Making Identity

And you thought I was just a TOY...I'm YOU!

So sit down and don't read this if you're easily grossed out. How's that for an intro! :D (Thanks to Rebekah for bringing this to our attention on CSPP!)

In "A New Way to Be Mad," an Atlantic article from 2000, Carl Elliott writes about acrotomophilia, a disorder/desire for amputation. Yes, amputation. Elliott's article is fascinating, not least because he takes the discussion farther than the physical ramifications--bleeeech!--into psychology and cultural analysis. Ultimately, he notices how the human body itself has become an identity-creating sphere, even to the point of people cutting off limbs to attain what they see as their "real" identities.

What it suggests is that an identity can be built around a desire. The person you have become may be a consequence of the things you desire.

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And to be honest, haven't surgeons made the human body fair game? You can pay a surgeon to suck fat from your thighs, lengthen your penis, augment your breasts, redesign your labia, even (if you are a performance artist) implant silicone horns in your forehead or split your tongue like a lizard's. Why not amputate a limb?

I'd expand a bit further. Why not engage in lots of premarital coitus because sex with numerous partners defines your identity? Why not abort your child because a child does NOT define your identity? Why not carry someone (or sometwo) else's child as a surrogate because giving others the gift of father/motherhood by using your body as a (as Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban put it) "gestational carrier" defines your identity?

Elliott's analysis shows that with the aid of modern science, not much of anything is off-limits if people can explain their desires as a form of identity creation--or get doctors to sign off on their desires as a recognized form of psychosis.

In each case the true self is the one produced by medical science.

At first I was inclined to think of this language as a literal description. Maybe some people really did feel as if they had found their true selves on Prozac. Maybe they really did feel incomplete without cosmetic surgery. Later on, however, I came to think of the descriptions less as literal than as expressions of an ambivalent moral ideal—a struggle between the impulse toward self-improvement and the impulse to be true to oneself. Not that I can see no difference between a middle-aged man rubbing Rogaine on his head every morning and a man whose discomfort in his own body is so all-consuming that he begins to think of suicide. But we shouldn't be surprised when any of these people, healthy or sick, use phrases like "becoming myself" and "I was incomplete" and "the way I really am" to describe what they feel, because the language of identity and selfhood surrounds us. It is built into our morality, our literature, our political philosophy, our therapeutic sensibility, even our popular culture. This is the way we talk now. This is the way we think. This is even the way we sell cars and tennis shoes. We talk of self-discovery, self-realization, self-expression, self-actualization, self-invention, self-knowledge, self-betrayal, and self-absorption. It should be no great revelation that the vocabulary of the self feels like a natural way to describe our longings, our obsessions, and our psychopathologies.

Of course, it's no great leap to see that all of this "vocabulary of the self" echoes our culture of self-idolatry, and self-idolatry is--quite literally, in so many forms--self-destructive.

It puts a whole new meaning into the words, "Ashes to ashes, dust to dust."