The issue of self-identity in a postmodern world

A friend of mine who works as a psychologist made the following observation, its perspective is supportive of my last post I'm so depressed

Until postmodern times, we dealt with problems that had their origins in relation to the other or the outside in a concrete way and in imagination problems tended to come from people with psychosis or personality disorders. We are still getting those problems but what has changed for some people are the triggers to illness, in so much as people who do not have a strong inner sense of self tend to feel more fragmented more easily and the idea of self construction is very threatening to these types of people.

They seem to need more direct human contact to help them to define themselves and years ago would have been defined and lived within the confines of their families, villages, social classes or friends, with daily personal interaction reinforcing that. So, for instance, we see a lot of phobias and depressions, particularly problems such as social phobia that are linked to this fearfulness of how to be in the world and whether one is acceptable or not.

Although the symptoms still fit into the categories, the stories that are connected to how they came to be this way are to do with lack of knowing how to operate in the world, poor problems solving skills, fearfulness of even mild risk taking and an inability to form healthy relationships due to suspiciousness. In psychological terms, it is a schizotypical form of relating to the world and the problems that I work with are often connected to that. One of the problems of self-construction through media for these people is they do not have the skills to take advantage of the opportunities presented and become a sort of "ghost" population that it is difficult to motivate and fearful of engaging. They often end up living vicariously through media constructed images in imagination and become very depressed when the reality fails to match. An unimportant but wide spread example of that is a middle aged man with a paunch who only ever wears a Chelsea football strip, because in his head he is that footballer. Whenever he is forced to confront the reality of his true condition which he has to do several times on a daily basis, it makes him feel just a little bit worse.

The other outcome is an overdeveloped sense of entitlement, far beyond the persons natural skill and ability and linked to "If I can imagine it and I want it, it must be".

People who have the social and intellectual skills to truely define themselves are in a good position, the rest are the often very noisy ghosts in the machine.

Comments

[Mark Earls]

There is of course a strong line of argument that the sense of self is but a necessary illusion to enable us to cope with our real - socially connected and constructed - lives. Just as consciousness gives each of us an illusory sense of being self-determining...

To put it bluntly we have created the world which reflects the illusions our minds create for us about who we are and the world we live in. No wonder we get sick...

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