we cycle through a series of selves

woops

woops

is not like other people
shiels said:
I get resentful of the idea others have of me in their head. having to work with that slither is frustrating isn’t it? When stupid people get a little taste for who you are and think they get you. Horrible feeling, stained
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the quicker people get an idea of what you are the quicker they can neutralise any threat
 
sus

sus

Moderator
suspended said:
This is a good read I think, it gets past the usual "we're many selves, depending on who we're around" basics and gets into the real quality of these selves, where they come from, the way they're "sticky":

www.lesswrong.com

The Intelligent Social Web — LessWrong

Social reality and culture work a lot like improv comedy. We often don't know "who we are" or what's going on socially, but everyone unconsciously tr…
www.lesswrong.com www.lesswrong.com



Related, from Sam Fussell, the bodybuilder son of Paul Fussell (American midcentury lit critic who wrote Class, the pre-eminent book on American social hierarchy):
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@shiels read this
 
snav

snav

Well-known member
Hume's mental atoms included only subpropositional components of beliefs — mostly names of perceptible and introspectible qualia. The mechanization of the self that Hume suggested, and that associationist psychology developed, amounted to little more than a transposition into mentalistic terminology of a rather crude physiology of perception and memory. By contrast, Freud populated inner space not with analogues of Boylean corpuscles but with analogues of persons — internally coherent clusters of belief and desire. Each of these quasi persons is, in the Freudian picture, a part of a single unified causal network, but not of a single person (since the criterion for individuation of a person is a certain minimal coherence among its beliefs and desires). Knowledge of all these persons is necessary to predict and control a human being's behavior (and in particular his or her "irrational" behavior), but only one of these persons will be available (at any given time) to introspection.
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Clinamenic

Clinamenic

Binary & Tweed
I remember Freud using metaphors of vesicles/membranes in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle"

So far we have got to the point that the living vesicle is equipped with a protection against stimuli from the outer world. Before that, we had decided that the cortical layer next to it must be differentiated as the organ for reception of external stimuli. But this sensitive layer (what is later the system Bw.) also receives excitations from within: the position of the system between outer and inner and the difference in the conditions under which this receptivity operates on the two sides become deciding factors for the functioning of the system and of the whole psychic apparatus.
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But I'm not familiar with his wider body of work, so maybe this isn't a persistent metaphor.
 
snav

snav

Well-known member
Clinamenic said:
I remember Freud using metaphors of vesicles/membranes in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle"

But I'm not familiar with his wider body of work, so maybe this isn't a persistent metaphor.
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I actually spent a lot of time the other day tracking down the justification for the Rorty claim I quoted above in Freud's source texts. Freud is actually quite clear that his psychical systems are NOT "quasi persons", even though he uses metaphors with that implication quite often (the actual story is fairly complicated. I'm considering writing an essay nailing everything down, from Studies on Hysteria and Interp of Dreams thru The Ego and the Id, but it would be a decently large undertaking). I wouldn't look to Beyond the Pleasure Principle for Freud's model of self-hood either, because that metaphor is in relation to drive (he uses the amoeba thing to explain life vs death drive) rather than self -- better to read BtPP as prep for Lacanian jouissance rather than as a core Freudian exposition.

Eric Berne (author of Games People Play, and considered sort-of within the Freudian lineage), however, does make his quasi person metaphor exhaustively clear, in how each of the "ego states" are explicitly quasi persons: the Parent, the Adult, and the Child. He does this contra Freud (which kind of problematizes the Rorty quote on its own):

It will be demonstrated that Parent, Adult, and Child are not concepts, like Superego, Ego, and Id, or the Jungian constructs, but phenomenological realities; while pastimes, games, and scripts are not abstractions, but operational social realities. Once he has a firm grasp of the psychological, social, and clinical meanings of these six terms, the transactional analyst, whether physician, psychologist, social scientist, or social worker is in a position to use them as therapeutic, research, or case-work tools according to his or her opportunities and qualifications.
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Looking at the last line there, it seems to me that Berne is saying "quasi persons is a very useful system [but wrong, or at least not attempting to systematize the totality of the psyche, as Freud was]", which brings up the question of "how true is the multiple self thing really?" It seems somewhat valid phenomenologically, but if we dig into the dynamics that exist between selves, will we end up back where Freud started?
 
shiels

shiels

_
When I think of superego, ego and id I’m thinking of self directed self concerned inward looking, understanding the world starting with your problems and needs. Whereas Berne feels more relational there. I only got a third into games people play, I found it quite funny unintentionally obviously

can you make your posts into a simple question for me?
 
snav

snav

Well-known member
shiels said:
When I think of superego, ego and id I’m thinking of self directed self concerned inward looking, understanding the world starting with your problems and needs. Whereas Berne feels more relational there. I only got a third into games people play, I found it quite funny unintentionally obviously
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oh no Berne was very intentionally funny. he wrote a book called "Sex in Human Loving" that's just full of jokes. Also, both Freud and Berne's models emerged from the same source, which is observation of other people. Freud tried to stay as minimally introspective as he could, although he couldn't avoid it at times (esp in dream book). I recall somewhere that Berne's models came from him playing guessing games about people when he was doing WWII army intake psychology, whereas Freud's models were more about intense, long-term 1-on-1 relations with individual others.
 
shiels

shiels

_
I like this article @suspended. I hate improv! I don’t really actually I’ve been to a few in mid west America actually and enjoyed but feel it’s just a position I have to take, I don’t like improv. I don’t like the people who are into it. But then the same with jazz, as a concept there’s little more beautiful but in terms of the people who love it present company excluded they’re all dicks

This was good:

“he was more focused on managing my perception of him than he was in noticing how the social web was tugging him toward a transition of roles”

This idea of co creation of the self is something I was going to post on your mask thread. The mask metaphor paints this idea of something decided inwardly and projected to the world but I think others pull the strings to your face muscles more than most would admit, and this is massively accelerated with thousands of followers and the urge to be seen by millions
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
luka said:
do you feel like the same person from day to day or can you vaugely intuit (or precisely conceive of) a cast of characters with different desires, values, modes of operating, interests, abilities and weaknesses?
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I can't remember the last time I felt like a person, can you?
 
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