The Nature of the Self

Sigmund Freud, the Austrian "father of psychoanalysis", generated major theories concerning the self, psychoanalysis, hypnosis, and sexuality. His ideas, while not directly related to this branch of cultural theory, did spur later theorists such as Jacques Lacan.

"If Marx looked at the consequences of our need to labour in terms of the social relations, social classes and forms of politics which it entailed, Freud looks at its implications for the psychical life" (Eagleton, 132-133; emphasis added).

Freud's work centered on explaining personality in terms of sexual drives. Basically, we all repress our tendencies to simple gratification and pleasure (the "pleasure principle") in order to work, function, and survive in the modern world. Often we can deal with this repression, but sometimes it becomes too great and we become ill (actually, neurotic). This repression is centered in our unconscious, which contains many of the clues to why we become neurotic. The primary purpose of psychoanalysis, then, is to explore the unconscious and figure out what's wrong. There's a lot of stuff about ids, egos, penis envy, and Oedipus complexes, but we don't need to go into that here.

Psychoanalysis remains at the root of most of our modern conceptions of the nature of the self, providing a base from which we can understand how our "self" is constructed, and from there gives us some clues about how that self is being affected by the emerging age of computers and new media.

The primary purpose of psychoanalysis is to explore the unconscious and figure out what's wrong. "The subject of Freud is most often encountered in states of extreme alienation. Driven by compulsions over which it has little or no control, haunted by repressed desires, shaped by traumatic experiences that it can neither fully recall nor clearly articulate, the self as Freud depicts it is not bound up with secure possession but with instability and loss. Such articulation of identity as exists occurs in states of self-abandonment -- in dreams and parapaxes -- and the self seems lost not only to others but to the cunning representations of others within the self" (Greenblatt 134).

Freud is relevant because he is a precursor to Lacan, who tried to "rewrite" Fruedianism in a way that was relevant to more modern studies of the human subject, its place in society, and most of all its relationship to language (Eagleton, 142). Freud provided inspiration to Lacan (who believed "the unconscious is structured like a language"), Jung, and others to examine the nature of the mind.

Jacques Lacan, the French poststructuralist, decenters the self; he says the self is constructed in language. Lacan decenters the source of knowledge and assumptions of Western thought by destabilizing that self.

I.
More on Lacan And The Self:

• 1) "Decentering the Self" (influenced Derrida's language deconstruction and Foucault's anti-history).
  
• 2) Lacan was a practising psychoanalyst and reinterpreter of Freud (but sometimes anti-Freud as well).
  
• 3) Up till 1960s, despite Marxism and Darwin's undermining of self, Descartes' idea of the self ("I think, therefore I am") was more-or-less maintained - until Lacan appeared on the scene.
  
• 4) Lacan believed that the subject is nothing more than a moment in discourse or language; he believed, much more so than Freud, that the self consists of language and deals with the symbolic nature of the self as a result of this belief. (Freud relied more heavily on the biological nature of the self).

Hence . . .

There are three stages of childhood development of the self (somewhat akin to Freud's stages of id, ego, and superego):

• a) the mirror stage - the imaginary.
  
• b) the symbolic stage - uses the "Father" from Freud in almost a metaphorical sense. "The Name of the Father" brings in the concept of language: i) Lacan wanted to prove that the self consists of language without abandoning the idea of sexual drives and relationships; ii) If the self is based in language then, language being common to everyone, you lose your uniqueness and become a social being (a link to Marxist belief).
  
• c) the real stage - always unattainable: Involves the idea of glissement - when we try to mean something or discover who we are, we only slide off another signifier (e.g., like Derrida's "chain of signifiers").

However, just as Foucault is vague about where power comes from, Lacan is vague about the nature of the self; one minute he argues as if he believes there is a self, but since his arguments say there is no Cartesian self, then we are all subjects to the social formations of language.

II.
Lacan And Decentering:
1) Here, Lacan tries to argue that the self is based in language, not biology, but keeps Freud alive at the same time.
2) Children who cannot understand language can't tell the difference between themselves and others; your sense of self comes about through language.
3) Consciousness comes from outside, not inside, your head.
4) Lacan also contributes to the nature/nurture arguement: are our individual eccentricities learned or inherited?

The concept of self is closely linked with the concept of identity, e.g., individual identity, collective identity (how do we see ourselves and each other?) Here are some ideas:
a) People band themselves together imaginatively in groups; you may as a person have a number of identities (national, gender, local/city, race) and different aspects of your collective identity are important to you than others.
b) Identity is therefore not fixed or given; this fights against dominant Western notion of the fixed, autonomous self.
c) Identity is constantly reconsituted and in constant flux; you are being reconstituted as are the collectives you define yourself against.

Crisis of Identity
Because the things that used to help us define who we are -- family, community, etc. -- have been undermined in recent decades, people talk about a crisis of identity we are all supposed to be suffering from. This is primarily a poststructuralist concept, since its effects seem to have been arisen with the changes in society brought about by poststructuralism and postmodernism. Here's how:

• From 1960s onwards dominant structuralism began to be replaced by micropolitics, lobby groups, localism, nationalism, etc., interms of group identity. The breakdown of the old order led to crises of identity and representation, and a loss of old identities at the collective level. So Jameson, for example, argues that the subject in a postmodern world is not alienated, but rather fragmented.
• "Alientation presumes a central, unitary self . . . [b]ut if, as a postmodernist sees it, the self is decentered and multiple, the concept of alienation breaks down. All that is left is the anxiety of identity" (Turkle, 1995: 49).

Identity, like self, has been subject to radical change in recent years:

• 1) Two things were happening at the same time in the 1960s:
  a) This was the beginning of the end of the modernist dominant theory thesis and traditional ideas about hegemony. Micropolitics arrives.
  b) Lacan begins writing about the decentered self, attacking the notion of an embedded self.

• 2) By beginning of the 1970s, the question "Who am I?" becomes harder to answer at both an individual and collective level. By the 1970s-80s, you see the beginnings of new collectives being formed (Yuppies, DINKies, etc.)

• Now, instead of experiencing, achieving or learning we're more likely to buy and consume our identity. Consumer culture was around earlier but now it has intensified, almost taken over. How do you get an authentic identity? Is it possible at all or is identity being undercut by the postmodern phenomenon?