Tip: click a paragraph to jump to the exact moment in the video. How You BEHAVE is NOT Who you ARE (Identity, Memory, Self)

1. 00:01 My latest video unsurprisingly confused many of you. You kept asking in
2. 00:08 the comment section, what is the difference between identity and behaviors? Identity and intentions, the self and
3. 00:20 plans and decisions and choices. Is there any difference? Like if someone
4. 00:26 behaves in a certain way or has a premedit meditated intention to commit an act, doesn’t this amount to who this person is? To summarize your questions,
5. 00:38 our behaviors not the same as one’s identity. And this is the topic of today’s video. I’ll give it to you in a nutshell so that you can
6. 00:49 log off and move on to much more interesting and less verbose videos. In
7. 00:55 a nutshell, how you behave is not who you are. Take it from me, Sam Vaknin,
8. 01:03 author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and a professor of psychology in the Commonwealth Institute in Cambridge, United Kingdom.
9. 01:14 Identity is not the same as behaviors for the simple reason that behaviors can
10. 01:21 and do change. Whereas what we call core identity, the self or in early
11. 01:28 psychoanalytic literature, the ego, these actually do not change. Now I know
12. 01:35 this creates another source of confusion. All kinds of self-styled experts, coaches, and the self-help
13. 01:42 industry and books, they keep telling you that you can change who you are. You can change your identity. You can change yourself so utterly and completely that
14. 01:54 you would be unrecognizable even unto yourself. But this is of course unmititigated nonsense and emanates from the conflation
15. 02:05 of certain determinants of personality and what we call core identity and self.
16. 02:13 Core identity and self form during early childhood. There are variety of theories
17. 02:19 as to how the self is formed, starting early on with Sigman Freud and then more
18. 02:26 um predominantly Jung and evolving throughout the throughout the ages. And
19. 02:33 today we have a plethora multitude of theories as to how the self forms. But what is common to all of them the accepted wisdom is once the self has oified once a self has crystallized once
20. 02:46 a self has constellated became became integrated and formed the self or the
21. 02:53 core identity are largely intact and unchangeable and immutable throughout
22. 02:59 the lifespan. Now, of course, as you can immediately see, behaviors are not the same.
23. 03:06 Behaviors get modified. Behaviors change. Behaviors sometimes um are
24. 03:15 radically contradictory. So, for example, you could be a drug dealer in the first 20 years of of your adult life
25. 03:21 and then a rehab counselor in the next 20 years. You can be a black hacker or a
26. 03:28 cracker in the first 20 years of your life and then you can become a white hacker or white knight in next 20 years
27. 03:35 of your life. You can change behavior so dramatically
28. 03:42 that it would appear as if your very very personality has changed and people
29. 03:48 would confuse it easily with who you are with your identity. But the truth is
30. 03:54 that the self is about immutability. The self is the
31. 04:00 kernel, the core, the nucleus which never changes no matter what. The
32. 04:07 self renders you recognizable as you regardless of circumstances.
33. 04:15 And so identity is not the same as behaviors because a great definition of the self is a sense of continuity across environments, changing circumstances,
34. 04:29 life mishaps and events and other externalities.
35. 04:37 self. The sense of this sense of continuity and contiguity, this sense of jointness rather than disjointedness. This is what we call the self. It’s
36. 04:50 always there and it’s present and it’s immediately accessible. you you know you are you
37. 04:58 even if you find yourself in the most amazingly new environment subject to
38. 05:04 unpredictable circumstances in the most uncertain um interactions with people and so even
39. 05:11 then when everything around you is chaos and mayhem and tumult
40. 05:17 even then you know that you are you even when the chaos is internal you
41. 05:24 experience emotional dysregulation you experience even identity diffusion you
42. 05:31 still know that it is you who is experiencing these things
43. 05:37 you can see that there is a vast cousin there’s a gulf and abyss gap between a
44. 05:44 yawning gap between who you are and how you behave it is the who that behaves
45. 05:53 Now a single unchangeable
46. 05:59 entity this entity that is you
47. 06:05 has a wide reperatory of potential possible behaviors. It’s it’s a the self
48. 06:11 is a flexible entity but not in the sense that it rearranges itself that it
49. 06:18 reframes itself that it it is that it is self transforming that not in this sense
50. 06:24 in the sense that it has the capacity to adopt behaviors which are perceived
51. 06:30 rightly or wrongly as adaptive as responsive to the environment as reactive to interpersonal relationships.
52. 06:37 Behaviors are like tools, like instruments. The self is always there,
53. 06:43 the same, unchanged throughout the lifespan from about six years old until
54. 06:51 you die. And it is this self which um makes the plans and the decisions and the choices and adopts behaviors. And
55. 07:02 yet the decisions, the choices, the plans, the goals, the behaviors,
56. 07:09 they are all superficial. They’re all external to the self. They are like
57. 07:15 picking up a tool because you need to do something specific. Picking up a fork or a knife or a spoon depending on the type
58. 07:21 of food on the table. The fork, the knife, and the spoon are not the food.
59. 07:27 Don’t confuse the two. Okay. So we have established that identity is not the same as one’s behavior behaviors and
60. 07:34 that the self is a sense of continuity precisely because it’s immutable. It doesn’t change unlike behaviors which often change and are often modified by
61. 07:45 external input. It’s easy to prove by the way. Consider your body for example
62. 07:51 or your body integrity. Imagine that owing to a horrible accident you have been quadruply amputated. Both your head, both your arms and your legs a gun, would you still be the same? Yes,
63. 08:04 you would still be the same. So, body integrity has nothing to do with identity and sense of self. How about aging? Are you the same person at age 80
64. 08:16 that you are or that you were at age 20? Why go so far? Are you the same at age
65. 08:24 40 that you were at age 20? Of course, you’re not. You are dramatically different, inconceivably different.
66. 08:32 You’re like two different people, but you are still you. You still maintain
67. 08:39 the sense of this is I. This is I who is aging.
68. 08:46 This is I who has been amputated. This is I. There’s a core, a stable core
69. 08:53 which links all these events together into a fabric into a narrative which
70. 09:00 makes sense of your life and is explanatory is hermeneutic. It’s an
71. 09:06 organizing principle and an explanatory principle. One could say therefore that the self is a narrative
72. 09:13 and it’s a rigid narrative. There’s no way to edit this specific document. And
73. 09:20 it is this rigid narrative that rearranges choices, decisions,
74. 09:26 behaviors, goals, plans, rearranges them in ways which always sustain the
75. 09:32 narrative, make sense and afford a sense, afford a perception
76. 09:39 of continuity. The selfconcept is this narrative. Now of course narratives
77. 09:45 could get distorted and pathized. For example in narcissistic personality disorder but the narrative is always
78. 09:52 there even in narcissist even in borderline personality disorder where there is an identity diffusion or
79. 09:59 identity disturbance. Regardless what happens to your body you age you get amputated. It changes in a variety of ways owing to illness or whatever substance abuse regardless you’re always
80. 10:11 you. And you wake up in the morning knowing that you are you and nobody
81. 10:17 else. The self is therefore also an exclusionary principle. One could
82. 10:24 conceive of the self or reconceive of the self as a kind of boundary. This is me. You are not me. This is me. The
83. 10:32 world is not me. This is where I end and the world begins. This is where the
84. 10:38 world ends and I begin. It’s a boundary condition.
85. 10:45 Now, I’ve got another proof for you. Imagine that at the tender age of 19, you have
86. 10:52 murdered someone, killed in cold blood someone, murder first degree. And then
87. 11:00 you escape. You become a fugitive of from justice. You roam the earth in
88. 11:06 unknown corners. You disappear off the face of the planet. You forge your documents and so on and so forth for many decades. And in
89. 11:17 one day, owing to face recognition software or god knows what, you’re captured in, of course, Mosmbique. You’re captured in Mosmbique and you’re
90. 11:28 brought back to the United Kingdom where you have committed the murder at age 19. But now you’re not 19 anymore. You’re 79.
91. 11:39 And yet you will still be judged. A verdict would be rendered against you
92. 11:46 and you will do time in prison probably for the rest of your natural life. Why is that? Because at age 79, you are still the same person who has
93. 11:59 committed the crime who had committed the crime at age 19.
94. 12:05 you you at age 19 is the same you at age 79.
95. 12:13 And that means you have criminal responsibility for what you have done even 60 years later. And why is that?
96. 12:20 Because we recognize not only in psychology, not only in personality psychology, not only in ego or self
97. 12:27 psychology, but we recognize in the legal system that there is a core
98. 12:33 identity. There is a self. There is a you that never ever changes. And this
99. 12:40 you bears criminal responsibility regardless of the passage of time, bodily changes, and even mental changes. For example, you would still be sentenced even if you were u with
100. 12:53 Alzheimer’s disease. Imagine you’re 79 years old. You have Alzheimer’s disease. You don’t know who
101. 13:00 you are. Definitely, you have no recollection of what you may have done at age 19. You don’t recognize anyone
102. 13:06 around you. You’re totally amnesiac. Yet, you would still be sentenced to prison.
103. 13:13 Murder is punished decades late later because your behaviors may have changed.
104. 13:19 You may have become a charitable, compassionate, loving person. You may have become a pillar of the community.
105. 13:26 Your behaviors may have changed dramatically. You no longer murder people. And yet the new you, so to speak, pays
106. 13:34 the price for the old you. Because the new you and the old you are ultimately a
107. 13:40 single you. you. And that’s of course why SS criminals
108. 13:47 who served in extermination camps have been hunted all over the globe and brought to justice. Adulman, many
109. 13:54 others. Think of a corporation.
110. 14:00 In the 18th century, there was a new invention, the corporation, limited liability companies.
111. 14:06 These were considered to be the equivalent, the legal equivalent of individuals. A corporation is like an individual because it has a self. It has a sense of
112. 14:17 historicity. It has a sense of continuity. A corporation is the same corporation despite changes in its
113. 14:25 entire personnel. Consider for example IBM International Business Machines.
114. 14:32 IBM has been in existence for many many decades. its entire management has died a few
115. 14:40 times over. There is not a single worker in IBM today who has worked in IBM in the 1930s when it sold machines to the
116. 14:51 extermination camps in Germany. And yet it is the same corporation.
117. 14:59 It could, for example, be fined and punished for actions that it has taken
118. 15:06 during the Holocaust in Germany. It could benefit from business decisions
119. 15:14 made in the 1980s. Regardless of the changes in personnel, in management, in working methods, in behaviors, in policies, less green, more
120. 15:26 green, it is still the same IBM, the same corporation. There is continuity
121. 15:34 of the self, of the idiosyncratic individuality of the corporation. The
122. 15:41 behaviors of the corporation may change. The policies of the corporation may change. The personnel of the corporation
123. 15:47 may may change. The management may go away and another management installed. The the entire board of directors may
124. 15:53 disappear. And yet in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of people generally,
125. 15:59 it is still the same individual, the same corporation because the self never
126. 16:06 changes. It’s immutable and should not be conflated and confused with behaviors.
127. 16:13 We will discuss in a minute what happens when you have multiple selves. Dissociative identity disorder which
128. 16:20 used to be known as multiple personality disorder which used to be known erroneously as split personality and
129. 16:26 which was wrongly associated with schizophrenia and psychotic disorders. Multiple personality disorder is a phrase I like very much because I think it it’s it captures the clinical essence
130. 16:40 of the disorder better than the more modern dissociative identity disorder. And we’ll discuss in a minute what
131. 16:46 happens in this case when you have multiple selves, multiple streams of consciousness, multiple continuitities.
132. 16:53 Are you then responsible? Are you then the same as your behaviors? Should you
133. 16:59 be judged for any acts you have committed as one personality when you have been when you are now another
134. 17:05 personality? We’ll talk about this in a minute. The reason we are confusing
135. 17:11 behaviors with identity is because of our culture and societal mories and
136. 17:17 conventions. Our civilization, modern civilization is founded on action,
137. 17:25 not on being. We emphasize acts. We emphasize decisions. We emphasize
138. 17:31 choices and goals and plans. We’re very actionoriented. And we ignore the dimensions of being, of existing, of becoming. Our civilization is founded on action
139. 17:43 and on objects. It is materialistic. It is a death cult. And that is why people
140. 17:50 say your behaviors are who you are when manifestly they are not.
141. 17:56 And they say this because our culture, our societies, our governments, our our
142. 18:02 institutions, they keep informing us that what matters is what you do. What
143. 18:08 matters are your choices and decisions, not who you are. Who cares about who you are. It’s what you do that counts. It’s
144. 18:15 how much you how much money you have. It’s how accomplished you are, what type of car you drive, and is your smartphone
145. 18:22 the latest? We consume not only inanimate inert objects, we consume each
146. 18:28 other. We have become consumer products. We commoditize each other. We objectify
147. 18:35 each other. So in this death cult, of course people would confuse who you are, yourself, your core identity, your
148. 18:42 essence, your quidity with how you behave, with how you act and with the outcomes of your actions. Cumulative
149. 18:49 outcomes. It’s a type of hoarding. It’s compulsive.
150. 18:55 Let us um let us u read the definitions a few definitions from the American Psychological Association dictionary and then transition to the discussion of
151. 19:07 multiple personality disorder dissociative identity disorder. The APA dictionary defines identity as an
152. 19:15 individual’s sense of self defined by a a set of physical, psychological, and
153. 19:22 interpersonal characteristics that is not wholly shared with any other person.
154. 19:28 The exclus exclusionary element. Yes. And B, a range of affiliations. Example,
155. 19:34 ethnicity and social roles. Identity involves a sense of continuity
156. 19:40 or the feeling that one is the same person today that one was yesterday or last year despite physical or other changes. That’s a dictionary. That’s not some. Such a sense is derived from one’s
157. 19:54 body sensations, one body image and the feeling that one’s memories, goals, values, expectations, and beliefs belong
158. 20:01 to the self. This is also called personal identity. In cognitive development,
159. 20:07 the identity is an awareness that an object is the same even though it may
160. 20:13 undergo transformations. For example, a coffee cup remains the same object despite differences in distance, size, color, lighting, orientation, shape,
161. 20:26 and may I add, whether it contains coffee or not, temperature, whether we break it or and so on so forth. So this is called object identity. There
162. 20:38 is something called identity theory. It’s a theory that mental states are identical with brain states.
163. 20:45 In token identity theory, identical mental and brain states occur within the individual. So there’s a grounding of
164. 20:52 the concept of core identity itself in neurobiological conditions and and um
165. 20:59 substrate neurobiological wetwware hardware type identity theory extends
166. 21:05 this to theorize that when two or more people share a mental state the belief that ice is cold for example they also have the same brain state and this is
167. 21:16 the foundation of what what is called entrainment which is major component in
168. 21:22 narcissistic abuse. Okay, this is also called central state theory, identity theory of the mind and so on. But what is the self? The APA dictionary defines
169. 21:33 the self this way. The totality of the individual consisting of all characteristic attributes, conscious and
170. 21:40 unconscious, mental and physical. Apart from its basic reference to personal
171. 21:46 identity, being and experience, the term self is used in psychology in a wide-ranging way. According to William James, the self can refer either to the
172. 21:57 person as the target of appraisal. One introspectively evaluates how one is doing or to the person as the source of agency. One attributes the source of
173. 22:08 regulation of perception, thought and behavior to one’s body or mind. Carl Youngung maintained that the self gradually develops by a process of individuation which is complete which is
174. 22:21 not complete until late maturity is reached. Alfred Adler identified the
175. 22:27 self with individuals lifestyle the manner in which they seek fulfillment. This is a discarded view by the way. It’s no longer used. Khan Hornai held that one’s real self as opposed to one’s idealized self-image consists of one’s
176. 22:43 unique capacities for growth and development. In other words, Hornai’s view was that the self is some kind of
177. 22:50 machinery, some kind of core that has potentials is a field of potentials.
178. 22:56 Um Gordon Alport substituted the word proprium for self and conceived of it as
179. 23:04 the essence of the individual consisting of a gradually developing body sense, identity, self-estimate and a set of
180. 23:11 personal values, attitudes and intentions. Austrianborn US psychoanalyst Hines
181. 23:17 Kohut used the term self to denote as the sense of a coherent stable and yet
182. 23:24 dynamic in some ways experience of one’s individuality continuity in time and space autonomy
183. 23:32 efficacy motivation values and desires cohort believed that this sense emerges
184. 23:38 through healthy narcissistic development empathically supported by the significant figures in one’s early life,
185. 23:45 maybe the mother, and that conversely, narcissistic developmental failure leads to a fragile or incoherent sense of self. Now, back to my promise. What
186. 23:58 happens if you have more than one self? Imagine that you have like mulligan
187. 24:04 17elves. What happens if you have three selves, four selves, five selves? What happens if you have what used to be
188. 24:11 called multiple personality? One day you are a 20-year-old woman, the
189. 24:17 next day you are 45 year old burly logger and the next day you are 65 year
190. 24:23 old intellectual and the next day you’re 80 an 8-year-old child. What happens then? Imagine you have committed a crime. Imagine you’ve murdered someone. You’ve murdered that
191. 24:35 someone as a logger. Would the woman be responsible? Would the child be responsible? Would the elderly
192. 24:41 intellectual be responsible? Why should they be held responsible? It’s the logger who has committed the crime. I’ll
193. 24:48 give you a tip or a hint. You would still be considered responsible. You’ll be taken to court. You’ll be adjudicated
194. 24:55 and you’ll be sent to prison for the rest of your life or executed depending on the country.
195. 25:01 DID, dissociative identity disorder, multiple personality disorder is not a defense. It is recognized that in some extremely rare cases, some bodies and some minds
196. 25:14 host a group of personalities, a group of dissociative states or dissociative
197. 25:20 self states. This is recognized, but it’s still you. Even in this extreme
198. 25:27 condition, the legal theory is that it is still you. There is still an immutable core
199. 25:34 that should be held responsible, criminally criminally responsible for one’s actions.
200. 25:41 So let’s retrace. Imagine there’s someone we call him Dan. Imagine that
201. 25:47 Dan were a victim or sufferer of multiple personality disorder. What if one of his altars, one of the multitude of identities who share uh Dan’s mind
202. 25:59 and body, imagine that one of the altars committed a crime. Should Dan
203. 26:05 be held responsible? What if this altar, this fragment of personality, this
204. 26:11 separated, dissociated self-state, what if this altar, let’s call him John, what
205. 26:18 if John committed a crime and then vanished, leaving behind another altar, call this other altar Joseph in control. So there’s Dan. Dan is the container.
206. 26:30 Dan is the receptacle. And within them there are many personalities jostling for space and control. One day one of these personalities John has taken
207. 26:41 control over the system has killed someone vanished and handed the control
208. 26:47 over to another entity Joseph an altar called Joseph. Should Joseph be
209. 26:53 punished? Should Joseph be executed for John’s mur for the murder committed by
210. 27:00 John? What about Dan? Where is Dan in all this? Should Joseph be held responsible for the crime John committed? What if John were to reappear 10 years after John has vanished? What if he were to reappear 50 years after he
211. 27:16 vanished? What if he were to reappear for a period of 90 days only to vanish again? And what is Dan’s role in all
212. 27:23 this? Who exactly then is Dan? In which sense does he have a self? And in which
213. 27:30 way does the continuity of this self compromise done legally speaking?
214. 27:36 Buddhism compares men to a river. Both men and river retain their identity
215. 27:43 despite the fact that their individual composition is different at different moments. The possession of a body as the
216. 27:51 foundation of a selfidentity is a dubious proposition. Bodies change drastically in time. Consider for
217. 27:58 example a baby compared to an adult. Almost all the cells in a human body are replaced every few years. Changing one’s brain by brain transplantation
218. 28:11 also changes one identity even if the rest of the body remains the same. And so the only thing that binds a person together gives him a sense of
219. 28:22 self and self-concept and identity. The only thing that binds someone together is time or more precisely memory. And when I say memory, I mean personality,
220. 28:35 skills, habits, retrospected emotions. In short, all the long-term imprints.
221. 28:42 The body is not an accidental and insignificant container. Of course, I’m not saying this. It constitutes an
222. 28:49 important part of one’s self-image, self-esteem, sense of self-worth, and sense of existence. spatial, temporal,
223. 28:56 social, this proprioception. But one can easily imagine a brain in vitro, in a vial, in a jar as having the same identity as when it used to reside
224. 29:09 in a body. One cannot imagine a body without a brain or with a different brain as having the same identity that is it had before the brain was removed or replaced. In other words, a brain without a body is still the same person,
225. 29:25 same same identity, same self. A body without a brain is not the same.
226. 29:31 What if the brain in vitro in the above example in a jar could not communicate
227. 29:37 with us at all? Would we still think that it is possessed of some kind of self or identity? The biological functions of people in coma for example
228. 29:48 in a vegetative states uh vegetative state are maintained. But do these people in a vegetative state do they have an identity a self? And if so if they do why do we pull the plug on them so often? It would seem as he did to
229. 30:06 Loach the philosopher that we accept that someone has a selfidentity if number one he has the same hardware as we do most notably a brain and B he
230. 30:19 communicates his humanly recognizable and comprehensible inner world to us and manipulates his environment. We accept that someone has a given the
231. 30:31 same continuous selfidentity if he shows consistent intentional willed patterns
232. 30:38 memory in doing be for a long period of time. It seems that we accept that if we
233. 30:46 have a self identity we are self-conscious um then we must satisfy some conditions.
234. 30:53 Number one, we discern usually through introspection long-term consistent
235. 30:59 intentional willed patterns, memories in our manipulation relating to our
236. 31:05 environment. That’s one condition. And the second condition, others accept
237. 31:11 that we have a selfidentity. And this is the amendment introduced by Herbert me
238. 31:17 and Foyer Dan probably. Now, let’s apply to Dan. Okay, remember
239. 31:25 Dan has multiple personality disorder. So, first of all, Dan probably has the same hardware as we do. He has a brain. He communicates his humanly recognizable
240. 31:37 and comprehensible inner world to us, which is how he manipulates us and his environment. And so, Dan clearly has a
241. 31:45 selfidentity. But Dan is inconsistent. his intentional willed patterns, his memory are incompatible with those demonstrated by Dan um when Dan is in a different
242. 31:59 as a different altar in a different self state. Though Dan clearly is possessed of a
243. 32:05 selfidentity, we cannot say that he has the same selfidentity he possess he
244. 32:12 possesses every time like his selfidentity changes with every altar. In other words, we
245. 32:19 cannot say that Dan is always Dan. Dan himself does not feel that he has a
246. 32:26 selfidentity at all. He discerns intentional willed patterns in his
247. 32:32 manipulation of his environment. But due to his dissociative state, his amnesia,
248. 32:38 Dan cannot tell if these patterns are consistent, if they’re long-term. In
249. 32:46 other words, Dan has no memory. Moreover, others do not accept Dan
250. 32:53 uh as Dan. They have their doubts because they have they have witnessed
251. 32:59 Dan as being not Dan in various periods.
252. 33:06 They have witnessed Dan become John. They’ve witnessed Dan become Joseph. They have witnessed D again become D. So
253. 33:14 they don’t know who is done anymore and they can’t trust them to be done and they’re not absolutely not sure that
254. 33:20 John and Joseph are done done in any meaningful sense. Having a memory is a necessary and
255. 33:28 sufficient condition for possessing a selfidentity. And in the absence of memory or at least shared memory, it’s
256. 33:35 very difficult to claim that someone has a selfidentity. John, Joseph, they do not share
257. 33:41 memories. In dissociative identity disorder, there’s no sharing of memory. There’s not universally accessible
258. 33:49 memory database. And so this raises the first qu the first doubt regarding the uh existence
259. 33:58 of selfidentity in dissociative identity disorder. Remember the conditions posed
260. 34:04 by lo. I’ll summarize them for you again. Someone has a self-identity if
261. 34:10 they have the same hardware brain and they communicate their humanly recognizable and comprehensible inner world to us and thereby manipulate their
262. 34:21 environment. These are the two conditions of lock. Someone has a given continuous
263. 34:30 selfidentity if they show consistent intentional patterns of will and memory.
264. 34:36 if they repeatedly do be for long periods of time, repeatedly communicate
265. 34:42 their internal environment and manipulate it and manipulate the external one. And so we have a selfidentity if we discern usually through introspection long-term consistent intentional willed patterns and memories
266. 34:58 in our manipulation of the environment in relating to the environment. and also
267. 35:04 others accept that we have a selfidentity. This is Herbert me and for so these are
268. 35:10 the conditions bear them in mind as we progress. So
269. 35:16 we have established that without continuous shared resource
270. 35:22 of memory we don’t have identity. And yet resorting to memory to define
271. 35:29 identity may appear to be circular tological argument. It’s like how do do
272. 35:35 you find identity? You defined it by memory using memory. And how do you define memory? It’s someone with an
273. 35:41 identity that has a memory. So it’s a tology. When we postulate memory, don’t
274. 35:48 we already presuppose the existence of someone who remembers a remembering agent with an established selfidentity? Moreover, we keep talking about
275. 35:59 discerning, intentional, willed, will voluntary patterns, but isn’t
276. 36:06 valitional, I’m sorry, patterns, but isn’t a big part of our self in the form
277. 36:12 of the unconscious repressed memories, isn’t isn’t it unavailable to us? Like if we define
278. 36:20 selfidentity as introspection, as intention, as will, as memory,
279. 36:30 we are excluding the unconscious because the unconscious cannot be introspected, cannot be discerned. It’s not intentional. There’s no will in the unconscious.
280. 36:41 And so we are excluding the unconscious. But the unconscious is like 90% of our mental life.
281. 36:47 Don’t we develop defense psychological defense mechanisms against repressed
282. 36:53 memories and fantasies against unconscious content which is in congruent with our self concept? We do.
283. 37:02 And so isn’t isn’t the use of memory and introspection as the foundational
284. 37:09 cornerstones of selfidentity and continuity.
285. 37:15 Isn’t this u counterfactual? Isn’t this ignoring a major part of the human psyche? Even worse, this hidden hidden occult, inaccessible, dynamically active
286. 37:27 part, the content that is repressed in the unconscious is a part of our self
287. 37:33 selves. No one would deny that the self includes the unconscious and it is thought responsible for our
288. 37:41 recurrent discernable patterns of behavior. The unconscious is responsible for behavior. One a few scholars would
289. 37:49 even say much more so than the conscious. There was Freud’s attitude. The phenomenon of posthypnotic suggestion for example seems to indicate
290. 38:00 that actually the unconscious plays the major part. But this seems to be the case. The unconscious rules many of our behaviors and choices and decisions and
291. 38:11 so on so forth. The existence of a selfidentity is therefore determined through introspection
292. 38:17 and observation. We introspect and others observe us. But we introspect and
293. 38:25 others observe not only the the conscious part but presumably the
294. 38:31 unconscious part. And that to some extent is an extension of Lacan. Lakhan’s belief that the unconscious was the amalgam of voices of others. But the
295. 38:44 unconscious is as much a part of one’s selfidentity as one’s conscious. What if due to a
296. 38:51 mishap, the roles were reversed? What if Dan’s conscious part were to become his
297. 38:58 unconscious and his unconscious part were to become his consciousness? What if all his conscious memories and drives and fears and wishes and fantasies and hopes which used to be
298. 39:10 conscious have become unconscious while his repressed memories drives the energy
299. 39:17 attendant upon these memories and content. What if these were to become conscious? Would we still say that it is the same Dan that that he retains a core
300. 39:30 identity, an immutable selfidentity? Think about it for a minute. If your unconscious became your conscious and your conscious became your unconscious, would you still be the same person? And
301. 39:42 yet one’s unremembered unconscious, one’s repressed unconscious, the content
302. 39:48 that has been relegated to the outer darkness, the oblivion of the mind,
303. 39:54 the unconscious, the for example, the conflict between Eid and ego in in psychonalytic theory, the unconscious determines one’s personality and selfidentity to a large extent. The main contribution of psychoanalysis
304. 40:10 and later psychonamic schools is the understanding that selfidentity is a dynamic evolving everchanging con
305. 40:18 construct and not a static inertial and passive entity if we take into account
306. 40:24 the unconscious. Later theories have discarded this
307. 40:30 insight. Modern theories do not regard the unconscious as a dynamic agent of
308. 40:36 selfhood or personhood. Current thinking is that the self is
309. 40:43 largely conscious and that consequently it is a stable entity across the
310. 40:50 lifespan. And yet psychoanalysis I callastically dared to suggest early on about 100 plus
311. 40:57 years ago that maybe the self is a river. Maybe it is in flux and the
312. 41:04 vortex the energy which renders it fluid is the unconscious.
313. 41:11 And this cast doubt over the meaningfulness of the question with which we started our exposition.
314. 41:18 Who exactly is Dan? Dan is different at different stages of
315. 41:24 his life according to Erikson and he constantly evolves in accordance with his innate nature according to Jung. He
316. 41:32 is reactive to his past history according to Adler. His drives control him according to Freud. His cultural milu milure affects him according to Hornai. His upbringing is crucial
317. 41:45 informing him according to Klein and Winnott. His needs dominate according to Mari and there is always the interplay
318. 41:53 with his genetic hereditary makeup of course. So according to psychoanalytic theory
319. 42:00 and later psychonamic schools and some extent object relation schools, Dan is not a thing. He’s a process. He’s ever changing.
320. 42:11 He is mutable. He is dynamically transform transforming transformative.
321. 42:18 Even Dan’s personality traits and cognitive style which which may well be stable often influenced by Dan’s social
322. 42:26 setting and by his social interactions is triggering. The environment triggers
323. 42:32 as we well know in dissociative identity theory um identity disorder I’m sorry
324. 42:39 the environment does trigger transition between altars and in my theory the IPOM theory
325. 42:47 intracychic activation model the external environment coupled with the internal environment they trigger
326. 42:53 together changes transitions between self states
327. 43:00 It would seem that having a memory is a necessary but insufficient condition for possessing a selfidentity. One cannot remember one’s unconscious states although one can remember the outcomes
328. 43:14 for example the behaviors they generate. To remind you all this has been discarded. That is not the mainstream view. That is not the orthodoxy and that
329. 43:25 is not what I teach at university. Today we believe that the self core
330. 43:31 identity are stable ac across the lifespan. We minimize the importance or we even
331. 43:38 doubt the existence of the unconscious. Um our current approach is much more
332. 43:44 observational behaviorist if you wish. It’s like behaviorism 2.0.
333. 43:50 And yet I dwell I delve into all this to show you that there were major thinkers
334. 43:57 who belonged admittedly to specific traditions and schools who doubted the stability and rigidity and lifelong
335. 44:06 viability of a self a self identity.
336. 44:12 One often forgets events, names, and other information, even if it even if they were conscious at a given time in one’s past. Yet, one’s unremembered
337. 44:23 unconscious is an integral and important part of one’s identity in oneself. According to these early theories and
338. 44:29 schools in psychology, the remembered as well as the unremembered constitute
339. 44:35 one’s selfidentity. That is not my approach. I have stated my approach at the beginning of this video, but I owe you this historical survey.
340. 44:46 The philosopher Hume said that to be considered in possession of a mind, a creature needs to have a few states of consciousness linked by memory in a kind of a narrative or personal mythology.
341. 45:00 And can this conjecture be equally applied to unconscious mental states,
342. 45:06 subliminal perceptions, beliefs, drives, emotions, desires, repressed content?
343. 45:14 Are they all uh linked via some kind of narrative, personal mythology? Do they
344. 45:22 constitute a form of inaccessible memory? Maybe preverbal or non-verbal in some cases. In other words, can we rephrase Hume and say that to be
345. 45:33 considered in possession of a mind, a creature needs to have a few states of consciousness and a few states of the
346. 45:40 unconscious all linked by memory into a personal narrative? Is this is this the idea? Isn’t it a contradiction in terms to remember the unconscious? Is there
347. 45:51 such a thing as inaccessible memory? In which sense is it a memory? The UNC and this is the core these are the core problems that undermine the psychoanalytic and psychonamic
348. 46:04 attitude to selfhood to the self to selfidentity because the involvement of the
349. 46:10 unconscious renders the whole thing nonsensical. Basically
350. 46:16 the unconscious and the subliminal are instances of the general category of mental phenomena which are not states of consciousness. They’re not conscious. For example, sleep, uh, hypnosis, these are non-concious states. But background mental phenomena are also in
351. 46:39 many ways not conscious. For example, you hold on to one, we hold on to your
352. 46:46 beliefs and knowledge even when you’re not aware. You’re not conscious of them at every given moment. It’s not like
353. 46:52 every given moment you create an inventory of everything you believe in and everything you know and yet they are somewhere in the background. You’re holding on to them. We know that an apple will fall towards the earth.
354. 47:04 That’s called gravity. We know how how to drive a car automatically speaking.
355. 47:10 It’s a dissociative state. We believe that the sun will rise tomorrow. But we don’t spend every second of our waking life consciously thinking about falling
356. 47:22 apples, driving cars or the position of the sun. The fact that knowledge and beliefs and other background mental phenomenon are not phenomena are not constantly conscious does not mean that
357. 47:35 they cannot be remembered. And so I’m postulating a third state. Maybe it’s
358. 47:41 the equivalent of the subconscious or preconscious. It’s a third state of all
359. 47:48 the things that are not thought about but are known. So I’m appropriating
360. 47:56 Christopher Bolas’s concept of the unthought known although he meant it in a different way. He was referring to preverbal uh stages of life. But I think there is
361. 48:07 a general state of the unthought known things that are are in principle accessible and remembered but they’re
362. 48:15 not in consciousness constantly. These things can be remembered either by an act of will voluitionally or sometimes involuntarily
363. 48:27 uh in a as a response to changes in the environment or to some stimuli and so on. The same applies to all other
364. 48:34 unconscious content. unconscious content can actually be dredged up, can be recalled. That’s the very foundation of psychoanalysis as a system of treatment
365. 48:45 treatment modality. Psychoanalysis is about reintroducing repressed unconscious content to the
366. 48:52 patient’s conscious memory. Make making this content remembered. And there is even a a reaction to this ab reaction. It’s kind of energy that comes with the content. In fact, one’s selfidentity
367. 49:06 may be such a background mental phenomenon. It’s always there, but it’s not always
368. 49:13 conscious, not always remembered. The acts of will which brings your
369. 49:19 selfhood, your self identity, your core identity into the surface are what we
370. 49:25 call memory and introspection. I suggest therefore that the self
371. 49:33 is there, always there, always present, imminent, but is not constantly accessible. In order to access your sense of self,
372. 49:47 your experience of identity, of being, of existence. In order to do this, you
373. 49:53 need to exercise your will. You need to for example introspect or you need to remember. This reconciles all the theories in physics because now
374. 50:05 we have a situation where the self is stable, immutable, represents a core and also is sometimes forgotten so to
375. 50:17 speak, not accessed, which could give the illusion or the the
376. 50:23 perception that either there’s no self there or there’s a different self or that the
377. 50:29 self is changing. So that the self is changing
378. 50:36 is a mistaken a mistaken perception either external perception observation
379. 50:42 or internal perception introspection a mistaken perception of the absence of
380. 50:48 the self in consciousness. When the self is not present in consciousness, which
381. 50:54 is a lot of the time, you could be forgiven for believing that yourself is
382. 51:01 changing. It is only when you reaccess yourself via memory or via introspection that you
383. 51:08 realize that you are the same person. Nothing has changed. You are you.
384. 51:15 And this sense of you, this continuity and contiguity are unimpeachable,
385. 51:22 indisputable. You immediately know they’re true. Memory is just a mechanism by which one
386. 51:28 becomes aware of one’s background, always on omnipresent or pervasive
387. 51:34 selfidentity. Selfidentity is the object and the predicate of memory and introspection.
388. 51:40 ities as though selfidentity were an emergent extensive parameter of the
389. 51:46 complex human system measurable by the dual techniques of memory and introspection.
390. 51:53 We therefore have to modify our previous conclusions. I think m thinks having a
391. 52:00 memory is not a necessary or sufficient condition for possessing a self identity. It is merely the mode of
392. 52:07 accessing the selfidentity and same applies to introspection. We’re back to square one. The poor souls in Oliver success seinal
393. 52:19 tone the man who mistook his wife for a hat. Poor patients there are unable to
394. 52:25 create and retain memories. They occupy an eternal present with no past. This
395. 52:31 happens in for example Kosakov syndrome. These patients are thus unable to access or invoke their selfidentity by remembering it. Memory is not available to them. They don’t have this instrument. Their selfidentity is
396. 52:48 unavailable to them though it is available to those who observe them over many years. But it exists for sure. And so while they’re not able to access their identities via memory, surely they
397. 53:04 must be able to access their identities via introspection. Therapy often succeeds in restoring
398. 53:10 pre-nesic memories and selfidentity using exactly this introspection.
399. 53:16 So I would say that the self is not only stable is not only the same across a
400. 53:22 lifespan, it’s also encouraable. Selfidentity is not always on. Not all pervasive but is not only always on. It’s always on. Is not is not only all
401. 53:34 pervasive. It is all pervasive. It’s sometimes unconscious but it’s there
402. 53:40 available to be accessed. But it is also encouraable. In other words, no one, not
403. 53:47 an observer, not the person himself, no one can disprove the existence of one’s
404. 53:54 selfidentity. If you, if you try to negate your selfidentity, if you observe yourself, introspect, if you vis revisit your memories in a desperate attempt to
405. 54:05 prove that you don’t exist, you will fail, of course, because who is it that is introspecting? Who is it that is
406. 54:13 revisiting the memories and why these visits are identical across decades?
407. 54:20 The nature of these visits, the pattern of these visits, the character of these visits, it’s the same, it’s the same
408. 54:26 mechanism accessing the memories. So not you and of course no observer can
409. 54:35 prove that you don’t exist, can disprove your existence, disprove your selfidentity. No one can prove that a
410. 54:43 report about the existence of his or another’s selfidentity is mistaken, wrong or false. And this is the
411. 54:50 interubjective problem. We have no access to other people’s minds. We rely on self-reporting and observation. It is
412. 54:57 equally safe to say that no one, not an observer, nor the person himself can
413. 55:04 prove or disprove the non-existence of selfidentity.
414. 55:10 So selfidentity if I were to summarize is inaccessible
415. 55:17 to argumentation. It is an undecidable proposition.
416. 55:23 So would it be correct to say that no one can prove that a report about the non-existence of his or another
417. 55:30 selfidentity is true or false? Let’s go back to Dan’s criminal
418. 55:37 responsibility. Dan suffers from dissociative identity disorder, multiple personality disorder.
419. 55:43 An alter of Dan, John, has committed murder and vanished, handing over control of Dan’s system to another altar
420. 55:50 named Joseph. What is Dan’s criminal responsibility?
421. 55:56 It depends crucially on the answers to these questions. Dan cannot be held responsible for the
422. 56:04 murder. If Dan can prove that he is ignorant of the facts of his action, if
423. 56:10 he can prove the non-existence of his selfidentity
424. 56:16 and if he has no access to his former selfidentity, John, he can hardly be expected to be aware and cognizant of these facts. So what is at question is not Dan’s
425. 56:30 mena, Dan’s criminal intent. What is that question is not the application of
426. 56:36 the Mcnutton test. Did Dan know the nature and quality of his act or could he tell right from wrong. We are not here to determine whether Dan was insane, legally insane when he committed
427. 56:48 the crime. We are here to determine whether Dan was at all when he committed the crime. A much broader issue is at stake. Is it
428. 56:59 the same person? Is Dan the same person as John? John killed someone. Is Dan the
429. 57:06 same person? Dan, John, Joseph, they’re all members of the same dissociative
430. 57:14 system. They’re alters. Are they responsible for each other’s actions or inaction? Is the murderous John the same person as the docsile and
431. 57:28 peaceloving Dan? Even though Dan seems to own the same body,
432. 57:34 have access to the same has access to the same brain as John, Dan and John
433. 57:40 share the same body, share the same brain. Even though even though Dan is manifestly sane,
434. 57:46 he patently has no access to his former selfidentity. He has changed so
435. 57:53 drastically that it is arguable whether he is still the same person. He seems to have been replaced
436. 58:01 or even one might say possessed. Finally, we can try to put all these strands of our discourse together to unite them
437. 58:12 into this double definition. It would seem that we accept that someone has a selfidentity if number one he has the same hardware as we do, notably a brain
438. 58:24 and by implication the same software as we do. and all pervasive omnipresent selfidentity.
439. 58:31 And B, he communicates his humanly recognizable and comprehensible inner world to us and by doing so manipulates his environment, us included.
440. 58:43 We accept that someone is a specific the same continuous self-identity if C he
441. 58:51 shows consistent intentional willed patterns memories in doing B for a long
442. 59:00 period of time. It seems that we accept that we have a specific selfidentity
443. 59:06 that we are self-conscious of a specific identity if a we discern usually through
444. 59:12 memory and introspection long-term consistent intentional willed patterns
445. 59:19 memory in our manipulation of our environment in relating to our environment and B other people accept
446. 59:27 that we have a specific selfidentity the role of other people as observer is therefore crucial in a crucial
447. 59:34 determinant of selfidentity and this has been uh described by many
448. 59:42 uh many giants in psychology. We are defined from the outside. Lan, Fairburn,
449. 59:49 Freud, Jung, you name it. Almost everyone agrees that the self is relational. The self is the outcome of interacting with other people one way or another. In conclusion, Dan undoubtedly
450. 60:03 has a selfidentity. He is human. He’s endowed with a brain. Equally, undoubtedly, this selfidentity is not Dan’s. But a new unfamiliar one,
451. 60:14 John. And this innate contradiction
452. 60:21 is the stuff of nightmares. body snatching, demonic possession, waking up in a strange place, not not knowing where you are and who you are without a continuous personal history.
453. 60:33 We are not. The associative identity disorder proves conclusively and
454. 60:39 dramatically that when memory breaks down, when it is not shared, there is no
455. 60:45 selfidentity and that selfidentity is one and the same, a stable construct. rigid cast of stone until you die.
456. 60:59 It is what binds our bodies, states of mind, memories, skills, emotions, cognitions into a coherent bundle that is known as identity. Dan speaks, Dan drinks, he dances, he talks, he makes love. But throughout this time, he is not present
457. 61:20 because he does not remember Dan and how it is to be done. He has no experience
458. 61:26 of being done because his body and mind are hijacked by John and Joseph and
459. 61:32 others. He may have murdered someone, but by all philosophical and ethical criteria, it was most definitely not done. Not Dan who has done it. The legal system would say otherwise. Legal theory would say otherwise. But
460. 61:49 psychologically there is no question that in dissociative identity disorders
461. 61:56 there is a severe problem with the emergence of a self that is coherent,
462. 62:02 consistent, stable across time, across a lifespan. And this outlier, this
463. 62:10 psychopathological outlier teaches us everything we need to know about the self. The self is who we are. It never
464. 62:19 changes. Because it never changes, it affords us the sense that we are who we
465. 62:25 are. The sense of continuity across time, environments, people, relationships, and events. We are who we are.
466. 62:36 Since we gain consciousness age 33, H4, H5, H6 and until the very
467. 62:43 day we die. And that is why it is wrong to conflate or confuse who we are with what we do, how we behave.
468. 62:55 Because actions, behavior, behaviors, patterns of behavior, policies, ideas, plans,
469. 63:03 beliefs, values, they’re all changeable, immutable, and they often do change across a lifespan. But who is doing the change? Who is
470. 63:14 doing the changing? Yourself is this hard rock inside you that oified in
471. 63:23 the formative years into becoming you and only you.