Personal Identity Change and Identification Acts

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Nowadays, it became a commonplace practice among many psychologists to suggest that the act of ‘identification’, which Hollway defines as “imagining oneself in another person’s place”¹, is capable of altering the qualitative subtleties of one’s sense of self-identity. This suggestion does appear thoroughly legitimate. After all, there is indeed a plenty of empirical evidence as to the fact that, as people live their lives, they grow increasingly aware of what would account for the age-related circumstantially appropriate behavioral stances (capable of affecting one’s sense of self-identity), on their part.

It is understood, of course, that the acts of ‘identification’ play an important role, within the process’s context – while addressing life-challenges, people do tend to reflect upon how others proceed with doing the same. This, of course, has a strong effect on the manner, in which individuals perceive the surrounding reality and their place in it. However, it would be wrong to suggest that the acts of ‘identification’, on a particular person’s part, affect the innermost constituents of how he or she is being genetically ‘preprogrammed’ to react to the externally induced stimuli. It appears that, instead of being referred to as the agent of ‘identity change’, the act of ‘identification’ should be discussed as one among many strategies, deployed by people on the way of trying to maintain the integrity of their deep-seated/unconscious understanding of who they really are. In this paper, I will explore the validity of the above-stated at length.

Before I proceed, I will need to establish a discursive premise, upon which the consequent discussion of what account for the actual relationship between the notions of identity and ‘identification’ will be based. This premise can be formulated as follows. Due to being primates (in the biological sense of this word), the representatives of Homo Sapience species are essentially ‘hairless apes’. In its turn, this presupposes that, regardless of what happened to be the qualitative characteristics of their sense of self-identity; they may have only three true purposes in life, justified by the Darwinian laws of evolution – spreading genes (sex), making money (nutrition/survival) and striving to attain a social prominence (domination).

Biologically speaking, one’s existence is solely concerned with establishing the objective preconditions for the spatial preservation of his or her DNA. As Dawkins pointed out: “We are survival machines – robot vehicles, blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes”.²

This, of course, suggests the legitimacy of the ‘instrumental’ outlook on the significance of how one goes about constructing its sense of identity – hence, implying that there is indeed nothing ‘phenomenological’ about the notion in question. Apparently, the manner in which people react to the challenges of life (commonly assumed reflective of their identity), cannot be discussed outside of what accounts for the measure of their ‘existential fitness’. Therefore, contrary to what many psychologists believe, rather than connoting the notion of ‘uniqueness’, the term ‘self-identity’ in fact connotes the notion of ‘survival’.

Discursively speaking, just about any person can be compared to an automaton, which is being preprogrammed to adequately react to whatever happened to be the environmental circumstances at the time.

The main aspect of the process in question is that there is a spatial continuity to it, which in turn creates the illusion that, as time goes on; one’s identity never ceases to undergo a qualitative transformation. This illusion is explainable, because the very passing of time brings about the conditional changes to the surrounding social reality – hence, causing people to try to adjust their behavior to remain fully observant of them, which formally justifies the assumption that the flow of time does have a strong effect on a person’s sense of self-identity. According to Erikson, cited in Hollway’s article: “A person’s identity changes over the course of a lifetime because of the conﬂict produced by ordinary life circumstances”.³

The mentioned assumption appears fully consistent with the idea (promoted in Hollway’s article) that, after having given birth to a child, women acquire nothing short of a completely new identity: “They (these women) are thus simultaneously ‘self-as-mother’, ‘self-as-child’ and, therefore, ‘mother-of-self-as-child’”.⁴ In its turn, this is being commonly regarded as the proof that by identifying ourselves with others, we cease being what we used to be in the past. Nevertheless, even though there is indeed a good point in referring to life in terms of an everlasting struggle/conflict, which induces the observable changes to what happened to be one’s conflict-‘fueled’ identity, the idea that these changes affect the unconscious workings of the concerned individual’s psyche, cannot be referred to as such that represents an undisputed truth-value.

The rationale behind this suggestion can be formulated as follows: As the recent breakthroughs in the field of neurology indicate, the spatially observable alterations to one’s sense of self-identity do not quite reflect the process of this individual growing emotionally detached from what he or she used to be in the past. Rather, they reflect the degree of an environmental adaptability, on the part of what happened to be the concerned person’s ‘true-self’ (or ‘soul’, as religious people refer to it) – something, solely defined by the constituents of his or her DNA-makeup.

While addressing life-challenges, throughout our lives, we naturally adopt different approaches to doing it, which is often seen as being yet another confirmation of the validity of the specifically ‘relativist’ outlook on how one’s sense of self-identity is being formed and maintained.

Yet, there are many good reasons to think that the qualitative essence of these approaches remains the same, regardless of what happened to be the affiliated external forces of influence, which in turn presupposes the existence of ‘true-self’ (unaffected by the flow of time) in just about any person. Allegorically speaking, as they go through life, people do wear different ‘masks’. However, the actual force that makes the ‘identification’-triggered replacement of these ‘masks’ possible, does not undergo any transformation.

In her article, Hollway mentions the case of Liyanna, who in the aftermath of having given birth to her daughter, has gained the sudden awareness of what the identity of a ‘mother’ stands for.⁵ The author interpreted as the indication that the process of ‘identification’ does in fact results in the affected individual becoming a ‘new person’. However, there are also many cases of women abandoning their newly born infants out on the street – obviously enough, the changeover into ‘mothers’, on these women’s part, did not have any effect on how they position themselves in life (their sense of self-identity), whatsoever. We can well come up with the speculative, but nonetheless discursively legitimate explanation for this – even though, physically speaking, these women were fully capable of becoming pregnant/giving birth, whatever happened to be their deep-seated sense of ‘true-self’, did not have anything to do with the notion of ‘motherhood’ – pure and simple.

The same line of argumentation can be deployed, when it comes to explaining the phenomenological aspects of homosexualism – specifically, the fact that many ‘queer’ men do experience the overwhelming desire to live up to the socially upheld conventions of what the notion of ‘normal sexuality’ stands for. This explains why, while striving to suppress their homosexual leanings consciously, many ‘hidden gays’ apply a great effort into becoming affiliated with the so-called ‘masculine virtues’ – these men’s externally displayed behavioral ‘machismo’ is nothing but the extrapolation of their deep-seated ‘femininity’.

Obviously enough, when trying hard to radiate the very spirit of ‘masculinity’, these men expect that it will indeed help them to overcome what their unconscious psyche deems as ‘deficiency’ (from the evolutionary point of view, homosexualism is indeed a deficiency, because it does incapacitate the affected person rather substantially in a variety of different ways). However, as practice indicates, the undertaken act of ‘identification with masculinity’, on the part of ‘hidden gays’, is rarely capable of restoring their perceptual/behavioral adequacy – they simply cannot help being drawn towards men. This, of course, once again suggests that the claim that personal identity changes, as a result of acts of ‘identification’, is conceptually fallacious.

I believe that the earlier deployed line of argumentation, in defense of the idea that ‘identification’ does not change the identity (‘true-self’) of an ‘identifier’, is fully consistent with the paper’s initial thesis. Apparently, the very fact that humans are in essence ‘gene-vehicles’, creates the objective preconditions for this to be the case. To think otherwise, is to be utterly arrogant, as to how the Darwinian laws of evolution actually work.

References

Dawkins, R., The Selfish Gene, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1976.

Hollway, W., ‘Identity Change and Identiﬁcation’, in Bromley, S., Clarke, J.

Hinchliffe, S. and Taylor, S. (Eds.), Exploring Social Lives, Walton Hall, The Open University, 2009, pp. 251-289.

Footnotes

W. Hollway, ‘Identity Change and Identiﬁcation’, in Bromley, S., Clarke, J., Hinchliffe, S. and Taylor, S. (Eds.), Exploring Social Lives, Walton Hall, The Open University, 2009, p. 255.
R. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1976, p. 2.
Hollway, Identity Change and Identiﬁcation, 2009, p. 257.
Ibid., p. 257.
Ibid., p. 255.

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Personal Identity Change and Identification Acts

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