The self-model: the self I believe me to be

Accepting models of my self from others is informative in building a picture of how I am viewed by others; but, more importantly for the story of selfhood, it provides a third-person model of me to sit in my social calculus system – and this model appears to be undifferentiated. So how to collapse the many Social selves into one self-model? The obvious solution is to merge the different social models into an integrated self-model, discarding contradictions; but, because of the wide variation in Social selves offered to me, this is neither possible nor necessary. Instead, we tend to hold cognitive representations of several self-models, although only one at a time (the self-in-context) is treated as the valid self for modelling purposes. Over time, we cycle through a range of self-models depending on our current electrochemical state, the context in which we are self-modelling and the company we are keeping.

Each of my self-models is integrated from sets of social models, but because I have more than one self-model they are also differentiated; and because the currently active model changes over time, the self-model is also protean – like an amoeba, it constantly changes its form. This variable nature of the self can become an important source of self-anxiety: do my inconsistencies represent a failure or fraying of my integrated selfhood? There is only one actual, physical me, so why do there seem to be several real me’s?

One way out of the dilemma is to ignore the differences and simply believe there is a fully integrated self-model that collocates with the Actual self. This seems to be the solution chosen by narcissists, who usually avoid internalised self-awareness in favour of externalised approbation. Their internal self-models (their egos) are often brittle and easily damaged. Any criticism is not just criticism of the critic’s model of the narcissist, it is criticism of the single self-model the narcissist possesses; it is, therefore, criticism of the narcissist in every possible way. Critics are therefore dealt with vindictively and with an overkill out of proportion to the criticism offered (Campbell and Baumeister 2006). However, while this is a description of people who would be clinically diagnosed as narcissists, it is also a description of most of us at one time or another: we all sometimes believe that the currently active self-model is our only self-model, and take criticism badly. What is being described here is a strategy of selfhood, not necessarily an aberrant psychological behaviour (Krajco 2007). What makes it aberrant is if it is an individual’s default, or only, strategy.

A second way out of the dilemma is to believe that the differences amount to a negation of an integrated self-model. All I have to inform my self-model are the impressions that others have of me; and these can be manipulated by adopting whatever appearance-model will get me immediate gratification. This seems to be the solution of sociopaths (also called psychopaths), who take the protean aspect of self-modelling to extremes: they will do, say and be whatever they need to in order to manipulate others and satisfy their needs. There is no negotiation toward meaning for sociopaths because there is only one relevant meaning to the universe – that of the undifferentiated self. And criticism does not matter, because there is no self-model to criticise, only a projected model or appearance that can be adjusted to meet current needs. If someone does not like the self you are projecting, project a different self (Gallagher 2013b). To quote Groucho Marx, ‘Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them … well, I have others’.

Once again, it must be emphasised that what is described here is not a diagnostic aid for identifying clinical sociopathy. It is a self-modelling behaviour that we all display at one time or another. In fact, the frequency of clinical sociopathy in the general population (about 3 per cent of males and just under 1 per cent of females) makes them unusual but not rare (Mealey 1995). On any London tube train during rush hour, there are likely to be a dozen or more people who would be diagnosed as sociopathic if their behaviour warranted a diagnosis; but, in the vast majority of cases and for most of the time, it does not.

A third way out of the dilemma is not really a way out at all. It is possible to surrender to the multiple selves by losing the capacity to control which single self-model dominates at any one time. This is the problem that schizophrenics face, with the different self-models competing in the conscious mind, rather than being policed by the subconscious mind and presented to the conscious mind one at a time. In this case, my inconsistencies do not represent a failure or fraying of the integrated model of my selfhood, they really are the fraying of my selfhood. This collapsing selfhood causes the boundaries between actuality, reality and virtuality to blur even more than usual, hence typical schizophrenic symptoms include hallucinations and delusions. The lack of a cohesive self-model also affects the self that the person can project, causing breakdowns in their social relationships (Bowes 2014).

Schizophrenia is a particularly interesting ‘solution’ to the many-selves dilemma, because it seems to be a by-product of having language: the condition has been linked to language in several ways. First, schizophrenia is linked to dysphasia, or the loss of communicative competency; and it also seems to affect phonology, leading to flat-toned speech (Covington et al. 2005). Second, schizophrenia has been shown to be implicated in the language and social-modelling areas of the brain. Radanovic et al. (2013) discovered a link between formal thought disorder (a diagnostic criterion for schizophrenia) and language impairment. The severity of both impairments was correlated with deficits in the left superior temporal gyrus and the left planum temporale, both areas in a Statistically Standard Brain (SSB)² implicated in language; and in the orbitofrontal cortex, which is implicated in modelling for decision-making, including social calculus modelling. Pu et al. (2017) identified correlated deficits in the anterior part of the temporal cortex, the ventro-lateral prefrontal cortex, the dorso-lateral prefrontal cortex and frontopolar cortex areas of the brain – all areas implicated in both social cognition (particularly ToM) and language production. It seems that schizophrenia is somehow involved in the neural connections between social cognition and language cognition.

It also seems that there may be a genetic basis to the link between schizophrenia and language. The gene FOXP2 is implicated in both language production and hallucinatory episodes in schizophrenia (Tolosa et al. 2010); there does not seem to be a causal relationship, but there is a strong correlation. Srinivasan et al. (2016) showed that many of the genes implicated in schizophrenia are also involved in general cognitive development, and specifically human versions of the genes seem to have appeared since the split between humans and Neanderthals. These gene-forms seem to be absent from chimpanzee genomes (Srinivasan et al. 2017).

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is another condition in which the individual seems to surrender to the dilemma of multiple selves. This condition has similarities to schizophrenia, and it is often presented in the lay media as schizophrenia. In terms of the SSMH, it poses a slightly different problem for the individual: it is not that the selves are indistinct, it is that there is no concord between them; each self has somehow set itself up as an independent person – sometimes with recognition that there is only one shared body, but sometimes not. Whitehead points out that we all live with multiple modelled personalities when he says, ‘Shakespeare can fill a stage with characters, all of whom act and speak convincingly as whole and distinct persons, though all were born within a ‘single’ mind’ (Whitehead 2001, 4). The problem with DID would seem to be that Shakespeare has left the stage, and all that is left are the characters.

Depersonalisation Disorder is yet another condition on the schizophrenia spectrum where SSMH may be relevant. In this condition, individuals feel they are somehow not a real person: the modelling is still working, but the self has gone missing (Baker et al. 2003). It is a state that we are all in at some point in our lives, and it is only a disorder when it becomes prolonged. This condition shows that the metaphor SELF IS OTHER is more than just a cognitive explanation after the fact; it is itself a cognitive fact with consequences.

Between too little modelling, too many selves, and not enough self, the schizophrenia spectrum seems to be a product of self-modelling. However, as with narcissism and sociopathy, it must be emphasised that what is being discussed here is a self-modelling behaviour, and does not necessarily indicate a medical condition. Poor Alice could not explain herself because a very confusing day had exhausted her range of self-models, leaving her with no dominant self to rely on; but she did recover quite spectacularly by the end of the book. In a similar way, we can be left nonplussed and dumbfounded without needing a diagnosis of formal thought disorder and dysphasia. Life may currently be complicated; this, too, shall pass.

Most of us wander around in this triangle of selfhood extremes without particular difficulty, doing what we need to get by as a self-modelling entity; and mostly we do it without being consciously aware of the choices we are making about our self-modelling. The terminology of selfhood modelling often deceptively implies conscious choices are being made in self-modelling; but most self-modelling involves subconscious cognition, implicit knowledge and automatic responses. We first start to build our self-models when we receive our first recognised piece of information about our self from others; and this happens around age 2, when the child becomes aware of the dyadic negotiation toward meaning between them and their caregiver. ‘Daddy loves Baby’ may sound like a simple idea for adults to comprehend, but it makes huge demands on the social calculus and social modelling of the child, long before the child has conscious knowledge of their social selfhood.