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FAKING INDIVIDUATION IN THE AGE OF UNREALITY
Mass media, identity confusion and self-objects
Helena Bassil-Morozow and James Alan Anslow
It has become a commonplace to call postmodern culture fluid, traditionless, lacking in stable identities and meanings. It is characterised by a sense of ‘unreality’, identity confusion, and lack of psychological unity and completeness. In the ever-changing, fluid post-industrial world, with its endless consumer and personal choices, the only thing that is not on offer is the absolute truth, wholeness, meaning. However, even now that psychological fragmentation is the psycho-cultural norm, and the quest for wholeness has long been relegated to the ‘mytho-religious’ domain, the question of identity remains as acute as ever.
‘Stable’ identities grow in stable cultural environments with fixed meanings. In the absence of a fixed order, or habitus, to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term, mass media has begun to perform some of its functions. Television, newspapers, the Internet offer alternative identities (or, rather, fragments of identities), which lead to the confusion between truth and fiction. In this liminal atmosphere, in the absence of permanent identity-inspiring role models, mass media reflects, embraces and contributes to the brokenness of culture. It acts as a kind of identity pimp providing the insatiable public with a rotation of inspiring public figures.
However, due to the speed of news rotation, identities thereby procured are often shallow and superficial. The entire cultural framework can be seen as narcissistic in the sense that it relies on the individuals not having, or sometimes not even seeking a stable individual character core. Not only mass media, but consumer capitalism in general does not support the concept of stable identity. Instead, it manipulates consumer demand by introducing multiple choice and uncertainty.
The individual inhabiting such a culture does not feel psychologically safe; his or her sense of identity remains fluid and shaky, always keeping pace with the fast-moving life, always prepared to change direction of individual or professional development. Marshall Berman highlights one of the principal dialectical features of modern existence: alongside the great emptiness of values (‘God is dead’) there exists ‘a remarkable abundance of possibilities’ (1983, p. 21). The psyche of the modern individual – and of society in which he or she inhabits – consists of fleeting, flying, metamorphosing elements. Its very ephemeral character constitutes its anxiety – its neuroses and psychoses.
This chapter combines postmodern theory, Jung’s concept of individuation and Heinz Kohut’s notion of selfobject in an attempt to outline the trajectories of personal evolution in the dynamic and unpredictable world.
Identity and individuation in post-traditional contexts
In post-industrial contexts individuals are responsible for their own development, and they are not expected to rely on community, tradition and ritual for providing them with a sense of identity. Anthony Giddens argues in Modernity and Self-Identity that in pre-modern contexts
tradition has a key role in articulating action and ontological frameworks [and that it] offers an organising medium of social life specifically geared to ontological precepts. […] In addition, tradition creates a sense of the firmness of things that typically mixes cognitive and moral elements. The world is as it is because it is as it should be.
(Giddens 1991, p. 498)
Identity transitions and any reorganisations of the self in pre-modern cultures usually have predetermined character:
Transitions in individuals’ lives have always demanded psychic reorganisation, something which was often ritualised in traditional cultures in the shape of rites de passage. But in such cultures, where things have stayed the same from generation to generation on the level of the collectivity, the changed identity was clearly staked out – as when an individual moved from adolescence into adulthood.
(Giddens 1991, pp. 32–3)
By contrast, identity in post-traditional order is fluid. The self becomes a do-it-yourself, reflexive project. This constant redefinition and recollection of the self from fragments is the norm in post-traditional societies and is not confined to life’s crises. It is, Giddens argues, a feature of modern social activity in relation to psychic organisation (1991, p. 33).
Despite psychological fragmentedness being the norm in post-industrial societies, the individual still regards it as unsettling. In the absence of ‘instructions’, people are left directionless and looking for leaders and role models. Giddens writes:
Modernity, it can be said, breaks down the protective framework of the small community and of tradition, replacing these with much larger, impersonal organisations. The individual feels bereft and alone in a world in which she or he lacks the psychological support and the sense of security provided by more traditional settings.
(1991, pp. 33–4)
Individuating in the Jungian sense – i.e. defining yourself in relation to your surroundings; gradual self-fulfilment through inner internal and external psychological conflict – in post-traditional societies is invariably bound with the question of lifestyle and the dilemma of choice. It is also closely linked to the projective–introjective character of mass culture assisted by contemporary media structures. Jung defines the individuation process as driven by the self – the centre of the personality. He writes in Psychological Types:
In general [individuation] is the process by which individual beings are formed and differentiated; in particular, it is the development of the psychological individual as a being distinct from the general, collective psychology. Individuation, therefore, is a process of differentiation, having for its goal the development of the individual personality.
(Jung 1921, para. 757)
However, the weakening of habitus (the collective aspect of life) did not in any way enhance individuals’ ability to ‘individuate’ – it only gave them more choice; it presented them with the right to build their lives from a wider variety of bricks. Choosing from a variety of options and constructing one’s identity from an array of available building bricks requires a high degree of self-knowledge and self-reflection. Giddens argues:
Lifestyle is not a term that has much applicability to traditional cultures, because it implies choice within a plurality of possible options, and is ‘adopted’ rather than ‘handed down’. Lifestyles are routinised practices, the routines incorporated into habits of dress, eating, modes of acting and favoured milieu for encountering others; but the routines followed are reflexively open to change in the light of the mobile nature of self-identity. Each of the small decisions a person makes every day – what to wear, what to eat, how to conduct himself at work, whom to meet with later in the evening – contributes to such routines. All such choices (as well as larger and more consequential ones) are decisions not about how to act but who to be. The more post-traditional the setting in which the individual moves, the more lifestyle concerns the very core of self-identity, its making and remaking.
(Giddens 1991, p. 81)
A fixed order, or habitus (to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term) can be both a good and a harmful thing for the individual. Culturally prescribed norms tend to swing the individuation process in the direction of the collective. By contrast, lifestyle choices characterising post-industrial societies are supposed to assist individuals in discovering their new – and unique – identity. This does not mean, however, that each and every individual is equally capable of assembling this unique identity from a variety of fragments offered by the capitalist system and mass media. Moreover, mass media makes the differentiation of the personal from the collective difficult due to the powerful character of mass projections. Often projection on to public figures, assisted by mass media, takes the place of true self-reflection. Objectification is firmly integrated into contemporary individuation process and often replaces true, live, problematic, uncontrollable human relationships.
Mass media provides its customers with self-definitions, which, in their quality and disposability, differ from the relatively stable identities characteristic of community-based societies. It ensures rapid rotation of celebrities, borrowed and appropriated by consumers for the purposes of self-understanding. In doing so, individuals hope to restore their relationship with their inner wholeness on the one hand, and their connections with the outside world on the other. With the help of these artificial identities urban individuals gain a false feeling of being at one with the (Jungian) Self, as well as being connected to one’s community.
Heinz Kohut’s selfobject: towards artificial individuation
When relationships and people are replaced with objectification and objects, the vision of oneself – of one’s personality core – becomes blurred and destabilised. Heinz Kohut’s concept of selfobject can clarify the main mechanisms, as well as explain personal and cultural aspects, of objectification.
In his book Individuation and Narcissism (1985) Mario Jacoby argues that Jung and Kohut are ideologically close and compatible despite the fact that their sets of terminology differ significantly. He notes that ‘modern psychoanalytic research on narcissism, especially that of Heinz Kohut, shows a clear convergence with the Jungian position’ and Jung’s concept of the individuation process ‘may be paralleled with the lines of maturation in narcissism as postulated by Kohut’ (Jacoby 1985, p. 6). For instance, their views on individual development are not conflicting and can even be used to complement and enrich each other. Kohut’s concept of selfobject, coupled with Jungian individuation, can illuminate the contemporary individual’s struggle for identity and self-definition.
Selfobjects are ‘people or objects that help the self regulate affect and feel whole and competent, but cause frustration if not there when needed’ (Fromme 2010, p. 201). The self in Kohut’s psychology is self-representation rather than the totality of the psyche. Self-representation is the way in which ‘I-as-a-person am represented in my own mind – in contrast to representations of persons and things that are not myself – i.e., objects’ (Jacoby 1985, p. 59). In this sense, the concept of the self as self-representation is ideologically close to the Jungian ego – its subjective and introspective experience (ibid.).
Jung defined the ego, the conscious part of the personality, as the complex of representations that constitutes ‘the centre of the field of consciousness and possesses a high degree of continuity and identity’, is strong and solid enough to expose and confront evil (Jacobi 1973, p. 7). Meanwhile, the Self in his psychology is the totality of the psyche, embracing both its conscious and unconscious aspects. As Mario Jacoby notes, the Self is an experiential fact that is far superior to ego consciousness: ‘for Jung the self is at the same time an irrepresentable psychic centre, the central archetype, which affects psychic development, change and balance’ (Jacoby 1985, p. 70).
By contrast, Kohut theorised the self as being split into the True and False parts. Jacoby notes that the concepts of the split self – its False and True parts – correspond to Jung’s concepts of persona and the personal ego/transpersonal self structure (Jacoby 1985, p. 70). False Self is an external and largely artificial structure (very much like the persona) that ‘behaves’ in a way that brings social benefits. In narcissistic disturbances, when the True Self is damaged, the False Self is particularly well developed as its overgrowth serves to protect the fragile personality core. The genesis of the disorder, Kohut argues, can be insufficient mirroring of the child’s self by the mother. As a result, the child’s self cannot
establish itself securely (the child does not build up an inner sense of self-confidence; it continues to need external affirmation). […] But … we do not see merely fixation on a small child’s need for mirroring – the traumatic frustration of the normal need intensifies and distorts the need: the child becomes insatiably hungry for mirroring, affirmation, and praise. It is this intensified, distorted need which the child cannot tolerate and which it therefore either represses (and may hide behind pseudoindependence and emotional coldness) or distorts and splits off. […] In the narcissistic transference, the infantile need for selfobject is remobilized.
(Kohut 2011, p. 558)
Kohut’s analysis of narcissism and immature relationships that rest on mirroring and manipulation is applicable to cultural analysis. The psyche of the urban individual is living with a very old trauma – inflicted by industrialisation, social alienation, the weakening of community and intensification of city life – which was already apparent in the middle of the nineteenth century but became particularly acute at the start of the twentieth century. The trauma – of which Jung was a faithful historiographer – was catastrophically deepened by the two world wars. The individual of today is suffering from a traumatic identity crisis brought about by the profound and irreversible changes in the social and relational structures of society.
The individual, torn from his or her roots, grows up thinking that the most responsible way of dealing with problems is trying to solve them on your own, without the involvement of your immediate or wider environment. The society of independent individuals, self-reliant and stoical, barraged with identity and lifestyle choices, separated from fellow human beings and isolated by the specifics of the urban environment, feel fragmented and broken. They feel out of control, insecure, lost. Anthony Giddens projects the loss of ‘the early sense of ontological security’ (characteristic of narcissisti...
