Seven Ways to Re-Frame Self-Contradiction to Your Advantage

A psychoanalytically-informed take on the potential uses of seeing personality as multilayered.

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As Walt Whitman penned in Songs of Myself:

Do I contradict myself? /
Very well then I contradict myself, /
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

We are, perhaps, self-contradictory by nature. However, we are also taught to be consistent as a matter of moral integrity. From a psychological point of view, a coherent sense of self, consistency of self, is associated on average with better function.

It is possible to be both individualistic and communal, combining self-efficacy with the perspective that we are often inherently plural. Relational psychoanalysis and trauma theory suggests that we experience different “self-states” (e.g. the work of Philip Bromberg). In extremis, this is pathological, as we are so fragmented and internally disconnected (“dissociated”), it causes serious problems in living. In another sense it is “more simply human than otherwise”, the “illusion of personal individuality”.

“In most general terms, we are all much more simply human than otherwise, be we happy and successful, contented and…