The new perspective on identity presented in the previous posts has substantial consequences for both how we form relationships and how we function within and develop family. We shall examine each of these issues in turn.
If our sense of personal identity is shifting towards a peripheral organisation, towards taking responsibility for one’s actions in the now, and towards a multiple and inconsistent set of identities, then these changes will be necessarily reflected in the relationships we form. In fact our relationships are one of the tools that are in use to help forge the new identity. Relationships have an inertia of their own. As long as the majority of them were rooted in the older identity paradigm, change was slow, but today, increasingly, relationships incorporate some of the shifts in how identity is constructed.
Almost all of our knowledge of ourselves is reflected knowledge. A person is more than 90% "underground" - that is, aside from the occasional fleeting thought in our conscious minds, almost everything else in who we are is unconscious, and not directly accessible to us. Our memories store both factual knowledge and procedural knowledge, but procedural knowledge is not stored in a way that allows us to recall it as we would a fact. And although we may store information about ourselves in our factual knowledge memory store, this information is not the result of direct observation of who we are, but rather some form of interpreted knowledge.
Because all of the really important information about ourselves and who we are is automatic and unconscious, we have only three means of examining it - watch "thought/feeling" events as they flit through our conscious minds, make note of the actions we take, and observe how other people react to us. The first is problematical, because the events that happen in our conscious mind actually tell us very little about what is going on in our unconscious. I will come back to the second means later. The primary means is by studying other people. We reflect an image of ourselves back from the people who surround us. This is the function of "projection", and it is fundamentally necessary in order to be able to determine anything of importance about ourselves.
I have heard people say to me, "you're projecting, stop it!", or "you're not seeing me as I am, you're projecting". Well, the truth of the matter is, it is impossible to turn this off... we are always "projecting" all the time. It is how we make sense of ourselves and our relationships to others. The trick is not to stop doing it, but rather to stop doing it unconsciously. It is to known when and how you are doing it, so that one can take this effect into account when untangling information about ourselves from that about the people with whom we are interacting. When we become aware of how we project ourselves onto other people, then we may mentally "subtract out" things we know about ourselves and are left with inferences about the other person. This is actually what is meant by someone who says "stop projecting"!
Modern research in cognitive science has discovered some of the neurological machinery that underlies this process. Hence so called "mirror neurons" fire when we act or emote, but also when we observe the same emotions and actions in another person. Hence the reflecting process is built into our brain structure.
Incidently, this phenomenon of reflection underlines one of the main facets of the human condition - we cannot function effectively in isolation from other living beings.
When I say that we are reflected in our relationships, of course I mean all the varied forms of relationships, including family, lovers, friends, colleagues, business partners, acquaintances, students, clients, teachers, therapists and passing strangers.
Unfortunately, most people are unaware of how they project, and indeed, need to project, their own being into their relationships in order to acquire an image of who they are. Becoming aware of this process is a crucial step to taking responsability for who one is, and for ensuring that one is integral to one's own nature, that one is not dependent on other people's actions to determine who we are.
The first major shift in identity, away from a predominant focus on one's history and towards one's actions in the present, is expressed here as the need to develop greater awareness of how we "project" ourselves into our relationships. The use of our personal histories, which has been our principle way of defining the self, will become increasingly outmoded. Indeed, within the older paradigm, much of our self knowledge was organized into our personal history. Hence we all have the experience of knowing "how we have always felt" when relating to certain kinds of person, and assuming that this historical knowledge is a reliable indicator of what we shall feel, say and do in the present. We have all also been surprised on occasions when what we feel, say and do is quite different from our historical expectations - it would seem that other factors affect our behaviour and not only "what we have always done". In fact, our reliance on personal history may have biased us towards its having a greater effect on our current actions that it need necessary do. 21st century relationships will revolve around more awareness of who we are and how we interact than did 20th century relationships - whether these be intimate relationships or passing strangers or anything in-between.
We see signs of these changes in all our different social environments, even though many relationships are still mired in the older paradigm. In a society in which we must co-exist, side-by-side, with people who are different than we are, there are both more occasions and a greater need for being aware of who we are and how we interact. Today's men are highly aware of the different discourses that surround the relationships between men and women, and comments made today are offered in full knowledge of these complexities. The same is true of women with regard to men, perhaps even more so. Things that were said unthinkingly in the 1950's cannot be said in the same way today. Usually, the individual not only speaks in ways that recognize the surrounding discussions, but he or she will situate him or herself in relation to this discourse when speaking to each new person. How we talk to children has changed, and how we talk to our parents is changing.
While for much of the 20th century (and previous centuries), we were focused on issues of duty and obligation in these contexts (to intimate partners, but also to family, colleagues, and so forth), today we are much less willing to engage in duty to the exclusion of personal factors. That is, each instance of duty is modulated by specifics of how we feel about a person, what we think about them, what our values are and where they are situated in our value system. In the old days, duty meant duty, independent of personal factors. In the 21st century, duty is still present, but it is modulated by other factors. This again highlights the shift from orthodoxy to paradoxy.
The second characteristic of the paradigm shift in identity is the move from a central focus to a peripheral one. How is this expressed in our relationships?
Throughout the 20th century, the principle social unit was the nuclear family. The nuclear family is a complex unit, but includes a monogamous intimate relationship between two people, usually a man and a woman, along with a sharing of responsability between these two with regard to the needs and responsabilities of raising children. The nuclear family is a centralist nexus of relationships, a necessary organisation in the face of rapid socio-economic expansion and change. However, by the latter part of the 20th century, the signs of stress and breakdown in the nuclear family were becoming a flood!
The "orthodox" heterosexual couple was one of the first elements to break down. Today, many gay couples are clamouring for recognition within marriage, after having obtained a certain level of recognition as longterm life arrangements. However, the couple as a social unit is also under threat from a variety of sources. Increasingly, friendships, which were long seen as a well-defined relationship, are diversifying into a range of possible relationships. Individuals today do not, for the most part, expect to be in a life-long intimate relationship with a single partner. Many may still yearn for this, but most do not expect it. Nor do they expect all their needs to be met through one person. In today's emerging world, relationships are characterised by more variety in form and nature, and more pluralistic. This is an area that shall see substantial more change over the coming years as the straightjacket of orthodoxy, which has held relationships frozen in form for a long time, loses more and more its hold.
I shall be exploring issues of family life in more detail later on. What is important to note at this point is that the nature of our relationships are becoming more pluralistic and more diversified, hence more peripheral in organisation.
Finally, the large number of extra-marital affairs that is known to occur in both sexes, highlights the fact that people are not consistent, even within themselves, certainly not within orthodox social arrangements. The need for various sexual partners, and the need for intimate partners who meet different needs, the separation of issues of child support from issues of intimacy, friendship, sexuality, identity, and so forth, are all alligned with the shift towards a multiple and inconsistent identity.
