Identity Fixation

Hello everyone. I want to read a piece that I recently wrote, and I write these so that I can think them through very carefully. By the way, instead of just reading them or spontaneously uttering them sometimes, that works, but sometimes you have to think things through in more detail. This is about identity. I entitled it "Identity Fixation: Degenerate Protestants and Two-Year-Olds."

The great psychologist Carl Jung believed that while the fundamental threat posed to the integrity of the Catholic Church was associated with the temptations of centralized power, so the pull of authoritarianism, the threat to Protestantism was unconstrained factionalism. Jung believed that the logical conclusion of the Protestant revolution was atomization serious and wide-reaching enough so that all those in the Protestant world would end up members of their own personal church. The wars that currently rage in our culture around issues of identity can be profitably considered in that light.

The radical activists who purport to be on the left and therefore standing for the oppressed and marginalized have attributed to each individual the omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent power once reserved only for God. This attribution is most evident in claims insisting upon the unquestionable and purely subjective nature of identity. Each individual is deemed uniquely capable of defining who they are, not only for themselves but for other people, a capability increasingly enshrined in punitive law.

Furthermore, the epistemological grounds for that claim are equally, if not more, subjective. A person's identity is to be determined by what he, she, or they, or some other pronoun variant, feels. A philosophically preposterous claim to say the least, given the importance of the issue at hand, which is, after all, the essential nature of a person. That vague and absolutely arbitrary feeling is deemed to exist utterly apart from any biological, physical, or even social grounding, leaving the observer to wonder if it is not at least implicitly regarded as the manifestation of some disembodied soul and furthermore can shift and change with time, place, and whim in a manner also not to be questioned.

This is all part of the philosophy of the authentic self, also a doctrine of something approximating the soul, where the genuine identity of the person is held to be found within a very ill-defined locale. What is that neurological, spiritual, heavenly, and all social regulation of that identity is held to be unacceptably arbitrary, punitive, and compulsion-based, and all biological determination of that parodied as prejudiced essentialism. In the world where the authentic self is the ultimate authority, only the atomized individual rules.

This insistence is reflected not only in the observed doctrines of the subjectively defined self but also in the reconfiguration of violence, harm, and offense. Harm is held to be something only the putative target of that harm can define. If I feel that your words have hurt me, another feeling, then you are deemed guilty regardless of intent, precedent, or the opinions of others who may very well not agree that a reasonable person would have been hurt by the action or statement in question.

Worse, all of this appears to be a consequence of something approximating what Freud defined as fixation—that is, failure to develop beyond a given developmental stage or degree of maturity. Freud observed that when people hit an insuperable obstacle in the development of their personality, they tended to retain the patterns of behavior that characterized their age at the time of impediment. I learned to see this in my clinical practice and then also in my private life.

Now and then, when I was discussing something serious with one of the people I worked with, their entire yen would shift. I remember in particular one woman about 50 discussing an event that occurred when she was about five. She'd been riding in a shopping cart, which her mother unfortunately left unattended on a slanted road. The cart sped down the road, eventually tipping, spilling out my client, who then ended up in a hospital where she was subjected to the tender mercies of a rather psychopathic nurse.

When she told me this story, her face and her body positioning shifted dramatically. It was as if her five-year-old self was right there in front of me. I learned from this occurrence and many others like it to note very carefully any discontinuities, unpredictability, or oddities in the behavior of others, particularly if repeated, and to observe carefully to determine the age of the spirit inhabiting the misbehaving individual.

Sometimes I could bring that to the attention of the person concerned. Jung recommended giving such partial, immature spirits of possession names to concretize their existence, to find out what they wanted in imaginative discussion, and to allow for clearer conceptualization of their existence.

With regard to maturation, there is a large literature on the development of early aggressive behavior, childhood conduct disorder, adult criminality—all part of the broad class of antisocial personality disorder. In the psychiatric diagnostic terminology, antisocial personality disorder is a pernicious manifestation harming both those who manifest it, as they tend to be impulsive and self-destructive in their attitudes and actions compared to those who have been properly socialized, and posing the substantive danger to the stability of social organizations that criminals and worse clearly pose.

The condition, really a pattern of perception and action, makes itself manifest very early in life and is characterized by both a disheartening stability and longevity, as well as a remarkable resistance to psychiatric or social remediation. There is a subset of children, overwhelmingly male, who when grouped with others of their age tend to bite, kick, hit, and steal. This proclivity, which characterizes about five percent of males, is evident as early as two years of age.

In fact, two-year-olds are the most violent human beings. If you group children in peer groups with others of their age, the two-year-olds manifest the most overt aggression, relying on the compulsion of others to a degree not seen in more mature individuals. Now, two-year-olds are not very dangerous, being small, physically unimposing, and soft. So, even when enraged, they cannot pose much danger either to themselves or others, and they are certainly capable of rage.

There is little behavior more dramatic than a full-fledged two-year-old temper tantrum—arms akimbo, prostrate on the ground, fists and legs pumping and pounding, face red, tears of rage, sometimes accompanied by the remarkable ability to suspend breathing until unconsciousness. If you ever saw an adult manifest such behavior, you would be struck dumb and never forget it. And I have seen that more times than I care to remember.

Clinical research has shown that although these intrinsically aggressive two-year-olds exist, and these are individuals who are perhaps more aggressive than typical, even earlier than two for reasons that may be primarily genetic but may also indicate disturbances in the earliest environment of relationship, most of them are socialized before the age of four—a critical age for the instantiation of such socialization according to the Freudians.

This means that they have developed a superego, an internal representation of the external social order, primarily inhibitory in its effects that forestalls that aggression. This is generally what people assume when they think of self-control—that primordial urges, urges Freud would have associated with the id, that primal repository of animalistic motivation have become subject to social control, compulsion, and repression.

This is not what was posited by the great developmental psychologist Jean Piaget. He had a theory of integration rather than of inhibition. This is a crucially important distinction—a fundamentally vital philosophical distinction with profound implications for our understanding of child development, adult behavior, and social order.

It is of vital importance that this dysregulated and aggressive behavior be brought under control, regardless, for now, of the nature of that control, by the time a child is four. Why it is normal for two-year-olds, in Piaget's terminology, to be egocentric. Imagine that the child maturing from birth to two has a set of developmental requirements in front of him or her.

At birth, the child is a somewhat unspecified set of possibilities rife with potential but lacking integrated control and physical skill. The child has to learn to move with ever greater degrees of precision, gaining the ability to voluntarily move arms and legs and then hands, fingers, and toes as he or she learns to reach and grasp, walk and run, kick and jump.

The child also has to learn to integrate across all those abilities so that he can walk and chew gum, say, at the same time. Simultaneously, he or she has to unify a diverse set of fundamental biologically predicated emotions and motivations—circuits, so to speak—governing goal-directed action, response to damage, danger, and the unknown, food and water intake, temperature regulation, rage, exploration, interpersonal care, and play.

This is an incomplete list, and its details are subject to ongoing debate. It is an error and a logical conclusion, in some sense, of the essentially insistence on the autonomy of the self to assume that these diverse drives and impulses are subject only to inhibition as the individual matures. That there is a battle, in the Freudian sense, between the id and the superego, that all socialization is essentially a consequence of external compulsion, and that the social world is the enemy of autonomy and freedom.

How might the alternative be understood? As the infant matures towards his or her two-year-old self, the various subsystems given at birth and biologically instantiated organize themselves competitively and cooperatively into an integrated hierarchy with a goal, at least implicit, beginning to manifest itself at the pinnacle. That goal is full integration into society and recognition by the others who make up that society of the value and worth of the integrated individual.

Such integration occurs as a consequence of the cooperation and competition that makes up socialization itself. Even breastfeeding is a negotiation. The child has to learn how to latch onto the nipple without biting, without too much fuss, with a certain degree of cooperation. Even in the face of hunger and discomfort, the child is best served not only by its demands but by the impetus to maintain and extend the developing mutual care-based relationship with the mother.

Even those who might doubt such a thing have had ample opportunity to observe, if they care to, the proclivity for children to burst into tears if surrounding children do so and to manifest distress in the face of the distress of their mother or father. That empathy is there very early and is part of what regulates what might be otherwise considered the more basic and self-centered drive of hunger.

The child must also learn how to balance fear with the desire to explore, rage with the wish to maintain social relations, the same applies to exhaustion and the narrow desire to dominate. Most importantly, with the wish to continue playing. By the time a child nears the end of his or her second year of life, what might be described as the internal hierarchical organization has made itself manifest.

The two-year-old is, in some sense, internally consistent enough to be somewhat autonomous and to maintain enough balance across emotions and motivations, which can still be powerfully disruptive to manage long periods of voluntary exploration and self-guided play. But two-year-olds lack the ability to integrate across others. Piaget observed that two-year-olds placed together cannot really share.

This is an average observation. They don't really play together either. Each two-year-old is quite likely to grab and hoard toys for themselves, playing with said toys according to the dictates of their individual imaginations. They are in their own subjective world, so to speak, and are as of yet unable to engage in the true social play characteristic of shared pretense.

Let’s pretend. Their identities are defined subjectively; two-year-olds are egocentric, in the Piagetian terminology. They will insist that the game they have defined and fallen into is the game that must be played, and they will become frustrated and unruly if that egocentric play is disrupted.

Around three, this changes. The properly developing child becomes able to communicate well enough to start to bring his or her own being in line with that of another. One two-year-old might sit beside another, play independently with his truck while his potential partner in play imagines another game with a doll. Now and then they might interact, but without attempting to bring their mutual play worlds together.

Two mature three-year-olds, by contrast, can begin to negotiate a shared play space. This is the beginning both of mature identity, intensely social and thoroughly negotiated in its nature, and of sophisticated social being. One might propose to the other, "You be the daddy and I’ll be the mummy and this can be our house." Each can then adopt that fiction as an identity and play out the interaction.

That exploratory play is the child's primary form of thought, particularly in relationship to identity, and occurs almost entirely in a social space. A well-developed child of three can subordinate his or her impulsive short-term drives to the demands of a larger, more inclusive narrative and can listen and take turns during the game, as well as modifying his or her behavior in response to the ongoing drama of the pretend play.

There is little difference, except in degree, between successfully playing house as a child of three to seven, say, and doing the same as an adult. The basic structure for the cooperation and competition toward a shared end—the establishment of a peaceful, loving, productive, generous, secure, and playful home—makes itself manifest at that early age.

Play is so crucially important to children and so utterly engaging to them because it constitutes a microcosm of the expanded adult social world. The child who, by the age of four, insists that only the identity he has formulated matters and only the game that he wishes to play is to be played will find himself exceptionally unpopular with his four-year-old peers.

This is a complete catastrophe, as the primary agents of socialization for children four years old and older are other children. This means that the child who still uses the strategies of a two-year-old at the age of four, particularly if those strategies involve the violence of that small percentage of two-year-olds who spontaneously manifest aggression, will be unable to make friends.

This means further that he or she will basically be outcast, alone, frustrated, angry, and arguably worse, falling further and further behind comparatively speaking with every passing month and year. The aggressive two-year-old who is still kicking, biting, hitting, stealing, having temper tantrums when frustrated, and who is unable to adopt a negotiated identity is all too frequently a bully, a narcissist, a delinquent when teenaged, and then later, a criminal.

The best predictor of adolescent and adult criminal behavior is childhood conduct disorder, which is characterized precisely by such attributes evident upon further exploration at a very early age. Identity is negotiated, plain and simple, not subjectively defined for all of those who have matured past the level of an egocentric and sometimes violent two-year-old.

Yet our society is increasingly predicated upon the insistence that such egocentric definition of identity must be accepted at face value, with all exceptions to that acceptance punishable by law. There is nothing good about this for anyone. The adolescents who insist that their identity be subjectively defined and who simultaneously toy with a fluid self-description, even at the level of basic sex to say nothing of gender or sexual attraction, appear fixated at the two-year-old level of development.

They are ensconced in a subjective solipsistic world of pretense, which operates independently of the concerns of all others. They insist with all the egocentricity of a two-year-old that their opinion about their identity, regardless of whether that identity constitutes a playable social game voluntarily acceptable to others, is to be regarded as paramount, with all violations marked by what is essentially a temper tantrum.

And with all violators, regardless of intent—another characteristic of two-year-old thought—to be punished as perpetrators. Why might this be? Well, first, children are now being born to adults who are old enough, by historical standards, to be grandparents. Such adults are likely to be more conservative and sheltering than younger parents. They are also possessed of the resources that make optimal deprivation for their children difficult.

If your family is wealthy, why not shield your children from all threat and pain, but therefore also from all necessary challenge? If your family is wealthy, why not give in to every material request and fulfill every whim, particularly if accompanied by an unpleasant emotional outburst easily, if only temporarily, quelled by parental submission?

Second, children are increasingly likely to be only children, and it is highly probable that much of the basic narcissism of the two-year-old, developmentally appropriate at two but not thereafter, is negotiated or even pounded out by siblings who tend to be very intolerant of excess self-absorption and attention-seeking. Third, parents are guilty, in this atomistic Protestant-liberal sense, believing at least implicitly and often explicitly that any restrictions placed on the development of their darling will interfere with his or her happiness, which generally means moment-to-moment emotional stability and even worse, creativity.

As if the relationship between constraint and creative endeavor is negative rather than positive, even though the latter is clearly and demonstrably true. We are also likewise increasingly required to believe and even sometimes actually believe that all social institutions are predicated upon compulsion and the arbitrary expression of power, and that the relationship between the authentic and true individual and the social world is fundamentally antagonistic and something our children must be protected from if they are to develop fully.

This extends even to the point of skepticism about the utility and necessity of so-called competitive games, as if it could be a game at all in most cases without that necessary element of competitive striving toward what is, after all, the point or goal of the game. Fourth, we surround our children with attention-attracting screens from the time they are very young onward through their young lives.

Even when my wife and I had young children and although we were both near 30, we were often the youngest parents with the oldest children. The typical consequence of visiting another couple with kids the same age as ours was their immediate positioning in front of a TV so that they would not disturb the adults for a few hours. The kids should have been tossed, so to speak, into the basement together without anything distracting so that they became bored and frustrated enough to invent their own entertainment, which certainly would have entailed the generation of the spontaneous and mutually engaging drama that constitutes pretend play.

We worry very much about the content that children are exposed to on our ubiquitous personal phones, even more invasive than the TV that everyone worried about for decades. But it's not the content, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out, it's the medium itself. What children are not doing when glued to a screen is a more important determinant of their now too often pathological development than whatever content they might be exposing themselves to.

There is no good evidence, for example, that children who watch more violent stories or play more violent video games are driven towards violence by that content. It is far more likely that kids with a propensity for violence, at age two, say, are unlikely to mature out of that propensity if their salutary play with other children is constantly disrupted by the presence of screens.

Fifth, and perhaps as a consequence of older parents, more resources, and fewer siblings, we radically privilege safety over play, exploration, curiosity, autonomy, and encouragement. This proclivity has been accelerated by the rise of single mother families, as mothers are more likely to be concerned about safety, given the on-average higher levels of threat sensitivity characteristic of women, and less likely to facilitate the forms of play that appear risky in the short term but which have marked advantages in the broader social world and at more sophisticated stages of maturity.

This problem is exacerbated by the broader scale shortage of male primary school teachers, the relative dearth of males in positions that enable the masculine socialization of children, and the high probability that in the case of divorce, primary custody will be awarded to the mother. All of this is made worse by the broad scale of male patterns of child and adolescent care that now characterize our society.

None of this is remotely acceptable, and it is certainly not sustainable. The absence of father-patterned socialization is a complete catastrophe for children, as the clinical developmental literature makes perfectly clear. We have become so deluded in our theories of identity that we now privilege—to use that hated word—the solipsistic self-pronouncement of developmentally delayed adolescents, possessed though they are by the necessity to frantically engage in the kinds of pretend play they should have been encouraged to manifest when transitioning from the age of two to three.

This impulse for pretense, suppressed by eatable helicopter parents, re-emerges with pronounced motivational force and no shortage of moral outrage when interfered with. When those damaged children escape from home to school or university and get enough freedom to embark upon their now terribly delayed journey of maturation, they experiment with their gender identity, even extending that into the world of sheer make-believe.

Hence, all the experiments with animal and fictional identities, in precisely the manner of very young children attempting to find their place in the social world. These attempts at identity development should be viewed with compassion, reflective as they are both of a very disturbed society and, more particularly, of very disturbed childhoods. But that does not mean that the identity claims of exceptionally immature adolescents, buttressed by the idiot intellectuals who purport to serve as teachers and guides, should now come to establish our social norms, let alone our laws.