Сергей Гладков – The Human Being as a Multilevel System (страница 11)

how does personality arise?

Not as a label.

Not as passport identity.

Not as an unchanging core.

But as a process through which changing experience is still assembled into a story that a person can call his own.

The Feeling of Constancy

In ordinary life, personality seems to be something given.

A person says, "I have always been like this." Or, on the contrary: "I have completely changed." In both phrases, some line is assumed, relative to which one can speak about constancy or change. Even when a person says, "I am no longer the same," he still connects his present self with the one he was before. Otherwise the phrase would lose its meaning.

The feeling of constancy is supported by many things.

The name remains the same. The body changes, but does not disappear instantly. The face ages gradually. The voice keeps its intonations. Close people address the person as one and the same. Documents, photographs, messages, objects, places, and habits create an external line of continuation. Memory connects separate episodes. Language allows them to be told as a story.

But constancy does not mean immobility.

Personality is more like a melody that is preserved through changes of sound than like a stone lying inside a person. A melody may sound faster or slower, in another instrument, with another color, but remain recognizable. Yet if too much is changed, recognition begins to weaken. So it is with a person: he can change and remain himself, but this "himself" requires the holding of connections.

The feeling of constancy appears where changes do not completely break coherence.

A person can go through a move and remain himself if new places gradually become connected with his memory, actions, relationships, and meaning. He can change profession and remain himself if the new role is not simply put on from outside, but included in the story: why it became important, what led to it, what had to be left, what was preserved.

But there are situations where coherence is disturbed more strongly.

After a crisis, a person may say: "I do not understand what I have become." Or: "I cannot return to the old one, but the new one is not here yet." This intermediate state shows that personality does not simply lie inside as a ready-made form. It is held, reconfigured, and sometimes temporarily loses clarity.

Here an important distinction appears.

Personality is not equal to the fact of biological continuation.

The body may continue, but a person may experience the loss of self.

Personality is not equal to a set of character traits.

Traits may remain, but their meaning in a person's life may change.

Personality is not equal to a social role.

A role may disappear, and the person will continue searching for another form of coherence.

Personality is the process of continuous assembly of a coherent story.

This formula does not claim that personality is invented. It says: personality is real as a process, not as an immobile essence.

The idea of a connection between personality and story does not appear out of nowhere. It has long been possible to think about the human being through narrative, memory, biography, role, and self-understanding. But in this book another movement is important. Here, story is not simply the ready-made self telling about itself. It is a way of stabilizing experience. A person becomes himself not because an unchanging hero of the story lies inside him, but because different levels of experience again and again receive a coherent form.

Later this can be stated even more carefully: personality does not exist as a continuous thing that simply passes through time. It is held through a sequence of acts of reconfiguring subjective continuity. In each such act, experience receives connection again: attention is distributed, memory selects significant traces, language names what is happening, meaning holds direction, the body and relationships return to the person a feeling of continuation.

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