In the past week, I’ve written a couple of pieces about identity – about extroverstion, introversion, about the question every human being who sets out on the hero journey or any search for self-awareness eventually asks: Who Am I?
I got a lot of responses to these pieces. In the new world of inter-galactic writing and sharing, one thing leads to another. Patty Adjamine, a passionate and intelligent person who is a fierce critic of my views on animal rights and animal welfare – she is a supporter of the New York Carriage Horses but you can find her blasting me quite regularly on my Facebook Page, especially when I defend Joshua Rockwood, the farmer so unjustly accused of animal cruelty (that one’s for you, Patty.).
Patty is also open-minded enough to be an admirer of other parts of my life, and suggested the other day after reading my pieces on Carl Jung, that I read the works of the psychoanalyst Theodor Reik, one of Sigmund Freud’s best and most brilliant students. Sometimes she got so angry with me I thought about blocking her, as others have done, but something stopped me, and I am glad. I admire Patty, she is passionate about her beliefs and respects the boundaries of civil discourse. Sort of.
The Reik suggestion pulled me right in. I saw a psychoanalyst in New York City for nearly eight years, and various therapists and counselors for many more years. Analysis has faded in influence, nobody has time for it any more and no corporation or insurance company will pay for it now. I am eternally grateful for it. It was a transformative experience for me. Insofar as I am able to think about who I am, I learned to do it in those sessions.
I had heard of Reik but not read any of his books and so I went to Amazon after Patty’s suggestion and got the book overnighted this afternoon. I couldn’t get to it until after dinner and when I opened Listening With The Third Ear, Reik’s famous memoir of his life as an analyst – it is 514 pages in paperback – it flipped open to Page 173, Chapter 27.
It was entitled “Who Am I?”
Well…
So this is how the world works sometimes. I am grateful that Patty and I never walked away from one another, I am embarrassed to admit to being surprised – shocked, really – at her interest in Reik. You never know. Don’t give up on love. Don’t give up on people.
Every social interaction between people and therapists, writes Reik, leads to the same question: Who Am I?
I began writing about this subject because I was puzzled and uncomfortable that so many people I know answered the question Who Am I? by saying they were introverts or extroverts. They all took that test, you know the one. This did not seem to me an explanation of a person, it seemed a label, and a pretty thin one. My pieces about that have triggered a lot of responses. I touched a deep nerve. Patty, of all people, who gets apoplectic by much of what I write, loved what I wrote.
Everybody makes their own way, but for me the search for the answer to that question – Who Am I? has been a long and bloody mess that continues to this day. Every day I live I come to understand that I will never fully know the answer, I just want to keep looking. Reik helps me understand why.
The frontiers of the personality reach farther than we think, writes Reik. What we hate and what we love, what propels us and what hinders us, all constitute a part of us. The soul is a wide country. “It has room for so much,” writes Reik,” opposite tendencies can coexist in us, feelings contradicting each other live together, and what is true and false can be confused.
Analysts were among the first mind-healers to demonstrate that the ego has built up an “ego-ideal,” a picture of oneself, an image of oneself as one wishes to be. That is not always an accurate image, it is not always the truth, and the role of the professional, the social worker, the analyst, the psychologist and the psychiatrist, the shaman and the spiritual counselor, is to help us find the truth, the reality that lives beyond our own sense of self. For me, this is the path to authenticity and self-awareness.
Reik calls this the “counter-picture, the ego-horror, a picture of oneself at which we shudder,” a picture of alternative possibilities that frighten us and that we reject.”
Here, reading this chapter, I began to shiver, because this was my experience of learning who I am, this shattering of my ego-ideal, the deluded and dishonest image of myself that I always carried around in my head and which justified my many mistakes and self-delusions and destructive acts.
I will always remember the analyst, and then the therapist after her, shattering these illusions and delusions, kindly but relentlessly, one at a time, helping me to see who I really was, not who I insisted I was. I left session after session drained, horrified, shaking my head, crying many times, hearing one thing after another than I didn’t want to hear, couldn’t bear to hear, needed to hear.
Reik catalogs all of the crimes we commit against self-awareness, the puzzling resemblances in failure and success, friendships broken up in similar ways, the deceptions shattered by bursts of insight and self-justification, the necessary “life-lies” that go hand in hand with a clearer understanding of the sometimes painful truth, the tenderness that covers cruelty. Dr. Jekyll is shocked because he is really Mr. Hyde, but Mr. Hyde is also astonished when he discovers that he is Mr. Jekyll. We say a person is an introvert or an extrovert.
We say a person is good or evil. It is never so easy.
In reality, he is good and evil, better and worse than he thinks. My list of ego-horrors was long and detailed.
When I could see what was wrong, it also became possible to see what was right. We are all comprised of both.
It was strange, how far my self deception went. You fool yourself about yourself all the time, my analyst told me. You have lost perspective.
It is not easy to follow the advice “to thine own self be true,” says Reik. Most people ask: “which self?”
Reik offered a proverb that my analyst also told me in New York City – it must be in their textbooks – as I sat in awe and trembling in the face of learning who I really am. I was surprised to see it again, but the truth is, I repeat it often to myself.
It is a Hungarian proverb, and it advises: “When a man says you are a horse, laugh at him; when two men assert it, give it a thought; and when three men say you are a horse, go and buy a saddle for yourself.”
And then there’s the proverb of Patty, who oddly enough, could have so easily been one of those bothersome people you flick away with a click and never hear from again. That would have been a shame. She seems to understand me as well or better than I understand myself.
So thanks for the tip, Patty, I look forward to reading the rest of the book, if Chapter 27 is any guide. You are right about that, at least. The art of reading between the lines is the lifelong quest of the wise.
