Over the last six or seven months, I have been observing shifts in some of the fundamental dimensions of my identity, and have been understanding these shifts in terms similar to internal family systems. Specifically, the recent shifts have pertained to openness to emotional and physical intimacy.
A comparable but less foundational development, which has unfolded primarily over the last year, has been my novel passion for cooking, which I will now expound upon for the sake of comparison. For most of my life, cooking was of little interest, and food was primarily about sustenance. Since moving into a grouphouse, however, I’ve noticed how certain circumstantial changes have impacted my relation to cooking, and have opened new domains of curiosity.
Firstly, the nature of placing bulk orders of diverse food items, and having these items delivered, minimizes the effort required to start cooking. That is, the fact that I don’t need to individually select and source these ingredients means that meal preparation is less effortful. This also applies to collective ownership of cooking utensils and appliances, which have communally accumulated over the years. Secondly, having more people than myself to cook for, especially people who express appreciation, makes the preparation of elaborate meals more worthwhile, especially if others are willing to reciprocate by helping clean up afterward. Thirdly, and by virtue of the first two points, I began to appreciate in cooking the capacity for creative exploration, experimental iteration, and incremental skill refinement - all things which I am generally drawn to. Cooking itself constitutes a very visceral and tangible creative process, with a clear output which lends itself to direct qualitative evaluation (i.e. tasting how good it is), which in turn feeds back into the iterative refinement of technique. Without these circumstantial changes, however, I may not have gotten to appreciate why cooking is a passion for so many.
That is all to say, I began to realize how much there is to appreciate in this particular domain of human experience. Beyond how directly rewarding it can be, and as with many other skills, there are also micropolitical advantages to be derived as byproducts of the development of this particular skill, e.g. being perceived as capable of preparing exquisite or nourishing meals. Ultimately, this served as an example of how certain environmental circumstances can serve to catalyze internal developments, such as a heightened appreciation of cooking as a creative outlet. These circumstantial changes arguably entail a deepening of one’s interiority, or perhaps one’s internal integration of the broader expanse of human experience.
More recently, having seen how my relation to cooking has developed in response to changing circumstances, I’ve been observing how my relation to intimacy, both emotional and physical, could be similarly plastic. The plasticity of these dimensions of one’s interiority also seems related to the various narratives one tells oneself to make sense of their relation to the world. These narratives can serve to reify certain patterns of how one identifies and behaves, and the repetition of these patterns often succeeds in crystalizing certain aspects of one’s identity which, once settled into some lifestyle equilibrium, can be painful to augment or reevaluate. This point is similar to the ideas explored in A Rhapsody on Neurodiversity, which pertained specifically to the plasticity of one’s sociality and cognition, which has implications about neurodiversity and various symptoms associated with autism spectrum disorders. The broader theme under consideration here is the plasticity of conscious identity, or at least human identity, and how this identity undergoes qualitative differentiation across various cognitive-behavioral equilibria, stabilizing and destabilizing in dynamic response to environmental circumstances, along the lines of active inference.
The introduction of pluralistic identity, along the lines of internal family systems, brings an additional variety of curious implications to these considerations. For example, instead of understanding oneself as a unitary identity, necessitating some harmonization of conflicting desires or opinions, one can view oneself as an assemblage of personas which come in and out of prominence in response to changing life circumstances. If one understands one’s cognitive model of the world as epiphenomenal to the experience being modeled, one can begin to appreciate the risk of said model doing some representational disservice to said experience. That is, any given model necessarily introduces some bias, oversight, or other subjective artifacts within the representation itself. Allowing for a plurality of models can help accommodate representational conflicts, or aspects of lived experience which may not clearly fit harmoniously into a unitary model, and by extension enable one to appreciate a wider breadth of conscious experience than can be coherently reconciled into a unitary model.
Combining this plurality of identity with the aforementioned plasticity of identity, one arrives at a conceptual paradigm for understanding how conscious systems model their worlds and integrate their experience through an emergent and protean process of individuation. Over the course of this individuation, narratives are employed at the conceptual level to cement certain models of the world and one’s position in it, and the absence of a coherent narrative can often be felt as chaotic, especially if one is tacitly enforcing a standard of conflict-free coherence within one’s modeling efforts.
With respect to myself specifically, while I have long been thinking in terms of plasticity of identity, I’m only beginning to think in these pluralistic terms, let alone a combination of the two. In my case, it’s as if my most prominent persona is the stoic, pragmatic, apollonian figure I believe I usually present as. I have tacitly been treating this persona as my single equilibrium of identity, such that the impulses or desires I experience are implicitly bound to be either expressed in compliance with this given persona, otherwise sublimated, or, failing both of those, altogether suppressed.
To think in more pluralistic terms, however, would mean that these otherwise non-conformant impulses may find organic coherence in some other identity equilibrium. This ensemble of identities can be visually conceptualized as points settled into a number of valleys in a fluctuating terrain, where x and y position represent arbitrary qualitative states of personality, and altitude represents the effortfulness of embodying a given state within a given set of circumstances. The fluctuations of altitude represent the changing of these circumstances over time. In this conceptual model, plasticity is the potential for traversing the terrain via efforts of what could be called ‘active individuation’, and plurality is the potential to simultaneously hold various positions. Of course, this visual model is provisional and limited in its utility. I find it useful to illustrate the potential for plasticity and plurality of identity in a manner which trivializes a given identity as a point on a terrain, making it easier to detach and mobilize from a given state.
In my personal situation, i.e. my hitherto effectively unitary model of my identity as a secular monk of sorts, there hasn’t been a clear way to integrate erotic or socially romantic impulses, resulting in their repeated suppression over the course of my life. In some cases, I have managed to transmute or sublimate these impulses via discursive or creative endeavors, often to fruitful ends but only with great effort, and in manners which largely preclude the possibility of my experiencing some of the ostensibly richer dimensions of human experience, i.e. romantic intimacy. Indeed, I have even managed to crystalize a perception of myself as asexual, via repeatedly employing that narrative as a way to rationalize the conflicts between my prominent stoic identity and these decidedly non-stoic impulses, to the self-fulfilling extent of diminishing my sexual desire.
In recognizing the plasticity of this aspect of my identity, I’ve been gradually opening myself up to the possibility of making space in my life for emotional and physical intimacy. In so doing, it felt like this re-conditioning threatened to disrupt the stable equilibrium of my more equanimous default persona, thus resulting in an ostensibly irreconcilable inner conflict. In recognizing the potential for plurality in one’s identity, however, I am beginning to realize that not every aspect of oneself needs to conform to a single coherent equilibrium of identity, but that there could be multiple such states which exist in a sort of rotation or superposition, alleviating some of these conflicts.
Of course, to grasp this conceptually is one thing, but what is notable is the degree to which it is dawning on me in a more embodied manner, resulting in the relief of long-standing and seemingly intractable tensions between conflicting impetuses of individuation, which may not actually need to compete. This paradigm seemingly defies the orthodox psychoanalytic epistemology, instead lending itself naturally to a schizoanalytic epistemology. The former would, to my knowledge, attempt to reduce one’s psychic state to some unitary narrative of trauma and personal development, thus subordinating the desires and impulses which cannot neatly be expressed within the regime of the unitary identity. The latter, however, could better promote a sort of rhizomatic or pluralistic individuation of an ensemble of identities.
Theoretically, one can start to imagine a praxis for active rhizomatic individuation, as a paradigm for psychic development. The ‘active’ part of this could be seen, conceptually, as involving an awareness of one’s identity as malleable, in developmental dialogue with one’s world, and playing an active role in situating oneself in manners conducive to intended trajectories of individuation. The discursive elaboration of this praxis could perhaps benefit from the insights of Karl Friston, Deleuze-Guattari, and Carl Jung on the topics of active inference, schizoanalysis, and individuation, respectively. The western esoteric tradition may, in turn, offer some oblique assistance from the perspective of magic, understood as the willful steering of conscious experience, but it’s not presently clear to me whether sifting through all that stuff will prove worthwhile.
Practically, however, it is yet to be seen how meaningfully such a praxis may be implemented, or at least of what personal use it may prove to be. The fact that I remain unmedicated and entirely unmired in our clinical-industrial complex seems, frankly, somewhat miraculous, although perhaps not altogether inexplicable, and arguably a testament to the efficacy of this way of thinking. The auto-discursive expounding of this praxis would remain within the vocational purview of my inner stoic, which needn’t necessarily preclude my other selves, as it were, from enjoying alternative modalities of human experience.
