Post #43: Self and Self-Importance (A Tribute to Adler and Freud)

7 July 2023

There is a tough-minded school of worldly thought that dismisses all reflection about oneself as self-indulgent navel gazing. In more meditative circles, it has its equivalent in the idea that since no-self is the gateway to liberation, to spend time examining the self is a waste, or even a counter-productive reinforcement of something we are meant to overcome and be done with.

I have my doubts about this kind of toughness. Although I am open to the charge that I spend altogether too much time with myself in the above sense, it seems more likely to me that examining the self with a view to greater self-awareness (Know thyself!), and some therapeutic untying of knots, is not an impediment to deeper understanding, but rather an important facilitator, or perhaps even an outright precondition. (I remember hearing or reading about this angle on no-self from a clinical psychologist who is also a meditator—I think it may have been Mark Epstein, author of the excellent Going on Being (Wisdom 2008), but I cannot remember for sure.)

A therapist that I was very lucky to see during a sojourn in upstate New York—the former Catholic priest I have mentioned before—once told me that the deeper insecurities we carry through life are like bricks missing from the supporting walls of our personalities. It is too late for these structural weak spots to be filled in, and they are therefore bound felt painfully whenever pressure is brought on our mental dwellings, be it by the ordinary storms of life or by the more extraordinary rumbles and earthquakes that may afflict us from time to time. What can be done, however, even if full repair is not possible anymore, is to reinforce the remaining structure so that the weaknesses in the wall can be made up for to some extent.

I was then already quite familiar with Papa Freud, owing to an intense period I spent in graduate school with this pioneering genius who made a point of never promising his patients happiness, but only a more ordinary kind of unhappiness in place of their intolerable miseries.* But my more personal Viennese epiphany did not come until twenty years later, in my mid-forties, when I read Alfred Adler for the first time and was dumbstruck by how devastatingly true his basic analysis of character development felt. It was not even a matter of intellectual agreement, but of a deeper kind of recognition that I could not withhold even though it painted a most uncomfortable and unflattering picture of myself first and foremost.

I cannot do justice to the power of Adler’s insight in a few sentences, but the basic idea is that we develop our vision of who we want to be at a time when we cannot even articulate it yet, in very early childhood, under the acute impression of our own relative weakness. The personality, seen in this light, is the child’s answer—often remarkably imaginative and even brilliant—to its own insecurities and vulnerabilities, and this establishes the lines of development that we then follow, usually without being fully aware of them, for the rest of our lives. Touché! Could I ever feel those weak spots in my trembling walls at the recognition!

I have often asked myself just why I should feel these missing bricks so very acutely. My grandparents were born into a world of terrible deprivations in lower middle-class Germany in 1921, my parents into the hunger years immediately after the Second World War, but by the time I came around, the country had recovered and become affluent, and I cannot complain of having ever been exposed, even remotely, to any serious hardship, let alone abuse. Nor can I blame my parents for not having done their best, they being likable enough that I have had friends of theirs collar me (in the most endearing manner possible) to ask me whether I was fully aware of just what fine people they are. Well, a son’s perspective is bound to be a little more nuanced and ambivalent, but the quality of their friends itself speaks volumes.

Still, the missing bricks are troublesome, to say the least, and much as it embarrasses me to admit it, the inner voice telling me that I can only be barely good enough with the greatest effort, and perhaps not even then, has always been a conspicuous part of my life, inwardly I mean. (Perhaps the reader will now find it a little easier to credit my repeated profession that even ten thousand hours on the mat cannot make more than a lousy meditator of me. This is not a pretense, nor false humility; it is the inner voice speaking its verdict and brooking no emotional disagreement, whatever protests my intellect may lodge by way of appeal.) I wonder whether perhaps it has something to do with an arrival in this world so premature, not long after the invention of the incubator, that my skin is said to have been translucent, and that the doctors advised my parents not to get their hopes up: “Fifty-fifty,” they told to my dad.

Be that as it may, my parents were turning seventy a few years ago when another one of their very good friends mentioned to me in passing what a very pretty child I supposedly was once upon a time. I thanked her for her kindness and said, quite truthfully, that this was the first I’d ever heard of it. No joke. My surprise was even greater when my mother, this time on occasion of my own fiftieth birthday, wrote me a message about “how very cute, sweet, and imaginative” she remembered me being. This time I was truly thunderstruck, because she had never—I call on the gods for my witnesses—said or written any such thing to me before. Not that I have any reason to doubt that she loves me, and always has, but because such things are not said in my family.

Which brings us back to Adler, because the key twist in his account is that the outlines of the personality a child will develop (before it even has access to language, remember) will depend not so much on the actual situation as on the child’s perceptions. That my parents really did always love me, doing what they could for me, given the usual limitations, I do not doubt, as an adult looking back; but who knows what emotional sense I could make of it all then, judging by the circumstantial evidence. (They would not be pleased to read this, I am sure, as they are very private about the essentials, and confessional transparency of the public kind is not their thing at all. But perhaps that is part of my problem, so I hope they will forgive me if I will not let myself be bound by their ways here.)

So what reading Adler did for me was to pull back the veil and to show me how much of what I have been up to in the world was, and perhaps still is, patently a response to these ancient insecurities. The difference between all of us human beings in this respect is likely a matter of degree only, with everyone playing more or less the same game of shoring up an overly frail sense of self-importance. Those who come across as most brash about it (often the most accomplished too) should not be mistaken for the most confident at bottom; on the contrary, they are almost certainly those who are haunted especially by their own secret sense of inadequacy and who are therefore driven, often unawares, to take the most aggressive (and secretly desperate) remedial measures. In other words, the need to set oneself above others—the arrogant impulse—is not in fact the mark of excessive confidence that it appears to be, but on the contrary, an indication of structural weaknesses that run especially deep, even if the offender himself commonly has no inkling of what is behind his or her behavior. (Adler and Freud often disagreed quite vehemently, but what they could agree on was that efforts in three directions are entirely indispensable for getting out of life what happiness we are capable of: work, love, and some kind of meaningful involvement with a community. Defensive arrogance, needless to say, is not likely to prove much of an asset in any three of these endeavors.)

When it is understood personally and up close just how desperate one’s bid for self-importance really is at bottom, two realizations should dawn before long, even if one may not always be able to act on them as resolutely as one might wish. The first is that if this hunger for feeling important is so central and so urgent a motivator for everything one does, almost to the point of being a requirement of psychological survival, then surely it would be wise to make a few more concessions to the same need in others—thus redirecting one’s interactions roughly along the lines recommended by Dale Carnegie, instead of dismissing such accommodations to human vanity as vulgar and intolerable toadying before others. (The things one finds to appreciate in one’s fellow human beings should always be genuine, and the admiration one professes sincere! If you cannot find anything, look more closely; somewhere, somehow, you will be able to discover something if you make an honest effort. And from Carnegie to a loftier conception of universal loving kindness may not be as great a leap as scoffers might imagine.)

The second dawning insight gets us to the elusive nature of no-self. Once one can see in all its nakedness how much suffering there is behind our efforts to shore up a precarious sense of self that is never quite adequate to the jo, all the clinging and clutching that we habitually do around the self should begin to appear in a new and rather less edifying light. Which is by no means to say that seeing more clearly what is going on makes it easy to let go; only that the Buddhist diagnosis that discovers the root of our suffering at the very point we seek to protect and project most tenaciously and blindly, makes not just intellectual but unanswerable emotional sense once you have looked without flinching into the Adlerian mirror. Or that has been my experience, anyway. Whether I shall ever be ready to let go at that ultimate level, I don’t know; but I can say that it is a moment to look forward to, not something to fear or resist, though it probably cannot be rushed either, let alone be brought about by a simple act of will. The snake will shed its skin when the conditions are ripe for it, and then it will be free at last.

*“Zur Psychotherapie der Hysterie,” Part VI, Studien über Hysterie (1895). I defy anyone who has read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, especially in German, to tell me that the man was not a genius, whatever wild ideas he may have espoused and cultivated alongside the sounder ones. He had so many of them, and such rich ones, that they could not possibly all of them have worked out; but even where he went wrong, he erred with more brilliance than others bring to their greatest successes.