{"id":3053,"date":"2013-05-10T17:21:26","date_gmt":"2013-05-11T00:21:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.janhenderson.com\/self\/?p=3053"},"modified":"2014-05-18T18:13:59","modified_gmt":"2014-05-19T01:13:59","slug":"more-thoughts-from-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.janhenderson.com\/self\/more-thoughts-from-the-past\/","title":{"rendered":"More thoughts from the past"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was originally thinking of writing this blog, it didn\u2019t occur to me to include chapters from my 1981 book on anxiety. But as I was writing the last post<\/a>, I saw a connection between my past and this blog. I\u2019m still intensely interested in the things I wrote about over 30 years ago. I hadn\u2019t realized until just now how much I\u2019ve wanted to get back to those ideas. It seems surprising to me, actually, to find that I am still that same person.<\/p>\n

\"television-marquee-moon\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The next two posts are additional chapters from that book. The first post, a chapter I\u2019ve renamed The flexible self and the inflexible individual<\/a>, applies social construction to identity formation, the illusion of self-creation (the belief that who we are comes from within, not without), and the belief that identity persists over time. The point I was trying to make relates to what I find liberating about social construction: that despite socially shared beliefs on what is socially acceptable, there is no one way to live that is correct, permanent, or guaranteed to be satisfying. Our self-concept is more flexible than the scientific studies of research psychologists might lead us to believe. (I discuss this in another chapter of the book, The Problem is You<\/a>). I also briefly relate all this to anxiety, which, after all, was the subject matter expected by the book\u2019s publisher. <\/p>\n

The second post, You are what you think<\/a>, touches on the experience of consciousness in daily life, describes Aron Gurwitsch\u2019s model of awareness with its center and margins (Gurwitsch was a phenomenologist and gestalt psychologist), and relates this back to identity. \u201cThe ingredients that go into a self-image come from the world we encounter. But our formulas for putting these ingredients together are not original prescriptions we’ve written by ourselves. \u2018Identity\u2019 is a full-blown idea we encounter readymade in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

I notice there are a few obscure allusions in this second chapter to the music I was listening to at the time \u2013 \u201cStation to Station\u201d (Bowie), \u201cEditions of You\u201d (Roxy Music). There are more of these throughout the book, disguised as innocent prose: \u201cundercover Sigmund Freud\u201d (John Cale), \u201cbefore and after science\u201d (Eno), \u201cthe problem is you\u201d (Sex Pistols), \u201cJesus died for somebody\u2019s sins but not mine\u201d (Patti Smith), \u201cboat made out of ocean\u201d and \u201cI love disaster and I love what comes after\u201d (Tom Verlaine). In my household, I\u2019m still known as a punk rocker. <\/p>\n

The ideas in these chapters come from Berger and Luckmann<\/a>, Alfred Schutz<\/a>, Aron Gurwitsch<\/a>, and others. The particular attitude expressed in applying these ideas is mine. It turns out that thirty years later I still recognize that attitude as the essence of who I am.<\/p>\n