Selfie: How the West Became Self-Obsessed

by Will Storr

insult and crave good reputation. ‘The rest of your life is, I think, motivated by feeling good about ourselves and avoiding negative emotions, which are about being ostracized or rejected or devalued,’ he said. ‘If you look at our daily activities, we earn wages to bring an income. But once we’ve satisfied our basic food, housing and environmental needs, we’re motivated to pursue validation from other people. And that, of course, is because of this need to keep our belief in our self-worth.’ Our lack o...

When we’re doing our job, for example, we often ...

Sartre’s thoughts on the waiter were published in 1943, but today’s social psychologists are still interested in the notion that the self warps and morphs depending upon what it believes is expected of it. We have a self for work and a self for home, a self for lovely restaurants and a self for roadside diners; a self for Twitter and a self for Facebook; a self for the plumber and a self for the mayor; a morning self and an evening self, a Monday self and a Sunday self, a self of the business suit and a self of the dressing gown.

Many of us complain that when we visit our parents for family events, such as Christmas, we

seem to helplessly revert to our childhood selves. This is likely because Mum and Dad are treating us as the person we were.

As we travel through our days and lives, then, we’re being continually changed by the situations we’re in and the personalities that orbit us. The people around us create a kind of psychic mould that we expand into. ‘This notion that we have a coherent self with integrity is slightly undermined by the fact that under different circumstances in different events we behave in totally different ways,’ Bruce told me. ...

A team led by psychologist Professor Mark Snyder examined some of these effects in a fascinating stud...

beauty changes people’s behaviour – and how that change in behaviour then changes us. Fifty-one men...

intercom system. Each man was given a Polaroid of a woman and told (falsely) that it was of the person they’d be chatting to. Some of the Polaroids were of notably attractive women and others were not. Analysis of the conversations that followed indicated that the men appeared to engage with the women under the power of the cultural belief that ‘beautiful people are good people’ – that old Greek idea of kalokagathia. Even though the photos were fake, when the conversations were finished, the men perceived the ‘pretty’ women as being more friendly, likeable and sociable. But the really fascinating ...

Other researchers have found that when people falsely believe they’re conversing with someone lonely, they tend to behave less sociably towards them and with greater levels of hostility – which, of course, changes the behaviour of the lonely person for the worse, creating an unhappy feedback loop.

Although we obviously have some awareness of our shifting guises and behaviour, we’re only usually conscious of them when another person points them out, or when the shifts are so flagrant they can’t be ignored. However, we’re mostly unaware of the constant state of flux that our self is in. It’s not even as if we ordinarily have any proper control over it. According to Bruce, it’s the environments that really do the switching, not us. And it’s mostly unconscious. And it’s not only the social environment that changes us. The psychologists

Dan Ariely and George Loewenstein explored our multiple nature in an unforgettably dark experiment on twenty-five male Berkeley undergraduates. They were asked to predict how they’d behave in a serie...

The study didn’t only suggest we have radically different moral codes depending on our shifting states of self. More unsettlingly, it showed how poor we can be at predicting our own behaviour. We’re not one person, then, but many, and the people we are can be strangers to each other.

All of this, needless to say, happens beneath our conscious awareness, whilst the left-brain interpreter narrates all our actions, reassuring

us that we are the free choosers of our behaviour, when we’re probably not.

What all this work suggests is that a foundational idea of the Humanistic Psychologists is simply wrong – there is no authentic core to us, no essential, happy and perfect version of the self that can be exposed by stripping back the repressing expectations of society. In fact, the self is modular. We’re made up of many competing selves, all of which are equally ‘us’, and which fight for dominance. Different versions of us emerge depending on where we are, what we’re doing, who we’re with and how aroused we happen to be. Our sense of who we actually are turns out to be critically dependent on what we believe others think of us. This brings to min...

The idea of the Looking-...

exposes the social perfectionist in every one of us. We all judge ourselves by looking into the eyes of other people an...

But it also exposes a terrible danger in the concept of the encounter group. If a person – especially a psychologically vulnerable person – is surrounded by others who are abusing them, perhaps calling them ‘weeper’, ‘shithead’, ‘mindfucker’ or ‘fake’, then t...

It also exposes the inherent cruelty in the hard form of personal responsibility that gained traction at Esalen and remains common today. The humanistic psychologists were convinced the authentic self was not only real but perfect and full of latent potential – only 10 per cent of your brain is in use! But if it’s true that we hold within us all the power we need to succeed, then it naturally foll...

that runs backwards from today’s age of perfectionism, through Esalen’s Will Schutz and Fritz Perls, and directly back again to the faith healers and Mind Cure proponents of nineteenth-century America such as Smith Wigglesworth and Mary Baker Ed...

Perhaps it was the problem that was the consistent thing – that was the facet of my self that seemed to have remained stubbornly unchanged. But what was it? Ah, well, but my left-brain interpreter had a new name for that now, thanks to my conversation with Professor Gordon Flett – neurotic perfectionism.

We’re those worried and anxious people who have a ‘massive discrepancy’ between who we are and who we need to be. We make these sweeping generalizations, about ourselves, so if we’re not efficient at a particular thing, it’s a failure of the entire self. And with this comes a lot of self-loathing.

I spend quite a lot of my life in a state of self-loathing. I’m not sure why people don’t admit to this more commonly, because

I’ve no doubt it is common. Perhaps it’s because it (not quite accurately) implies a level of self-pity, and self-pity is a quality that’s uniquely unattractive. The feeling of angry repulsion it can inspire when we come across it in others is surely telling. Our storytelling brains want the selves it meets to act as heroes, optimistically rising to the challenges of life. When they encounter the opposite, they react viscerally, as if they’ve come across something infectious. But this is a problem. When people feel suicidal it often comes with feelings of self-loathing and, because of this cultural taboo, we don’t want to admit them. We certainly don’t want to talk about it to anyone, especially if we’re prone to perfectionistic thinking and a heightened sensitivity to signals of failure. The way we feel about ourselves is shameful. And in the silence that’s pushed upon us, that shame and self-loathing grow. It seems to me that self-loathing is

what happens when our brain’s hero-making capacities become defective. When we’re happy, we feel good about ourselves, successfully pursuing our meaningful projects, making our lives and the world around us better. We’re distracted from the truth of our situation, which is that we have personal flaws that are deep and many, that our lives are ultimately pointless, that we live in a realm of chaos and injustice, and that we and e...

I realize, of course, that ‘nihilistic’ thoughts such as these are often dismissed as ‘adolescent’. But isn’t this also telling? It’s in our teenage years that the curtains briefly open on these depressing

truths, and then we’re swept up into the compelling plots of the grown-ups, with all the thrills and responsibilities they bring. Adolescence is the break between the delusions of childhood and the delusions of adulthood, a time when the projects of one phase of life have broken down and the next have yet to emerge. And in that gap we glimpse the horrors that our storytelling brains work so hard to keep from us. I wish my storytelling brain worked better. I want some more of that delusion.

Perhaps the thing that’s remained consistent is the low self-esteem that underlie...

The next morning, I began. In accordance with Fritz Perl’s gestalt method, Paula had instructed many of us to inhabit, fully and without reserve, the version of ourselves that we feared the most.

Schutz was a celebrity. The hit film Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, starring the unhappily spanked Natalie Wood, satirized the Californian hot-tubs of personal transformation (‘The truth is always beautiful!’).

relationships; little Esalen phrases – ‘I love your energy’; ‘Go into the pain’; ‘I hear you’; ‘Be real’. It had its cauldron on this Big Sur cliff. But at the Institute itself, things were changing. In the media, founders Murphy and Price began downplaying the promises of catharsis and radical transformation that had become its trademark. The programme of lengthy residential courses, which had seen some of Esalen’s most berserk scenes, was halted. ‘Many reasons were given for ending it,’ writes Anderson, ‘but the overwhelming reason seemed to be that altogether too many of the people in it ended up committing suicide.’ The deaths involved men and women who had been in Esalen’s constellation,

near

and far. Whilst it would be wrong to blame the Institute directly for what was happening, it was nonetheless troubling. In 1968, Marcia Price, who’d been a patient and a lover of Fritz, was found in a Volkswagen camper, which was parked on the grounds, having shot herself through the head with a rifle. After her death, footage was released of a Gestalt session in which Fritz had taunted her with her own suicide threats. Another vulnerable woman mocked by Fritz was a psychologist named Judith Gold. She’d confessed to having had suicidal thoughts and was ‘degraded aloud and mocked by Fritz’, according to witness Jacqueline Doyle. She left the group ‘distraught’. The next morning Judith Gold drowned herself in the baths. Back in the...

grief being expressed. Just “Ach, people who play games.” You know, his way.’ In 1970 an attendee named Sunshine shot himself in a barn. Then a Harvard graduate named Nick Gagarin, who’d written about Esalen several times in the Harvard Crimson before attending a four-month residency, shot himself at his father’s house. Another former member of that programme, Jeannie Butler, apparently threw herself into the Pacific: her clothes were found on the edge of the cliff. Art Rogers, the shy psychotherapist who was chased and attacked in Schutz’s group, would also go on to kill himself. And if all that wasn’t enough, like some strumming, soothsaying demon, Ch...

Far more dangerous than that was the fact that what Rogers, Perls and Schutz had unwittingly created was a perfect environment in which to generate a species of agony whose true nature was not well understood at the time. It’s only in recent years that scientists have begun to properly understand what’s known as ‘social pain’, which is that which springs from rejection and ostracism.

Kip was a social scientist who’d been looking for a way to study ostracism. They’d given him a brilliant idea. He decided to recreate the situation in the lab. He’d record what happened when a person was engaged by two strangers in a catch game before suddenly being frozen out. ‘It had an extraordinary impact on them,’ he told me. ‘It affected

their self-esteem, their sense of control over their environment and what we call their “meaningful existence”, which is whether someone feels acknowledged or invisible. It also affected their anger and their sadness.’ Kip observed some of these experiments through a one-way mirror. ‘They were so powerful I had trouble watching.’ All this undermines the folk truth that ‘names can never hurt me’. They can and they do. ‘People say social pain “is all in your head” and, indeed, it is,’ said Kip, ‘because that’s where you register both physical and social pain.’ (Some researchers, in fact, believe they actually use the same brain networks but, at the time of writing, a dispute has broken out in academia as to the extent of the overlap.) And social pain can be no less painful. ‘Sometimes we’d prefer to experience physical pain than the breakdown of a relationship,’ Dr Giorgia Silani of Italy’s International School for Advanced Studies told me.

There are many different kinds of social pain: embarrassment, betrayal, bereavement, insult, exclusion by a group or individual, loneliness, heartbreak. What they have in common is rejection. Ostracism is a capital assault on the self, sometimes described as ‘psychological death’. (It’s not for no reason that St Benedict considered ‘the cauterizing iron of excommunication’ the ultimate punishment for wayward monks.) The reason we’ve evolved to experience it with such agony is thought to go back to when we roamed the planet in vulnerable tribes.

‘The tribe is providing

you with protection and with food and water,’ said Giorgia. ‘To hunt, you need maybe five or six people. You can’t do it by yourself.’ If you were rejected by the group, back then, it would very probably mean death. This is perhaps why social pain developed: it was an alarm system that told you som...

typically involved in threat response became more active, just as they did in Giorgia’s tests. But when that threat was made to a stranger, only minimal activity was observed. Other studies, by researchers at China’s Shenzhen University, have indicated that we can struggle to feel empathy for those who we think of as having a higher status than us. This effect, of course, is made manifest in the fact that we often feel entitled to be extremely bullying and unfair to politicians, CEOs and celebrities who are, after all, no less human than we are. Once moral outrage is triggered, so is our thirst for revenge. Our use of ostracism as a weapon of assault is with us as much today as it’s always been, of course, and the science of social pain suggests it can sometimes feel hardly less brutal than the physical variety. ‘Anthropologists think ostracism was the

foundation of civilization, because fear of it keeps you in line,’ said Kip. ‘But taken too far, it makes everybody too similar to each other. It penalizes diversity and creativity. You end up wanting to get along to such an extreme that you fear expressing anything unique.’ In today’s culture, this effect can be seen often in social media, newspapers and on university campuses. ‘You see it on both sides, from the right and left. There are strong pressures to conform and an immediate response to disrupt or to ostracise people who disagree.’

In the months leading up to his death, in 1970, the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow began worrying about his legacy. He’d been preparing to write a critique of Esalen ‘and its whole chain’. One of the issues he’d become concerned with was self-esteem. Maslow was famous, most of all, for his hugely influential ‘Hierarchy of Needs’, which said that people are motivated to fulfil certain psychological appetites. At the top of his pyramid was ‘actualization’, which was extremely difficult and had, he thought, only been achieved by a few. But just beneath that was ‘esteem’.

‘After several years in California, Carl got so tired of having aspirants arrive at our door with no intention or ability to WORK that he sent out a letter. It said, in fact, “Less self-esteem, please. More self-discipline.”’

EST, which took place over two weekends and combined Esalen-style Human Potential thinking with a sales seminar format more familiar in an earlier period of America’s history. EST was created in 1971 by Werner Erhard, an Esalen graduate and student of both Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, who had also been a fan of a Dale Carnegie course he’d attended.

The Human Potential Movement had posed the Western self a question: if God is inside all of us, then doesn’t it naturally follow that we are all Gods? Now the Western self had given its answer. Marin called his story ‘The New Narcissism’. It described the stunning darkness of Esalen’s conviction that, as gods, all humans have complete responsibility for everything that happens to them,

America’s chief chronicler of culture, Tom Wolfe, would author his own cover story on the subject, this time in New York Magazine. He named Esalen ‘Lemon Session Central’ and described the programmes of Fritz and Schutz in wild and cynical terms. ‘Outsiders, hearing of these sessions, wondered what on earth their appeal was,’ he wrote. ‘Yet the appeal was simple enough. It is summed up in the notion: “Let’s talk about Me.” No matter whether you managed to renovate your personality through encounter sessions or not, you had finally focused your attention and your energies on the most fascinating subject on earth: Me.’ Wolfe’s piece was called ‘The “ME” Decade’.

this feel-good American revolution, in which the interior self was recast as

holy, and took responsibility for everything that happened to it, would turn out to be perfect for the coming times. In the 1970s and 1980s, as the economy underwent new, dramatic changes, the English-speaking nations became feverish with the idea that all of society’s problems, from unemployment to child abuse to domestic violence, could be solved by teaching the people to believe in their authentic, godlike selves. This harsh new world would be no place for ‘fakes’ or ‘shitheads’ or ‘weepers’. Everyone was special, and had what it took to thrive. All they had to do was believe.