A young, grotesquely characterized duck was born among others. He was ostracized and shamed by those around him for being different. Everyone screamed at him, calling him ugly, awkward and altogether strange. He became dejected and isolated, eventually running away and finding a group of beautiful, elegant swans in the spring. The duck thought he would face rejection again, looking in the water only to find himself a swan. Only in embracing his true self did he find acceptance and joy – we’re all familiar with the anecdotes and parables about embracing your true self and identity. I believe it’s more nuanced than how these stories typically describe this journey of self-discovery and self-welcome.
Carl Rogers, a famous American psychologist known for being one of the founders of humanistic psychology, described his viewpoints regarding identity and acceptance. “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” He trisected his theory of self-concept: the ideal self, self-image and self-esteem, and they sound like what they are. Your ideal self is who you would like to be, your self-image is how you currently perceive yourself and your self-esteem, an in-vogue term in every household, is how you value and feel about yourself. When your self-concept is aligned and matches reality (i.e., you value yourself as you perceive yourself as your ideal self), you’re in congruence and you experience a greater psychological well-being. Psychologists believe unconditional love fosters self-acceptance, as it’s conducive to a child not feeling the need to distort self-image beyond reality and having a lower self-esteem.
If congruence is extremely beneficial, shouldn’t we attempt to align our self-concept and identity? Do we have control over it? Well, Rogers’s theory is very internal, though that may or may not be the case. Enter Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu, two very famous scholars in the field of sociology. Judith Butler articulated a concept called performativity before matcha and Clairo even existed. The essence of Butlerian performativity is that identity is a social construct created and maintained by continued performative actions in anticipation that those actions are associated with one’s identity. As an example, consider a world where people believe 37-year-old accountants wear only orange t-shirts. Sherry, a 37-year-old accountant, wears an orange t-shirt in anticipation that that is what she should do, maintaining the idea that people like herself only wear orange t-shirts. Identity is then very environmentally and externally regulated and internally maintained.
Who influences that external environment the most? Here comes Bourdieu. He articulated the ideas of field and habitus. Field is the sociological environment — geographical, academic, occupational — you’re in, while habitus is the resources and characteristic background you have to navigate your environment. Depending on the habitus you have, the more or less successful you may be in your field. Say, for example, you are applying for an associate position at the fictional law firm Pearson Hardman, which only accepts candidates from Harvard, under Harvey Specter. Since you graduated from Harvard and the only other candidate graduated from Duke, you’re more likely to succeed. To synthesize, depending on the environment, certain groups or people may have more power over your identity and anticipatory self-perception.
Perhaps Butler and Bourdieu’s ideas lead to an inability or barrier in reaching congruence, but Bourdieu also brings us to another interesting modern-day concept: code-switching. Since our environment and our habitus inside that specific environment determine our success or how we are socially reacted to, people may be inauthentic to project a different habitus when they can; this is what code-switching in a sense generally refers to. In a professional environment, someone may speak more formally rather than in slang. In a racially discriminatory environment, a minority may act in ways more traditionally associated with the dominant culture or race. In a field where French is valued, a native English speaker may attempt the best with their broken French. Code-switching could be used for purposes ranging from professional development to survival and perseverance, hence why this question of fully, continual authentic existence may be more multifaceted than it initially appears to be.
The insights of Jung, Butler, Bourdieu and modern cultural phenomena enable us to see both the difficulties of embracing our true selves and the potential benefits of doing so. An exploration of authentic existence and identity is beneficial to our psyche, but that identity is both internally and externally malleable — and our agency to do so is delimited by anthropological phenomena. Whether one should perform their identity truly is both a question of agency and individuality.