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The Journal of Brief Terapy Network. Vol 3, No. 2, Winter, 2004

Unpacking identity conclusions

Tapio Malinen

Pure joy! Intellectual excitement! Relief! Philosophical curiosity! All these states of mind or ways of being were awaken by the reading experience of mine on the subject of unpacking identity conclusions. In this reflection my intention is to elaborate on and open up these living ways of being a little bit more.

Pure joy!

My personal history of therapeutic training includes lots of studies in the so called humanistic psychologies. In 1970´s I got quite familiar with the different kind of “internal mining enterprises” with which I – as so many others of my generation - tried to seek the answer to the question “who I really am” or who the persons consulting me really are in their true nature. For a long time, in my practice as a psychologist, I felt that the main goal in my job was to help the persons consulting me to be more aware of their different “inner obstacles”, to somehow remove them away in order to promote inner growth towards the more “mature” or “self-actualizing” inner and outer life and some day be a person who you truly really are.

So, the search for the true nature of the self has been one of the constant preoccupations in my professional and personal life. Is there an essential part of human nature that is “higher” or more evolved? Does it reside in an unchanging state of being, untouched by the process of becoming? I truly have been a part of this modern discourse in which psychologies offered different models of the self´s inner structure, as well as therapies for curing its distresses and promoting its growth.

It was quite joyful to read Michael´s analysis about how the possession of personal properties has been a general phenomenon in western culture and how this narrative is historically linked to the modern liberal theory and to the thoughts about the identity as a private property. Reading this, what specially awoke my feeling of joy? Well, I think that the objects of our identification always control us in some wy. As I become more and more aware how my nature as a psychologist is always a product of history and culture, I may someday – if I want to – be able to transcend what is given. And I can also start to unpack the thin conclusions of my identity as a psychologist and as a human being and recreate/reconstruct my professional and personal history rather than just “remember” it. What a joyful opportunity!

Intellectual excitement!

Knowledge is relational and is embodied and generated in language and our everyday practices. Science, as one of the ways of producing knowledge, is not isolated from cultural values. An interplay between knowledge and values is as inherent in both the rhetoric and practice of science as it is in other areas of human discourse. So, the “truths” about the human nature come not from the culturally isolated system, but the scientific world picture is historically changing all the time. And because science is one among many epistemic practices that have been developed by different cultures at different times, so also, for example, the history of the concepts like “human nature” or “self” have not always been the same, as Michael is so magnificently describing.

As a solution-focused therapist I am quite used to ask who-, what-, when-, where-, and how-questions. The why-question has not been so much a part of my toolkit, yet. What is a problem? Where do problems exist? What is a solution? Where is strength? How did you get it? What is knowledge? Where does it exist? How do we get it? What is self? After reading Michael´s and Alice´s papers I started to think that all these questions may stem from the historical – to us very familiar – Newtonian spatial-temporal metaphor, from the world of duality and dichotomy. What if no “thing” exist “out there”, but it´s rather a question of continual, mutual co-arising of creator and created. What if the roads are not leading anywhere, but the world is always all the time perfect freedom and our lived experience of it is just problematic? Right now this possibility excites me a lot.

The writings on postmodernism (Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, Taylor etc.) are often characterized by the same emphasis as I found in Michael´s and Alice´s papers: the self is conceived not as a reified entity, but rather as a narrative, an evolving process; the individual is considered within a context of social meaning rather than as an intrapsychic entity. We constitute the world in which we live, our own “reality” within a context of a community of others. And our stories are always constructed through political, economic, social, and cultural constraints and potentials. The sense of self or our identity arises not only through discourse with others, but is our discourse with others. There is no hidden self to be interpreted. We constitute or “reveal” ourselves in every moment of interaction through the on-going narrative that we maintain with others. A permanent self or identity is merely an illusion that we cling to, a narrative developed in relation to others over time that we come to identify as who we are.

It´ extremely interesting to notice that similar thinking can be found also in other domains. Buddhist thought and teachings, for example, claims that it is a fallacy to treat reality as composed of things instead of processes. Buddha may have been the first deconstructionist, because for him the self was not innate to our spiritual makeup. It was or is, instead, constructed out of our identification with experience in each moment, thus providing a sense of continuity in time and space. It is highly interesting to notice that while claiming that the selfhood is a dynamic condition that arises from the effort after meaning, the postmodern thinkers are echoing very old thoughts from the premodern world in the sixth century B.C.

Relief!

“I could call it the Worry”, answered 13 years old Heikki, when I was negotiating a definition of the problem that had brought him to my consultation. There had been a separation in the family and Heikki has stayed with his father while the two daughters had moved away with the mother. Father – a psychotherapist- had phoned me asking for consultation, because “I think Heikki is depressed about all this what have happened in our family”.

Mapping the effects of the Worry Heikki told me that it is causing him tears, making him not to concentrate in school, sometimes taking his sleep away and affecting also his relationships with his peers and his mother. It turned out that Heikki was especially worried about the mental health and the economical coping of his mother. After interviewing and scaling the length, breath, and depth of the problem I enquired him to evaluate the effects of this Worry. I was quite amazed to hear him say that the Worry and the effects it is causing are good things in his life. Asking for the justification of this evaluation he answered: “This is a good thing, because from the existence of the Worry I know I care for my mother, and she knows it, too”. During our first session Heikki told me that the Worry doesn´t like him talking about it to people outside the family, it doesn´t like the tears and the notion
that the mother is not crying and sleeping so much any more.

When I met Heikki the second time, he told me he was feeling much better, sleeping more, having more energy and concentrating better in school. When asking his understanding of what it was that had contributed to his success in turning back many of the effects of the Worry, Heikki said he thought it was his “patience” that has made it possible for him to achieve this. And now – for the first time in my career – I started to unpack this structural concept of “patience” and experiencing all what happened while doing it. Heikki told me that in the future he wanted to use “patience” to learn new things, for example foreign languages. This was important for him, because he valued everything learning new things can open up in his life. When asking what hopes or dreams this value is reflecting, he told me that he has the dream to some day become a golf star. And the skill of patience could really serve him well in this enterprise. What ways of being was this dream of his representing for him? Heikki answered that he was ready to stand for the happy life and everything that is connected with it.

After this I asked some questions about the history of “patience”, the history of the dream to become a golf star and in order to complete this richly describing the knowlegdes of life and practices of living these values, dreams and longings were reflecting, we had a re-membering conversation. During this conversation Heikki re-joined his father and his grandfather into his club of life, where patience was honoured and respected among different generations.

I will meet Heikki probably once more and I am looking forward to a conversation in this new intentional, multi-storied space these questions have opened up. After this session I felt very relief because I have been struggling both in my thinking and in my practice quite a lot, during couple of last years, how to distinguish between structuralist (naturalistic) and non-structuralistic categories of identity or self and how to scaffold therapeutic conversations that could open up the space for intentional state of understandings in order to more richly describe the knowledges and practices that so often are absent but implicit in the stories of persons consulting me. Now I know that “patience”, “resilience”, “intuition”, “trauma”, “failure”, “depression” are not the whole story.

Philosophical curiosity!

All words gain their power from the situation they are spoken or written. Words do not possess this power in themselves: they are, according to Buddhist theory “empty” of inherent meaning. The meeting of my world with Michael´s and Alice´s living words probably created these words. I´m not sure who´s the creator and where these words were created. I just know that these new words are living, because of my sense of participation, joining, openness, curiosity and unpredictability.

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