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In this article, Nuar Alsadir examines how psychoanalysis can help people move from living out “inherited” roles and unexamined patterns towards making choices that feel more alive, truthful, and — perhaps, most importantly — internally grounded. This is centred on the idea of a “true self” which is contrasted with the ways social pressures, family expectations, and cultural scripts shape what we think we want.

Alsadir draws on thinkers such as Winnicott, Žižek, and Baudrillard, showing how identity can be reduced to performance or brand, and argues that paying attention to so-called “slips,” jokes, and other unplanned eruptions of the psyche can be revealing.I particularly appreciated the passage below, in which she explores what happens when a person’s carefully managed public image hardens into a kind of “performance” that replaces their inner life. A self built on external “consistency” and “strategic signalling” risks becoming technically convincing yet emotionally hollow, like an actor whose performance is polished but lacks genuine life.

Some people refer to the emotions and perceptions they signal about themselves to others as their “brand.” A personal brand is maintained through a set of consistent choices that signify corresponding character traits—an approach that shows how an essentialist idea of identity can be manipulated for strategic purposes even as it blocks out information from the external world and calcifies habitual patterns of behavior.

Focusing on the surface, lining up your external chips, often results in immediate social reward, yet it can also cause you to lose sight of your interior. In extreme cases, the surface may even become the interior, like the map that comes to stand in for the territory, as philosopher Jean Baudrillard describes it: a simulation that takes the place of the real. The virtual can even feel more real than the real, as happened to a couple in Korea who left their infant daughter at home while they camped out in an internet café playing a video game in which they successfully raised a virtual child. Their daughter starved to death.

When a person becomes a simulation—when it is difficult to distinguish between their self and their role in the game—they may be said, in psychoanalytic terms, to have an “as-­if” personality. An as-­if person, according to psychoanalyst Helen Deutsch, who coined the term, appears “intellectually intact,” able to create a “repetition of a prototype [but] without the slightest trace of originality” because “expressions of emotion are formal . . . all inner experience is completely excluded.” She likens the behavior of someone with an as-­if personality to “the performance of an actor who is technically well trained but who lacks the necessary spark to make his impersonations true to life”

Source: The Yale Review

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