I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [116]
When we’re a little older, we watch as our puns fall flat or evoke admiring laughter, and according to the results we either modify our punmaking style or learn to censor ourselves more strictly, or perhaps both. We also try out various styles of dress and learn to read between the lines of other people’s reactions as to whether something looks good on us or not. When we are rebuked for telling small lies, either we decide to stop lying or else we learn to make our lies subtler, and we incorporate our new knowledge about our degree of honesty into our self-symbol. What goes for lies also goes for bragging, obviously. Most of us work on adapting our use of language to various social norms, sometimes more deliberately and sometimes less so. The levels of complexity are endless.
The Lies in our I’s
For over a century, clinical psychologists have tried to understand the nature of this strange hidden structure tightly locked in at the deepest core of each one of us, and some have written very insightfully about it. A few decades ago, I read a couple of books by psychoanalyst Karen Horney, and they left a lasting impression on me. In her book Our Inner Conflicts, for instance, Horney spoke of the “idealized image” one forms of oneself. Although her primary focus was how we suffer from our neuroses, what she said had much wider applicability.
…It [the idealized image] represents a kind of artistic creation in which opposites appear reconciled…
The idealized image might be called a fictitious or illusory self, but that would be only a half truth and hence misleading. The wishful thinking operating in its creation is certainly striking, particularly since it occurs in persons who otherwise stand on a ground of firm reality. But this does not make it wholly fictitious. It is an imaginative creation interwoven with and determined by very realistic factors. It usually contains traces of the person’s genuine ideals. While the grandiose achievements are illusory, the potentialities underlying them are often real. More relevant, it is born of very real inner necessities, it fulfills very real functions, and it has a very real influence on its creator. The processes operating in its creation are determined by such definite laws that a knowledge of its specific features permits us to make accurate inferences as to the true character structure of the particular person.
Horney is obviously not speaking of one’s awareness of one’s most superficial perceptual features such as height or hair color, or of one’s knowledge of slight abstractions such as what kind of job one has and whether one enjoys it, but rather of the (inevitably somewhat distorted) image that one forms, over a lifetime, of one’s own deepest character traits, of one’s level in all sorts of blurry social hierarchies, of one’s greatest accomplishments and failures, of one’s fulfilled and unfulfilled yearnings, and on and on. Her stress in the book is on those aspects of this image that are illusory and thus tend to be harmful, but the full structure in which such neurotic distortions reside is much larger. This structure is what I have here called the “self-symbol”, or simply the “I”.
Horney’s earlier book Self-Analysis is devoted to the complex challenge whereby one tries to change one’s own neurotic tendencies, and it inevitably centers on the rather paradoxical idea of the self reaching in and attempting deliberately to effect deep changes in itself. This is not the place to delve into such intricate issues, but I mention them briefly because doing so may help to remind readers of the immense psychological complexity that lies at the core of all human existence.
The Locking-in of the “I” Loop
Let me now summarize the foregoing in slightly