David Lynch: How would you describe yourself?
Harry Dean Stanton: There is no self.
DL: How do you want to be remembered?
HDS: Doesn't matter.
Has there ever been a time when we were so confessional by nature, and yet our sense of self stood on shakier ground?
According to Freud, the self is opaque, divided into ego, id, and superego. According to Donna Haraway, the self has been subsumed into technology. We are cyborgs. According to Judith Butler, the self is a performance, iterative and prone to incoherence, to failures of the performance. And according to de Beauvoir, the self is invented out of a negative state: one is not born a woman, but becomes one.
As a therapist, I talk a lot about identity, and I am fascinated by the ways we construct, or are constructed into, selves. It's the central motivating question behind why I became a therapist. Put simply: Who am I?
In the modern world, selfhood is something we believe we do. We make the self, with less emphasis on anything like a pre-existing one. We still recognize some kind of fundamental selfhood, but most of our language, especially since the advent of psychology, concerns itself with willing a self into existence. Just look at our vocabulary: "self-development," "stages of growth." A political self, for instance, must interface deeply with ideas, critiques, history, and analysis, then evolve and become expert. We don't spend much time considering the political consciousness of a baby, or whether a baby could even have one.
As a species, we first heard whispers of this new kind of consciousness in Augustine's Confessions, an appeal to God, an exposé of his own life, and arguably the first record of the human need to write down one's distress and inner thoughts and purge them to an audience. Rousseau wrote a work by the same title, except his audience was posterity, not God. He simply wanted it to exist on the record. The next evolution might be Sylvia Plath, whose confessional writing was addressed to readers, purchasers of her work. So we have a movement: God as witness, then posterity, then consumers. The striptease of subjectivity had been solidified, replicated, and evolved.
After these works, and in tandem with structures like psychoanalysis (expose to heal), wartime interrogation (information extraction), and New Age psychic ideas like telepathy (the transpersonal), confession became an expected act, something one must do to be known, to feel perhaps more real. In the '90s the memoir exploded, and confession as commodity was born. It existed for its own sake, and for the sake of capital. The content shifted too, ranging from the expected catharsis of being mirrored by another (note that the social media influencer's stated goal is to "explain someone's experience better than they can themselves", a tactic for increasing sales) all the way to letting readers vicariously experience scandal, drugs, and depravity, things they would never do themselves.
So confession began as something like absolution and ended as exhibitionism: a product to be sold, or a way to sell other products.
By the time reality TV arrived, Oprah Winfrey's interviews, the carnivalesque Jerry Springer Show, a confession was meaningless unless it reached the widest possible audience. That became the goal. And the refractions began: MTV's The Real World lifted the "confession booth" out of religion and into spectacle. The lexicon of self-revelation grew, and it became the training most of us received in how to talk about "ourselves." Now influencers in TikTok and Instagram's self-help universe follow, listen to, and consume each other's content, then replicate it nearly verbatim, complete with formats and frameworks for how best to be relatable. It's a self-degrading echo chamber with very little new spiking through.
And for those of us who find compulsory confession "cringe", don't worry, your data will be collected and aggregated anyway. Confession is now non-consensual, too, and the landscape of the private continues to recede. Take the show Couples Therapy: wildly entertaining, but an inversion of the most basic principle of what makes therapy work, confidentiality, and the trust that whatever you're working out is allowed to be messy, shameful, difficult, and embarrassing.
Winnicott tells us the inner world develops principally in unwitnessed space: the capacity to be alone, the after-school daydream, the incommunicado core of the self. Silence and aloneness can feel threatening. "I struggle to be alone with my own thoughts" is a common refrain, and it betrays our ever-growing impulse to be witnessed in totality.
Do our inner thoughts, feelings, and dreams feel unimportant unless we can share them for profit? Is the habit of interiority disappearing? And what constitutes the ethics of what should remain private versus what needs to be, or ought to be, disclosed?
If the self is made, not just found, then how we practice subjectivity matters. I'm not here to tell you the right way to do it. I just want you to think about where your privacy lives, and ask whether you'd do well to protect that landscape.