R.D. Laing : Self-Consciousness

R-D Laing

The Divided Self

Self-consciousness

"Self-consciousness, as the term is ordinarily used, implies two things : an awareness of oneself by oneself, and an awareness of oneself as an object of someone else's observation. These two forms of awareness of the self, as an object in one's own eyes and as an object in the other's eyes, are closely related to each other. In the schizoid individual both are enhanced and both assume a somewhat compulsive nature. The schizoid individual is frequently tormented by the compulsive nature of his awareness of his own processes, and also by the equally compulsive nature of his sense of his body as an object in the world of others.

The heightened sense of being always seen, or at any rate of being always potentially seeable, may be principally referable to the body, but the preoccupation with being seeable may be condensed with the idea of the mental self being penetrable, and vulnerable, as when the individual feels that one can look right through him into his 'mind' or 'soul'. Such 'plate-glass' feelings are usually spoken about in terms of metaphor or simile, but in psychotic conditions the gaze or scrutiny of the other can be experienced as an actual penetration into the core of the 'inner' self.

The heightening or intensifying of the awareness of one's own being, both as an object of one's own awareness and of the awareness of others, is practically universal in adolescents, and is associated with the well-known accompaniments of shyness, blushing, and general embarrassment. One readily invokes some version of 'guilt' to account for such awkwardness. But to suggest, say, that the individual is self-conscious ' because' he has guilty secrets does not take us far.

(...)

The self-conscious person feels he is more the object of other people's interest than, in fact, he is. Such a person walking along the street approaches a cinema queue. He will have to 'steel himself to walk past it: preferably, he will cross to the other side of the street. It is an ordeal to go into a restaurant and sit down at a table by himself. At a dance he will wait until two or three couples are already dancing before he can face taking the floor himself, and so on.

(...)

Further features of such self-consciousness may seem again to point to guilt being the key to the understanding of the difficulty. The look that the individual expects other people to direct upon him is practically always imagined to be unfavourably critical of him. He is frightened that he will look a fool, or he is frightened that other people will think he wants to show off. When a patient expresses such phantasies it is easy to suppose that he has a secret unacknowledged desire to show off, to be the centre of attraction, to be superior, to make others look fools beside him, and that this desire is charged with guilt and anxiety and so is unable to be experienced as such.

An understanding of self-consciousness in some such terms eludes, I believe, the central issue facing the individual whose basic existential position is one of ontological insecurity and whose schizoid nature is partly a direct expression of, and occasion for, his ontological insecurity, and partly an attempt to overcome it; or, putting the last remark in slightly different terms, partly an attempt to defend himself against the dangers to his being that are the consequences of his failure to achieve a secure sense of his own identity.

Self-consciousness in the ontologically insecure person plays a double role:

1. Being aware of himself and knowing that other people are aware of him are a means of assuring himself that he exists, and also that they exist. Kafka clearly demonstrates this in his story called 'Conversation with a Suppliant': the suppliant starts from the existential position of ontological insecurity. He states,

'There has never been a time in which I have been convinced from within myself that I am alive.'

The need to gain a conviction of his own aliveness and the realness of things is, therefore, the basic issue in his existence. His way of seeking to gain such conviction is by feeling himself to be an object in the real world; but, since his world is unreal, he must be an object in the world of someone else, for objects to other people seem to be real, and even calm and beautiful. At least, '... it must be so, for I often hear people talking about them as though they were'. Hence it is that he makes his confession

'... don't be angry if I tell you that it is the aim of my life to get people to look at me'.

(...)

2. In a world full of danger, to be a potentially seeable object is to be constantly exposed to danger. Self-consciousness, then, may be the apprehensive awareness of oneself as potentially exposed to danger by the simple fact of being visible to others. The obvious defence against such a danger is to make oneself invisible in one way or another.

In an actual instance, the issue is thus always necessarily complex. Kafka's suppliant makes it the aim of his life to get people to look at him, since thereby he mitigates his state of depersonalization and derealization and inner deadness. He needs other people to experience him as a real live person because he has never been convinced from within himself that he was alive. This, however, implies a trust in the benign quality of the other person's apprehension of him which is not always present. Once he becomes aware of something it becomes unreal, although 'I always feel that they were once real and are now flitting away'.

One would not be surprised to find that such a person would have in some measure a distrust of other people's awareness of him. What, for instance, if they had, after all, the same 'fugitive awareness' of him as he had of them ? Could he place any more reliance on their consciousness than on his own to lend him a conviction that he was alive ? Quite often, in fact, the balance swings right over so that the individual feels that his greatest risk is to be the object of another person's awareness.

Indeed, considered biologically, the very fact of being visible exposes an animal to the risk of attack from its enemies, and no animal is without enemies. Being visible is therefore a basic biological risk; being invisible is a basic biological defence. We all employ some form of camouflage.

(...)

It may be that here is a biological analogue for many anxieties about being obvious, being out of the ordinary, being distinctive, drawing attention to oneself, where the defences employed against such dangers so often consist in attempts to merge with the human

landscape, to make it as difficult as possible for anyone to see in what way one differs from anyone else. Oberndorf, for instance, has suggested that depersonalization is a defence analogous to 'playing possum'. Being like everyone else, being someone other than oneself, playing a part, being incognito, anonymous, being nobody (psychotically, pretending to have no body), are defences that are carried through with great thoroughness in certain schizoid and schizophrenic conditions.

(...)

Awareness of an object lessens its potential danger. Consciousness is then a type of radar, a scanning mechanism. The object can be felt to be under control. As a death ray, consciousness has two main properties: its power to petrify (to turn to stone: to turn oneself or the other into things); and its power to penetrate. Thus, if it is in these terms that

the gaze of others is experienced, there is a constant dread and resentment at being turned into someone else's thing, of being penetrated by him, and a sense of being in someone else's power and control. Freedom then consists in being inaccessible.

The individual may attempt to forestall these dangers by turning the other into stone. Unfortunately, since one cannot be seen by a stone, one becomes, in so far as others have been successfully reduced to things in one's own eyes, the only person who can see oneself. The process now swings in the reverse direction, culminating in the longing to be rid of the deadening and intolerable selfawareness so that the prospect of being a passive thing penetrated and controlled by the other may come as a welcome relief. Within such oscillation there is no position of peace, since the individual has no choice between feasible alternatives.

The compulsive preoccupation with being seen, or simply with being visible, suggests that we must be dealing with underlying phantasies of not being seen, of being invisible. If, as we saw, being visible can be both in itself persecutory and also a reassurance that

one is still alive, then being invisible will have equally ambiguous meanings.

The 'self-conscious' person is caught in a dilemma. He may need to be seen and recognized, in order to maintain his sense of realness and identity. Yet, at the same time, the other represents a threat to his identity and reality. One finds extremely subtle efforts

expended in order to resolve this dilemma in terms of the secret inner self and the behavioural false-self systems already described.

(...)"

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