| 7 | Self-consciousness |
Self-consciousness, as the term is ordinarily used, implies two things: an awareness of oneself by oneself, and an awareness of oneself as an object of someone else’s observation.
These two forms of awareness of the self, as an object in one’s own eyes and as an object in the other’s eyes, are closely related to each other. In the schizoid individual both are enhanced and both assume a somewhat compulsive nature. The schizoid individual is frequently tormented by the compulsive nature of his awareness of his own processes, and also by the equally compulsive nature of his sense of his body as an object in the world of others. The heightened sense of being always seen, or at any rate of being always potentially seeable, may be principally referable to the body, but the preoccupation with being seeable may be condensed with the idea of the mental self being penetrable, and vulnerable, as when the individual feels that one can look right through him into his ‘mind’ or ‘soul’. Such ‘plate-glass’ feelings are usually spoken about in terms of metaphor or simile, but in psychotic conditions the gaze or scrutiny of the other can be experienced as an actual penetration into the core of the ‘inner’ self.
The heightening or intensifying of the awareness of one’s own being, both as an object of one’s own awareness and of the awareness of others, is practically universal in adolescents, and is associated with the well-known accompaniments of shyness, blushing, and general embarrassment. One readily invokes some version of ‘guilt’ to account for such awkwardness. But to suggest, say, that the individual is self-conscious ‘because’ he has guilty secrets (e.g. masturbation) does not take us far. Most adolescents masturbate, and not uncommonly they are frightened that it will show in some way in their faces. But why, if ‘guilt’ is the key to this phenomenon, does guilt have these particular consequences and not others, since there are many ways of being guilty, and a heightened sense of oneself as an embarrassed or ridiculous object in the eyes of others is not the only way. ‘Guilt’ in itself is inadequate to help us here. Many people with profound and crushing guilt do not feel unduly self-conscious. Moreover, it is possible, for instance, to tell a lie and feel guilt at doing so without being frightened that the lie will show in one’s face, or that one will be struck blind. It is indeed an important achievement for the child to gain the assurance that the adults have no means of knowing what he does, if they do not see him; that they cannot do more than guess at what he thinks to himself if he does not tell them; that actions that no one has seen and thoughts that he has ‘kept to himself’ are in no way accessible to others unless he himself ‘gives the show away’. The child who cannot keep a secret or who cannot tell a lie because of the persistence of such primitive magical fears has not established his full measure of autonomy and identity. No doubt in most circumstances good reasons can be found against telling lies, but the inability to do so is not one of the best reasons.
The self-conscious person feels he is more the object of other people’s interest than, in fact, he is. Such a person walking along the street approaches a cinema queue. He will have to ‘steel himself’ to walk past it: preferably, he will cross to the other side of the street. It is an ordeal to go into a restaurant and sit down at a table by himself. At a dance he will wait until two or three couples are already dancing before he can face taking the floor himself, and soon.
Curiously enough, those people who suffer from intense anxiety when performing or acting before an audience are by no means necessarily ‘self-conscious’ in general, and people who are usually extremely self-conscious may lose their compulsive preoccupations with this issue when they are performing in front of others – the very situation, on first reflection, one might suppose would be most difficult for them to negotiate.
Further features of such self-consciousness may seem again to point to guilt being the key to the understanding of the difficulty. The look that the individual expects other people to direct upon him is practically always imagined to be unfavourably critical of him. He is frightened that he will look a fool, or he is frightened that other people will think he wants to show off. When a patient expresses such phantasies it is easy to suppose that he has a secret unacknowledged desire to show off, to be the centre of attraction, to be superior, to make others look fools beside him, and that this desire is charged with guilt and anxiety and so is unable to be experienced as such. Situations, therefore, which evoke phantasies of this desire being gratified lose all pleasure. The individual would then be a concealed exhibitionist, whose body was unconsciously equated with his penis. Every time his body is on show, therefore, the neurotic guilt associated with this potential avenue of gratification exposes him to a form of castration anxiety which ‘presents’ phenomenologically as ‘self-consciousness’.
An understanding of self-consciousness in some such terms eludes, I believe, the central issue facing the individual whose basic existential position is one of ontological insecurity and whose schizoid nature is partly a direct expression of, and occasion for, his ontological insecurity, and partly an attempt to overcome it; or, putting the last remark in slightly different terms, partly an attempt to defend himself against the dangers to his being that are the consequences of his failure to achieve a secure sense of his own identity.
Self-consciousness in the ontologically insecure person plays a double role:
1. Being aware of himself and knowing that other people are aware of him are a means of assuring himself that he exists, and also that they exist. Kafka clearly demonstrates this in his story called ‘Conversation with a Suppliant’: the suppliant starts from the existential position of ontological insecurity. He states, ‘There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive.’ The need to gain a conviction of his own aliveness and the realness of things is, therefore, the basic issue in his existence. His way of seeking to gain such conviction is by feeling himself to be an object in the real world; but, since his world is unreal, he must be an object in the world of someone else, for objects to other people seem to be real, and even calm and beautiful. At least, ‘… it must be so, for I often hear people talking about them as though they were’. Hence it is that he makes his confession ‘… don’t be angry if I tell you that it is the aim of my life to get people to look at me’ (italics mine).
A further factor is the discontinuity in the temporal self. When there is uncertainty of identity in time, there is a tendency to rely on spatial means of identifying oneself. Perhaps this goes some way to account for the frequently pre-eminent importance to the person of being seen. However, sometimes the greatest reliance may be placed on the awareness of oneself in time. This is especially so when time is experienced as a succession of moments. The loss of a section of the linear temporal series of moments through inattention to one’s time-self may be felt as a catastrophe. Dooley (1941) gives various examples of this temporal self-awareness arising as part of the person’s ‘struggle against fear of obliteration’ and his attempt at the preservation of his integrity ‘against threats of being engulfed, crushed, of losing… identity…’. One of her patients said: ‘I forgot myself at the Ice Carnival the other night. I was so absorbed in looking at it that I forgot what time it was and who and where I was. When I suddenly realized I hadn’t been thinking about myself I was frightened to death. The unreality feeling came. I must never forget myself for a single minute. I watch the clock and keep busy, or else I won’t know who I am’ (p. 17).
2. In a world full of danger, to be a potentially seeable object is to be constantly exposed to danger. Self-consciousness, then, may be the apprehensive awareness of oneself as potentially exposed to danger by the simple fact of being visible to others. The obvious defence against such a danger is to make oneself invisible in one way or another.
In an actual instance, the issue is thus always necessarily complex. Kafka’s suppliant makes it the aim of his life to get people to look at him, since thereby he mitigates his state of depersonalization and derealization and inner deadness. He needs other people to experience him as a real live person because he has never been convinced from within himself that he was alive. This, however, implies a trust in the benign quality of the other person’s apprehension of him which is not always present. Once he becomes aware of something it becomes unreal, although ‘I always feel that they were once real and are now flitting away’. One would not be surprised to find that such a person would have in some measure a distrust of other people’s awareness of him. What, for instance, if they had, after all, the same ‘fugitive awareness’ of him as he had of them? Could he place any more reliance on their consciousness than on his own to lend him a conviction that he was alive? Quite often, in fact, the balance swings right over so that the individual feels that his greatest risk is to be the object of another person’s awareness. The myth of Perseus and the Medusa’s head, the ‘evil eye’, delusions of death rays and so on are I believe referable to this dread.
Indeed, considered biologically, the very fact of being visible exposes an animal to the risk of attack from its enemies, and no animal is without enemies. Being visible is therefore a basic biological risk; being invisible is a basic biological defence. We all employ some form of camouflage. The following is a written description given by a patient who employed a form of magical camouflage to help her over her anxiety when she was twelve years old.
I was about twelve, and had to walk to my father’s shop through a large park, which was a long, dreary walk. I suppose, too, that I was rather scared. I didn’t like it, especially when it was getting dark. I started to play a game to help to pass the time. You know how as a child you count the stones or stand on the crosses on the pavement – well, I hit on this way of passing the time. It struck me that if I stared long enough at the environment that I would blend with it and disappear just as if the place was empty and I had disappeared. It is as if you get yourself to feel you don’t know who you are or where you are. To blend into the scenery so to speak. Then, you are scared of it because it begins to come on without encouragement. I would just be walking along and felt that I had blended with the landscape. Then I would get frightened and repeat my name over and over again to bring me back to life, so to speak.
It may be that here is a biological analogue for many anxieties about being obvious, being out of the ordinary, being distinctive, drawing attention to oneself, where the defences employed against such dangers so often consist in attempts to merge with the human landscape, to make it as difficult as possible for anyone to see in what way one differs from anyone else. Oberndorf (1950), for instance, has suggested that depersonalization is a defence analogous to ‘playing possum’. We shall consider these defences in some detail in the case of Peter (Chapter 8).
Being like everyone else, being someone other than oneself, playing a part, being incognito, anonymous, being nobody (psychotically, pretending to have no body), are defences that are carried through with great thoroughness in certain schizoid and schizophrenic conditions.
The above patient became frightened when she had blended with the landscape. Then, in her words: ‘I would repeat my name over and over again to bring me back to life, so to speak.’ This raises an important issue. I think that it would be a correct conjecture to suppose that the particular form of defence against anxiety in this little girl could only have arisen from a shaky ontological foundation. A securely established sense of identity is not easily lost, not as readily as this girl of twelve was able to lose hers in her game. It is, therefore, probable that this very ontological insecurity at least partly occasioned her anxiety in the first place and that she then used her source of weakness as her avenue of escape. This principle has been seen operating already in the cases of James, David, Mrs D., and others. In blending with the landscape, she lost her autonomous identity, in fact she lost her self and it was just her ‘self’ that was endangered by being alone in the gathering dusk in an empty expanse.
The most general expression of this principle is that when the risk is loss of being, the defence is to lapse into a state of non-being with, however, all the time the inner reservation that this lapsing into non-being is just a game, just pretending.
As Tillich (1952, p. 62) writes: ‘Neurosis is the way of avoiding non-being by avoiding being.’ The trouble is that the individual may find that the pretence has been in the pretending and that, in a more real way than he had bargained for, he has actually lapsed into that very state of non-being he has so much dreaded, in which he has become stripped of his sense of autonomy, reality, life, identity, and from which he may not find it possible to regain his foothold ‘in’ life again by the simple repetition of his name. In fact this little girl’s game got out of hand in this way. When the patient wrote her account of her life, from which the above quotation is taken, she had remained severely depersonalized for a number of years.
In this region everything is paradoxical. In Chapter 5 we stated that the self dreads as well as longs for real aliveness. The self dreads to become alive and real because it fears that in so doing the risk of annihilation is immediately potentiated. ‘Self-consciousness’ is implicated in this paradox.
Our little girl blended with the landscape. Now, someone who only too easily blends with other people (we have described ways in which this occurs in the previous chapter), and is frightened of losing his identity thereby, uses his awareness of his self as a means of remaining detached and aloof. Self-consciousness comes to be relied upon to help sustain the individual’s precarious ontological security. This insistence on awareness, especially awareness of the self, ramifies in many directions. For instance, whereas the hysteric seems only too glad to be able to forget and to ‘repress’ aspects of his being, the schizoid individual characteristically seeks to make his awareness of himself as intensive and extensive as possible.
Yet it has been remarked how charged with hostility is the self-scrutiny to which the schizoid subjects himself. The schizoid individual (and this applies still more to the schizophrenic) does not bask in the warmth of a loving self-regard. Self-scrutiny is quite improperly regarded as a form of narcissism. Neither the schizoid nor the schizophrenic is narcissistic in this sense. As a schizophrenic put it (see p. 204), she was scorched under the glare of a black sun. The schizoid individual exists under the black sun, the evil eye, of his own scrutiny. The glare of his awareness kills his spontaneity, his freshness; it destroys all joy. Everything withers under it. And yet he remains, although profoundly not narcissistic, compulsively preoccupied with the sustained observation of his own mental and/or bodily processes. In Federn’s language, he cathects his ego-as-object with mortido.
A very similar point was made in different terms when it was said earlier that the schizoid individual depersonalizes his relationship with himself. That is to say, he turns the living spontaneity of his being into something dead and lifeless by inspecting it. This he does to others as well, and fears their doing it to him (petrification).
We are now in a position to suggest that whereas he is afraid not to be dead and lifeless – as stated, he dreads real aliveness – so also he is afraid not to continue being aware of himself. Awareness of his self is still a guarantee, an assurance of his continued existence, although he may have to live through a death-in-life. Awareness of an object lessens its potential danger. Consciousness is then a type of radar, a scanning mechanism. The object can be felt to be under control. As a death ray, consciousness has two main properties: its power to petrify (to turn to stone: to turn oneself or the other into things); and its power to penetrate. Thus, if it is in these terms that the gaze of others is experienced, there is a constant dread and resentment at being turned into someone else’s thing, of being penetrated by him, and a sense of being in someone else’s power and control. Freedom then consists in being inaccessible.
The individual may attempt to forestall these dangers by turning the other into stone. Unfortunately, since one cannot be seen by a stone, one becomes, in so far as others have been successfully reduced to things in one’s own eyes, the only person who can see oneself. The process now swings in the reverse direction, culminating in the longing to be rid of the deadening and intolerable self-awareness so that the prospect of being a passive thing penetrated and controlled by the other may come as a welcome relief. Within such oscillation there is no position of peace, since the individual has no choice between feasible alternatives.
The compulsive preoccupation with being seen, or simply with being visible, suggests that we must be dealing with underlying phantasies of not being seen, of being invisible. If, as we saw, being visible can be both in itself persecutory and also a reassurance that one is still alive, then being invisible will have equally ambiguous meanings.
The ‘self-conscious’ person is caught in a dilemma. He may need to be seen and recognized, in order to maintain his sense of realness and identity. Yet, at the same time, the other represents a threat to his identity and reality. One finds extremely subtle efforts expended in order to resolve this dilemma in terms of the secret inner self and the behavioural false-self systems already described. James, for instance, feels that ‘other people provide me with my existence’. On his own, he feels that he is empty and nobody. ‘I can’t feel real unless there is someone there.…’ Nevertheless, he cannot feel at ease with another person, because he feels as ‘in danger’ with others as by himself.
He is, therefore, driven compulsively to seek company, but never allows himself to ‘be himself’ in the presence of anyone else. He avoids social anxiety by never really being with others. He never quite says what he means or means what he says. The part he plays is always not quite himself. He takes care to laugh when he thinks a joke is not funny, and look bored when he is amused. He makes friends with people he does not really like and is rather cool to those with whom he would ‘really’ like to be friends. No one, therefore, really knows him, or understands him. He can be himself in safety only in isolation, albeit with a sense of emptiness and unreality. With others, he plays an elaborate game of pretence and equivocation. His social self is felt to be false and futile. What he longs for most is the possibility of ‘a moment of recognition’, but whenever this by chance occurs, when he has by accident ‘given himself away’, he is covered in confusion and suffused with panic.
The more he keeps his ‘true self’ in hiding, concealed, unseen, and the more he presents to others a false front, the more compulsive this false presentation of himself becomes. He appears to be extremely narcissistic and exhibitionistic. In fact he hates himself and is terrified to reveal himself to others. Instead, he compulsively exhibits what he regards as mere extraneous trappings to others; he dresses ostentatiously, speaks loudly and insistently. He is constantly drawing attention to himself, and at the same time drawing attention away from his self. His behaviour is compulsive. All his thoughts are occupied with being seen. His longing is to be known. But this is also what is most dreaded.
Here the ‘self’ has become an invisible transcendent entity, known only to itself. The body in action is no longer the expression of the self. The self is not actualized in and through the body. It is distinct and dissociated. The implicit meaning of Mrs R.’s (p. 54) actions was: ‘I am only what other people regard me as being.’ James played on the opposite possibility. ‘I am not what anyone can see.’ His apparent exhibitionism was, therefore, a way of avoiding people discovering what or who he felt he really was.
The adult is not able to use either being seen or being invisible as a stable defence against the other, since each holds dangers of its own as well as affording its own form of safety. How complicated are the issues at stake can be gauged by considering the complexity even of the earliest and simplest infantile situations.
It is a common game for children to play at being invisible and at being seen. This game has several variations. It can be played alone; in front of a mirror; or with the collusion of adults.
In a footnote to his famous description (1920) of the little boy’s play with the reel and string, Freud gives a description of one version of this game. It is worth while recalling the whole passage although it is to the footnote that I wish to direct particular attention.
The child was not at all precocious in his intellectual development. At the age of one and a half he could say only a few comprehensible words; he could also make use of a number of sounds which expressed a meaning intelligible to those around him. He was, however, on good terms with his parents and their one servant-girl, and tributes were paid to his being a ‘good boy’. He did not disturb his parents at night, he conscientiously obeyed orders not to touch certain things or go into certain rooms, and above all he never cried when his mother left him for a few hours. At the same time, he was greatly attached to his mother, who had not only fed him herself but had also looked after him without any outside help. This good little boy, however, had an occasional disturbing habit of taking any small objects he could get hold of and throwing them away from him into a corner, under the bed, and so on, so that hunting for his toys and picking them up was often quite a business. As he did this he gave vent to a loud, long-drawn-out ‘o-o-o-o’, accompanied by an expression of interest and satisfaction. His mother and the writer of the present account were agreed in thinking that this was not a mere interjection but represented the German word fort (gone). I eventually realized that it was a game and that the only use he made of any of his toys was to play ‘gone’ with them. One day I made an observation which confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied round it. It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage. What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skilfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive ‘o-o-o-o’. He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful ‘da’ (there). This then was the complete game: disappearance and return. As a rule one only witnessed the first act which was repeated untiringly as a game in itself though there is no doubt that greater pleasure was attached to the second act.
Freud adds this significant footnote to his account of this game:
A further observation subsequently confirmed this interpretation fully. One day, the child’s mother had been away for several hours and on her return was met with the words, ‘Baby o-o-o-o!’ which was at first incomprehensible. It soon turned out, however, that during this long period of solitude the child had found a method of making himself disappear [italics mine]. He had discovered his reflection in a full-length mirror which did not quite reach to the ground so that by crouching down he could make his mirror-image ‘gone’.
Thus, this little boy not only plays at making his mother disappear, but plays also at making himself disappear. Freud suggests that both games are to be understood as attempts to master the anxiety of a danger situation by repeating it again and again in play.
If this is so, the fear of being invisible, of disappearing, is closely associated with the fear of his mother disappearing. It seems that loss of the mother, at a certain stage, threatens the individual with loss of his self. The mother, however, is not simply a thing which the child can see, but a person who sees the child. Therefore, we suggest that a necessary component in the development of the self is the experience of oneself as a person under the loving eye of the mother. The ordinary infant lives almost continually under the eyes of adults. But being seen is simply one of innumerable ways in which the infant’s total being is given attention. He is attended to, by being noticed, petted, rocked, cuddled, thrown in the air, bathed: his body is handled to an extent that it never will be again. Some mothers can recognize and respond to the child’s ‘mental’ processes but cannot responsively accept its concrete bodily actuality and vice versa. It may be that a failure of responsiveness on the mother’s part to one or other aspect of the infant’s being will have important consequences.
A further consideration of what this boy was achieving by his game suggests that he was able, as Freud presumes, to make himself disappear by not being able to see his reflection in the mirror. That is to say, if he could not see himself there, he himself would be ‘gone’; thus he was employing a schizoid presupposition by the help of the mirror, whereby there were two ‘hims’, one there and the other here. That is to say, in overcoming or attempting to overcome the loss or absence of the real other in whose eyes he lived and moved and had his being, he becomes another person to himself who could look at him from the mirror.
However, although the ‘person’ whom he could see in the mirror was neither his own self nor another person but only a reflection of his own person, when he could no longer see that other reflected image of his own person in the mirror he himself disappeared, possibly in the way he felt that he disappeared when he could no longer feel that he was under scrutiny or in the presence of his mother. Now, whether the threat from the real other arises out of the contingency of the fact that the other may at any time go away or die or not reciprocate one’s feelings for him, or whether the other represents more directly a threat in the form of implosion or penetration, the schizoid person seeks in the boy’s way of being a mirror to himself, to turn his self, a quasi-duality with an overall unity, into two selves, i.e. into an actual duality. In this little boy, of the ‘two selves’, his own actual self outside the mirror was the one which one could imagine would most readily be identified with his mother. This identification of the self with the phantasy of the person by whom one is seen may contribute decisively to the characteristics of the observing self. As stated above, this observing self often kills and withers anything that is under its scrutiny. The individual has now a persecuting observer in the very core of his being. It may be that the child becomes possessed by the alien and destructive presence of the observer who has turned bad in his absence, occupying the place of the observing self, of the boy himself outside the mirror. If this happens, he retains his awareness of himself as an object in the eyes of another by observing himself as the other: he lends the other his eyes in order that he may continue to be seen; he then becomes an object in his own eyes. But the part of himself who looks into him and sees him, has developed the persecutory features he has come to feel the real person outside him to have.
The mirror game can have peculiar variants. The manifest onset of one man’s illness occurred when he looked into a mirror and saw someone else there (in fact, his own reflection): ‘him’. ‘He’ was to be his persecutor in a paranoid psychosis. ‘He’ (i.e. ‘him’) was the instigator of a plot to kill him (i.e. the patient) and he (the patient) was determined to ‘put a bullet through “him” ’ (his alienated self).
In the game of this little boy, he, in the position of the person who was perceiving him, that is, his mother, was in a sense killing himself in a magical way: he was killing the mirror image of himself. We shall have occasion to return later to this peculiar state of affairs when studying schizophrenia. Making himself disappear and return again must have had a similar significance to that of his other game, of making his mother (symbolically) disappear and reappear. The game makes sense in this way, however, only if we can believe that there is a danger situation for him not only in not being able to see his mother but also in not feeling himself to be seen by her. At this stage, esse = percipi, not only as regards others but also as regards the self.
At two years six months, one of my daughters played a similar game. I had to cover my eyes with my hands on the command, ‘Don’t see us.’ Then, on the command, ‘See me’, I had suddenly to take my hands away, and express surprise and delight at seeing her. I also had to look at her and pretend I could not see her. I have been made to play this game with other children. There is no question of not seeing them doing something naughty. The whole point seems to lie in the child experiencing himself temporarily as not being seen. It is not a question of the child not seeing me. One notices also that no actual physical separation occurs in the game. Neither the adult nor the child, in this game, has to hide or actually to disappear. It is a magical version of the peek-a-boo game.
The child who cries when its mother disappears from the room is threatened with the disappearance of his own being, since for him also percipi = esse. It is only in the mother’s presence that he is able fully to live and move and have his being. Why do children want the light on at night, and want their parents so often to sit with them until they fall asleep? It may be that one aspect of these needs is that the child becomes frightened if he can no longer see himself, or feel himself to be seen by someone else; or to hear others and be heard by them. Going to sleep consists, phenomenologically, in a loss of one’s own awareness of one’s being as well as that of the world. This may be in itself frightening, so the child needs to feel seen or heard by another person, while he is losing his own awareness of his being in the process of falling asleep. In sleep the ‘inner’ light that illumines one’s own being is out. Leaving on the light not only provides assurance that if he wakes there are no terrors in the dark, but provides a magical assurance that during sleep he is being watched over by benign presences (parents, good fairies, angels). Even worse, perhaps, than the possible presence of bad things in the dark is the terror that in the dark is nothing and no one. Not to be conscious of oneself, therefore, may be equated with nonentity. The schizoid individual is assuring himself that he exists by always being aware of himself. Yet he is persecuted by his own insight and lucidity.
The need to be perceived is not, of course, purely a visual affair. It extends to the general need to have one’s presence endorsed or confirmed by the other, the need for one’s total existence to be recognized; the need, in fact, to be loved. Thus those people who cannot sustain from within themselves the sense of their own identity or, like Kafka’s suppliant, have no inner conviction that they are alive, may feel that they are real live persons only when they are experienced as such by another, as was the case with Mrs R. (p. 54), who was threatened with depersonalization when she could not be recognized or imagine herself recognized and responded to by someone who knew her sufficiently well for their recognition of and response to her to be significant. Her need to be seen was based on the equation that ‘I am the person that other people know and recognize me to be’. She required the tangible reassurance of the presence of another who knew her, in whose presence her own uncertainties about whom she was could be temporarily allayed.