One of my professors may have told us that we could get as much out of graduate school by retreating to a mountain for a year and contemplating the koan, “Identity is defense.” Either that or, since none of my classmates seems to recall this advice, I imagined it. It’s a paradox because what is defended by psychological defenses is identity itself, so how could identity be a defense?
The idea of defense mechanisms came out of clinical practice, but it can be situated in a research tradition in the concept of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort created by holding conflicting ideas; the theory also postulates various ways of managing that discomfort, the most common of which is to trash one of the ideas. When we believe something about ourselves that conflicts with disconfirming information, we typically trash our belief in the validity of the disconfirming information, thereby protecting our beliefs about ourselves. Identity is the aggregation of beliefs we have about ourselves—although belief is a bit misleading, since the definition of self—the master narrative—is rarely verbal like a novel and tends to be pictorial like a portrait or cinematic like a movie.
Forming an identity has many advantages. On the most practical level, it enables us to make plans. If you lack a coherent sense of self, you don’t know what kind of thing you might like to do tomorrow evening. A coherent sense of self also allows us to participate in attenuated reward systems like work and love, since it bolsters the sense that the person who gets the reward at the end of the week is strongly related to the person today who must do the work or make space for the beloved.
But forming an identity also has a protective function. An instructive thought experiment is to imagine that you get up in the morning, brush your teeth, and look in the mirror only to see that there is no reflection of yourself in it. The panic you feel at that moment is what an identity protects you from. We surround ourselves with reminders of who we are to protect ourselves from this panic. Once an identity is under way, it casts what Jung called a shadow that includes what the person is not. Sometimes, what is then excluded is trivial. For example, a Red Sox fan may most decidedly not be a Yankees fan. Sometimes, what is excluded is essential. A good girl may most decidedly not be a judgmental girl; a good boy may most decidedly not be a vulnerable boy. To reclaim what is excluded by identity is the work of relational psychotherapy.
The more fragile an identity, the more it needs defending. This observation is the basis of the well-known tendency for severe psychopathology to be paired with primitive defenses. Here, primitive means those first learned in early childhood. If you barely know who you are, if your master narrative is spotty and incoherent, then you must not only refuse to acknowledge the contents of your shadow, you must refuse to acknowledge that you have a shadow at all. Healthy people sustain an image of their own goodness by forgetting or ignoring their prior bad behavior, or by making excuses for it. Disturbed people sustain an image of goodness by imagining that they are being assailed by dark forces, such as aliens or evil demons. Or Democrats or Republicans.
The more unrealistic an identity, the more fragile it will be. Goffman teaches us that a performance of excellence is more easily discredited by a slip-up than a performance of mere skillfulness. A professor (or student) who claims to be brilliant is exposed by any mistake; shooting for “interesting” insulates the professor from the damage done by a single mistake. Parents and cultures foster unrealistic identities when they disavow or exclude from their image of a child things that are integral to being human. These include, notably, sex, aggression, and death, with death also standing for the fact that the child is subject to the laws of nature, that the child is ultimately ordinary. Perhaps every parent, and certainly every therapist, would benefit from prolonged reflection on which aspects of the human condition are integral and cannot be disavowed. When a person claims to have no aggression, I see this performance as unsustainable given my assessment of our species, and it makes me wonder what panic is being avoided. Usually, only a wolf wears sheep’s clothing.
When Democrats and Republicans see each other as villains, it makes me wonder why the identities at stake are so fragile. Oh, I see how over the course of my life party identification has become a life-and-death issue, generating powerful emotions. The party label meant at one time whether my government was trying to kill me by sending me to Vietnam. The label also became freighted with associations to abortion and civil rights. But it doesn’t have to be all-out war. In all-out war, soldiers are more likely to kill the enemy if they are demonized.
I suspect that many hateful Democrats are uncomfortable with their own will to power, their own natural tendency to see some people as worthier than others. I suspect that many hateful Republicans are uncomfortable with their own vulnerability, their own subjection to the tides of chance. When Democratic and Republican politicians assure us that we are the living equivalent of Jesus or Caesar, respectively, it is tempting to believe them. Perhaps the antidote (besides re-instituting high school civics classes) is to remind ourselves that we are all sorters of people and that we are all vulnerable, because we are all human.
