The measure of development will not be how a lot we’ve got modified, however how harmoniously we’ve got built-in our modifications with all of the selves we’ve got been — these vessels of personhood stacked inside the present self like Russian nesting dolls, to not be outgrown however to be tenderly included. True development is immensely tough exactly as a result of it requires befriending the components of ourselves we’ve got rejected or forgotten — what James Baldwin so memorably referred to as “the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are”; it requires shedding all of the inauthentic personae we’ve got placed on in the midst of life below the forces of conference and compulsion; it requires residing amicably with who we’ve got been as a way to absolutely reside into who we will be.
These delicate and sometimes tough fundaments of true development are what the German psychoanalyst Karen Horney (September 16, 1885–December 4, 1952) examined within the closing years of her life in her uncommonly insightful guide Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization (public library).
A technology earlier than Joan Didion noticed that “character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs,” Horney writes:
An individual can develop, within the true sense, provided that he* assumes accountability for himself.
Noting {that a} fulfilled and fulfilling life necessitates “the liberation and cultivation of the forces which result in self-realization,” she considers the well-spring of that final splendid in relation to development:
You needn’t, and actually can not, train an acorn to develop into an oak tree, however when given an opportunity, its intrinsic potentialities will develop. Equally, the human particular person, given an opportunity, tends to develop his explicit human potentialities. He’ll develop then the distinctive alive forces of his actual self: the readability and depth of his personal emotions, ideas, needs, pursuits; the flexibility to faucet his personal sources, the power of his will energy; the particular capacities or presents he might have; the school to specific himself, and to narrate himself to others together with his spontaneous emotions. All this can in time allow him to search out his set of values and his goals in life. In brief, he’ll develop, considerably undiverted, towards self-realization.
Development is simply attainable when the self being realized is the genuine self — “the true self as that central interior pressure, widespread to all human beings and but distinctive in every, which is the deep supply of development.” And but it may be maddeningly tough to discern that actual self beneath the costume of shoulds, beneath the armors donned in our confrontations with actuality, beneath all of the personae realized in the midst of adapting to the world’s calls for and assaults. E.E. Cummings knew this when he noticed that “to be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.” From the second we’re born, we start morphing that tender actual self to the pressures of our emotional and bodily surroundings — a means of adaptation that can be the start of our lifelong means of self-alienation, marked by an ongoing tyranny of shoulds — our mother and father’, our tradition’s, our personal. Horney considers the trail to liberation and self-possession:
All types of strain can simply divert our constructive energies into unconstructive or harmful channels. However… we don’t want an interior strait jacket with which to shackle our spontaneity, nor the whip of interior dictates to drive us to perfection. There is no such thing as a doubt that such disciplinary strategies can achieve suppressing undesirable elements, however there may be additionally little doubt that they’re injurious to our development. We don’t want them as a result of we see a greater chance of coping with harmful forces in ourselves: that of really outgrowing them. The way in which towards this aim is an ever rising consciousness and understanding of ourselves. Self-knowledge, then, will not be an goal in itself, however a method of liberating the forces of spontaneous development.
On this sense, to work at ourselves turns into not solely the prime ethical obligation, however on the identical time, in a really actual sense, the prime ethical privilege. To the extent that we take our development significantly, it will likely be due to our personal need to take action. And as we lose the neurotic obsession with self, as we develop into free to develop ourselves, we additionally free ourselves to like and to really feel concern for different folks.
Development, then, will not be one thing we do just for and by ourselves, however one thing we do for and with others — a testomony to the truth that human connection is “a root-factor of ordinary human growth.” And but we alone are accountable — to ourselves and to others — for enterprise the method and following by with its unfolding. A century after Nietzsche thought of the path to finding yourself, insisting that “nobody can construct you the bridge on which you, and solely you, should cross the river of life,” Horney writes:
Solely the person himself can develop his given potentialities. However, like some other residing organism, the human Individuum wants favorable circumstances for his development “from acorn into oak tree”; he wants an environment of heat to offer him each a sense of interior safety and the interior freedom enabling him to have his personal emotions and ideas and to specific himself. He wants the great will of others, not solely to assist him in his many wants however to information and encourage him to develop into a mature and fulfilled particular person. He additionally wants wholesome friction with the desires and wills of others. If he can thus develop with others, in love and in friction, he can even develop in accordance together with his actual self.
Neurosis and Human Growth is a revelatory learn in its entirety. Complement this fragment with poet, thinker, and activist Edward Carpenter on love, pain, and growth and poet Robert Penn Warren on the paradox of “finding yourself,” then revisit thinker Amélie Rorty on the seven layers of selfhood.
