Notes on the Symbolic Self

Notes on the Symbolic Self

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” –Joan Didion

      The symbolic self has been proposed as an evolutionary adaptation unique to the human species.  Evolutionary psychologists have proposed that symbolic self-awareness likely emerged from previous and less sophisticated self-referential capacities including subjective self-awareness and objective self-awareness.  It follows then that mere subjective self-awareness leads a self-concept—a feature shared throughout the animal kingdom.  Objective self-awareness is observed higher level organisms including some primates, allowing for an objectified self.  Human self-awareness is an achievement of a highly sophisticate self-referential system that can be conceived of and communicate in symbolic form.  Sidikes and Skowronski distinguish its key features:

1.       Form an abstract cognitive representation through language

2.       Communicate this symbolic self to other organisms and negotiate content with others to establish personal and social relationships

3.       Set social and achievement goals that prompted by the symbolic self far into the future

4.       Perform goal guided behavior

5.       Evaluate the outcome of these goals and whether behavior have fulfilled relevant goals

6.       Link behavioral outcomes to feelings toward the symbolic self (pride—achievement, embarrassment over failure)

7.       Defend the symbolic self against events and ideas through several strategies, such as avoidance of negative feedback, derogation of negative evaluators, rejection of negative feedback, and self-deception.

       I won’t go into all of the literature that this was drawn from, nor can I address the massive amounts of literature that have focused on number 7 over the past three decades.  1 and 2 seem like no brainers. 3-6 are fruitful areas of study, noteworthy because they are exceedingly complex and therefore prone to behavioral outcomes at odds with goals.  Human beings are routinely bad at judgment and evaluation of performance in pursuit of stated goals.  When we are bad at performance we tend to look for ways to change the rules of the game, or decide that the goal was not really what we desired.  Why? Because pride feels better than embarrassment.  There is certainly a protective advantage to number 7 that contributes to self-esteem.  The optimism piece that I posted previously illustrates how to evaluate and modify negative thinking patterns.  We are prone to those, especially in the face of repeated obstacles. Unfortunately, the conditions under which we currently live seem to present obstacle after obstacle.

      The mind evolved from a set of constraints that is very different than today, and this is particularly important to remember.  As noted above, it appears that evolution has provided this unique capacity of symbolic self-awareness that contributed greatly to the establishment of human societies.  But, what now that we have human societies, and what questions should we ask about awareness?  Cognitive psychologists and behavioral economists continue to poke holes in our notions of what we believe we are aware.  When we talk of evolutionary adaptation there is a tendency to think of it as an unmitigated success.  We risk the naturalistic fallacy.  Success as species does not entail that everything about the species is advantageous. This was best articulated in by college Biology professor—natural selection’s chief motive is reproduction and yet we have the scrotum, half of the species reproductive capacity is housed outside of the human body, which makes you question whether thousands of years of humor was the goal.

     This is also why you should laugh at anyone who makes social Darwinist arguments.  Natural selection explains the flourishing of our society in a competitive environment, not treating the less fortunate and poor as subhuman, lazy, or lacking whatever virtue you can conceive to explain your own success.  But, hey at least natural selection equipped you with the cognitive mechanisms to rationalize, otherwise you would subsist in a constant state of despair over the actual conditions of the world.

     This is particularly important for the present circumstances we face. If you look at number seven you can see the conditions of almost any outgroup that has taken on a type of cultish devotion: avoidance of negative feedback, derogation of negative evaluators, rejection of negative feedback, and self-deception.  And here you have the recipe for cognitive dissonance.  I am increasingly convinced that trauma and anxiety, both individual and community, drive these conditions.  It would make sense that protective evolutionary mechanisms would become salient in the most stressful conditions.  It would make sense that a community that has been traumatized would move toward inclinations for self-protection. And if you extrapolate further you have the conditions for tribalism that have beset our culture. 

     The problem—none of them are adequate enough to be perfectly true.  In the case of trauma it is true that the event is over, even if your brain responds otherwise.  In the community it may be true that the economy does not work, crime is pervasive, etc—but this is not true everywhere and all the time. (the notes on optimism—permanent, personal, pervasive are antecedents for helplessness).  It is very difficult for someone to recognize this when their lived experience tells them otherwise.  It takes a certain flexibility in thinking to transcend this.  The symbolic self is the mechanism through which we make meaning of the world.  It is far from perfect.  If it was, none of us would make mistakes.

The purpose of the past writings, and the ones that will follow are to serve as a template for a map out of suffering.  For the purpose of consistency and because it is an essential point, I will reiterate that this worked for me.  I have no idea if it will work for you.  You will have to find your own map.  What I can share is that years of experience in counseling, my academic work in the past three to four years, personal experiences, and the level of support that I have received from others have allowed me to be self-reflective enough to intuit, apply, and note what worked and what did not. 

     One of the other great insights that neuroscience has revealed in the past decade is just how much of the memory is a creative process.  As it turns, there is a creative process that takes place when we retrieve memory.  Cognitive psychologists have recognized that this one of the distinguishing traits of human beings.  It is not that we are alone in the animal kingdom with the capacity for creative problem solving, but we are in the extent to which we can use this capacity to manipulate our environment to suit our purposes.  The symbolic self allows us to do this on such a remarkable scale that it would almost certainly position our species for evolutionary success. 

      A second and equally important achievement in cognitive and evolutionary psychology was the recognition of the modularity of the mind.  (This is extensively reviewed in Why Buddhism is True) This might be a bit dated, I am not super fond of the term, and neither is the author.  I think that network is a better conceptualization.  Modularity lends itself to the old notions of phrenology, and while it is true that certain functions correspond to regions of the brain, I believe that it is much more likely that when we talk about mind, it is the collection of multiple nodes in multiple regions of the brain that contribute to an activity that we interpret as the self at any given moment in time. 

The huge advantage of consciousness is that we have the capacity to recognize this and attend to it.  This was one of the single most important insights that helped me in my own suffering.  Thoughts and feelings think themselves, a great deal of human mental activity is unconscious and has to be, and all I have is the capacity from moment to moment to choose what I attend to. The mind is easily drawn to autopilot, because a vast collection of nodes firing away at any given moment competes for attention. This is what rumination does, pulls you away from the moment to attend to other things. 

      Rumination is a signal to the mind that something is not resolved.  This is exponentially compounded in cases of trauma, grief, and despair.  It is exhausting, but it is by no means a hopeless situation.  The insight that helped get me out of this obstacle was that I had the ability to select which module/network I wanted active.  I would occasionally wake up from an ugly dream, that I had no recollection of, just that lingering feeling of dread.  I simply told myself that this was not the network that I wanted in charge.  I want to stress the word “simply” because the insight was simple.  It was by no means simple to remind myself of this countless times throughout the day.  It is the practice of the action in this insight that helped.

     Taken together, what I am hoping to hammer home here is that the symbolic self is a powerful module that evolution has provided to protect us.  It is by no means perfect, because human beings are nowhere near perfect.  Under normal conditions we make thinking errors when presented with choices. Stress increases the likelihood, simply placing people under a time constraint increases the likelihood of making less than optimal choices.  Massive amounts of stress over prolonged periods makes it even more difficult.  Modern life has left us with enough stress to buckle any given day of the week.  And these conditions are draining, which increases suffering, which feeds isolation, and makes us identify so strongly with the self that it is hard to escape.  At the group level—we are the aggrieved, we are under attack, we are the persecuted.  At the individual level—it’s not that this is necessarily untrue, it is necessarily incomplete.

     It is not an inescapable position.  I am not suggesting that we can abandon the symbolic self, it is who we were and what we’ve carried, and it protects us in countless ways.  But, I intentionally use the word “were” because it’s not who we are.  Who we are is the process unfolding, moment by moment.  We are getting to the heart of what Maslow sought in the psychology of being.  Positive psychology has returned to this footing and holds great promise. One of the great therapeutic advancements in the treatment of trauma has been the development of Narrative Therapy.  Neuroscience and cognitive psychology have confirmed the creative processes that undergird memory.  Our great human capacity for creativity is also our remedy. Positive psychology helps to drive a better narrative.

      The stoics believed that the obstacle was the way, and sometimes the symbolic self is the obstacle. The symbolic self is the residue of living, a narrative for where we were.  If we are dissatisfied with that narrative, we have the option for writing a new narrative.  No easy feat, but we can learn to be better as with any skill. The symbolic self is the autobiographer, and has a gift for fiction. And, the lines between fiction and autobiographical elements has never been solid. 

To recap:

1.       The symbolic self was product of evolution selected because it conferred advantages to the species.

2.       It is not you, it is a mental representation of you

3.       The mind is a product of unconscious and conscious activity in a multiplicity of networks that compete for attention

4.       We have the capacity to attend to and manipulate mental schema (creativity)

5.       This function allows us to write new narrative(s)

6.       The world is neutral, it is not default negative, but we are prone to remembering and encoding negative information much more intensely and thoroughly than positive information

7.       Cognitive strategies (CBT, DBT, REBT) can help us to correct thinking errors, positive psychology allows us to build the pathways out.