Illusion of Self-Sufficiency - Sincerity and Authenticity

I am describing is a state of omnipotent self-sufficiency; the
belief that one does not need anything from others, which is an
illusion that may paradoxically deny an extreme dependency. Such
people may not be able to freely give or receive affection; they may
be truly isolated within their fortress so that they neither hear
nor receive anything from the outside. Some of my patients describe
themselves as being encased in a plastic bubble, a mummy case, or,
as Sylvia Plath perceived it, a bell jar. As one penetrates further
into this phenomenology, one learns that the illusion of self-
sufficiency is reinforced by a magical belief that they occupy a
protected sphere, removed from the dangers of the world, removed
from the possibility of death, disease, and misfortune, that they
are not "really in the world". In this sense they have achieved an
illusion of invulnerability; they cannot be surprised, influenced,
or controlled.

The critic Lionel Trilling, in his celebrated essay, "Sincerity and
Authenticity", has grappled with the same problem. As he was a
critic and not a clinician, he examined literature and not patients.
He believed that in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century
something like a mutation of human nature took place, with the
formation of a new type of personality, a personality centered on
the virtue of sincerity. Trilling defines sincerity as the degree of
congruence between feeling and avowal. Sincerity is judged to be a
virtue as it supports the workings of society. Social institutions
require a measure of trust in order to function so that sincerity,
the congruence between feeling and avowal, is in its turn a measure
of truthfulness. Trilling further believed that this mutation of
personality coincided with the emergence of the idea of society much
as we now conceive it; that there was a time in which the concept of
society did not exist. If Trilling defines sincerity as the
congruence between feeling and avowal, the breakdown of sincerity
corresponds to what I have described as states of non-relatedness
and non-communication.

Sincerity was rightly considered to be a moral virtue as it
supported the underpinnings of society itself. So that spurious or
counterfeit communications by the leaders of our Society will
reinforce those same responses that the individual learned earlier
in coping with parental falseness. There is a reflexive
reinforcement of the privacy and secrecy of the self which remains
hidden behind a facade of compliance--that is, the facade of playing
the game. The authenticity of the self remains private. It is the
tragedy of those who present themselves to us as patients that they
are also cut off from their inner authentic self--they have played
the game too well.

In 1950 David Riesman and his collaborators in a remarkably
prescient book, The Lonely Crowd, described a change in American
culture--a shift from "inner directed" to "other directed"--a
character change in the direction of compliance, turning off, and
playing the game. This suggests that a certain degree of
counterfeiting affects is socially adaptive. Pathology ensues when
the counterfeiting of affects extends from the outer public sphere
to the inner private sphere; so that the preservation of the private
authenticity of the self is perhaps the paradigm of the normal
narcissistic personality of our time.

 
Defensive narcissism is in part as we have described earlier, a
reaction to the perceived loss of the parental protecting
environment. The child correctly perceives that the parent cannot in
fact protect him/her from the dangers of the real world. This is, of
course, our present condition. The individual has always experienced
a certain helplessness regarding his own fate. Human beings have
always been at the mercy of uncontrolled social eruptions which can
and do inalterably change their lives. The response has been a search for hopefulness
not in relationship to the world, but in relationship to the self.
One cannot master one's own fate, but at least one can master the
self, or the body that stands as a proxy for the self. Of course,
this too is an illusion.

We all have a need for privacy and secrecy. We need to keep a part
of ourselves isolated, hidden, and unfound.

 It is an issue of adaptation and
survival.

Arnold H. Modell, M.D.
401 Woodward Street
Waban, Massachusetts 02168



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