Searching for the Self: Classic Stories, Christian Scripture, and the Quest for Personal Identity

by Adrian T. Smith

Facebook. Twitter. Email. Voicemail. Feel overwhelmed? Join the club. Kenneth Gergen (a psychologist) coined two terms that describe the disorientation felt in the electronic village. “Multiphrenia” (i.e., schizophrenia on steroids); “the Saturated Self.”658 Our identity gets molded by two-way traffic: stories we tell and stories we hear in daily social interactions. When the quantity of that traffic increases exponentially, and the kind of traffic diversifies pluralistically, the self-image equivalent of a multi-car pileup looms ahead. Hardcore postmoderns go one step beyond Gergen, and affirm (or celebrate?) the death of the stable self. “Rather than cementing an identity as an ontology of the person . . . [we] start from the assumption that narratives form something like a playground—a ground that allows us to test out identity categories.”