“How can we be sure that we are not impostors ?”
- Jacques Lacan

Ever since Lacan it has been common enough to understand our Self as being a psychological entity defined reflexively through the image(s) we perceive, interpret or project upon the world. That the image in the mirror of culture, language, media and narrative represents something of an idealised and eternally unattainable complete and perfect symbol of a notional psychological wholeness is of no great contention. We human beings are narrative creatures - we tell stories, we gossip, we collect anecdotes and news items. Our psychological essence is, in many ways, a composite or amalgam of many creatively fabricated, collected and thoroughly plagiarised stories which we manage to weave into one grand narrative of Self. This makes our temporal, time-based existence and our cognitive understanding of this sound very fragmented, partial, incomplete and unsettled. It appears this way because it is incomplete and fragmented and in a fundamental way.

There are various strategies that people may engage in to shore up their fragmented and insecure selves. We can attempt, after the Buddhists, to disassemble and dissolve this frothing narrative complexity that we have drawn as clothing and armour around what in fact really may be nothing at all. We could, after some proponents of the American “ego psychology” school of thought, seek to strengthen the ego and more accurately define it’s boundaries and contents to solidify this self against the ravages of impermanence and incompleteness. My interests tend towards asking the questions of why we conceive that there is a separate, isolated self-in-the-world in the first place which needs dissolving or strengthening as per one’s paradigm of therapeutic thought or spiritual method.

At about this point you may be wondering what the relevance of all of this is. The salience of the concept of negotiating, interpreting and (potentially) restructuring the fragile and yet domineering human psychological ego-self is that we can see everywhere places in which this “narrative self” approximates very closely to a psychotic adherence to text, narrative and doctrine. The internalisation of apparently “complete” and “whole” external narratives towards the ends of strengthening the ego against the ravages of reality and Others is a process which millions upon millions of people engage in every day. Religion, for example, can be a profoundly energising and creative force but at the point where it is placed at the notional centre of one’s being and a text becomes the superimposed story of one’s own life it can be a very dangerous tale to tell. For if we seek to become more solid, more secure and more permanent through placing these texts forcibly at our psychological center we tend to ossify and we are also open to destructive and selfish misinterpretations of these grand narratives. (Of course “fundamentalism” in this context of a narrative self could just as likely mean a devotion to just about anything - football, cars, political ideologies, nationalism, lifestyle; it is not just a matter of religion).

As should have been painfully obvious to most of us since around 1931 - that axiomatic certainty and psychological completeness that so many seek in the logic and security of a grand Truth does not and can not exist. The certainty, completeness and security that people seek and for which they assert religious or political narratives as a panacea - this completeness does not in fact exist. We are all fundamentally incomplete and in a very real sense the world we live in and everything in it represents an incomplete logical system. If the world were not incomplete it could hardly develop and change and we could hardly exercise in any sense free will or choice.

The stories we tell and those we adopt as our truths (or capital-T Truth) are in effect the mirror(s) in which we see our selves and through which we understand our place in the world and critical reflections on the topic such as this essay are little more than dust on this mirror. I personally feel that (just as was apparent to Hui Neng) there is in a very special sense no mirror (- no self) upon which this dust may accumulate in the first place. We should embrace incompleteness and openness and accept the imperfection of ourselves. It is a much healthier way of life than to live in a fantasy of perfection and then seek to destroy others when they do not meet up to our impossible expectations of them or if their story differs from our own.

This article originally published here on Issues Beyond Borders group blog.