Dating When You've Had a Bad Childhood
• 06. Varieties of Madness Commonly Met with On Dates
• 07. How to Seduce with Confidence
• 08. A Brief History of Dating
• 09. How to Prove Attractive to Someone on a Date
• 10. Existentialism and Dating
• 11. What to Talk About on a Date
• 12. What to Eat and Drink on a Date
• 13. How to Seduce Someone on a Date
• 14. How Not to Think on a Date
• 01. Getting Better at Picking Lovers
• 02. How We May Be Creating The Lovers We Fear
• 03. What If the People We Could Love Are Here Already; We Just Can't See Them?
• 04. The Lengths We Go to Avoid Love
• 05. Our Secret Wish Never to Find Love
• 06. Why We All End up Marrying Our Parents
• 07. True Love Begins With Self-Love
• 08. The Importance of Being Single
• 09. Why We Keep Choosing Bad Partners
• 10. Celebrity Crushes
• 11. Romantic Masochism
• 12. What Do You Love Me For?
• 13. If Love Never Came
• 14. On the Madness and Charm of Crushes
• 15. Why Only the Happy Single Find True Love
• 16. Should We Play It Cool When We Like Someone?
• 17. In Praise of Unrequited Love
• 18. Two Reasons Why You Might Still Be Single
• 19. How We Choose a Partner
• 20. Why Flirting Matters
• 21. Why, Once You Understand Love, You Could Love Anyone
• 22. Mate Selection
• 23. Reasons to Remain Single
• 24. How to Enjoy a New Relationship
• 01. Alternatives to Romantic Monogamy
• 02. Twenty Ideas on Marriage
• 03. For Moments of Marital Crisis
• 04. What to Do on Your Wedding Night
• 05. Who Should You Invite to Your Wedding?
• 06. Pragmatic Reasons for Getting Married
• 07. The Standard Marriage and Its Seven Alternatives
• 08. Utopian Marriage
• 09. When Is One Ready to Get Married?
• 10. On the Continuing Relevance of Marriage
• 11. On Marrying the Wrong Person — 9 Reasons We Will Regret Getting Married
• 01. What Are We Lying To Our Lovers About? 
• 02. Those Who Have to Wait for a War to Say ‘I Love You’
• 03. What Celebrity Stalkers Can Teach Us About Love
• 04. The Achievement of Missing Someone
• 05. How Love Can Teach Us Who We Are
• 06. Beyond the Need for Melodrama in Love
• 07. True Love is Boring
• 08. How to Make Love Last Forever
• 09. How to Be Vulnerable
• 10. Why You Can't Read Your Partner's Mind
• 11. What Teddy Bears Teach Us About Love
• 12. What Role Do You Play in Your Relationship?
• 13. Why We Should Be 'Babyish' in Love
• 14. The Maturity of Regression
• 15. The Benefits of Insecurity in Love
• 16. Taking the Pressure off Love
• 17. A Pledge for Lovers
• 18. A Projection Exercise for Couples
• 19. A New Ritual: The Morning and Evening Kiss
• 20. Can Our Phones Solve Our Love Lives?
• 21. If We're All Bad at Love, Shouldn't We Change Our Definition of Normality?
• 22. Other People's Relationships
• 23. How to Cope with an Avoidant Partner
• 24. The Pleasure of Reading Together in Bed
• 25. 22 Questions to Reignite Love
• 26. The Wisdom of Romantic Compromise
• 27. How to Complain
• 28. How We Need to Keep Growing Up
• 29. Teaching and Love
• 30. Love and Self-Love
• 31. Humour in Love
• 32. The Advantages of Long-Distance Love
• 33. In Praise of Hugs
• 34. Why Affectionate Teasing is Kind and Necessary
• 35. The Couple Courtroom Game
• 36. Getting over a Row
• 37. Keeping Secrets in Relationships
• 38. A Lover's Guide to Sulking
• 39. Artificial Conversations
• 40. On the Role of Stories in Love
• 41. On the Hardest Job in the World
• 42. On the Beloved's Wrist
• 01. How Even Very ‘Nice’ Parents Can Mess Up Their Children
• 02. The Parents We Would Love To Have Had: An Exercise
• 03. Fatherless Boys
• 04. How to Raise a Successful Person
• 05. The Problems of Miniature Adults
• 06. Mothers and Daughters
• 07. The Importance of Swords and Guns for Children
• 08. When Parents Won't Let Their Children Grow Up
• 09. The Fragile Parent
• 10. Parenting and People-Pleasing
• 11. Three Kinds of Parental Love
• 12. A Portrait of Tenderness
• 13. What Makes a Good Parent? A Checklist
• 14. On the Curiosity of Children
• 15. How to Lend a Child Confidence
• 16. The Importance of Play
• 17. Why Children Need an Emotional Education
• 18. Coping with One's Parents
• 19. Are Children for Me?
• 20. How Parents Might Let Their Children Know of Their Issues
• 21. How We Crave to Be Soothed
• 22. Escaping the Shadow of a Parent
• 23. On Being Angry with a Parent
• 24. What You Might Want to Tell Your Child About Homework
• 25. On Apologising to Your Child
• 26. Teaching Children about Relationships
• 27. How Should a Parent Love their Child?
• 28. When people pleasers become parents - and need to say 'no'
• 29. On the Sweetness of Children
• 30. Listening to Children
• 31. Whether or not to have Children
• 32. The Children of Snobs
• 33. Why Good Parents Have Naughty Children
• 34. The Joys and Sorrows of Parenting
• 35. The Significance of Parenthood
• 36. Why Family Matters
• 37. Parenting and Working
• 38. On Children's Art
• 39. What Babies Can Teach Us
• 40. Why – When It Comes to Children – Love May Not Be Enough
• 01. What We Really, Really Want in Love
• 02. Falling in Love with a Stranger
• 03. Why We Need 'Ubuntu'
• 04. The Buddhist View of Love
• 05. What True Love Looks Like
• 06. How the Wrong Images of Love Can Ruin Our Lives
• 07. Kierkegaard on Love
• 08. Why Do I Feel So Lonely?
• 09. Pygmalion and your Love life
• 10. How to Love
• 11. What is Love?
• 12. On Romanticism
• 13. A Short History of Love
• 14. The Definition of Love
• 15. Why We Need the Ancient Greek Vocabulary of Love
• 16. The Cure for Love
• 17. Why We Need to Speak of Love in Public
• 18. How Romanticism Ruined Love
• 19. Our Most Romantic Moments
• 20. Loving and Being Loved
• 21. Romantic Realism
• 22. On Being Romantic or Classical
• 01. The Difficulties of Impotence
• 02. What is Sexual Perversion?
• 03. Our Unconscious Fear of Successful Sex
• 04. The Logic of Our Fantasies
• 05. Rethinking Gender
• 06. The Ongoing Complexities of Our Intimate Lives
• 07. On Post-Coital Melancholy
• 08. Desire and Intimacy
• 09. What Makes a Person Attractive?
• 10. How to Talk About Your Sexual Fantasy
• 11. The Problem of Sexual Shame
• 12. Who Initiates Sex: and Why It Matters So Much
• 13. On Still Being a Virgin
• 14. Love and Sex
• 15. Impotence and Respect
• 16. Sexual Non-Liberation
• 17. The Excitement of Kissing
• 18. The Appeal of Outdoor Sex
• 19. The Sexual Fantasies of Others
• 20. On Art and Masturbation
• 21. The Psychology of Cross-Dressing
• 22. The Fear of Being Bad in Bed
• 23. The Sex-Starved Relationship
• 24. How to Start Having Sex Again
• 25. Sexual Liberation
• 26. The Poignancy of Old Pornography
• 27. On Porn Addiction
• 28. A Brief Philosophy of Oral Sex
• 29. Why We Go Off Sex
• 30. On Being a Sleazebag
• 31. A Brief Theory of Sexual Excitement
• 01. Work Outs For Our Minds
• 02. Interviewing Our Bodies
• 03. The Top Dog - Under Dog Exercise
• 04. A Guide For The Recovering Avoidant
• 05. Where Are Humanity’s Problems Really Located?
• 06. On Feeling Obliged 
• 07. Why We Struggle With Self-Discipline
• 08. Why We Should Practice Automatic Writing
• 09. Why We Behave As We Do
• 10. Mechanisms of Defence
• 11. On Always Finding Fault with Others
• 12. The Hidden Logic of Illogical Behaviour
• 13. How to Weaken the Hold of Addiction
• 14. Charles Darwin and The Descent of Man
• 15. Why We Are All Addicts
• 16. Straightforward vs. Complicated People
• 17. Reasons to Give Up on Perfection
• 18. The Need for a Cry
• 19. On Confinement
• 20. The Importance of Singing Badly
• 21. You Don't Need Permission
• 22. On Feeling Stuck
• 23. Am I Paranoid?
• 24. Learning to Be More Selfish
• 25. Learning How to Be Angry
• 26. Why We're All Liars
• 27. Are You a Masochist?
• 28. How Badly Adapted We Are to Life on Earth
• 29. How We Prefer to Act Rather Than Think
• 30. How to Live More Wisely Around Our Phones
• 31. On Dreaming
• 32. The Need to be Alone
• 33. On the Remarkable Need to Speak
• 34. Thinking Too Much; and Thinking Too Little
• 35. On Nagging
• 36. The Prevention of Suicide
• 37. On Getting an Early Night
• 38. Why We Eat Too Much
• 39. On Taking Drugs
• 40. On Perfectionism
• 41. On Procrastination
• 01. Why We Overreact
• 02. Giving Up on People Pleasing
• 03. The Benefits of Forgetfulness
• 04. How to Take Criticism
• 05. A More Spontaneous Life
• 06. On Self-Assertion
• 07. The Benefit of Analogies
• 08. Why We Need Moments of Mad Thinking
• 09. The Task of Turning Vague Thoughts into More Precise Ones
• 10. How to Catch Your Own Thoughts
• 11. Why Our Best Thoughts Come To Us in the Shower
• 13. Confidence
• 14. Why We Should Try to Become Better Narcissists
• 15. Why We Require Poor Memories To Survive
• 16. The Importance of Confession
• 17. How Emotionally Healthy Are You?
• 18. What Is An Emotionally Healthy Childhood?
• 19. Unprocessed Emotion
• 20. How to Be a Genius
• 21. On Resilience
• 22. How to Decide
• 23. Why It Should Be Glamorous to Change Your Mind
• 24. How to Make More of Our Memories
• 25. What’s Wrong with Needy People
• 26. Emotional Education: An Introduction
• 27. Philosophical Meditation
• 28. Honesty
• 29. Self-Love
• 30. Emotional Scepticism
• 31. Politeness
• 32. Charity
• 34. Love-as-Generosity
• 35. Comforting
• 36. Emotional Translation
• 38. On Pessimism
• 39. The Problem with Cynicism
• 40. On Keeping Going
• 41. Closeness
• 42. On Higher Consciousness
• 43. On Exercising the Mind
• 44. Authentic Work
• 45. The Sorrows of Work
• 46. Cultural Consolation
• 47. Appreciation
• 48. Cheerful Despair
• 01. How 'Mad' People Make a Lot of Sense
• 02. Why We Keep Repeating Patterns of Unhappiness
• 03. Your Self-Esteem is a Record of Your History
• 04. Why Some People Love Extreme Sports
• 05. The Overlooked Pains of Very, Very Tidy People
• 06. On Feeling Guilty for No Reason
• 07. The Fear of Being Touched
• 08. Why Most of Us Feel Like Losers
• 09. One of the More Beautiful Paintings in the World...
• 10. The Origins of a Sense of Persecution
• 11. How to Overcome Psychological Barriers
• 12. The Sinner Inside All of Us
• 13. How to Be Less Defensive
• 14. Are You a Sadist or a Masochist?
• 15. You Might Be Mad
• 16. Fears Are Not Facts
• 17. Why It's Good to Be a Narcissist
• 18. Am I a Bad Person?
• 19. Why Some of Us Are So Thin-Skinned
• 20. The Five Features of Paranoia
• 21. Why So Many of Us Are Masochists
• 22. In Praise of Self-Doubt
• 23. Why We Get Locked Inside Stories — and How to Break Free
• 24. Why Grandiosity is a Symptom of Self-Hatred
• 25. The Origins of Imposter Syndrome
• 26. The Upsides of Being Ill
• 27. The Roots of Paranoia
• 28. Loneliness as a Sign of Depth
• 29. How Social Media Affects Our Self-Worth
• 30. How to Be Beautiful
• 31. Trying to Be Kinder to Ourselves
• 32. The Role of Love in Mental Health
• 33. Trauma and Fearfulness
• 34. On Despair and the Imagination
• 35. On Being Able to Defend Oneself
• 36. The Fear of Death
• 37. I Am Not My Body
• 38. The Problems of Being Very Beautiful
• 39. 6 Reasons Not to Worry What the Neighbours Think
• 40. Am I Fat? An Answer from History
• 41. The Problem of Shame
• 42. On Feeling Ugly
• 43. The Particular Beauty of Unhappy-Looking People
• 44. How Not to Become a Conspiracy Theorist
• 45. The Terror of a ‘No’
• 46. On Being Hated
• 47. The Origins of Everyday Nastiness
• 48. The Weakness of Strength Theory
• 49. On Self-Sabotage
• 50. FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out
• 51. On a Sense of Sinfulness
• 01. We All Need Our North Pole
• 02. We Need to Change the Movie We Are In
• 03. Maybe You Are, in Your Own Way, a Little Bit Marvellous
• 04. Why We Deny Ourselves the Chance of Happiness
• 05. How to Live More Consciously
• 06. Our Secret Longing to Be Good
• 07. Why Everyone Needs to Feel 'Lost' for a While
• 08. On the Consolations of Home | Georg Friedrich Kersting
• 09. On Feeling Rather Than Thinking
• 10. How to Be Interesting
• 11. Am I Too Clever?
• 12. A More Self-Accepting Life
• 13. 'Let Him Who Is Without Sin Cast the First Stone'
• 14. The Roots of Loneliness
• 15. Small Acts of Liberation
• 16. Overcoming the Need to Be Exceptional
• 17. The Fear of Happiness
• 18. The Truth May Already Be Inside Us
• 19. What Is the Meaning of Life?
• 20. The Desire to Write
• 21. Are Intelligent People More Lonely?
• 22. A Better Word than Happiness: Eudaimonia
• 23. The Meaning of Life
• 24. Our Secret Fantasies
• 25. Why We’re Fated to Be Lonely (But That’s OK)
• 26. Good Enough is Good Enough
• 27. An Updated Ten Commandments
• 28. A Self-Compassion Exercise
• 29. How to Become a Better Person
• 30. On Resolutions
• 31. On Final Things
• 01. The Life-Saving Nature of Poor Memories
• 02. The Stages of Development - And What If We Miss Out on One…
• 03. Who Might I Have Been If…
• 04. Yes, Maybe They Are Just Envious…
• 05. We Are All Lonely - Now Can We Be Friends?
• 06. How to Make It Through
• 07. 12 Signs That You Are Mature in the Eyes of Psychotherapy
• 08. The Breast and the Mouth
• 09. A Test to Measure How Nice You Are
• 10. What Hypochondriacs Aren't Able to Tell You
• 11. The Origins of Sanity
• 12. The Always Unfinished Business of Self-Knowledge
• 13. Learning to Laugh at Ourselves
• 14. A Simple Question to Set You Free
• 15. Locating the Trouble
• 16. Who Knows More, the Young or the Old?
• 17. Beyond Sanctimony
• 18. The Ingredients of Emotional Maturity
• 19. When Illness is Preferable to Health
• 20. What Should My Life Have Been Like?
• 21. Why We Need to Go Back to Emotional School
• 22. The Point of Writing Letters We Never Send
• 23. Self-Forgiveness
• 24. Why We Must Have Done Bad to Be Good
• 25. Finding the Courage to Be Ourselves
• 26. What Regret Can Teach Us
• 27. The Importance of Adolescence
• 28. How to Love Difficult People
• 29. On Falling Mentally Ill
• 30. Splitting Humanity into Saints and Sinners
• 31. Becoming Free
• 32. Learning to Listen to the Adult Inside Us
• 33. The Ultimate Test of Emotional Maturity
• 34. Can People Change?
• 35. When Home is Not Home...
• 36. Learning to Lay Down Boundaries
• 37. You Could Finally Leave School!
• 38. When Do You Know You Are Emotionally Mature? 26 Signs of Emotional Maturity
• 39. How to Lengthen Your Life
• 40. We Only Learn If We Repeat
• 41. The Drive to Keep Growing Emotionally
• 42. On Bittersweet Memories
• 43. Small Triumphs of the Mentally Unwell
• 44. The Importance of Atonement
• 45. How To Be a Mummy's Boy
• 46. On Consolation
• 47. The Inner Idiot
• 48. The Dangers of the Good Child
• 49. Why None of Us are Really 'Sinners'
• 50. How We Need to Keep Growing Up
• 51. Are Humans Still Evolving?
• 52. On Losers – and Tragic Heroes
• 53. On the Serious Role of Stuffed Animals
• 54. Why Self-Help Books Matter
• 01. Living Long Term With Mental Illness
• 02. Suffering From A Snobbery That Isn’t Ours
• 03. How to Recover the Plot
• 04. Why We Have Trouble Getting Back To Sleep
• 05. When, and Why, Do We Pick up Our Phones?
• 06. What is the Unconscious - and What Might Be Inside Yours?
• 07. Complete the Story – and Discover What's Really On Your mind
• 08. Complete the Sentence – and Find Out What's Really on Your Mind
• 09. The One Question You Need to Understand Who You Are
• 10. Six Fundamental Truths of Self-Awareness
• 11. Why Knowing Ourselves is Impossible – and Necessary
• 12. Making Friends with Your Unconscious
• 13. Do You Believe in Mind-Reading?
• 14. Questioning Our Conscience
• 15. A Bedtime Meditation
• 16. How to Figure Out What You Really, Really Think
• 17. Why You Should Keep a Journal
• 18. In Praise of Introspection
• 19. What Brain Scans Reveal About Our Minds
• 20. What is Mental Health?
• 21. The One Question You Need to Ask to Know Whether You're a Good Person
• 22. Eight Rules of The School of Life
• 23. No One Cares
• 24. The High Price We Pay for Our Fear of Being Alone
• 25. 5 Signs of Emotional Immaturity
• 26. On Knowing Who One Is
• 27. Why Self-Analysis Works
• 28. Knowing Things Intellectually vs. Knowing Them Emotionally
• 29. The Novel We Really Need To Read Next
• 30. Is Free Will or Determinism Correct?
• 31. Emotional Identity
• 32. Know Yourself — Socrates and How to Develop Self-Knowledge
• 33. Self-Knowledge Quiz
• 34. On Being Very Normal
• 01. How History Can Explain Our Unhappiness
• 02. How Lonely Are You? A Test
• 03. The Wisdom of Tears
• 04. You Don't Always Need to Be Funny
• 05. On Suicide
• 06. You Have Permission to Be Miserable
• 07. The Pessimist's Guide to Mental Illness
• 08. Why Do Bad Things Always Happen to Me?
• 09. Why We Enjoy the Suffering of Others
• 10. The Tragedy of Birth
• 11. What Rothko's Art Teaches Us About Suffering
• 12. Our Tragic Condition
• 13. The Melancholy Charm of Lonely Travelling Places
• 14. Nostalgia for Religion
• 15. Parties and Melancholy
• 16. Why Very Beautiful Scenes Can Make Us So Melancholy
• 17. On Old Photos of Oneself
• 18. Are Intelligent People More Melancholic?
• 19. Strangers and Melancholy
• 20. On Post-Coital Melancholy
• 21. Sex and Melancholy
• 22. Astronomy and Melancholy
• 23. Nostalgia for the Womb
• 24. Melancholy and the Feeling of Being Superfluous
• 25. Pills & Melancholy
• 26. Melancholy: the best kind of Despair
• 27. On Melancholy
• 01. The Impulse to Sink Our Own Mood – and Return to Sadness and Worry
• 02. We Are Made of Moods
• 03. Why Sweet Things Make Us Cry
• 04. Overcoming Manic Moods
• 05. Learning to Feel What We Really Feel
• 06. Exercise When We're Feeling Mentally Unwell
• 07. Why You May Be Experiencing a Mental Midwinter
• 08. Living Long-Term with Mental Illness
• 09. The Role of Sleep in Mental Health
• 10. The Role of Pills in Mental Health
• 11. Mental Illness and Acceptance
• 12. Mental Illness and 'Reasons to Live'
• 13. Taming a Pitiless Inner Critic
• 14. Reasons to Give Up on Human Beings
• 15. The Window of Tolerance
• 16. On Realising One Might Be an Introvert
• 17. Our Right to be Miserable
• 18. How to Manage One's Moods
• 19. On Living in a More Light-Hearted Way
• 20. On Disliking Oneself
• 21. Of Course We Mess Up!
• 22. Learning to Listen to One's Own Boredom
• 23. On Depression
• 24. In Praise of the Melancholy Child
• 25. Why We May Be Angry Rather Than Sad
• 26. On Not Being in the Moment
• 27. 'Pure' OCD - and Intrusive Thoughts
• 28. Twenty Moods
• 29. How the Right Words Help Us to Feel the Right Things
• 30. The Secret Optimism of Angry People
• 31. On Feeling Depressed
• 32. The Difficulty of Being in the Present
• 33. On Being Out of Touch with One's Feelings
• 34. Our Secret Thoughts
• 35. The Psychology of Colour
• 36. On Self-Pity
• 37. On Irritability
• 38. On the Things that Make Adults Cry
• 39. On Anger
• 40. Detachment
• 01. On Those Ruined by Success
• 02. The Demand for Perfection in Love
• 03. The Secret Lives of Other Couples
• 04. How the Wrong Images of Love Can Ruin Our Lives
• 05. Self-Forgiveness
• 06. How Perfectionism Makes Us Ill
• 07. Reasons to Give Up on Perfection
• 08. Are My Expectations Too High?
• 09. Of Course We Mess Up!
• 10. Expectations - and the 80/20 Rule
• 11. Good Enough is Good Enough
• 12. The Perfectionist Trap
• 13. A Self-Compassion Exercise
• 14. On Perfectionism
• 01. How Good Are You at Communication in Love? Questionnaire
• 02. How Prone Might You Be To Insomnia? Questionnaire
• 03. How Ready Might You Be for Therapy? Questionnaire
• 04. The Attachment Style Questionnaire
• 01. Why It Can Take Us So Long to Understand How Unwell We Are
• 02. Intergenerational Trauma
• 03. How the Unfinished Business of Childhood is Played Out in Relationships
• 05. Can Childhoods Really Matter So Much?
• 06. What Some Childhoods Don’t Allow You to Think
• 07. The Legacy of an Unloving Childhood
• 08. Why You Don’t Need a Very Bad Childhood to Have a Complicated Adulthood
• 09. When People Let Us Know What the World Has Done to Them
• 10. The Healing Power of Time
• 11. You Are Freer Than You Think
• 12. On Parenting Our Parents
• 13. Letting Go of Self-Protective Strategies
• 14. How to Tell If Someone Had a Difficult Childhood...
• 15. Childhood Matters, Unfortunately!
• 16. How Should We Define 'Mental Illness'?
• 17. Taking Childhood Seriously
• 18. Sympathy for Our Younger Selves
• 19. How Music Can Heal Us
• 20. What Your Body Reveals About Your Past
• 21. Why Adults Often Behave Like Children
• 22. How to Live Long-Term With Trauma
• 23. Should We Forgive Our Parents or Not?
• 24. Reparenting Your Inner Child
• 25. The Agonies of Shame
• 26. How Trauma Works
• 27. Why Abused Children End Up Hating Themselves
• 28. Why We Sometimes Feel Like Curling Up Into a Ball
• 29. How to Get Your Parents Out of Your Head
• 30. Why Parents Bully Their Children
• 31. On Projection
• 32. Self-Archaeology
• 33. It's Not Your Fault
• 34. If Our Parents Never Listened
• 35. Why Everything Relates to Your Childhood
• 36. Why Those Who Should Love Us Can Hurt Us
• 37. The Upsides of Having a Mental Breakdown
• 38. How Perfectionism Makes Us Ill
• 39. How We Should Have Been Loved
• 40. Self-Hatred and High-Achievement
• 41. A Self-Hatred Audit
• 42. How Mental Illness Impacts Our Bodies
• 43. Two Reasons Why People End up Parenting Badly
• 44. What is Emotional Neglect?
• 45. How Unloving Parents can Generate Self-Hating Children
• 46. How Mental Illness Closes Down Our Minds
• 47. Trauma and EMDR Therapy
• 48. How to Fight off Your Inner Critic
• 49. The One Subject You Really Need to Study: Your Own Childhood
• 50. Sharing Our Early Wounds
• 51. Trauma and How to Overcome It
• 52. Why We're All Messed Up By Our Childhoods
• 53. The Golden Child Syndrome
• 54. The Importance of Being an Unhappy Teenager
• 55. How We Get Damaged by Emotional Neglect
• 56. The Secrets of a Privileged Childhood
• 57. What We Owe to the People Who Loved Us in Childhood
• 58. Criticism When You've Had a Bad Childhood
• 59. On Suffering in Silence
• 60. How a Messed up Childhood Affects You in Adulthood
• 61. Daddy Issues
• 62. The Non-Rewritable Disc: the Fateful Impact of Childhood
• 63. On the Longing for Maternal Tenderness
• 01. The Need for Processing 
• 02. The Subtle Art of Not Listening to People Too Closely
• 03. The Art of Good Listening
• 04. Becoming More Interesting
• 05. In Praise of Small Chats With Strangers
• 06. Why We Should Listen Rather Than Reassure
• 07. How We Can Hurt Without Thinking
• 08. Leaning in to Vulnerability
• 09. How to Become Someone People Will Confide in
• 10. How To Write An Effective Thank You Letter
• 11. How to Be a Good Listener
• 12. How to Comment Online
• 13. Listening as Editing
• 14. The Importance of Flattery
• 15. How to Narrate Your Life Story
• 16. The Art of Listening
• 17. How to Narrate Your Dreams
• 18. How to Talk About Yourself
• 19. Communication
• 20. How to Be a Good Teacher
• 21. On How to Disagree
• 22. On the Art of Conversation
• 01. On Feeling Painfully Different
• 02. Abandoning Hope
• 03. How to Leave a Party
• 04. On Becoming a Hermit
• 05. How to Have a Renaissance
• 06. Think Like an Aristocrat
• 07. Van Gogh's Neglected Genius
• 08. How to Be Quietly Confident
• 09. How to Live Like an Exile
• 10. How to Cope With Bullying
• 11. Stop Being So Nice
• 12. The Origins of Shyness
• 13. On Friendliness to Strangers
• 14. What to Do at Parties If You Hate Small Talk
• 15. How to Approach Strangers at A Party
• 16. How to Be Comfortable on Your Own in Public
• 17. Akrasia - or Why We Don't Do What We Believe
• 18. Why We Think So Much about Our Hair
• 19. Aphorisms on Confidence
• 20. How Knowledge of Difficulties Lends Confidence
• 21. How Thinking You’re an Idiot Lends Confidence
• 22. How to Overcome Shyness
• 23. The Mind-Body Problem
• 24. The Impostor Syndrome
• 25. On the Origins of Confidence
• 26. Self-Esteem
• 27. On Confidence
• 28. On Not Liking the Way One Looks
• 02. Why Losers Make the Best Friends
• 03. Our Very Best Friends
• 04. The Difficulties of Oversharing
• 05. Is It OK to Outgrow Our Friends?
• 06. Why Everyone We Meet is a Little Bit Lonely
• 07. On 'Complicated' Friendships
• 08. The Friend Who Can Tease Us
• 09. Don't Be Too Normal If You Want to Make Friends
• 10. The Forgotten Art of Making Friends
• 11. The Friend Who Balances Us
• 12. The Purpose of Friendship
• 13. Why the Best Kind of Friends Are Lonely
• 14. How to Lose Friends
• 15. Why Misfits Make Great Friends
• 16. How to Handle an Envious Friend
• 17. Loneliness as a Sign of Depth
• 18. Companionship and Mental Health
• 19. How Often Do We Need to Go to Parties?
• 20. Virtual Dinners: Conversation Menus
• 21. The Cleaning Party
• 22. On Talking Horizontally
• 23. Dinner Table Orchestra
• 24. On Sofa Jumping
• 25. On Studying Someone Else's Hands
• 26. What Women and Men May Learn from One Another When They are Just Friends
• 27. How to Say 'I Love You' to a Friend
• 28. How to End a Friendship
• 29. What Can Stop the Loneliness?
• 30. Why Men Are So Bad at Friendship
• 31. What Would An Ideal Friend Be Like?
• 32. 'Couldn't We Just Be Friends?'
• 33. On Acquiring an Enemy
• 34. Why Old Friends Matter
• 35. Why Not to Panic about Enemies
• 36. What Is the Purpose of Friendship?
• 37. Friendship and Vulnerability
• 38. On Socks and Friendship
• 39. The Teasing of Old Friends
• 01. The Boring Person
• 02. The Loveliest People in the World
• 03. The Life Saving Role of Small Chats
• 04. The Origins of Shifty People
• 05. The Many Faults of Other People
• 06. Why Nice People Give Us the 'Ick'
• 07. How to Become a More Interesting Person
• 08. The Challenges of Hugging
• 09. Dale Carnegie — How to Win Friends and Influence People
• 10. The Origins of People Pleasing
• 11. The Eyes of Love
• 12. Kindness Isn't Weakness
• 13. Why We're All Capable of Damaging Others
• 14. Rembrandt as a Guide to Kindness
• 15. What Love Really Is – and Why It Matters
• 16. The Need for Kindness
• 17. 6 Reasons Not to Worry What the Neighbours Think
• 18. What to Do When a Stranger Annoys You
• 19. How to Choose A Good Present
• 20. How to Be a Good Guest
• 21. How To Make People Feel Good about Themselves
• 22. How To Tell When You Are Being A Bore
• 23. What Is Empathy?
• 24. How Not to Rant
• 25. How Not to Be Boring
• 26. On Eggs and Compassion
• 27. How to Become an Adult
• 28. People-Pleasing: and How to Overcome It
• 29. Why Truly Sociable People Hate Parties
• 30. How to Be Diplomatic
• 31. Sane Insanity
• 32. Charity of Interpretation
• 33. How to Be a Good Teacher
• 34. The Solution to Clumsiness
• 35. How to Be a Man
• 36. Political Correctness vs. Politeness
• 37. Aphorisms on Kindness
• 38. Why We Don’t Really Want to Be Nice
• 39. The Charm of Vulnerability
• 40. The Ultimate Test of Your Social Skills
• 41. How to Be Open-Minded
• 42. Why Kind People Always Lie
• 43. How to Be Warm
• 44. The Problem of Over-Friendliness
• 45. How to Forgive
• 46. Why We’re Fated to Be Lonely (But That’s OK)
• 47. How to Cope with Snobbery
• 48. On Charm
• 49. On Being Kind
• 50. On Gratitude
• 51. On Forgiveness
• 52. On Charity
• 53. On Wisdom
• 01. How to Fire Someone
• 02. Diplomacy at the Office
• 03. How to Tell a Colleague Their Breath Smells
• 04. How to Screw Up at Work
• 05. In Praise of Teamwork
• 06. How to Become an Entrepreneur
• 07. The Need for Eloquence
• 08. The Nature and Causes of Procrastination
• 09. In Praise of Networking
• 10. Why Creativity is Too Important to Be Left to Artists
• 11. How to Survive Bureaucracy
• 12. Machismo and Management
• 13. What Art Can Teach Business About Being Fussy
• 14. On Novelists and Manuals
• 15. How Not to Let Work Explode Your Life
• 16. How to Sell
• 17. Innovation, Empathy and Introspection
• 18. Innovation and Creativity
• 19. Innovation and Science Fiction
• 20. The Acceptance of Change
• 21. The Collaborative Virtues
• 22. Towards Better Collaboration
• 23. How To Make Efficiency a Habit
• 24. On Raising the Prestige of 'Details'
• 25. Monasticism & How to Avoid Distraction
• 26. How to Dare to Begin
• 27. On Meaning – and Motivation
• 28. The Psychological Obstacles Holding Employees Back
• 29. On Feedback
• 30. How to Better Understand Customers
• 31. On Bounded and Unbounded Tasks
• 01. What Should Truly Motivate Us at Work
• 02. Nature as a Cure for the Sickness of Modern Times
• 03. The Difficulties of Work-Life Balance
• 04. The Challenges of Modernity
• 05. Businesses for Love; Businesses for Money
• 06. Countries for Losers; Countries for Winners
• 07. Towards a Solution to Inequality
• 08. Free Trade - or Protectionism?
• 09. Should We Work on Ourselves - or on the World?
• 10. Why Is There Unemployment?
• 11. Artists and Supermarket Tycoons
• 12. Business and the Arts
• 13. Sentimentality in Art - and Business
• 14. How to Make a Country Rich
• 15. First World Problems
• 16. On Devotion to Corporations
• 17. Good vs Classical Economics
• 18. What Is a Good Brand?
• 19. Good Economic Measures: Beyond GDP
• 20. What Good Business Should Be
• 21. On the Faultiness of Our Economic Indicators
• 22. On the Dawn of Capitalism
• 23. Utopian Capitalism
• 24. On Philanthropy
• 01. Why Do We Work So Hard?
• 02. On Eating a Friend
• 03. Is the Modern World Too 'Materialistic'?
• 04. On Consumer Capitalism
• 05. How to Choose the Perfect Gift
• 06. The Importance of Maslow's Pyramid of Needs
• 07. How to Live More Wisely Around Our Phones
• 08. Money and 'Higher Things'
• 09. Why We Are All Addicts
• 10. Why We Are So Bad at Shopping
• 11. Business and the Ladder of Needs
• 12. Consumer Self-Knowledge
• 13. "Giving Customers What They Want"
• 14. The Entrepreneur and the Artist
• 15. What Advertising Can Learn from Art
• 16. What the Luxury Sector Does for Us
• 17. On Using Sex to Sell
• 18. Understanding Brand Promises
• 19. Consumer Education: On Learning How to Spend
• 20. Good Materialism
• 21. Why We Hate Cheap Things
• 22. Why We Continue to Love Expensive Things
• 23. Why Advertising Is so Annoying - but Doesn't Have to Be
• 24. On Good Demand
• 25. On Consumption and Status Anxiety
• 26. On the Responsibility of the Consumer
• 27. Adverts Know What We Want - They Just Can't Sell It to us
• 28. On the True Desires of the Rich
• 01. How to Be Original
• 02. When Are We Truly Productive?
• 03. The Importance of the Siesta
• 04. Career Therapy
• 05. On Meritocracy
• 06. The Vocation Myth
• 07. The Good Sides of Work
• 08. The Good Office
• 09. The EQ Office
• 10. Good Salaries: What We Earn - and What We’re Worth
• 11. What Good Business Should Be
• 12. On the Pleasures of Work
• 01. How Does An Emotionally Healthy Person Relate To Their Career?
• 02. The Concept of Voluntary Poverty
• 03. The Dangers of Having Too Little To Do
• 04. How Could a Working Life Be Meaningful?
• 05. On Learning to Live Deeply Rather than Broadly
• 06. What They Forget to Teach You at School
• 07. Authentic Work
• 08. Why We Need to Work
• 09. How We Came to Desire a Job We Could Love
• 10. Why Work Is So Much Easier than Love
• 11. Work and Maturity
• 12. How Your Job Shapes Your Identity
• 13. Authentic Work
• 01. Do We Need to Read the News?
• 02. On Gossip
• 03. How the Media Damages Our Faith in Humanity
• 04. Why We Secretly Love Bad News
• 05. Celebrity Crushes
• 06. On Switching Off the News
• 07. We've Been Here Before
• 08. In Praise of Bias
• 09. The News from Without - and the News from Within
• 10. History as a Corrective to News
• 11. Emotional Technology
• 12. What's Wrong with the Media
• 13. On the Dangers of the Internet
• 14. On Taking Digital Sabbaths
• 15. On the Role of Censorship
• 16. On the Role of Disasters
• 17. On the Role of Art in News
• 18. Tragedies and Ordinary Lives in the Media
• 19. On the Failures of Economic News
• 20. On Health News
• 21. What State Broadcasters Should Do
• 22. On the Role of Cheerful News
• 23. On News and Kindness
• 24. On Maniacs and Murderers
• 01. The United States and Happiness
• 02. Political Emotional Maturity
• 03. On Feeling Offended
• 04. A Guide to Good Nationalism
• 05. Why We Do - After All - Care about Politics
• 06. Why Socrates Hated Democracy
• 07. The Fragility of Good Government
• 08. Romantic vs. Classical Voters
• 09. Africa after Independence
• 01. Should I Follow My Dreams?
• 02. How to Retire Early
• 03. The Agonies of Choice
• 04. The Creative Itch
• 05. Broadening the Job Search
• 06. Our Families and Our Careers
• 07. The Challenges of Choosing a Career
• 08. On Career Crises
• 09. The Output/Input Confusion
• 10. Finding a Mission
• 11. How to Serve
• 12. Why Work-Life Balance is an Illusion
• 13. On Gratitude – and Motivation
• 14. How to Find Fulfilling Work
• 15. On the Origins of Motivation at Work
• 16. On Becoming an Entrepreneur
• 17. On Being an Unemployed Arts Graduate
• 01. On Small Talk at the Office
• 02. On Falling Apart at the Office
• 03. The Sorrows of Competition
• 04. What Is That Sunday Evening Feeling?
• 05. How Parents Get in the Way of Our Career Plans
• 06. Why Modern Work Is So Boring
• 07. Why Pessimism is the Key to Good Government
• 08. The Sorrows of Colleagues
• 09. The Sorrows of Commercialisation
• 10. The Sorrows of Standardisation
• 11. Confidence in the System
• 12. Job Monogamy
• 13. The Duty Trap
• 14. The Perfectionist Trap
• 15. On Professional Failure
• 16. Nasty Businesses
• 17. The Job Investment Trap
• 18. How Your Job Shapes Your Identity
• 19. The Pains of Leadership
• 20. Would It Be Better for Your Job If You Were Celibate?
• 21. On Stress and Inner Voices
• 22. On Being Wary of Simple-Looking Issues
• 23. On Commuting
• 24. On the Sorrows of Work
• 25. On Misemployment
• 26. On Guilt-trips and Charm
• 01. The Dangers of People Who Have Been to Boarding School
• 02. Giving Up on Being Special
• 03. The Problem with Individualism
• 04. Winners and Losers in the Race of Life
• 05. Being on the Receiving End of Pity
• 06. Shakespeare: 'When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state...'
• 07. Overcoming the Need to Be Exceptional
• 08. On the Loss of Reputation
• 09. The Secret Sorrows of Over-Achievers
• 10. You Are Not What You Earn
• 11. Artistic Philanthropy
• 12. The Need to Keep Believing in Luck
• 13. On Glamour
• 14. The Incumbent Problem
• 15. How to Cope with Snobbery
• 16. On the Dangers of Success
• 17. On Doing Better Than Our Parents
• 18. Success at School vs. Success in Life
• 19. Why We Look Down on People Who Don’t Earn Very Much
• 20. What Is 'Success'?
• 21. On Children and Power
• 22. On Pleasure in the Downfall of the Mighty
• 23. On Status and Democracy
• 24. On Failure and Success in the Game of Fame
• 25. On Envy
• 26. A Philosophical Exercise for Envy
• 27. On the Envy of Politicians
• 28. On Consumption and Status Anxiety
• 29. On the Desire for Fame
• 30. On Fame and Sibling Rivalry
• 01. Why Humanity Destroyed Itself
• 02. How Science Could - at Last - Properly Replace Religion
• 03. Our Forgotten Craving for Community
• 04. Why isn't the Future here yet?
• 05. On Changing the World
• 06. What Community Centres Should Be Like
• 07. On Seduction
• 08. The Importance of Utopian Thinking
• 09. Art is Advertising for What We Really Need
• 10. Why the World Stands Ready to Be Changed
• 11. On the Desire to Change the World
• 12. Utopian Collective Pride
• 13. Envy of a Utopian Future
• 14. Utopian Artificial Intelligence
• 15. Utopian Education
• 16. Utopian Marriage
• 17. Utopian Film
• 18. Utopian Culture
• 19. Utopian Festivals
• 20. Utopian Business Consultancy
• 21. Utopian Capitalism
• 22. Utopian Government
• 23. Utopian Media
• 24. Utopian Tax
• 25. Utopian Celebrity Culture
• 26. The Future of the Banking Industry
• 27. The Future of the Communications Industry
• 28. The Future of the Hotel Industry

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True Self and False Self

True self and false self are terms introduced into psychoanalysis by D. W. Winnicott in 1960. Winnicott ‘contrasts a basic True Self with a False Self, the latter a self-protective mechanism….The true self feeling involves a sense of all out personal aliveness…feeling real’. ‘Winnicott conceives of a “false self” that an infant develops in despairing defence against the trauma of inadequate maternal care; the analytic task is to give the “true self”, which can feel and is cowering behind the “false self”, which cannot, the strength to emerge’.

Before Winnicott

There was much in psychoanalytic theory on which Winnicott could draw for his concept of the False Self. Helene Deutsch had described the “as if” personalities who have ‘succeeded in substituting “pseudo contacts” of manifold kinds for a real feeling contact with other people: they behave “as if” they have feeling contacts with people’. Winnicott’s own analyst, Joan Riviere, had memorably explored the concept of the masquerade – of ‘the mask of the narcissist…”the trait of deceptiveness, the mask, which conceals this subtle reservation of all control under intellectual rationalizations, or under feigned compliance and superficial politeness”‘. Freud himself, with his late theory of ‘the ego as constituted in its nucleus by a series of alienating identifications’, had produced a theory of ‘the Ego, which does bear some comparison with the False Self’.

Despite its many antecedents, it would be wrong to underestimate the quiet conceptual revolution offered by Winnicott’s 1960 article, which offered a fresh and compelling, clinically-rooted picture of the human mind.

For Winnicott, in the False Self, ‘Other people’s expectations can become of overriding importance, overlaying or contradicting the original sense of self, the one connected to the very roots of one’s being’. The danger is that ‘through this False Self, the infant builds up a false set of relationships, and by means of introjections even attains a show of being real’. The result can be a ‘child whose potential aliveness and creativity has gone unnoticed…concealing an empty, barren internal world behind a mask of independence’. Yet at the same time the ‘Winnicottian False Self is the ultimate defence against the unthinkable “exploitation of the True Self, which would result in its annihilation”‘.

By contrast, the True Self is rooted in, and ‘”does no more than collect together the details of the experience of aliveness” – this means the body’s life-sustaining functions, “including the heart’s action and breathing”‘. Out of this the baby creates the experience of reality: a sense that ‘”Life is worth the trouble of living”. In the baby’s nonverbal gesture which ‘… expresses a spontaneous instinct’, the true self potential can be communicated to, and affirmed by, the motherer.

‘The False Self in its pathological guise prevents and inhibits what Winnicott calls the “spontaneous gesture” of the True Self. Compliance and imitation are the costly results’. Some would indeed consider that ‘the idea of compliance is central to Winnicott’s theory of the false self’, and add, paradoxically, that ‘concern for an object is easily a compliant act’. Where the motherer is not responsive to the baby’s spontaneity, where instead ‘a mother’s expectations are too insistent, they can eventually result in compliant behaviour and an impaired autonomy’, as the baby has ‘to manage a prematurely important object….The False Self enacts a kind of dissociated regard or recognition of the object; the object is taken seriously, is shown concern, but not by a person’.

It has been suggested that ‘in pathology, Winnicott’s distinction between “true and false selves” corresponds to Balint’s “basic fault” and to Fairbairn’s “compromised ego”‘.

One persistent criticism of Winnicott’s theory of is that it was not theoretically integrated. Neville Sympington writes: “Most clinicians … when they have a clinical insight, they simply paste it onto existing theory. … Winnicott did the same with the true and false self: he did not ask himself how the theory fitted with ego and id.” Similarly Jean-Bertrand Pontalis and Maud Mannoni are very reserved about the theoretical implication of Winnicott’s true/false self distinction, but they acknowledge the justice of his clinical observations.

Further developments

The last half-century have seen Winnicott’s ideas extended and applied in a variety of contexts, both in psychoanalysis and beyond.

It has been suggested that ‘Kohut offers essentially the same program’ as Winnicott in his descriptions of ‘the narcissistic disorders in which he specializes….Like Winnicott’s “false-self” patients, these patients develop a shoddy armor (of a “defensive” or “compensatory” character) around their maimed inner core’. Kohut himself ‘has noted that his work “overlaps” with Winnicott’s investigations’, and others have ‘regarded Kohut’s contribution to psychoanalysis to be an extension of Winnicott’s work’.

Thus Kohut emphasises that ‘to be…the maintenance of even the diseased remnants of the self is preferable to not being, that is, to accept the takeover of another’s personality rather than his actively elicited responsiveness’. Similarly, he stressed that ‘there is a decisive difference between the support of self-objects that are sought after and chosen by a self in harmony with its innermost ideals…and the abandoning of oneself to a foreign self, through which one gains borrowed cohesion at the price of genuine initiative and creative participation in life’.

Alexander Lowen identified narcissists as having a true and a false, or superficial, self. The false self rests on the surface, as the self presented to the world. It stands in contrast to the true self, which resides behind the facade or image. This true self is the feeling self, but it is a self that must be hidden and denied. Since the superficial self represents submission and conformity, the inner or true self is rebellious and angry. This underlying rebellion and anger can never be fully suppressed since it is an expression of the life force in that person. But because of the denial, it cannot be expressed directly. Instead it shows up in the narcissist’s acting out. And it can become a perverse force.

James F. Masterson argued all the personality disorders crucially involve the conflict between a person’s two “selves”: the false self, which the very young child constructs to please the mother, and the true self. The psychotherapy of personality disorders is an attempt is to put people back in touch with their real selves.

Jungians have explored how ‘the narcissistic longings of mothers (or fathers) to amass reflected glory through their children’ can result in a situation where ‘in place of autonomy, the adult…would come to obey an internal source that the psychoanalyst Neville Symington calls the “discordant source”‘. Symington contrasted ‘two poles: one in which I am the source of my own action, where I have a creative capacity that comes from my own source of action, and the other in which an inner figure opposed to myself is the source of action. He termed the twin ‘sources of action the “autonomous source” and the “discordant source”‘, and acknowledged that ‘although the formulation is different, it is along the lines of what Winnicott talks about – the true self and the false self’.

His main criticism of Winnicott concerned the initial adoption or internalisation of the discordant source – wanting ‘to stress that an intentional identification is what brings about the donning of the false self. Winnicott leaves out this intentional aspect in his description of its origins’.

Persona and false self

Jungians have explored ‘to what extent Jung’s concept of the persona overlaps with Winnicott’s concept of the False Self’ – noting the way ‘the antecedents of such persona-identification in the individual’s life-history are usually quite similar to those of the False Self’. However most would agree that it is only ‘when the persona is excessively rigid or defensive…[that] the persona then develops into a pathological false self’.

Stern’s tripartite self

In The Interpersonal World of the Infant, Daniel Stern considered ‘the sense of physical cohesion (…”going on being”, in Winnicott’s term)’ as essential to what he called the Core Self – providing ‘an affective core to the prerepresentational self’. He also explored how selective maternal attunement could create ‘two versions of reality….Language becomes available to ratify the split and confer the privileged status of verbal representation upon the false self’, so that ‘the true self becomes a congloberate of disavowed experiences of self which cannot be linguistically coded’.

However ‘in place of true self and false self, Stern suggests the adoption of a tri-partite vocabulary: the social self, the private self and the disavowed self’.

“No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.” – Thomas Mann

W e all wear masks.  Our social masks enable us to survive and to interact appropriately in a wide variety of interpersonal contexts.  We show a different side of ourselves to different people in our lives: significant others, family members, friends, professional colleagues, and acquaintances.  It is important to be aware of these different social masks and use them to help us manage our lives in a balanced and integrated way.  Without this awareness and balance, we are at risk for feeling disconnected from ourselves and others.  A clear understanding of our various selves enables us to develop a cohesive integrated identity.

According to Dr. Donald Winnicott , an English psychoanalyst hugely influential in the field of object relations , the false self develops through early environmental failure wherein true self-potential is unrealized and hidden.  The idea is that infants depend on their primary caregiver not only to meet their most basic needs for survival, but also for reliable, accurate, and empathic emotional responses.

When these emotional needs are either unmet, or met unreliably, the infant gradually learns not only not to trust the environment, but also not to trust the self.  Psychoanalytically speaking, this basic mistrust develops because infants rely on their primary caregivers to accurately mirror their emotional experiences.  It is through this accurate mirroring that infants learn not only how to label their own emotions, but to trust the validity of their internal experiences.

How does this apply to us as adults?  Whether the basic ideas of object relations and psychoanalytic thought sit well with you or not, almost all of us (except maybe those lucky few who seem to have reached complete self-actualization ) struggle at times to project what we believe to be the “true” or “authentic” self.  In many ways, wearing a social mask protects our authentic selves from being constantly exposed to the nonstop demands of our interpersonal environment.

There is a natural human tendency to protect our authentic selves from the scrutiny of the outside world.  When we protect our true selves, we are able to avoid being rejected or hurt.  There is a downside to this protection though – we may miss out on the opportunity to have genuine connections with other people.

Some of us may relate to both ourselves and others from a dominantly false self position.  If we have been relating to the world in this way for many years, it can feel “normal.”

Authentic Self:

• Thoughts, beliefs, words, and actions come from a deep-seated place within
• Lack of disparity between values and lived values
• Unique combination of your vast multitude of talents, skills, interests, and abilities

False Self:

• Putting on a facade with others may result in an internal sensation of being depleted, drained, or emotionally numb
• Possible tendencies to turn to mood-altering substances in order to feel “different”
• Actions may feel forced, alienated, or detached

W hile there are clear distinctions between characteristics of acting from the authentic self versus the false self, it is important to remember that the false self, or social mask, serves many adaptive (i.e., useful) purposes.  We need to be able to utilize aspects of the false self in a variety of social contexts.  The difference between utilizing the false self in an adaptive way versus a maladaptive way has to do with both our awareness of its attributes and sense of congruence between our social masks and our core values.

When we are aware of the many sides of ourselves we are able to gain a sense of ownership and mastery over when and how we choose to show these sides.  When we are in control of what part of ourselves we choose to show, the false self is no longer foreign and detached: our social masks become congruent and integrated.  We are whole.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Winnicott, D. W. (1960). “Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self,” in The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development. New York: International UP Inc., 1965, pp. 140-152.

Featured image: Jackie Martinez (#31899) by mark sebastian / CC BY-SA 2.0

About Laura K. Schenck, Ph.D., LPC

I am a Licensed Professional Counselor (LPC) with a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from the University of Northern Colorado. Some of my academic interests include: Dialectical Behavior Therapy, mindfulness, stress reduction, work/life balance, mood disorders, identity development, supervision & training, and self-care.

Another excellent post! As you know we work with kids. I am always fascinated at how young some kids really are when they learn to wear their masks. So this is a very interesting read you’ve posted about Dr. Winnicott’s work in the filed of object relations and gives me great insight into the possibilities of what is behind this behavior for youth.

I’ve read Dr. Robert Coles’ books on adolescent behavior where he makes a point (loosely quoted here) that kids are ever attentive witnesses of their parents and others behaviors. Now, through your post, you are reminding me of just how important it is to teach/model an integrated balance and perspective of these aspects to help kids learn healthy ways to connect with their peers, parents and other adults in their lives!

Will you be posting insights on how some of the issues you cover in your blog affect youth specifically as well?

Thanks again for a thoughtful post!

Amy – It seems like we learn how to wear social masks very early on in the socialization process. We learn this through repeated experiences of getting particular responses when we act in particular ways. These responses serve to reinforce certain behaviors. All of these experiences build upon our constantly evolving style of relating to others. It helps me to remember that people absolutely “are the way that they are” for innumerable reasons. I will include some posts specifically geared towards youth in the future. I’m glad that you enjoyed this post!

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True-self vs. false-self.

A Coaching Power Tool By Marc Blais, Leadership Coach, CANADA

Learning to Find Your True-Self vs. False-Self

I promise you that the discovery of your True Self will feel like a thousand pounds of weight have fallen from your back. You will no longer have to build, protect, or promote any idealized self-image. Living in the True Self is quite simply a much happier existence. – Richard Rohr

The corporate ecosystem for a licensed professional is an internal tug of war between ethics and profits. With a duty to act in the best interest of the public in addition to contributing to corporate financial success, it can feel as if you are balancing on a tightrope. The stakes are high with the expectation to deliver absolute precision while contributing to economic gains. Survival is a by-product of a competitive personality and perfectionistic mindset. Neglecting the care of the public risks penalty of professional license, while negative financials jeopardize employment stability.

As a licensed professional engineer myself with 15+ years of experience, I have participated in a culture that categorizes people into rank. This inherently creates competition, performance pressure, and a belief that the engineer is right. An environment that fuels a drive to have no limits with always being on, in order to deliver perfection with an attitude to win. There is a human cost, the body keeps score. Forgoing personal care, and ignoring your needs, is the result of the body being the last to act.

An environment that nurtures being the best and being right, translates into pushing the mental, emotional, and physical boundaries of oneself to always be of service. There is a disconnect from what the body is communicating, and a mindset that forces you to keep going. My personal experience stemmed from a fear of rejection that unknowingly empowered my ego (or false self)to operate with no boundaries, suppress inner feelings, and involuntarily burn out (emotional exhaustion). While burnout was a cycle that I experienced before, this time it forced me to swallow my pride and step away from the workplace for an extended period of time. I am not alone as peer professionals suffer chronic workplace stress, leading to burnout with differing outcomes.

How did it get this bad for me? I started with a new company in an unfamiliar role and was eager to make an impact quickly to gain the acceptance of the team. Without knowing the company culture or the team dynamics, I got drawn into proving I can do it (somewhat self-imposed) instead of understanding what should I be doing. Of course, I could do it, I was equipped with a career track record of delivering on promises. My professional journey included being self-sufficient, having the answers, and being accepted by the tribe (belonging to a group).

Through my coaching journey, I have learned and adopted the importance of being present, focusing on interoception (what is the inner sensation telling me), and having the confidence to be my true self; what a liberating feeling. The power of suspending judgment of myself and others shifts from needing to know everything myself, to being open to learning from others. I now recognize there is a health cost to perfectionism, including the risk of compromising relationships. Turns out my daughter’s school teacher had it right “sharing is caring”. By asking for help, a strength not a weakness provides an opportunity to empower others to feel valued and appreciated. Preservation of the relationship with myself, and with others, overcome a desire to be unrealistically flawless. We are in this together.

What Is the Difference Between True-Self vs. False-Self?

What is false-self.

How does one define the false self? The late English pediatrician Donald W. Winnicott (1896-1971) described the False Self as:

“An artificial persona that people create very early in life to protect themselves from re-experiencing developmental trauma, shock, and stress in close relationships.”

As early as childhood the false self is actively avoiding being vulnerable to others, shielding against sharing how one truly feels. This version of the self has the belief that it is necessary to emotionally protect oneself in order to gain acceptance, knowing survival is dependent on a connection with others (e.g.caretaker). This early pattern of survival, dependent on others, becomes ingrained as a way of life without being aware of the relationship-forming habit that is guarding against emotional harm from others.

There is much effort, either consciously or subconsciously, exerted to protect and hide the True Self with a fear of not being accepted. This form of hiding can cause mental exhaustion and is compared to wearing a mask to conceal what is real. With a human need to belong, the false self creates relationships that are superficial in nature in order to gain acceptance from social groups (e.g. family, friends, colleagues). It’s like being a superhero that never reveals its real powers, afraid of losing connections with people. The false self is a defensive attitude that is imprisoning to the mind, lonely, and limits the ability to freely experience life.

This artificial persona can be necessary when viewed as a spectrum, healthy versus unhealthy. To act from the false self can be beneficial in navigating the demands of social situations. To be functional in society, it is healthy to refrain from sharing how you really feel as a means of being polite around strangers with no emotional connection. It’s an application of healthy boundaries with people for self-preservation and adaptation. Acting from the false self, in a healthy way, empowers you to navigate unknown social situations that mitigate emotional harm.

On the other side of the spectrum, Donald W. Winnicott defines the unhealthy false self as one that fits into society through forced compliance rather than a desire to adapt. Through our life teachers, we learn to put others ahead of ourselves and to always be of service. These teachings are understood that self-sacrifice is the expectation.

Enter the professional work world in championing a career and this false self is all-consuming to be of service. The demands within a corporate environment for a professional result in mounting pressures, whereby the false self struggles to survive and jeopardizes burnout. A Deloitte survey found that 77% of professionals have experienced burnout in their current job. The finding also revealed that 87% of these professionals were passionate about what they did. This demonstrates that passion alone is not enough for well-being in the long term and the effects of the false self can be quite negative when left unrestrained. There is a societal cost to societal due to burnout, as outlined in a Harvard Business Review that found that in the United States the financial impact on the healthcare system is~$160billion.

The worldwide COVID-19pandemic has contributed to the great resignation seen largely in the United States and elsewhere in the world, where employees voluntarily quit their jobs. This raises many questions about this workforce exodus. What happened to them? What is the relationship between burnout and false self?

The True-self

To be conscious of the self and respond to the world around you authentically is to be your true self. This empowers freedom of thought and to be impulsive with expressing your true self. As Donald W. Winnicott summarised:

True self can be spontaneous, creative, and feel real. Spontaneity and real impulse can only come from the true self, and for this to happen someone needs to take over the defensive functions of the false self.

To be real and honest with yourself and others takes courage in the pursuit of living your true self. This is vulnerability set in motion, requiring you to be brave without knowing how people will respond. Brené Brown , an American research professor, studies in great depth shame and vulnerability. In her book Rising Strong she defines it well:

I want to be in the arena. I want to be brave with my life. And when we make the choice to dare greatly, we sign up to get our asses kicked. We can choose courage or we can choose comfort, but we can’t have both. Not at the same time. Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it’s having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome. Vulnerability is not weakness; it’s our greatest measure of courage.

To have the courage to be your true self is an unmasking. The freedom of letting the canary out of the cage to fly free is terrifying but a truly liberating experience. You are consciously and respectfully being real with people about what you need, what you can truly offer, and what you are willing to accept. This sets in motion the creation of healthy boundaries, which allows for self-preservation with well-being in the long term.

Uncovering your true self starts with being curious about yourself. Questions that can set in motion self-discovery include:

• Who are you?
• What are you most proud of?
• What truly motivates you?
• What’s important to you?
• What do you fear?
• What do you believe in?
• What are your values?
• What is your life purpose?
• What is your relationship with yourself?
• What happens when you put your needs first?

What Is in It for the Professional?

As a professional, you have a tendency to measure your value and worth by your specialized skills, your achievements, your job title, and by simply being of service for the greater good of society. This social pressure can conceal your true self and give the false self the power of no boundaries with an ability to deplete the body of all that it has to give. The life of a professional becomes a crude cycle of burnout and forced rest. The long-term health impacts are undesirable to the body through disease (diss-ease).

Professionals are expected to exhibit the highest standards of honesty and integrity in protecting the health and well-being of people in society. With the privilege of being trusted to care for others, there is a need to care for yourself. You need a care program that allows you to reflect on who you are, your destiny, and an action plan to get you there.

A 3-step self-care program includes:

• Meditation–resting the mind
• Exercise – physical outlet
• Coaching – personal reflection

When you take care of yourself, you take care of others. When you operate from your true self you feel good about who you are, you have boundaries (and you honor them), and you maintain your wellbeing with sustainability top of mind. The act of asking for help is an opportunity for creative cooperation.

None of us get to the finish line alone – Jeff Adams, Canadian Paralympian & World Champion wheelchair racer

Stephen Covey highlights in his book ‘The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People’ a transition of three stages through life:

• Dependence – need others to get what you want
• Independence – can get what you want through your own efforts
• Interdependence – combine your efforts with that of others to achieve the greatest success

Each step is vital in exploring and experiencing life and reaching the highest state of being one with others(interdependence). When you are at peace with being your (true self)it is a state of enlightenment. The stage is set to trust others because you trust yourself.

Uncover Your Authentic True-Self vs. False-Self

The art of coaching provides a safe space for people to show up vulnerable, uncover for themselves their mindset, and put words to their thought (name it to tame it). It is a discovery journey into who they truly are, how they show up, and their conscious path forward.

Coaching creates an environment to have the freedom to speak the truth, a truth that may never have been spoken or realized. Taking steps to reveal the true self is a process of self-awareness and, through a trusting relationship with a coach , being challenged on beliefs to learning about who you are and how you want to show up in the world. There is an opportunity to break free from the false self by having the courage to be your true self.

Coaching creates an environment to bring awareness to clients that they are the creators of their life experiences: to be in flow with life rather than combating it. It’s a synchronization of the mind and body. Listening to the true self is being in tune with who you truly are.

There are two states of being: to operate from love or fear. Deep down people are good and unfavorable experiences can lead to misdirection in life. Through a trusting coaching partnership, clients can feel safe enough to operate from love and awaken themselves to release beliefs of fear for a purposeful future.

An incredible thing happens to you: you are able to be whole with life (personal and professional). You are truly engaged.

Psycho-Analytic Explorations , D. W. Winnicott Edited by Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd & Madeleine Davis. Published by Routledge. Rising Strong: How The Ability To Reset Transforms The Way We Live, Love, Parent, And Lead , by Brené Brown. PublishedRandom House Publishing Group The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People , by Stephen R. Covey. Published by FranklinCovey Who Am I Really? True Self vs False Self - Growth thru Change Workplace Burnout Survey | Deloitte US Employee Burnout Is a Problem with the Company, Not the Person (hbr.org)

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The Deeper Journey for Leaders: From the False Self to the True Self

“For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” Paul in Colossians 3

Once I asked the pastor of a large, vigorous, dynamic, growing church with a strong emphasis on the deeper life in Christ—a church that confirmed fifty to seventy-five new members each week—where these people were coming from.  His response surprised me.  He told me almost all of these people had begun their journey in Christ in an even larger, more vigorous, more dynamic church whose worship was leading-edge contemporary, whose focus was strongly charismatic and whose corporate life centered in highly emotional expressions of faith in God.

These people would stay in that church for about two to three years and then the novelty and excitement would become ritualized and dry for them.  They began to hunger, in his words, “for something deeper.”  They began to sense there was more to the Christian life.

You may have felt the same thing and asked yourself, Isn’t there more to the Christian life than being active in a Christian community, affirming a certain set of beliefs, adopting a particular behavior pattern?  

The answer is Yes. The “more” is the journey from living out one’s false self to living as our true self in Christ—a self that is deeply centered in and utterly abandoned to God. 

Two Ways of Being in the World 

You see, there are two fundamental ways of being human in the world: trusting in our human resources and abilities or radically trusting in God. You cannot be grasped by or sustained in the deeper life in God—being like Jesus— until you are awakened at the deep levels of your being to this essential reality. You might describe these two ways of being in the world as the “false self” and the “true self.” Unless you are aware of these two selves—these two ways of being in the world – you will have great difficulty allowing God to lead you into a deeper life of wholeness in Christ.

The reality of the “false self”–this pervasive, deeply entrenched, self-referenced structure of being as the primary context of our spiritual journey—is one of the hardest things for us to acknowledge. We tend to think of the false self as a “surface phenomena” that can be treated by a few cosmetic alterations in our behavior. We are slow to accept the fact that our false self permeates all the way to the core of our being. It is hard to admit that we are profoundly habituated to a self-referenced way of being in the world that manifests itself in characteristics such as being fearful, protective, possessive, manipulative, destructive, self-promoting, indulgent, and making distinctions so as to separate ourselves from others.

Jesus makes the reality of the false self unmistakably clear when he says, “If anyone would come after me, they must deny themselves,” and, “Whoever loses their self for my sake will find it” (Mt 16:24-25). Jesus is not talking about giving up candy for Lent. He is calling for the abandonment of our entire, pervasive, deeply entrenched matrix of self-referenced being so we can enter into a life of loving union with God that manifests itself in Christlikeness.

The Religious False Self

What’s even more difficult, however, for us as Christian leaders to acknowledge is the reality of a particular aspect of our false self that is even more subtle– our religious false self.

Our religious false self presumes, because we are religious, that everything is fine in our relationship with God. Oh, to be sure, there may be a need for some “fine-tuning” of a few aspects of our life, a polishing up of a few of our rough edges. Our religious false self may be rigorous in religiosity, devoted in discipleship and sacrificial in service—without being in loving union with God.

We see a frightening example of this at the end of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus depicts a scene before the throne on the judgment day. A group of people appear there and say, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?” Obviously these were serious, dedicated disciples. Their lives had been spent doing “God things.” But Jesus replies to them, “I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers” (Mt 7:22-23 NRSV).

Their lives, their ministries, were not grounded in a loving union with Christ. They were religious false selves. They were so busy being in the world for God that they failed to be in God for the world .  And here is a great difference between these two ways. A religious false self will expend amazing amounts of energy and resources to be in the world for God. But the true self is called to be in God for the world, and this is costly. It requires the abandonment of the whole self-referenced structure of our false self and, especially, the religious false self.

An Essential Awareness 

Perhaps the premier examples of religious false selves in the New Testament are the Pharisees. Jesus uses a powerful simile to describe their frightening condition. He calls them “whitewashed tombs” that outwardly appear beautiful but within are full of deadness (Mt 23:27). Their outward display of religiosity was enviable in its apparent holiness, in its faithful obedience to the Torah, in its devotion to the scribal lists of dos and don’ts, in its rigorous abstention from anything that might defile its purity. Behind this religious façade, however, was an emptiness of deadly proportions.

Their profound religiosity was a self-generated effort at attaining holiness for themselves rather than the fruit of a life in loving union with God.

For those on an intentional spiritual journey, our awareness of the deadly and debilitating nature of the religious false self is essential. Rigorous religious practices, devoted discipleship, sacrificial service, deeper devotional activities may do nothing more than turn a nominally religious false self into a fanatically religious false self.

The essential difference between a false self and a religious false self is that the latter brings God into its life, but in service of its false self programs.  Our religious false self may begin with a genuine experience with God.  But then, like Peter on the mount of transfiguration, we often seek to contain our experience within a box of our own making.  We attempt to integrate our experience with God into the structures of our life in ways that are minimally disruptive to our status quo.  The “God” within our box, however, becomes a construct, an idol, that enables us maintain control of what we call “God” as well as continue to be in control of our existence.

Letting God out of the Box

To put it succinctly, whenever we attempt to have God in our life on our own terms, we are a religious false self.  The temptation to take over God’s role in our life is the essence of the false self.  The false self is the self that in some way is playing God in its life and in its world. Before we can move forward to a life of radical abandonment to God in love—we must be clear on the nature of our religious false self and must come to the decision to lose this life for Christ’s sake.

But loss is not the main point. The main point is what we stand to gain.  We are created to experience our true life, our genuine identity, our ultimate value in an intimate loving union with God at the core of our being.  This is a life of radical abandonment to God in love and equally radical availability to God for others so that in all circumstances and relationships our life becomes one in whom God is present for others.

The life hidden with Christ in God is one of such growing union with God in love that God’s presence becomes the context of our daily life, God’s purposes become the matrix of our activities, and the values of God’s kingdom shape our life and relationships; God’s living presence becomes the ground of our identity, the source of our meaning, the seat of our value and the center of our purpose. And that way of being in the world is life indeed!

Gracious and merciful God, whose cruciform love has plumbed the depths of my false self, awaken me from the pervasive bondage of my false self and enable me through the power of your indwelling Holy Spirit to be restored to wholeness in the image of Christ.  As I reflect on the hope and the possibility of living as my true self in Christ, stir my heart to hunger and thirst for your transforming work in my life through the Holy Spirit, who with Christ lives and reigns with you.  Amen.  

©M. Robert Mulholland, 2016. This article is adapted by Ruth Haley Barton from  The Deeper Journey: The Spirituality of Discovering Your True Self (InterVarsity Press, 2016.)

Learn more about the impact of Dr. M. Robert Mulholland, Jr.:

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Purchase  Spiritual Transformation for the Sake of Others  DVD curriculum with Robert Mulholland and Ruth Haley Barton

Donate towards the  M. Robert Mulholland Scholarship Fund .

Dr. M. Robert Mulholland, Jr.

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Love this post. I had a colleague who was fond of saying, “Don’t be so heavenly minded that you’re no earthly good.” I have been living that way for over a decade. Then I come across this post which includes the statement “ They were so busy  being in the world for God  that they failed to  be in God for the world. ” Ouch! Makes me realize I’ve gotten out of balance in this, which has led to a sense of spiritual malaise. It’s time to focus on being in God for the world. Thank you so much for this reminder!!!

I love this article as you articulate so clearly what has been on my heart but I couldn’t find the language.I pray that training in Spiritual Direction will continue the transforming work of Jesus in me so I can truly let go of all aspects of my false self and learn to be in God for the world. Thank you, I can’t wait to receive Dr Mulhollands book on order.

Yes, our true self loves to worship God! Surmised from yesterdays’ Moravian Daily Watchword: Thus says the Lord God: Repent and turn away from your idols. Ezekiel 14:6

Join thousands of pastors and spiritual leaders

Receive Beyond Words ®, reflections on the soul of leadership. Written by Ruth Haley Barton, each reflection provides spiritual guidance and encouragement for those seeking to be in God for the world.

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Fact-Checking Claims About Tim Walz’s Record

Republicans have leveled inaccurate or misleading attacks on Mr. Walz’s response to protests in the summer of 2020, his positions on immigration and his role in the redesign of Minnesota’s flag.

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By Linda Qiu

Since Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota was announced as the Democratic nominee for vice president, the Trump campaign and its allies have gone on the attack.

Mr. Walz, a former teacher and football coach from Nebraska who served in the National Guard, was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2006 and then as Minnesota’s governor in 2018. His branding of former President Donald J. Trump as “weird” this year caught on among Democrats and helped catapult him into the national spotlight and to the top of Vice President Kamala Harris’s list of potential running mates.

The Republican accusations, which include questions over his military service , seem intended at undercutting a re-energized campaign after President Biden stepped aside and Ms. Harris emerged as his replacement at the top of the ticket. Mr. Trump and his allies have criticized, sometimes inaccurately, Mr. Walz’s handling of protests in his state, his immigration policies, his comments about a ladder factory and the redesign of his state’s flag.

Here’s a fact check of some claims.

What Was Said

“Because if we remember the rioting in the summer of 2020, Tim Walz was the guy who let rioters burn down Minneapolis.” — Senator JD Vance of Ohio, the Republican nominee for vice president, during a rally on Wednesday in Philadelphia

This is exaggerated. Mr. Walz has faced criticism for not quickly activating the National Guard to quell civil unrest in Minneapolis in the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer. But claims that he did not respond at all, or that the city burned down, are hyperbolic.

Mr. Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020, and demonstrators took to the streets the next day . The protests intensified, with some vandalizing vehicles and setting fires. More than 700 state troopers and officers with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources’ mobile response team were deployed on May 26 to help the city’s police officers, according to a 2022 independent assessment by the state’s Department of Public Safety of the response to the unrest.

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FACT FOCUS: False claims follow Minnesota governor’s selection as Harris’ running mate

Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz made their joint debut as the 2024 Democratic ticket Monday night at a packed rally in Philadelphia.

FILE - Gov. Tim Walz, D-Minn., speaks before President Joe Biden at the Earth Rider Brewery, Jan. 25, 2024, in Superior, Wis. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

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FILE - Minnesota Governor Tim Walz greets reporters before Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at Planned Parenthood, March 14, 2024, in St. Paul, Minn. (AP Photo/Adam Bettcher, File)

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Vice President Kamala Harris’ announcement on Tuesday that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz will be her running mate in the 2024 presidential election increased the spread of false claims about the Midwestern Democrat, some of which appeared on social media even before Harris made her pick public.

Here’s a look at the facts.

CLAIM: Walz said on CNN that he wants to invest in a “ladder factory” to help people scale the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border and illegally enter the U.S.

THE FACTS: That’s false. Posts are misrepresenting a comment Walz made on an episode of CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” last week. In the full segment , the Democrat criticizes former President Donald Trump’s plan to build a wall on the southern border by joking about the hypothetical investment. He then gives multiple other examples of how to address illegal crossings into the U.S. through Mexico.

Amid Harris’ Tuesday announcement, social media users used a clip from the segment to make it seem as though the Minnesota governor was advocating for illegal immigration.

“He talks about this wall, I always say, ‘let me know how high it is, if it’s 25 feet then I’ll invest in a 30-foot-ladder factory,’” Walz says, referencing Trump. “That’s not how you stop this.”

One X post that shared the clip reads: “FLASHBACK: Kamala’s VP pick, Tim Walz, says he should invest in a ‘ladder factory’ to help illegal aliens climb the border wall.”

But Walz was not offering to help people enter the U.S. without authorization. He was actually discussing how to prevent this from happening.

In the full segment, after making the investment quip, Walz gives alternative ideas for how to handle illegal crossings on the southern border. Arrests for such crossings reached a record high in December, but dropped to a new low for the Biden administration at the end of July following a temporary ban on asylum .

“You stop this using electronics, you stop it using more border control agents and you stop it by having a legal system that allows for that tradition of allowing folks to come here just like my relatives did,” Walz says near the end of the segment . “To come here, be able to work and establish the American dream.”

He also spoke in support of a bipartisan border security package intended to cut back on illegal crossings that the Senate voted down in February.

— Associated Press writer Melissa Goldin contributed this report.

CLAIM: Walz changed the Minnesota flag so that it resembles the Somali flag.

THE FACTS: Minnesota did unfurl a new state flag and accompanying seal in May, but the changes were made to replace an old design that Native Americans said reminded them of painful memories of conquest and displacement. The State Emblems Redesign Commission was established during the 2023 legislative session to oversee the development of a new design.

Changes were made to eliminate an old state seal that featured the image of a Native American riding off into the sunset while a white settler plowed his field with a rifle at the ready. The seal was a key feature of the old flag.

The commission included public officials, design experts and members of tribal and other communities of color. Its purpose statement dictated that the designs “must accurately and respectfully reflect Minnesota’s shared history, resources, and diverse cultural communities. Symbols, emblems, or likenesses that represent only a single community or person, regardless of whether real or stylized, may not be included in a design.”

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The public submitted more than 2,600 proposals and the commission picked one from Andrew Prekker, 25, of Luverne, as the basis for the flag.

Prekker said Walz had nothing to do with the creation of the flag, and Somalia had nothing to do with the flag design. Minnesota is home to the largest Somali population in the U.S. and is home to U.S. Rep. Ilhan Oman, who was born in Somalia and is a member of an informal group of progressive Democratic House members known as The Squad.

“The inspiration behind my flag were three main concepts inspired by Minnesota’s history and culture: The North Star, the Minnesota shape, and three stripes representing different facets of Minnesotan identity,” he wrote in an email.

Prekker’s original design had the white star on the blue background with white, green and light blue stripes stretching over the rest of the flag. The flag was compared online with flags from states in Somalia that have green, white and blue stripes and a star. The stripes were dropped by the commission in the final design.

The final version of the flag features a dark blue shape resembling Minnesota with a white, eight-pointed star on it. The right side is light blue and is meant to symbolize the state’s abundant waters that led to it being known as the Land of 10,000 Lakes.

The Somali flag has a five-point star on a light blue background. “There is no connection to Somalia or any other country, and in complete honesty I didn’t even know Somalia existed before the whole flag debacle. Any similarities people want to see are a coincidence. It is a Minnesotan flag, and that is what I designed it for,” Prekker said.

Find AP Fact Checks here: https://apnews.com/APFactCheck .

Beliefs About Political News in the Run-up to an Election

This paper develops a model of news discernment to explore the influence of elections on the formation of partisan-driven parallel information universes. Using survey data from news quizzes administered during and outside the 2020 U.S. presidential election, the model shows that partisan congruence’s impact on news discernment is substantially amplified during election periods. Outside an election, when faced with a true and a fake news story and asked to select the most likely true story, an individual is 4% more likely to choose the true story if it favors their party; in the days prior to the election, this increases to 11%.

We would like to thank Chiara Aina, Alexey Makarin, Vincent Pons, David Rand, Jesse Shapiro, Francesco Trebbi, Silvia Vannutelli, as well as seminar audiences at Berkeley Haas, Bocconi University, Harvard, MIT Sloan, and Pompeu Fabra for helpful comments and suggestions. We obtained approval from the Columbia University IRB under protocol AAAS3426 and from the MIT COUHES (Exempt ID E-3899). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

MARC RIS BibTeΧ

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Tim Walz's military record: What to know about potential VP's National Guard service

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate on Tuesday, choosing a progressive yet plain-spoken VP candidate from America’s heartland to help her win over rural, white voters.

“I’m pleased to share that I’ve made my decision: Minnesota Governor Tim Walz will join our campaign as my running mate,” Harris said via text to supporters. “Tim is a battle-tested leader who has an incredible track record of getting things done for Minnesota families. I know that he will bring that same principled leadership to our campaign, and to the office of the vice president.”

We look at Walz, a 60-year-old U.S. Army National Guard veteran, and his military career over the years.

More: Tim Walz is Kamala Harris' VP pick: Minnesota governor named running mate: Live updates

How long was Walz in the military?

Walz served in the military for 24 years, enlisting in the Nebraska National Guard at 17 in 1981 and then transferring to the Minnesota National Guard in 1996. He retired in 2005 to begin his successful run for the U.S. House, representing Minnesota as command sergeant major, among the highest ranks for enlisted soldiers. His battalion went on to deploy to Iraq shortly after Walz's retirement.

Walz specialized in heavy artillery and had proficiency ribbons in sharpshooting and hand grenades.

But during the 21 years that Walz spent working with large artillery pieces, he suffered hearing loss and tinnitus in both ears, Minnesota Public Radio reported. He was allowed to continue his service after undergoing surgery, which partially resolved his hearing loss.

Where did Walz serve, and what did he do in the National Guard?

During his service, Walz responded to natural disasters, including floods and tornadoes in Minnesota and Nebraska, and was deployed overseas for months at a time, according to MPR.

In 2003, he was sent to Italy, where he served with the European Security Force to support the war in Afghanistan. He was also stationed in Norway for joint training with other NATO militaries.

Walz told MPR that he reenlisted in the National Guard after the September 11 attacks but never saw active combat in his years in the military.

Stars and Stripes reported in 2020 that Walz credited his Army experience with helping him steer Minnesota through the COVID-19 pandemic as governor.

As governor of Minnesota, Walz is commander in chief of the 13,000-soldier Minnesota National Guard. “I’m certainly proud of my military service, but it’s one piece of me,” he told Minnesota Public Radio in 2018. “It doesn’t define me.”

Reuters and USA TODAY reporter Tom Vanden Brook contributed to this story.

False Self-True Self: The Perils of Living a Lie to Fit In

Exploring the link between authenticity and mental health..

Posted March 26, 2021 | Reviewed by Devon Frye

• Some scholars have linked the development of a true (or authentic) self to better mental health.
• Barriers to the development of a true self include peer pressure, family preferences, social norms, and cultural expectations.
• This can lead to a discrepancy between internal desires and lived reality, contributing to the development of a "false self."
• A "false self"—and the dysfunctional choices that may arise as a result—have been linked in research to poorer mental health.

One of the defining characteristics of modern society is the extent of choice and opportunity available. In times past, choices were constrained by culture, tradition, and convention. But today, we have the opportunity to pick and choose from a vast array of lifestyle choices related to diverse domains including diet, fashion, sexual behavior, spiritual practices, consumer habits, cultural activities, fitness regimes, employment, and education .

The True Self and Mental Health

This growth in choice and opportunity has been praised by many psychologists. For example, Carl Rogers argues that this expansion of choice allows humans the scope to develop a "true" (or "authentic") self, unfettered by the manacles of tradition and convention.

The true self is achieved through the conscious creation of a lifestyle commensurate with individual goals and desires—previously unattainable in eras where choices were more constrained.

In a similar vein, psychologist Kenneth Gergen states that modern society allows people to develop what he calls a "pastiche personality ," allowing them to playfully pick and choose various lifestyle choices according to their own needs, desires, and appetites.

In short, these authors praise the freedom, autonomy, and opportunity offered in modern societies, linking this to the development of a true or authentic self, which they argue can lead to greater mental, spiritual and human well-being.

Social Context and the False Self

However, it is important to recognize that lifestyle choices do not occur in a social vacuum. The choices of individuals are still heavily influenced by peers, parents, or others in the community such as religious leaders. Choices are also shaped by cultural expectations and social norms, which may vary according to age, gender , and other socio-demographic variables.

Moreover, social media trends may also affect individual decisions, with some research indicating that young people sometimes make lifestyle choices based on " fear of missing out" (FOMO) or attempts to convince others that they are living a "my fun-filled life" version of reality.

In other words, evidence suggests that many people still make lifestyle choices based on social expectations and the desire for external validation, rather than internal desires and individual preferences. Can this mismatch between desires and reality negatively affect well-being?

Psychiatrists such as D. W. Winnicott have suggested that this can lead to the development of a "false self." This is not an official psychiatric diagnosis, but a reference to a common feeling among some individuals that they are "living a lie" or "wearing a mask" in their daily lives, mainly in an effort to meet socio-cultural norms and familial/peer expectations.

False Self and Mental Health

Indeed, some research shows that this false self is often encouraged by peers and family, who can make aspects of their love, friendship , or support contingent on certain choices being made. This can lead many people to sacrifice their own authentic desires in the service of people-pleasing. In their writings, psychiatrists such as D.W. Winnicott and R.D. Laing have linked a "false self" to poorer mental health.

In fact, research indicates that many people make choices that can damage their mental health in an effort to fit in. For example, evidence suggests that alcohol use and drug abuse in young people often arise from peer pressure and aspirations to be part of a cool and trendy "in-crowd," rather than deep desires to use these substances.

Similarly, other research suggests that individual eating habits and exercise patterns are heavily influenced by a variety of factors such as social norms, family preferences, and media messages regarding ideal body types.

This can lead to many dysfunctional choices—for example, pathological dieting or over-exercising, both of which have been linked to the rise of eating disorders and body dysmorphia in young people. Again, these choices may not reflect a "true self."

The Conflict Between True Self and False Self

To be sure, this era of untrammeled choice offers boundless opportunities to engage in a myriad of activities and build a "pastiche personality" which expresses a true (or authentic) self. Indeed, this is one of the joys of living in a free and open society.

However, this vision of free individuals making free choices in a free society is somewhat Panglossian, and fails to recognize the social and cultural constraints experienced by many, including "fear of missing out," people-pleasing, and other forms of "living a lie" to fit in. In his famous poem "The Hollow Men," T.S. Eliot wrote:

Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow

In sum, the discrepancy between internal desires and actual choices can create a reality that casts a shadow over the lives of many people, which can have ramifications for mental health. This may mean we should all ask ourselves the question: Am I living a lie to fit in?

Facebook image: Drazen Zigic/Shutterstock

LinkedIn image: kittirat roekburi/Shutterstock

Rob Whitley, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the department of psychiatry at McGill University and a research scientist at the Douglas Hospital Research Centre.

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