How much of you is you? Identity and the human Psyche.

Reading up on the founding fathers of psychology, I rediscovered some interesting thoughts from Carl Jung. In essence he asked the question: how much of you is really you and in consequence, how much of you is really society and its stories that work through you (which he refers to as the collective unconscious). It dawned on me that Jung was indirectly as much a sociologist as a psychologist, and it immediately triggered the question to assess for myself how much of me is really ‘me’. Which values and statements can I consider to be genuinely ‘mine’ and not implanted by society??I didn’t find an easy answer to that question. The more I probed the more it seemed that everything I believe and stand for is somewhere, somehow implanted by my society, my family, its culture, and its values.

?It became clear that I constructed a ‘self’ with stories and plotlines. All the quotes with which I would describe my personality: ‘I am forever learning, ‘, ‘I rebel against authoritarianism’, ‘I strive for impact’, ‘I value personal integrity and moral courage’. All those self-views … were they ‘me’ or just societal values from others that helped me to ‘create’ an identity? Would the list be identical if I was born and raised in Japan, or would there be a different list of statements and values?

?The stories in our society, what we measure, what we value, what we care for, … they are the ingredients with which every person ‘creates’ his worldview and his identity. That notion triggers questions. Am I (merely?) an eclectic combination of stories of others? If stories cocreate us, can I contribute to the plot? Which story would I push? For, am I not as much a product of stories as an originator of new ones?

?Those questions made me acutely aware of the importance of what we call ‘framing’. Framing is the ultimate story. It is the underlying meta-message of every plot, the in-between-the lines-message. Which frames should we use when addressing an issue? How should we frame climate concerns, political agendas, or personality traits? Frames matter! They define us, more, they create us, literally. So being critical about our frames is important.

Politicians have long discovered the power of such frames. Consider the NVA, a separatist conservative faction in Belgian parliament. To push their separatist agenda, they initially highlighted money transfers from the North (Flanders region) to the South (Walloon region) to advocate a nation split. The thing is, that frame didn’t really mobilize. In fact, money transfers are a very normal thing in civilized societies (and happen within Flanders as well obviously). Adults care for the young, working people for the retired, the healthy for the sick: that is called solidarity and it has been in some shape or form part of all modern societies.

?So, the party reconsidered its plotline and reframed it towards ‘two democracies that need to be responsible for their own decisions’. That already sounds much more like a ‘no-brainer’ frame, that is, it seems like a self-evident truth that is more difficult to counter. (Although obviously their logic applies within Flanders as a region as well: that is, also in and by itself an aggregation of several different democratic provinces and cities with different majorities. Hence one might again question why Flanders itself shouldn’t be split into two or three separate democracies or even join the Netherlands for that matter?) Just like any other frame, also the new and improved version is flawed when we scrutinize it. But the thing is: we don’t! Good frames ‘sound’ logical.

?Since we use these frames to build our societies and (through that) our identities we should pay more attention to them. How many of the frames you use are really yours? How many of the frames you advocate have you really thought over and questioned? It is surely worth the question because before you know it, you might get framed by your own frames.

?As managing director of Sue Behavioural Design, it is my firm belief that solutions for the world’s challenges can’t solely come from technological innovation but need to take human psychology and social behaviors into account. With my work and writings, I hope to contribute to this view.

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