• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 973 0

—that we have always been the exact opposite of who we once seemed to be—reflects the difficulty we get ourselves into when we decline to acknowledge that we can change. We hear that difficulty in Whittaker Chambers’s impossible grammar: “I became what I was.” And we hear it, too, in Augustine’s strikingly contorted description of his life before finding God: “for I had placed myself behind my own back,” he wrote, “refusing to see myself.” And yet, as implausible as this idea sounds, it is a cornerstone of both popular and professional psychology. We commonly invoke it in daily life, as when we suggest that the most homophobic guy in town is himself homosexual deep down, or when we accuse people of “protesting too much”—that is, of disagreeing so stridently with a belief that they must secretly or subconsciously agree with it.

This folk notion was elevated to the status of a formal theory by the psychologist Carl Jung, who argued that our conscious and unconscious beliefs exist in opposition to each other. The more vociferously someone defends a belief, Jung held, the more we can be sure that he is defending it primarily against his own internal doubts, which will someday surge into consciousness and force a polar shift in perspective. According to Jung, this was especially true of the most dogmatic beliefs—which, by rendering all conscious doubt impermissible, must be all the more subconsciously resisted, and thus all the more unstable. (The obvious and important implication of this argument is that the more we can accommodate ambivalence, counterevidence, and doubt, the more stable our beliefs and identities will be.)

The idea that we possess a true self serves a hugely important psychological purpose. If we have an essential and unchanging identity, one we are destined to discover sooner or later, then the beliefs we hold, the choices we make, the person we become—none of this happens by chance. Instead, the entire course of our lives is inevitable, dictated by the certainty that our real self will eventually surface. Writing about his decision to testify against Alger Hiss, Whittaker Chambers declared that, “it was for this that my whole life had been lived. For this I had been a Communist, for this I had ceased to be a Communist. For this the tranquil strengthening years had been granted to me. This challenge was the terrible meaning of my whole life.” In this narrative, even Chambers’s false self—the devoted Communist—had to exist for a while in order to serve the greater purpose of his true self, the crusading anti-Communist.

This narrative is appealing for the same reason that it is problematic: within it, we can do no wrong. Our false beliefs were foreordained, our apparent errors occurred strictly in the service of a larger truth. This idea is made explicit in the religious affirmation that “God makes no mistakes”: even the seeming trials and blunders of our lives are part of a larger plan.* As that implies, stories starring a true self are teleological; we end up exactly where we are meant to be. This, too, is both an attraction and a weakness of the idea of an essential self. It suggests that our lives are deterministic, that yesterday’s convictions—which we thought we chose based on their intellectual, emotional, or spiritual merits—were merely a trap into which we were lured for the benefit of some predetermined future self. Whatever meaning or worth our past might have had on its own terms is effectively written out of existence.

Even more problematically, the idea of a true self suggests that we will never undergo momentous upheaval again. How could we? Having finally discovered who we really are and have always been, there is no further transformation available to us. If the self is constantly changing, then we can constantly feel our way forward, constantly become someone new—but if each of us possesses a fixed essence, then we can only return to it. Accordingly, our past departure from that essential self can only be a single and inexplicable aberration, associated as often as not with betrayal, transgression,