Guy Gladstone

Identity is something most people take for granted. Looking again at the first two letters of the word and then the remaining six: first comes the I, the subject, the ego (and as Freud wrote ‘first and foremost a bodily ego’). Next the Id (Freud again, the unconscious) or at a push ID, (prove who you are!). Finally we have six letters denoting an integrated whole – entity. This is more than wordplay, identity is fundamental to therapy and growthwork.

Who am I? This is usually the first koan or question addressed in the Enlightenment Intensive, with the objective of having a literally direct experience of who you are. This is spiritual work at the ground floor. Many people’s most intense experience of identity or heightened sense of who they are, has come about in a state of bodily ecstasy arrived at through sex, dance, a spiritual practice, hallucinogenic drugs or a communal ritual, to name some of the main routes. Often such moments occur after much preliminary preparation, with little idea of what is in store.

Speaking as someone who identifies as his body and with his body, I am my body. Body, my sense and sensing, are a large part of my identity. Recognising a baseline of genetically determined constitution, I am also a history of relationships and events giving a specific shape to my evolving body. For me bioenergetics has provided a medium for exploring that ongoing embodied identity.

Not everyone lives their body, its sensations and emotions, as the core of their identity. Some people’s identity is more grounded in their mind or even spirit. Such individuals will tend to live their body as an appendage to or so-to-speak afterthought of their mind or shadow of their spirit. Whichever way, identity will be composed of identifications, values and personal meanings, the invisible stuff, that uniquely differentiates one person from the next.

I have spent many hours in therapy, analysis and growthwork working through my disguysing, taking ‘guy’ here in this sentence as symbol of the core of me, with an identity extended by identifications, some enlarging that identity (retainable), some diminishing it (ideally discardable). For example, I have discovered that my occupation as a psychotherapist, with which I identify and by which I am identified, hides a deeper reluctance to care and share without a relationship structured by a role. This difficulty has roots in experience before I was two.

Identity concerns who is who. Most people will have had an experience of mistaken identity, of being taken for someone else. This can be amusing, freaky or even have tragic consequences. There are also very rare instances of a person having no continuous sense of who they (literally) are – clinically described as multiple personality disorder. Then again there is the deliberate assumption of another identity, to be taken for someone one is not. This may be a matter of life or death, say for a war criminal or a refugee. Here, and this is a reminder that only surface aspects of adult identity are exchangeable, identity is established via a new passport and/or supporting papers.

But more usually identity is jeopardised when as children we make compromises in the hope of being acceptable to those who matter most to us, a process many users of the Open Centre will be familiar with, as they reevaluate and understand the threat of loss of love from those figures has passed. A distinction needs to be made here between growthful roles that evolve organically as part of the human developmental thrust towards increasing differentiation (the self-actualising process) and the much earlier development of a false self that seriously compromises an individual’s identity. Psychodrama can facilitate sorting out this distinction, while also catering for the fact that most people have fantasies of being someone else while lacking a safe arena in which to play these out.

Groups as much as individuals can suffer identity crises. Recently I had first hand experience of a small grass roots organisation I am involved with as a supervisor, the Everyman Project (the identity of the group in this instance hingeing on men’s dedication to working with violent and abusive men), being faced with an attempt at incorporation (now seen off) by a large organisation, a section of the YMCA. This entailed ignoring the identity of the E.P. and substituting other agendas and working practices. Psychotherapeutic insights proved valuable political tools in deconstructing the moves by the big to eat the small.

There are global trends which can be read as either chronic low grade erosions or critical extensions of identity. Both community and ecological identities are at stake. Such trends create a new context to the individual quest for identity and emphasise that identity can no longer be taken for granted. In this respect perhaps apathy is more problematic than paranoia. Where identity is concerned both feeling and thinking and the personal and political need to be joined up, connected.

© Guy Gladstone