One of the most over-used over-rated and faux-wise formulations of the modern/postmodern era is the jaded idea of “being your self”. I have, upon hearing it ad nauseum now, come to absolutely despise it. When one actually does sit down to analyze what good there is to it, one finds nothing but a sack of entangled contradictions.
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We all have either multiple selves or a
multifaceted self but NOT a unitary self |
To begin with, most people are remarkably ignorant about what is it that their selves really are. In fact to be certain, there really is not a coherent monolithic self-contained thing as the “self”. The author undertook to examine different theoretical traditions in scholastic disciplines devoted, in part, to the understanding of this elusive construct of "self", a construct which has found its way into widespread use in everyday language but remains frustratingly hard to precisely define or articulate even. While there are divergences, what forms the common denominator of all “self” traditions (incl. in psychology and psychoanalysis), is that self is an ensemble of many things... a constellation of multiply realized ideas, schemas, memories, and emotional complexes. Without getting into the nuts and bolts of it, it’d be sufficient for us to distill out of the foregoing that there is no one, stable definite thing as a self – its very "thingness" is suspect - which fundamentally eats into the premise of “being yourself”.
