The True and the False Self

one of the most surprising but powerful explanations for why we may as adults be in trouble mentally is that we were in our earliest years denied the opportunity to be fully ourselves that is we were not allowed to be willful and difficult we could not be as demanding aggressive intolerant and unrestrictedly selfish as we need it to be because our caregivers were preoccupied or fragile we had to be preternaturally attuned to their demands sensing that we had to comply in order to be loved and tolerated we had to be false before we had the chance to feel properly alive and as a result many years later without quite understanding the process we risk feeling unanchored inwardly dead and somehow not entirely present this psychological theory of the true and the false self is the work of one of the 20th century's greatest thinkers the English psychoanalyst and child psychiatrist Donald Winnicott in a series of papers written in the 1960s and based on close observations of his adult and infant patients Winnicott advanced the view that healthy development invariably requires us to experience the immense life-sustaining luxury of a period when we don't have to bother with the feelings and opinions of those who are tasked with looking after us we can be holy and without guilt our true selves because those around us have for a time adapted themselves entirely to our needs and desires however inconvenient and arduous these might be the true self of the infant in winnicott's formulation is by nature a social and a moral it isn't interested in the feelings of others it isn't socialized it screams when it needs to even if it's the middle of the night or on a crowded train it may be aggressive biting and in the eyes of a stickler for manners or a lover of high Jeane shocking and a bit disgusting it wants to express itself where and how it wants it can be sweet of course but on its own terms not in order to charm or bargain for love if a person is to have any sense of feeling real as an adult then it has to have enjoyed the immense emotional privilege of being able to be true in this way to disturb people when it wants to kick when it's angry to scream when it's tired to bite when it's feeling aggressive the true self of the child must be granted to the imaginative opportunity to destroy the parent when it's in a rage and then witness the parent surviving and enduring which lends the child a vital an immensely reassuring sense that it's not in fact omnipotent and that the world won't collapse simply because it sometimes wishes or fears it could when things go well gradually and willingly the child develops a full self a capacity to behave according to the demands of external reality this is what enables a child to submit to the rigors of school and as it develops into an adult of working life as well when we have been given the chance to be our true selves we don't at every occasion need to rebel and insist on our needs we can follow the rules because we have for a time being able to ignore them entirely in other words Winnicott was not a thorough enemy of a full self he understood its role well enough he simply insisted that it belonged to health only when it had been preceded by a thorough earlier experience of an untrammeled true self unfortunately many of us have not enjoyed such an ideal start perhaps mother was depressed or father was often in a rage maybe there was an older or younger sibling who was in a crisis and required all the attention the result is that we will have learned to comply far too early we will have become obedient at the expense of our ability to feel authentically ourselves in relationships we may now be polite and geared to the needs of our partners but not for that matter able properly to love at work we may be dutiful but uncreated and unoriginal in such circumstances and this is its genius psychotherapy offers us a second chance in the hands of a good therapist we are allowed to regress before the time when we started to be false back to the moment when we so desperately needed to be true in the therapists office safely contained by their maturity and care we can learn once more to be real we can be intemperate difficult unconcerned with anyone but ourselves selfish unimpressive aggressive and shocking and the therapist will take it and thereby help us to experience a new sense of aliveness which should have been there from the start the demand to be false which never goes away becomes more bearable because we are regularly being allowed in the privacy of the therapists room once a week or so to be true Winnicott was famously calm and generous towards his patients when they were attempting to refined their true selves in this way one of them smashed a favorite vars of his another stole his money a third shouted insults at him session after session but Winnicott was unruffled knowing that this was part of a journey back towards health away from the deadly fakeness afflicting these patients in the rest of their lives we can be grateful to Winnicott for reminding us that contentment and a feeling of reality have to pass through stages of almost limitless delinquents selfish there is simply no other way we have to be true before we can be productively a bit fake and if we have never been allowed then our sickness and depression is there to remind us that we need to take a step back and therapy is there to allow us to do so please do comment like and subscribe and take a look at our shop for more from the School of Life you

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Keywords: the school of life, relationships, mood, alain de botton, philosophy, talk, self, improvement, big questions, wellness, mindfullness, psychology, schooloflife, false self, true self, who am i?, consciousness, enlightenment, awakening, self esteem, your self, my self, self control, self love, PL-SELf, 真实与错误的自我, O verdadeiro e falso eu, Le Vrai et le Faux Soi, Das wahre und falsche Selbst, El verdadero y falso yo, सच और झूठ स्व, Donald Winnicott, child psychology

Id: A02Ucd6monY

Length: 6min 55sec (415 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 19 2018