Thursday, May 7, 2020
recalling intra-psychal differences
1 | When a child personifies a toy, their enjoyment of actual interpersonal relations is mapped into relating to the toy (creating a “real” relation-
ship). Multiple toys, multiple personified relations; but the child has a dim conception of being one self having multiple personified relations.
2 | Likewise in actual interpersonal relations. Being personal is relative to relations with actual others; and multiple relationships are multiple interpersonal relations that don’t clearly cohere. To be “personal” is ordinarily to be [inter]personal variably.
3 | Over the years of individuation, a more discrete sense of self apart from all personal relationships is congealed, especially in adolescence, though an inferred sense of child self[identity] emerges (i.e., identity of one self—a better term, to me, than the recursive overtone of ‘self-identity’) as one living self apart from everyone else—being the single person with one’s proper name, one’s own interests, etc. An individuating of self/[inter]personal difference (which is hypen-ately self-identical) is integral to growing “up.”
4 | Yet, real difference exists between personifying something and being with someone alive. But we personify actual others, too: idealizing others, imagining a reality of them beyond their appearance—projecting aspects into their presence which may not or may be accurate. That personification, imagining, or projecting happens, easily experienced as belonging to the other.
5 | So, an other’s [inter]personal/self difference is easily experienced (partially accurate, partially questionable). The difference between what accurately belongs to the other and what belongs to one’s own action reflects a difference of oneself that includes the capability of psychalness to do more than one’s sense of self identifies with: non-conscious efficacy, unconscious efficacy (i.e., disowned “findings”), and all those capabilities that show themselves as mysteriously apart from one’s self understanding. Oneself may easily feel ordinarily as if being inhabited
by magical efficacies, about which one understands little, if anything: reliability of perception, linguistic efficacy, etc. “Skills”? Really, what “is” a capability? What’s a stable disposition?
6 | One is reflectively recognizable as vastly mysterious. One’s selfness
(-ness?)—oneself—expresses a deeper Selfness: oneSelf.
7 | So, however the mystery of psychalness is understood, a Self/self Difference is as real as a self/[inter]personal difference, but wholly in its own way: Self-differentially self-differencing.
8 | And one commonly distances aspects of oneSelf in order to live manageably with the Difference (e.g., the self-positing appeal
of ideals—the appealingness that’s “unrealistic,” if not intrusive).
Or one is anxious for unknown reasons, if not alienated from “one-
self,” i.e., actually alienated from aspects of one’s psychalness wholly presencing.
This is part 2 of “being one Self”
