Reading and Identity
This is a description of "identity
theory" as we developed and used it at the Center for
Psychological Study of the Arts, State University of New York at
Buffalo in the 1970s. We began with an inquiry into the way readers read. We soon
found ourselves re-thinking from the roots up what psychoanalysis
can say about the ways people sense and know things.
We theorists of literature used to think that a given story or
poem evoked some "correct" or at least widely shared response.
When, however, I began (at Buffalo's Center for the Psychological
Study of the Arts) to test this idea, I rather ruefully found a
much subtler and a more complex process at work. Each person who
reads a story, poem, or even a single word construes it
differently. These differences evidently stem from personality.
But how?
The key concept is identity (as developed by psychoanalyst
Heinz Lichtenstein). I see it as forming the latest of the four
characterologies that psychoanalysis has evolved. First there
are diagnostic categories like hysteric, manic, or schizophrenic.
Second, Freud and his followers added the libidinal types: anal,
phallic, oral, genital, and urethral. Although these terms could
bring larger segments of someone's behavior together in a
significant way, they pointed toward childhood; necessarily they
infantalized adult achievements. A third, ego-psychological,
notion of character was Fenichel's: "the ego's habitual mode of
bringing into harmony" the demands of the external world and the
internal world of personal drives and needs.
Lichtenstein suggests a way to conceptualize Fenichel's
central term, "habitual." We are each constantly doing new
things yet we stamp each new thing with the same personal style
as our earlier actions. Think of the individual as embodying a
dialectic of sameness and difference. We detect the sameness by
seeing what persists within the constant change of our lives. We
detect the difference by seeing what has changed against the
background of sameness.
The easiest way to comprehend that dialectic of sameness and
difference is Lichtenstein's concept of identity as a theme and
variations-like a musical theme and variations. Think of the
sameness as a theme, an "identity theme." Think of the
difference as variations on that identity theme. I can arrive at
an identity theme by sensing the recurring patterns in someone's
life, just as I would arrive at the theme of a piece of music. I
would express it, not in terms from elsewhere (either diagnostic
words like "hysteric" or structural words like "ego"), but in
words as descriptive as possible of that person's behavior.
For example,I phrased an identity theme for a subject I'll
call Sandra: "She sought to avoid depriving situations and to
find sources of nuture and strength with which she could exchange
and fuse." Similarly, "Saul sought from the world balanced and
defined exchanges, in which he would not be the one overpowered."
"Sebastian wanted to unite himself with forces of control, to
which he would give something verbal or intellectual, hoping to
sexualize them." Thus, Sandra's thoughts about the need for
equal strengths in marriage were one variation on her identity
theme, and Sebastian's desire to please an aristocracy or Saul's
fear of me as an interviewer were variations on theirs, just as
their various readings were.
For instance, these three read this clause in Faulkner's "A
Rose for Emily" describing Colonel Saratoris: "he who fathered
the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets
without an apron." Sandra adjusted the phrase to just the amount
of strength she could identify with: "It's a great little touch
of ironic humor, I think [of] the voice in the story as meaning
it that way . . . Using these heroic terms to
describe such a petty and obvious extension of
bigotry . . . It was such a perfect undercutting
of the heroic Colonel Sartoris." Sebastian discovered an
aristocratic, sexualized master-slave relationship: "I react to
the term `fathered' the edict . . . Fathering the
edict seems to in some way be fathering the women, to be
fathering that state of affairs. So it implied for me the sexual
- well [he laughed] - intercourse that took place between whites
and Negroes." Saul, however, had to reduce the force and cruelty
of the original: "`Fathered' . . . is the word
you're asking about, I suspect . . . It means
practically the same as `sponsored,' I think. I don't know.
Although I suppose you could talk about
paternalism . . . No one should appear on the
streets without an apron. That's just identifying the
servants . . . . That's a social thing."
One could have labeled Saul, Sandra, and Sebastian hysterics
or obsessionals (in diagnostic categories) or oral, anal, or
phallic (in libidinal stage characterology) or as identifiers,
reversers, or deniers (in a characterology of defense and
adaptation). But these categories would have lumped together and
blurred the particular details of their readings of stories, and
that is what reading involves--responses to detail. Saul,
Sandra, Sebastian, and the many other readers and writers we have
studied led us to a general principle: we actively transact
literature so as to re-create our identities.
We can refine that principle further, however. I see Sandra
bringing to this sentence both the general expectations I think
she has toward any other (that it will nurture or protect) and
also specific expectations toward Faulkner or the South or short
stories. She also brings to bear on the text what I regard as
her characteristic pattern of defensive and adaptive strategies
("defenses," for short) so as to shape the text until, to the
degree she needs that certainty, it is a setting in which she can
gratify her wishes and defeat her fears about closeness and
distance: "a great little touch." Sandra also endows the text
with what I take to be her characteristic fantasies, that is, her
habitual wishes for some strong person who will balance
closeness, nuture, and strength, here, "the voice in the story"
which undercuts the bigot. Finally, as a social, moral, and
intellectual being, she gives the text a coherence and
significance that confirm her whole transaction of the clause.
She reads it ethically.
These four terms, defense, expectation, fantasy, and
transformation (DEFT, for short) connect to more than clinical
experience. One can understand expectation as putting
the literary work in the sequence of a person's wishes in time,
while transformation endows the work with a meaning
beyond time. Similarly, I learn of defenses as they
shape what the individual lets in from outside, while
fantasies are what I see the individual putting out from
herself into the outside world. Thus these four terms let me
place a person's DEFTing at the intersection of the axes of human
experience, between time and timelessness, between inner and
outer reality.
Our readings of readers imply still more. We may extend what
we have found out about the perception of texts to other kinds of
perception. If Sandra uses Faulkner's words to re-create her
identity, will she not use The New York Times or,
indeed, any words the same way? If she DEFTSs the narrator or
Colonel Sartoris, characters in fiction, will she not DEFT
characters in real life?
Freud seemed to believe in "immaculate perception." He
assumed that eyes and ears faithfully transmit the real world
into the mind, where later these originally sound percepts may be
distorted by unconscious or neurotic needs. Few, if any,
twentieth century students of perception would agree. Hundreds
of their experiments have shown that perception is a constructive
act. The very cells of our eyes and ears have already begun to
shape the transmission of the outside world to our minds,
separating out voices from noise or an approaching object from an
approaching aperture. In some complex acts of perception, such
as recognizing particular objects, relative positions or
distances, contrasts, and so on, the role of the perceiver
becomes even clearer and stronger.
Psychologists who study sensing, knowing, or remembering have
long recognized the importance of the person who senses, knows,
or remembers. They have asked for a "top-level theory of
motivation" to take that whole person into account. That is, a
person's needs, motivation, and character shape even small
details of perception, cognition, and memory. But how can we
articulate that relationship?
I believe identity theory provides the necessary top-level
theory. That is, we can conceptualize sensing, knowing, or
remembering - indeed, the whole human mind (as William T. Powers
has done) as a hierarchy of feedback networks, each set to a
reference level from the loop above it. At the lowest level, the
outer world triggers signals from the cells of retina or cochlea
which, if they are big enough by the reference standards set from
above, stimulate movements of eyeball or ear canal to vary and
test those signals. Higher loops will deal with intensities,
sensations, configurations, objects, positioning, tracking,
sequencing, changing sequences, and will look more like DEFTings.
The highest reference level will be set by the identity loop: we
transact the world through all these particular transactions so
as to re-create our individual identities.
Because identity theory lets us integrate psychoanalysis with
at least some kinds of experimental psychology and
psycholinguistics, we have begun to teach psychoanalytic theory
at our Center in new ways. We see identity theory as moving
psychoanalysis definitively into a third phase. At first, Freud
explained things by the polarity: conscious versus unconscious.
Then, after Freud's 1923 revision of his early work, ego
psychology explained things by the polarity: ego as against non
ego. Now, we believe, psychoanalysis has grown to fill a still
larger conceptual frame: self and other - as in the work of
Lacan, Kohut, Fairbairn, Guntrip, Winnicott, Milner, or in the
identity theory of Lichtenstein as applied and developed by the
so-called "Buffalo school."
We believe that identity enriches the psychoanalytic theory of
motivation. Freud began with a two-level theory. The pleasure
principle (really, the avoidance of unpleasure) was the dominant
human motive except as it became modified by the reality
principle (we learned to delay gratification so as to achieve a
net increase in pleasure). Later he provided a third, deeper
level, "beyond" the pleasure principle, a death instinct or
perhaps a drive toward a constant or zero level of excitation, an
idea questioned by many psychoanalysts. Lichtenstein suggests
replacing it with an identity principle: the organism's most
basic motivation is to maintain its identity. Indeed, we will
even die to be true to what we hold fundamental to our being. So
deep and strong is identity, it defines what the pleasure and the
reality of the other principles are.
Accordingly, when we teach motivation, we set it in this
third-phase framework of identity theory. We teach, for example,
Waelder's notion of the ego as actively and passively harmonizing
the demands of id and superego (do it! don't do it!) and reality
and the repetition compulsion (find a new solution! try the old
one again!). Yet the principle of multiple function operates
within an identity principle. Ego, id, superego, reality, and
the compulsion to repeat all exist as functions of identity.
Hence, instead of structures, they can be better understood as
questions about a total transaction by a self with an identity.
One can ask, What in this transaction looks like an integrating,
synthesizing activity? What looks like an incorporated parental
voice? These questions will lead to a picture of the whole
person acting, rather than five "agencies."
Similarly, in teaching development through the familiar oral,
anal, phallic, etc., stages, we avoid giving the idea that the
child is "done to" by drives, parents, environment or society.
Rather, an active child with a developing identity marches
through an "epigenetic landscape" of questions posed by his own
biology, his parents, and the social and environmental structures
they embody. In effect, we can read the development of any given
individual as the particular answers he chooses (because they re
create his identity) to questions that his particular body or
family poses or that he shares with other children who have his
biology and culture. And, of course, the answers he arrives at
become part of the identity he brings to the questions he gets
thereafter.
One can think, for example, of the oedipal stage as society,
the parents, and biology all demanding that the child situate
itself in a world divided into male and female persons and
parental and filial generations. Different parents and societies
will favor different answers. A patriarchal family or culture
might treat the male-female distinction as those who have and
those who lack. A more enlightened group might see not a lack
but a difference, perhaps irrelevant to roles within or outside
the family. Whatever the biases, the individual child must
achieve an answer that will continue the growth of an identity
through the physical and social questions posed by a particular
landscape. Development becomes a dialogue (or, as in perceptual
theory, a feedback) between identity on the one hand and, on the
other, biology and culture.
Finding the principle of identity re-creation has changed the
method as well as the substance of our teaching. More and more
we use the Delphi ("know thyself") seminar to help students
discover how they each bring a personal style (identity) to
reading, writing, learning, and teaching. Students and faculty
read imaginative or even theoretical texts and pre-circulate to
one another written free associations. The seminar discuses both
texts and associations, but eventually turns entirely to the
associations as the texts to be responded to. Students master
the subject matter and also see how people in the seminar use
that subject matter to re-create their identities. Most
important, each student gains insight into his own characteristic
ways with texts and people - that is why we feel this method is
particularly valuable for all teaching of psychoanalysis,
psychiatry, and psychology.
In a Delphi seminar we come face to face with the ultimate
implication of identity theory. If any reading of a story or
another person or psychological theory is a function (among other
things) of the reader's identity, then my reading of your
identity must be a function of my own. Identity, then, is not a
conclusion but a relationship: the potential, transitional, in
between space in which I perceive someone as a theme and
variations. Just as in most psychoanalytic thinking about human
development, the existence of a child constitutes a mother and
the existence of a mother constitutes a child, so, in identity
theory, all selves and objects constitute one another. The hard
and fast line between subjective and objective blurs and
dissolves. Instead of simple dualism, we try for a detailed
inquiry into the potential space of that DEFT feedback in which
self and other mutually constitute each other.
That inquiry is part of science, so that it no longer makes
sense to ask: Is psychoanalysis "scientific"? That is, is it
independent of the personality of the scientist? Rather,
psychoanalysis is the science that tells us how to inquire into
that very question: How does a person doing science thereby re
create identity?
The question applies most pointedly to those in the human
sciences. Traditionally psychologists have tried to understand
new human events by impersonal if-then generalizations about
countable categories. Few large-scale generalizations have
resulted, however. If we define a science as yielding
understanding, psychology as we have known it so far, has not
been scientific.
Identity theory suggests a more promising method: one should
bring not generalizations but questions to the new event,
questions to be asked by a scientist acknowledging and actively
using his involvement with what he is studying. That is - I now
understand - what I was doing when I set out to study reading.
It is also the method shared by all psychoanalytic psychologists,
be they clinical or theoretical.
Norman N. Holland
If you have comments, email me at nholland@ufl.edu