ABSTRACT
From such identity experiences and disturbances as noted in Chapter 2 we can derive questions that we would like to answer, as best we can, with a psychological theory that can mesh well with the social and neuroscience theories that we will address in the next two chapters. Here are the salient questions:
Some people exhibit lapses in accuracy of knowledge about themselves as related to others. How and why might they retain and repeat the same errors of self and other beliefs?
If some lapses in accurate self and other appraisals involve switching between binary extremes or incompatible beliefs, how and why are such views compartmentalized rather than associated?
Why is it difficult for some people to find their way to a continuous and coherent configuration that harmonizes, rather than segregates, their multiple self-concepts?
How is it that some disturbed persons have frequent irrational projections or introjections, confusing traits and intentions of self and other?
How might a person, aiming at avoiding entry into an intense and negatively emotional self-state—such as a potential for searing shame, for example— evoke irrational self-concepts such as grandiosity?
All of these questions ask how to conceptualize sub-portions of overall self-organization, and their degree or level of achieved coherence in a person. A cartoon in the New Yorker magazine depicted the difficulties in the path toward self-coherence. It showed two middle-aged persons, talking over coffee. One is saying to the other: “If only my identity were not so wrapped up in who I am!” It is our empathy for this shared, human predicament that causes us to chuckle. A solid, well-defined identity is a product of complex combinations of social reflectance, conscious emotional and conceptual thinking, and unconscious mental processes that activate various, unconsciously stored sets of information.