DEE WILSON CONSULTING
Book Review:
Imaginative Roots of Personal Identity
This article about the imaginative roots of personal identity is the fifth in a series, "Imaginative Worlds." Previous have been book reviews including:
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When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness, by David Pena-Guzman
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The Cave Painters, by Gregory Curtis
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Imagining Human: The Epic of Gilgamesh, by Herbert Mason, and
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Imagining Social Identity: Why the Bible Began, by Jacob Wright.
The underlying theme of this series is that every dimension of human experience, including dreaming, the cultural meaning of "human being," all social and personal identities and experiences of the sacred are powerfully influenced by imagination, shaped (but not determined) by biology.
Initial attempts to describe and understand other people, or oneself, often begin with lists of character traits with polar oppositions: extroverted / introverted, friendly / unfriendly, energetic / subdued, hardworking / lazy, kind / cruel, honest / dishonest, etc. Character traits are elements of personal identity much as words and sentences are elements of stories, but no list of character traits, regardless of length or accuracy, ever adds up to a personal identity, which incorporates values, aspirations, interests, beliefs, values, and social roles, not to mention experiences over a lifetime. In addition, lists of character traits tend to be simplifications: any character trait, however strongly expressed in personality, is likely to have exceptions. Character, like much of the natural world and social world, is created in polarities. Character traits strengthened by repeated expression also strengthen the potential of the recessive, hidden part of the self. For this reason, character development is never a closed book regardless of age or life experience. There is always another side to character, which may be imbued with tremendous energy depending on how fully it has been suppressed. This is the theme of the Woody Allen movie, "Irrational Man," (2015) in which a soul sick academic philosopher comes alive through a plot to murder a corrupt judge. Taboo, socially unacceptable elements of the self, often associated with sexuality, aggression, spirituality, self glorification or self abasement, acquire the energy required over long periods of time to keep them dormant.
Personal identity has its imaginative roots in childhood. Children play at social roles valued by caregivers and others in their social world: fireman, policeman, soldier, doctor, nurse, mother, etc.. Such play begins to create identity when children become aware of an interest, talent, character trait which they can build on to develop a socially valued identity. I once heard a sports announcer comment that Josh Allen, an elite NFL quarterback, was practicing giving post-game interviews when he was nine years old! Children's play also reveals the ugly side of social environments. A few years I reread John O'Hara's acclaimed novel, Appointment in Samarra (1934), which follows a prosperous businessman in a small Pennsylvania community as he suddenly and quickly self destructs financially, socially and emotionally. Reading this novel, I was distressed to discover that children growing up in this Pennsylvania community played "Ku Klux Klan" during the early years of the twentieth century. I'm curious how future generations will respond to the information that, during decades when mass shootings were common, American children were permitted to entertain themselves by playing violent video games with rewards for "kills", in some families for several hours a day.
Adventure stories often have a powerful lasting effect on children's imagination. In his outstanding book, The CIA: An Imperial History (2024) Hugh Wilford states: "Among the CIA's imperial precursors, one was especially important in shaping a crucial but often overlooked part of the Agency's institutional identity: its imagination." Many CIA leaders during the Cold War had been deeply influenced by Rudyard Kipling's novel, Kim, which Wilford describes as "the first great spy novel" in which "the only thing standing between the (British) Raj and the Russians is an orphan boy and a handful of local accomplices." In Kipling's imagination, "the imperial mission ... (was) a form of heroic self sacrifice, The White Man's Burden ..." Wilford asserts that Kipling's influence lived on in the U.S. "where his romantic tales of imperial adventure beguile later generations of readers, among them many of the young men who would staff the Central Intelligence Agency during the first years of a new iteration of "The Great Game," the Cold War.
As children become young adults, they grow into social roles in part through play acting, a theme famously developed in Shakespeare's Hamlet. In Character and Conflict: An Introduction to Drama (1969) Alvin Kernan asserts: " ... the most thorough exploration of the relation of life and acting, the most complete investigation of the meaning of seeing the world as theatre, comes in Shakespeare's Hamlet." Kernan states: "Hamlet is fascinated with his interior struggle between the need for action and the passive desire for rest ... " Shakespeare plays on the dual meanings of "act," i.e., to do and to pretend. To act in both senses is to play a social role that gradually creates personal identity, as recognized by both oneself and others, even when unaware of the role or the "play." Kernan comments: "Each character (in Hamlet) has not the slightest awareness that he is but an actor in a play ... " yet "the surface of that reality is constantly parting to reveal the theatre inherent in it."
Young people and older adults develop personal identities by acting (i.e., both doing and pretending) in which they take on social roles, and also by participating in the improvisational creation of "plays" they are often unable to name. One of the most striking features of social experience is the joint creation of imaginative worlds that have a few main features:
a) participants take on specialized roles that include partners, allies, opponents and enemies;
b) participants care deeply about the outcomes of the "play," which to outsiders may seem of slight importance; and
c) participants quickly and intuitively understand the meaning of actions in a way that does not require verbal explanation. A person who requires explanations of the meaning of actions in a social environment is not a full participant in these imaginative creations.
In Hamlet, " ... there are few moments that are not a play within a play," Kernan writes. Hamlet maintains an "antic disposition," a pretense of madness, to disguise his thoughts and motives. Nevertheless, to pretend is to act and to become a certain kind of person in a social realm filled with suspicion and murderous intent. Shakespeare's deeper theme is that there is no personal identity without action in the social realm. Furthermore, it is possible for a self aware character such as Hamlet to be stuck on the border of identity / non identity ("not to be"), but not indefinitely, because in Hamlet's royal household to tolerate the murder of one's father by a usurper who has married the father's wife (Hamlet's mother) would be the act of a coward or a non-entity. Once Hamlet decides to act (rather than reflect), his actions are strictly constrained by social expectations. He is not free to create an identity that does not include acts of vengeance. Furthermore, to engage in violent actions is to narrow range of future options. A killer is always a killer, whatever else he turns out to be. Perhaps even torturers can be spiritually reborn, but can never be free of psychic pain, the cost of redemption.
Identity formation in children, adolescents and young adults is usually aspirational: a young person imagines how she/ he could become a star athlete, a scientist, an entrepreneur, a pilot, etc. In my twenties, I imagined becoming a public intellectual such as Paul Goodman or several other Jewish intellectuals. Fortunately, I lacked the social skills and access to publication this role requires. However, as people age they may embrace stories of identity that are painful, even self condemnations, and self defeating. In American society, so interested in success and failure, some people who have trouble in school, lack friends and have no apparent socially valued talent may conclude at a young age that they are "losers," a term of insult in a society given to dividing adults into winners and losers. This is a sad and pathetic world view, which had had an influence on deaths of despair among middle aged adults in the U.S..
Many psychologists and novelists have written about the influence of stories on personal identity, none with more acumen than Jennifer Egan in a visit from the goon squad (2011) and The Candy House (2022). These two novels have a common cast of characters, several of whom are musicians or musical producers, public relation specialists and their spouses, ex- spouses, friends and children. For these characters, self awareness is enfolded in memories which stretch back to early childhood and which are organized around personal stories and family stories full of regret, humiliations and other emotional injuries, social disgrace and renewal, peak experiences. The stories have formulaic elements which Egan parodies by reducing them to algebraic notations.
Egan's characters occasionally become fed up with their stories, so hurtful and limiting, and decide in an instant to utterly transform their life. Still, for the most part the stories the characters endorse and repeatedly tell themselves act like spider webs, i.e., essentially flimsy but effective prisons of the self, which depends on imagination to maintain its coherence. However, there are exceptions. Some of Egan's characters make a complete reversal of life course: Sasha ( whose name contains ash, as in "rise from"), controlled by her kleptomaniac compulsions in young adulthood, finds a life of artistic freedom in middle age. Self destructive Miles survives addiction, a near fatal car crash and a suicide attempt from a hot air balloon to became a State Senator. Roxy, a heroin addict in her 50's, loses interest in her personal story, i.e., devotion to heroin as complete as a devout monk's search for God or enlightenment, and joins Dungeons and Dragons to reimagine herself. Miranda Kline, a celebrity author, seeks anonymity, one of the main virtues in The Candy House. Chris Salazar, a blessed child and young adult, becomes sick of his sheltered life and ends up an alley populated by drug addicts holding suitcase of dangerous chemicals! Like the Buddha, Chris Salazar chooses freedom over a life of comfort and privilege that has smothered his development.
Not all the transformations in Egan's novels are good; some end in suicide. One of Egan's themes is that it's possible to free oneself from a life story that makes one miserable, often by reversing the story, i.e., adopting its polar opposite, but that there is no safe way to do this. Stories of personal identity are acts of the imagination that give meaning to experience. To abandon a life story that has been created over a lifetime and reinforced by the views of others is to be set adrift in a vast sea of possibility, to paraphrase the Bob Dylan song, "a complete unknown, no direction home."
The tried and true way of obscuring the imaginative roots of personal identity and social identity is through violent conflict, including but not limited to war. Playing for mortal stakes seems to make an identity unquestionably real; yet many of the conflicts that have led to war in recent years and past centuries, and other types of mass murder, often seem the product of collective delusions from an historical perspective. Organized violence may strengthen social bonds, both in the midst of conflict and in the aftermath of victory or defeat, but as time passes the causes of these conflicts are often understood to have been based on lies, delusions, historical fictions, along with grotesque justifications for horrendous acts such as acts of terror and the bombing of civilian populations in the name of self defense.
The series "Imaginative Worlds"
When Animals Dream: The Hidden World of Animal Consciousness
The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World's First Artists
Why the Bible Began: An Alternative History of Scripture and Its Origins
Commentary: Imaginative Roots of Personal Identity
-- Dee Wilson