Humanism and Human Extensions

Psychoanalysis is predicated on the ancient dictum that we need to know ourselves, while humanism emerged to counterbalance behavioristic and psychoanalytic reductionism. Psychoanalysis gave birth to depth psychology and humanism, moving beyond seeing a patient as an objectification of symptoms, created methods through which we could understand the phenomenal world of the experiencing person, as Carl Rogers has said. Both orientations, however disparate in some respects, do, nonetheless, converge in important ways. Both admonish that an unexamined life is, indeed, an empty life and, as the philosopher said, not worth living. Valuable living is conscious living, that is, living in the light of awareness.

Self-knowledge delivers us from the sometimes tyrannical forces beyond our conscious awareness, enabling us to more fully, freely, and with intentionality direct our lives. Knowing who we are renders us more mindful, that is, better able to comprehend what we are experiencing, thus increasing the likelihood of our making informed judgments about life’s challenges. Moreover, this understanding predisposes us toward self-reflection, which leads to what Ernest Becker has called “a progressive freedom of reactivity.” This self-reflection makes us uniquely human and, if engaged properly, positions us to consciously choose what we react to and how we will frame those reactions.

When people avoid this inner work, they foreclose their potential for happiness and love, as Erich Fromm reminds us. And, when we love insufficiently, we begin to substitute in sometimes inappropriate, extreme, and self-destructive ways. A common substitution style is creating artificial self-extensions, with which we overidentify, and sometimes exchange for aspects of our own identity. The more anxious we are, Becker says, the more we invest in self-extensions, until our lives become organizations of tools and machines and collections of things that define who we are.

It is easy to overidentify with almost any self-extension, obviating the inward journey. Children can be narcissistic self-extensions, for example, as can property, money, collectibles, clothing, causes, automobiles, or any other artifact. Granting some cross-cultural variations, televisions, computers, and telephones are now virtually universal self-extensions. But, if people fail to sufficiently self-reflect by focusing on their tools, will our species fall victim to what we have decided not to know? Might we ultimately relinquish the authorship of our personal and collective lives until we reach the point at which the car begins to drive the driver?

In his 1973 seminal work, Ivan Illich warned us about these very problems. He cautioned against relying too much on our tools rather than on each other, and said that any tool not “convivial” with human nature will become destructive. Illich is as accurate today as he was three decades ago, since our technologies far outstrip most people’s ability to manage them. Examples of the price we pay are all around us. Do physicians value patient input as much as their machines and pharmaceuticals? Is the nurse, watching a dying patient’s vital signs on a remote computer, engaged in behavior just as important as being with that dying person? Do we trust the cashier’s ability to deduce the correct change without checking the computer? Have we not wondered why, when a television show is virtually meaningless by any objective standard of personal growth, some people become irrational when interrupted during their viewing? In these situations, is the driver really driving the car?

Perhaps I overstate my case that people are moving toward internal desiccation. Consider, before deciding, that people can order virtually anything from a computer, have it delivered by a stranger, and never leave the house. When “Y2K” survival plans were discussed recently, the issue was clear: if the computers fail, perhaps nothing will work, life as we know it will stop. We realize from daily experience that when the computers are down, students cannot register for courses, online research stops, business transactions halt, and e-mail communication is interrupted. Machine-intensive lifestyles are replacing person-centered reality.

I am concerned about the numerous seductive alternatives to the quiet solitude Anthony Storr writes about. I am concerned about many other things as well: that it is easier to write an e-mail than talk with someone because an e-mail does not require “wasting time” on human factors; that some of my students mentally create “love relationships” with cyber partners who may or may not be who

Page 9

they say they are; that “computer addiction,” “television addiction,” “telephone addiction,” and other diversionary strategies testify to empty lives; that we are putting computers in every classroom when our students cannot read when they graduate from high school; that online time may be correlated with underdeveloped social skills, loneliness, anxiety, and depression; that academics are computerizing courses so sensitive that they require classroom processing for balanced interpretation; that we will suffer a greater void than before we created our tools, begin to see each other as expendable cogs in a wheel that has assumed a life of its own and, in the process, lose what it means to be most deeply human.

Can psychoanalysis and humanism be helpful with these problems? At a minimum, they urge us to connect deeply with ourselves, to learn to be with ourselves and understand who we are, without distraction or substitution. This internal connection constitutes the foundation for personal unfolding and relatedness with others. This is the wisdom of the ages and is verified by modern psychological research. Our tools cannot fulfill this need, and the need is unequivocal. It is in this self-searching that we find our center of values, as Rollo May tells us, without which we wander through life in a state of meaninglessness. Without values, we move by whim, and whimsical living is impulsive living, escapist living. We must decide what we care about. But, where shall we look for guidance? Psychoanalysis and humanism will, as the future unfolds, certainly continue to cry out for a return to the inner search, but they also offer a perceptual framework that helps us remain focused on what is important, since the future most assuredly challenges us in fundamental ways.

Perhaps Alfred Adler sets the stage best when he says, “The supreme law [of life] is this: the sense of worth of the self shall not be allowed to be diminished.” In the face of all our exciting new tools, then, in the future we cannot forget who the autonomous agent of life actually is: the human person, individually and in concert with other persons. Excessive preoccupation with self-extensions is a defense against knowing who we are because it diverts us from pondering the deepest elements of life and death.

As we consider what truly satisfies, we come to understand that creatively expressing who we are generates a deep fulfillment that speaks to our need for increasingly greater potentiation, as Maslow and May both argue. As we reach inside and unlock the parts of ourselves that tell us, honestly, who we are, we are emboldened in our attempts to recall the split-off aspects of ourselves, feeling much more complete for having done so. Then, feeling more complete, we are free to decide which tools to use and which to reject. We have gained perspective.

We would benefit from anxiety-reduction in the future. Early analysts conceptualized the “false self” as a primitive survival strategy, but we know it can become a lifestyle. If we create destructive fictions, to use Adler’s term, we essentially live a lie. We lose track of who we are. We pretend too much, substitute honesty for comfort, tools for authorship, and remove ourselves from ourselves. Creating a chasm between our real self and our fictional self can lead to neuroses and otherwise fractured lifestyles. Pretending that an easier life is a better one, or that it is acceptable for machines to determine our destiny, or that we love someone on the other side of an invisible monitor is, in short, neurotic. To build our lives on such self-deception cannot lead to happiness, and we will not know peace.

In conclusion, we are living in a time when knowing ourselves — and, indeed, caring about knowing ourselves — may well be in peril. Hence, psychoanalytic and humanistic understandings of who we are may be rendered secondary to the titillation our most novel self-extensions afford. In light of this, psychoanalysis and humanism are far from unnecessary expendables with nothing to offer; rather, they may well be among the few remaining signs that caution us not to lose ourselves, and not to forget who we are. After all, if, in the end, we confer on our machines the power to control our lives, while failing to attend to what it means to be complete, self-directed, and fully conscious persons, what kind of world are we saying we wish to create? If, finally, we do not know who we are, who (or what) shall we then become?

Page 10