The noimetic point of view on personality is that we are born with a personality. That hardly sounds like a radical statement and yet it is. Every parent knows that her children are born with their idiosyncratic personalities and anyone who has ever watched kittens or puppies knows that each kitten and each puppy comes with an individual personality. Yet traditional psychology does not posit or credit birth differences.
It is funny that the dubious occult philosophies do posit birth differences, like a Capricorn being different from a Pisces at birth, which no doubt helps explain their vast appeal. Psychology, unlike the occult philosophies, takes the democratic view that as a species we are so much more alike than different that it is better to act as if we are exactly alike, at least until we see differences that we feel should retroactively be called birth differences, like a putative biological predilection for so-called depression or so-called addiction.
The main psychologies act as if we are all "born one way" and then develop properly or poorly, as if there was one model off the assembly line with one set of blueprints which life then battered into this or that jalopy.
On the one hand, this view of "complete birth alikeness" is remarkably strange and on the other hand it is perfectly understandable. It is strange that a mental health professional, who as a parent knows that her little Jane is very different from her little Johnny and was already different at birth, should in the consulting room operate from a model that supposes that every Jane and every John is "normal" in the same way; and therefore easily "diagnosed" as "abnormal" when certain criteria are met. It is strange that she should do this but also perfectly understandable.
It is perfectly understandable for two reasons. The first is the quite honorable reason that, since we do not want to create seat-of-the-pants occult categories of birth personality that can never be tested in the real world, it is better to act "as if" people are pretty much the same and leave it at that. The second is the less honorable reason that the current mental health model of "diagnosis" and "treatment" requires this smoothing over of reality. It requires, for example, that a certain amount of sadness, renamed depression, be considered normal and "more than that much" be considered abnormal, whether or not little Jane was born sadder and wiser than little Johnny.
This is an important point as it applies to therapy. If little Jane was born sadder and wiser than little Johnny, then it is "normal" for her to be sadder and wiser. She may feel miserable but she is not abnormal. In this scenario, she is simply playing out her instructions, just as little Johnny is playing out his instructions when he learns to tie his shoelaces or ride his bicycle. If you are going to label a person as mentally disordered by virtue of the presence of certain "symptoms" and you do not ask yourself, "Has this person perhaps always inclined in this direction by virtue of his original personality?", you have left the richness of life at the consulting room door.
Of course, a mental health professional can't know what that original personality was; nor can Jane herself. This is one of our existential realities and one of our facts of existence. We can't know what our birth personality was. Even if you could ask some objective observer, say your uncle Max, what you were like when you were born and he replied that you were happy-go-lucky or withdrawn, would that amount to the answer? Certainly it wouldn't.
It wouldn't in two different senses. First, no objective observer could know what was going on inside of you or could gauge how, for example, your cheerfulness masked your sadness or your flightiness masked your boredom. All Max could have seen was your public persona. Second, even if in some sense you could nail down that you had been happy-go-lucky or withdrawn at birth, you would still not know if you were supposed to remain that way; that is, you would still not know anything about your particular blueprint or, to use fanciful language, your destiny.
"Original personality" has two different ideas built into it. First is the idea that you were already a certain person when you were born; and second is the idea that you had a developmental path built into you when you were born. Even if you could discern the first, say through home movies and reports of relatives, you would not be able to ever know the second. To take a simple example, if you saw a serious child you would not be able to tell how that seriousness was "supposed to" play itself out. Who would ever be able to say?
It should be clear that, since we do not know what sort of developmental blueprint human beings come with, the hypotheses of developmental psychology notwithstanding, we know far less about "original personality" than we wish we knew. Personality must remain a mystery because there is no way to tell who we were to begin with or who we were "meant to be." We will always be at a loss to know the influences of that original personality or how far we have veered from our "destiny."
That isn't to say, however, that because we do not know how a thing was made, what its instructions were, or how it was supposed to play itself out, that we must come to a screeching halt in our understanding of what could now help a person relieve her current distress or achieve her current goals. From the point of view of your ability to be the person you would like to be, more important than either your original personality or your formed personality is your available personality. Your available personality is knowable by you, testable by you, and exactly the means at your disposal to heal, change, and grow.
Noimetic psychology asserts that we come with an original personality about which we will never know enough, a formed personality that, in some fluid but solid way, is who we now are, and an available personality, which is the amount of awareness and courage available to us right now to change in ways that align with our intentions.
While each of us must remain a mystery that can't be solved, we can still prove a project worth undertaking. In noimetic psychology, we assert that while original personality must remain an everlasting mystery we can, if we care to, get on with our value-based meaning-making efforts.
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Eric Maisel, Ph.D., is a psychotherapist, bestselling author of 40 books, and widely regarded as America's foremost creativity coach. His latest book is Rethinking Depression: How to Shed Mental Health Labels and Create Personal Meaning (New World Library, February, 2012). He is the founder of noimetic psychology, the new psychology of meaning. Please visit Dr. Maisel at http://www.ericmaisel.com or contact him at ericmaisel@hotmail.com. You can learn more about noimetic psychology at http://www.entheosacademy.com/courses/7
