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      The Problem of Identity

      Normally, people don't ask themselves, Who am I? One's identity is taken for granted. Each person carries in his wallet papers that serve to identify him. Consciously, he knows who he is. However, below the surface a problem of identity exists. On the border of consciousness he is disturbed by dissatisfactions, uneasy about decisions, and tormented by the feeling of “missing out” on life. He is in conflict with himself, unsure of his feelings, and his insecurity reflects his problem of identity. When dissatisfaction becomes despair and insecurity verges on panic an individual may ask himself, Who am I? This question indicates that the facade through which a person seeks identity is crumbling. The use of a facade or the adoption of a role as a means to achieve identity denotes a split between the ego and the body. I define this split as the schizoid disturbance which underlies every problem of identity.

      For example, a famous artist walked into my office and said, “I am confused and desperate. I don't know who I am. I walk down the street and ask myself, Who are you?”

      It would have been meaningless to reply, “You are the well-known painter whose work hangs in many museums.” He knew that. What he complained of was a loss of the feeling of self, the loss of contact with some vital aspect of existence that gives meaning to life. This missing element was an identification with the body, the foundation upon which a personal life is erected. My artist patient became actively aware of this missing element in a dramatic experience. He told me:

      The other day I looked in the mirror, and I became frightened when I realized it was me. I thought, This is what people see when they look at me.

      The image was a stranger. My face and my body didn't seem to belong to me…I felt very unreal.

      This experience, in which there is a loss of feeling of the body, with accompanying sensations of strangeness and unreality, is known as a depersonalization. It denotes a break with reality and occurs in the first stages of a psychotic episode. If it continues, the person loses not only the feeling of identity but also his conscious awareness of identity. Fortunately, this episode was short-lived in my patient. He was able to reestablish some contact with his body, so that the feeling of unreality disappeared. However, his identification with his body remained tenuous, and the problem of his identity persisted.

      The feeling of identity stems from a feeling of contact with the body. To know who one is, an individual must be aware of what he feels. He should know the expression on his face, how he holds himself, and the way he moves. Without this awareness of bodily feeling and attitude, a person becomes split into a disembodied spirit and a disenchanted body. I will return again to the case of the artist.

      As he sat opposite me, I saw his drawn face, his empty eyes, his tightly set jaw, and his frozen body. In his immobility and shallow breathing, I could sense his fear and panic. He, however, was not aware of the gauntness of his face, the blankness of his eyes, the tension in his jaw, or the tightness of his body. He did not feel his fear and panic. Being out of touch with his body, he only sensed his confusion and desperation.

      The complete loss of body contact characterizes the schizophrenic state. Broadly speaking, the schizophrenic doesn't know who he is, and is so much out of touch with reality that he cannot even phrase the question.

      On the other hand, the schizoid individual knows he has a body and is, therefore, oriented in time and space. But since his ego is not identified with his body and does not perceive it in an alive way, he feels unrelated to the world and to people. Similarly, his conscious sense of identity is unrelated to the way he feels about himself. This conflict does not exist in a healthy person whose ego is identified with his body and in whom the knowledge of his identity stems from the feeling of the body.

      A confusion of identity typifies most persons in our culture. Many people struggle with a diffused sense of unreality about themselves and their lives. They become desperate when the ego image they have created proves empty and meaningless. They feel threatened and become angry when the role they have adopted in life is challenged. Sooner or later, an identity based on images and roles fails to provide satisfaction. Depressed and discouraged, they consult a psychiatrist. Their problem is, as Rollo May points out, the schizoid disturbance.

      Many psychotherapists have pointed out that more and more patients exhibit schizoid features and the “typical” kind of psychic problem in our day is not hysteria, as it was in Freud's time, but the schizoid type—that is to say, the problem of persons who are detached, unrelated, lacking in affect, tending towards depersonalization, and covering up their problems by means of intellectualizations and technical formulations….

      There is also plenty of evidence that the sense of isolation, the alienation of one's self from the world is suffered not only by people in pathological conditions, but by countless “normal” persons as well in our day.¹

      The alienation of people in the modern world—the estrangement of man from his work, his fellow man, and himself—has been described by many authors and is the central theme of Erich Fromm's writings. The alienated individual's love is romanticized, his sex is compulsive, his work is mechanical, and his achievements are egotistic. In an alienated society, these activities lose their personal meaning. This loss is replaced by an image.

THE IMAGE VERSUS REALITY

      The schizoid disturbance creates a dissociation of the image from reality. The term “image” refers to symbols and mental creations as opposed to the reality of physical experience. This is not to say that images are unreal, but they have a different order of reality than bodily phenomena. An image derives its reality from its association with feeling or sensation. When this association is disrupted, the image becomes abstract. The discrepancy between image and reality is most clearly seen in delusional schizophrenics. The classic example is the demented person who imagines he is Jesus Christ or Napoleon. On the other hand, “mental health” refers to the condition where image and reality coincide. A healthy person has an image of himself that agrees with the way his body looks and feels.

      In

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