The Habit of Identity
By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"

In a famous experiment, students were asked to take a lemon home and
to get used to it. Three days later, they were able to single
out "their" lemon from a pile of rather similar ones. They seemed to
have bonded. Is this the true meaning of love, bonding, coupling? Do
we simply get used to other human beings, pets, or objects?

Habit forming in humans is reflexive. We change ourselves and our
environment in order to attain maximum comfort and well being. It is
the effort that goes into these adaptive processes that forms a
habit. The habit is intended to prevent us from constant
experimenting and risk taking. The greater our well being, the
better we function and the longer we survive.

Actually, when we get used to something or to someone - we get used
to ourselves. In the object of the habit we see a part of our
history, all the time and effort we had put into it. It is an
encapsulated version of our acts, intentions, emotions and
reactions. It is a mirror reflecting that part in us which formed
the habit in the first place. Hence, the feeling of comfort: we
really feel comfortable with our own selves through the agency of
our habitual objects.

Because of this, we tend to confuse habits with identity. When asked
WHO they are, most people resort to communicating their habits. They
describe their work, their loved ones, their pets, their hobbies, or
their material possessions. Yet, surely, all of these do not
constitute identity! Removing them does not change it. They are
habits and they make people comfortable and relaxed. But they are
not part of one's identity in the truest, deepest sense.

Still, it is this simple mechanism of deception that binds people
together. A mother feels that her offspring are part of her identity
because she is so used to them that her well being depends on their
existence and availability. Thus, any threat to her children is
perceived by her as a threat to her own Self. Her reaction is,
therefore, strong and enduring and can be recurrently elicited.

The truth, of course, is that her children ARE a part of her
identity in a superficial manner. Removing them will make her a
different person, but only in the shallow, phenomenological sense of
the word. Her deep-set, true identity will not change as a result.
Children do die at times and the mother does go on living,
essentially unchanged.

But what is this kernel of identity that I am referring to? This
immutable entity which is who we are and what we are and which,
ostensibly, is not influenced by the death of our loved ones? What
can resist the breakdown of habits that die hard?

It is our personality. This elusive, loosely interconnected,
interacting, pattern of reactions to our changing environment. Like
the Brain, it is difficult to define or to capture. Like the Soul,
many believe that it does not exist, that it is a fictitious
convention.

Yet, we know that we do have a personality. We feel it, we
experience it. It sometimes encourages us to do things - at other
times, it prevents us from doing them. It can be supple or rigid,
benign or malignant, open or closed. Its power lies in its
looseness. It is able to combine, recombine and permute in hundreds
of unforeseeable ways. It metamorphoses and the constancy of these
changes is what gives us a sense of identity.

Actually, when the personality is rigid to the point of being unable
to change in reaction to shifting circumstances - we say that it is
disordered. One has a personality disorder when one's habits
substitute for one's identity. Such a person identifies himself with
his environment, taking behavioural, emotional, and cognitive cues
exclusively from it. His inner world is, so to speak, vacated, his
True Self merely an apparition.

Such a person is incapable of loving and of living. He is incapable
of loving because to love another one must first love oneself. And,
in the absence of a Self that is impossible. And, in the long-term,
he is incapable of living because life is a struggle towards
multiple goals, a striving, a drive at something. In other words:
life is change. He who cannot change, cannot live.



Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant
Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West
Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician,
Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a
United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and
the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in
The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government
of Macedonia.

Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com






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