Self-Absorption and Identification

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Why are boundaries needed?
The problem that faces the infant is that life is just too complex to master in its totality; therefore this complexity has to be restricted in some way in order to manage at least some part of it. The subconscious mind (along with the unconscious aspect of mind) has few boundaries, so the only way to make sense of the multitude of sensory impressions is to create boundaries. Such boundaries enable the mind of the infant to manage the sheer complexity of life that it is witness to.

The difficulty of trying to understand the multitude of sensations when boundaries are absent is illustrated very clearly by taking any powerful hallucinatory agent such as LSD.

To help in the task of creating an ego the infant takes its mother as a role model. It identifies with the parental image. As the child grows up it changes its identification model several times, to father, to adolescent peers, to teachers. The resulting adult is a montage of different models, of different foci of identification. Identification can be viewed as a psychological union with an external source, with jealousy (mode of love) as the binding ingredient. [³]

A different drama is enacted by the narcissistic and introverted child (such as myself). Identification with an external source ceases to have any intensity beyond the parental models. The narcissistic child begins to take itself as its own model : it begins to identify with itself. A better way of expressing this identification is to say that the child becomes self-absorbed. Self-absorption is a feature of narcissism in love mode.

Therefore, the growing child will tend to favour either jealousy or narcissism as the centre of its developing ego. Either way, the love modes can generate intense emotional experience.

A personal worldview
I indicate my attitudes up to the end of my self-analysis. From an early age, probably from when I was around six years old, my own internal world of phantasy was more important to me than my friendships with other children. Usually when school ended for the day, my absorption into phantasy began. Even today, I still need to spend a lot of time on my own ; when I am at work I have to find ways of creating a breathing space. I have had to create the greater part of my sense of identity from within myself alone. Self-absorption easily becomes self-perpetuating.

I rarely met anyone who shared either my views, or my existentialism, or my experience of life ; hence I could do nothing other than take myself as my own reference point. The intense idealist leads a lonely life.

The intensity of my self-absorption was the reason why:

• I usually had little need to seek close friends, though I responded easily to friendship that was offered to me.

• I daydreamed so much.

• Emotion was usually more important to me than will power. My approach to new adventures was to ‘jump in at the deep end’, that is, to plunge into emotionally-intense experience.

Narcissism and Jealousy

When I was reading Laing’s books one word that caught my eye was ‘smothered’. Smothering is an aspect of what Laing terms ‘engulfment ’, the process of being absorbed into the personality of another person. This process is also that of jealousy. I set up a binary, or complementary, relationship: [4]

Absorption in another person means almost the same as identification with that person. The only difference is that children and adolescents may feel identification with someone to be embracing, whilst the adult will view an identification that feels threatening to him /her as an engulfment.

It was this occasion when I when realised that narcissism is binary to jealousy. This binary sets up self-absorption against an identification with someone who is external to self. 

I considered my relationships ; they focus on intensity (a sure sign that absorption or identification is involved). I can choose either absorption in myself or absorption in another person. When I am centred in narcissism I do not need other people. Then I understood that it is narcissism that propels the person towards individuality. By comparison, jealousy keeps a person socially defined. Jealousy can also produce the manipulation of the person that one wants to be absorbed in.

Absorption /identification can work in either direction. In an adult relationship, either adult can be absorbed into the other one. The same process works even in an adult-child relationship.

For example, I watched a mother who kept shouting orders to her child every few minutes ; she refused to let him play as he wanted. I could see the resentment in his face. This mother was refusing to let the child be independent ; she was controlling him when there was no need to. This is jealousy. This is the refusal to allow the child to become different in any way that is at odds with the mother’s desire to mould him according to her views, her needs, according to her use of the child as a vehicle for her absorption. The idea that the parent becomes absorbed into the child is only another way of saying that the parent is going to use the child as a way of fulfilling that parent’s ambitions in life, irrespective of what the child wants to achieve.

Problems with Intense Experience

A long psycho-analysis can diminish and remove most, perhaps even all, confusion from the mind. This process is enhanced by the person’s ethical idealism. Therefore a long psychoanalysis reduces the importance of jealousy or narcissism (whichever is more dominant) and so helps to balance the person. This balancing brings out the differences between self-absorption and self-consciousness: the person’s ethical idealism (as a product of self-consciousness and not self-absorption) is the factor which pushes him or her towards being balanced.

All spiritual practices that aim to develop meditational or mystical ability also develop self-absorption and so have the effect of intensifying narcissism. Narcissism responds easily to emotional ecstasies. But meditation and mysticism have their limitations. Self-absorption does not of its own accord produce self-consciousness – psychological understanding is not usually found amongst the talents of meditators and mystics. Yet in order to achieve the highest degrees of self-consciousness then self-absorption is a necessary way station or state of mind that has to be experienced sometime in one’s life.

There is a socially undesirable spin-off to habitual self-absorption :
it may become impossible for the person to form social relationships of any depth. The budding introvert or the budding mystic desires intensity of experience. For a man, when he desires deep absorption in his own reality he can control the process. However, to form a deep social relationship means to become identified in some ways with the other person. Now the introvert’s narcissistic love has changed to jealous love, and this kind of love he cannot control. Jealous love confuses ego boundaries by removing the sense of separateness. The introvert can handle, in a fashion, his own intense emotions ; what he cannot handle is being subject to intense emotions, even affectionate ones, from someone else. The likelihood of being in a close social relationship engenders fear, the fear of the loss of his unique identity that is so precious to him. The only way to eliminate this fear is to base relationships on equality and trust.

The introvert or the budding mystic desires intensity of personal experience (but not social experience). In my 20s I tried to escape from my limitations within relationships by focusing on intensity of political experience. Intense experience is not deliberately sought or known by the majority of the members of society, except by the military and by youth. Soldiers know that the conditions of warfare produce an intensity of experience which is beyond the comprehension of the civilian.

The only route for such intensity in today’s youngsters is through drugs or dangerous sports, since much political activity was criminalised in Britain by the Conservative government of the 1990s. The thirst for mind-changing drugs will never be eliminated within a nice, safe materialistic world which lacks political or spiritual idealism, which lacks adventure and challenge. Therefore it is more important to oversee the proper use of drugs and to give guidelines for interpreting their effects on the mind than in being punitive to users.

Union

How does absorption function?
Consider meditation. Suppose that a meditator focuses his /her concentration on an object. For the practitioner of sufficient ability the knower and the known become one. The perceiver and the object of perception become one. The meditator links his /her mind to the mind within the object.

To illustrate what absorption means I give an example from my 20s.
On one occasion when I had taken the drug LSD, I hallucinated a caterpillar (or more correctly, my consciousness was transported to where that particular caterpillar happened to be). I seemed to become one with that caterpillar – I could feel its feelings. A kind of temporary one-sided symbiosis (I do not know if that caterpillar was aware of me, or of my feelings). The knower and the known became one. What in fact occurred was that my mind came into union with the mind of that caterpillar, so enabling me to know it.

Absorption indicates the union of two minds.
In self-absorption the individual takes their own idealism or their own mystical aspirations as their object ; the two minds are those of their own ego plus their idealised image of themself. So in self-absorption, the person effectively identifies with their own idealised image of themself.

When an inanimate object is used as the focus of concentration, the mind that the meditator unites with is some aspect of the mind of the immanent consciousness within the object.  [ My view of the material universe is pantheistic in the broad sense, that is, the world is part of god but god is more than the totality of the universe].

For many poets and artists, absorption can take the form of absorption into Nature. R.D. Laing, in ‘ The Divided Self ’, page 91, gives a description of an experience by James. James began to feel a tremendous oneness with the whole world. This both amazed and terrified him. He wanted to be absorbed into infinity, yet was afraid to do so since it meant losing his self. There is no half-way stage to absorption : the person either becomes absorbed into himself or absorbed into Nature.

This longing for absorption is a characteristic of a mentality which is narcissistic. Absorption is the quintessence of feeling. It is the entrancement with emotion. The person becomes absorbed into love, even though it is usually self-love.

I sum up these ideas on identification and absorption

The ego functions through identification. Evolution is a gradual process of changing identifications, and of reflecting identification back onto oneself to produce self-absorption. Once the infant has exhausted all the possibilities inherent in identification with the sensual body, then to support its continuing evolution the ego progresses to identification with the mother, then to the father, to peers (or to itself ), to teachers. Eventually it graduates to identification with its own idealised mind. In the course of time (a scenario presupposing a time scan of countless incarnations) it will progress to some degree of identification with the mind of the absolute reality (or god).

The number in brackets at the end of each reference takes you back to the paragraph that featured it. The addresses of my other websites are on the Links page.

[¹]. The differences between consciousness and ego are described on my website A Modern Thinker, in the section on Sign Systems.[1]

[²]. In my view, the ego is created in the first few months of life. For an analysis of this period, see the article Creating the Ego. [2]

[³]. Identification features jealousy in love mode. See the article on Transference.
My definitions, descriptions, and analysis of emotions are given in the three articles on Emotion. See home page. [3]

[4]. Emotions form into binary pairs, or pairs of opposites. Hence states of mind can also form into pairs of opposites. The binary nature of emotion is described in the first article on Emotion. [4]

Books

Laing, R.D.  The Divided Self. Pelican 1987.

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Copyright @2003  Ian Heath
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