The “idiocy of one’s own psychology”: Choosing the next right thing

When one is in a mess like you are, one has no right any more to worry about the idiocy of one’s own psychology, but must do the next thing with diligence and devotion…. [Everyone has] to do it the hard way, and always with the next, the littlest, and the hardest things. Carl Jung

I am super ambivalent about psychological approaches that would have me pick through my childhood memories to identify experiences that have helped shape me into who/how I am now. On the one hand, it feels constructive to find names for particular wounds and patterns. And it can also be validating to see myself reflected in diagnostic categories, to know that I am in ample company with respect to my personality and character. On the other hand, though, as an existentialist-inflected, pragmatically-inclined Buddhist-type, I’m uneasy focusing very much on the conditions of my past. I mean, haven’t I spent all these years meditating largely to become better at being in the present moment?

To be clear, I can fully accept that my psychological self — including many of my emotional and cognitive patterns — has, for better and worse, been formed and contorted by my childhood. Like everyone I’ve ever met, the story of my young life includes an impressive mix of ups and downs, experiences that have left both visible and hidden marks on me. What I do not accept is that this psychological self — this emotional and mentalizing locus of hoping, wishing, fretting, and so forth — is who I ultimately am. I believe, rather, that who I am is also who you are, and also who the Buddha is: pure awareness that transcends all narrative, a Self that cannot possibly be contained or comprehended by any theory that the mind might choose to weave, psychological or otherwise. From this point of view, our so-called psychological self, while terribly important as a workaday construct, is neither the end of the identity story nor even the most interesting part of it.

Evidently, these two different identity narratives — the psychological as compared to the metaphysical — create a paradoxical tension that I sometimes find difficult to accommodate skillfully, so much so that I usually try to avoid talking about this subject altogether. This is partly because I worry about offending others. To exist in the U.S. in 2023 — certainly within my demographic — is to live in a deeply psychologized and psychologizing milieu. It’s an environment in which many of us both adopt and project diagnoses with casual ease. Hence the proliferation of discussions about “attachment style,” being “codependent,” “CPTSD,” the impact of having a “borderline” parent, or “narcissistic” boss. This is not even yet to approach the more medicalized/biologized psychological diagnoses, including those associated with addiction.

For many of us, such psychological constructs come to serve as helpful identity touchstones in a life otherwise fraught with uncertainty. Explanations and ruminations connected to the past may then come to function almost like a personal religion, providing a sense of comfort as well as guidance. Obviously, to introduce philosophical doubt in such a context might be construed as an attack. Such defensiveness may also reflect a broader, perhaps natural, human tendency to understand who we are now by appeal to supposed facts from the past: “I am Abbie’s daughter. I come from Poland. My parents raised me Catholic. My sister died when I was seven, and on and on.” For better and worse, we are pressed, pushed and compelled to defer who we are now — and, therefore, who we might be next — to a material and psychological past.

But the Buddhist approach invites us to do something different: to move behind all mentalizing habits, including those responsible for weaving these psychological stories, at least for a moment. The question then becomes not, “Who am I because of my childhood?” but “Who am I, indeed, who have I always been, beyond what the empirical world has shown me? Beyond the particular emotional and cognitive elements — ‘I think,’ ‘I feel’ —that normally hijack my attention?” Psychological accounts, regardless of how helpful, and even necessary to survival they may be, then, are not the level from which the spiritual identity question: “Who am I?” arises or can be answered. So long as we remain entranced by our own psychological story — however ennobling or tragic that narrative may be— we will find it difficult to occupy the seat of our own pure awareness.

It is telling, I think, that Jung, a psychoanalytic theorist and practitioner, seems to have accepted that when we have tough decisions to make about our future, it is not to our self-scrutinizing psychological self that we should turn. He implies, instead, that, in such moments, self-referential psychologizing may even serve as a distraction or avoidance technique, an attempt to bypass the existential angst of taking profound responsibility for one’s choice. “When one is in a mess like you are,” he writes, “one has no right any more to worry about the idiocy of one’s own psychology.” But this does not mean we are left merely to flip a coin, for it is to the intuition of a larger Self that one should turn. The real tragedy is that, when we have become hypnotized by our psychological self-stories, we may be unable even to recognize the wise, utterly capable, unshakably confident voice of our deepest “I.”

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