https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=tnYr12hB5kU
So one of the things that really strikes me as odd as a psychologist, there’s two things, I suppose. When I look at modern claims about identity, the first is that identity is subjectively defined. I think that is so utterly preposterous, I can’t believe that we’re even entertaining it as a culture, it’s so idiotic. Every single time I have a conversation with my wife, or with anyone else for that matter, but let’s say with my wife, I’m negotiating my identity, just as she’s negotiating hers, because we have our viewpoints and our proclivities for action, and we have our, each of us have our tendency to insist that our way is the right way, but if you’re gonna be around other people, you have to constantly negotiate that so that you can stand each other. And so a real identity is actually the ability to negotiate the transformation of your own identity in a social space. It has nothing to do with you subjectively defining your identity. So that’s, now as far as I can tell, the only people who are unable to negotiate identity, and who insist upon having it subjectively defined, are literally two years old. Because according to Piaget, and there’s some good research support for the basic outlines of this theory, two year olds are too egocentric to negotiate a shared play space. So their identity is subjectively defined, and they’re almost entirely hedonistically oriented, which means they run by whim, which everyone knows if you’re around two year olds, and they can’t play with other children. Okay, so the idea that identity is subjectively defined is utterly preposterous, and it’s actually an anti-truth, because if you try to define your identity subjectively, you are a bloody tyrant, and you’re gonna be an unpopular one too, and you deserve it. But then, secondarily, we have this other weird insistence, and I don’t know why we’ve become so demented that we also accept this, that your identity is subjectively defined, but nonetheless, the core element of your identity is some immutable group characteristic, and the one we stress most is sexual attraction. And I suppose the secondary one is something like race. It’s like so, it’s so peculiar that your identity is subjectively defined, but it’s also boxed into this very narrow set of parameters, which is, well, the most important thing about you is who and to what degree, to whom and to what degree are you sexually attracted? Like, that’s just, it just leaves me speechless. Well, it doesn’t, but you get my point. So I think what we’re seeing is this idea of subjective identity taken to its absolute extreme, because you’re right, up to two years old, it amazes me how so many parenting books are based on building your child’s self-esteem. Well, sorry, your child is born, your child is only self-esteem, nothing else. For their survival, they have to be. So it’s not the adult’s job to build the child’s self-esteem, as if that’s something we can put on them. It’s part of your child’s interaction with life, with the environment, in relationships that build self-esteem. So it might be achievement, it might be, yeah, something that you can do, something that you achieve, and then you feel good about yourself. It’s not your parents always telling you, you’re amazing, you’re brilliant, and praising them, and also that idea of identity, it’s the idea of the self, this thing that you’re supposed to be born with. And I don’t know what myself is yet, and I’m 63. I don’t know, because it changes. It changes according to circumstances. I don’t know if I’d be a great person to be on a lifeboat with, for example, would I be the one that stood up and saved people, helped save others, or would I be so scared? I don’t know. I don’t know myself, and I don’t believe there is a fixed self that we move through life with. We’re always changing according to our circumstances and our environment, and perhaps we get to know ourselves a bit better, but we can still fool ourselves. We can still be dishonest about who we are to ourselves. So that idea that the child possesses this innate identity, innate sense of self, apart from the fact that it’s nonsense, roles have been completely reversed between adult and child, so we are encouraged to see children as wise and as knowing themselves, and that we follow the child. We follow, you know, you hear parents say, oh, I’ve learned far more from my child than they’ve ever learned from me. Well, that’s the wrong way around. You know, you are the adult. You are the one that’s gathered life experience and hopefully some wisdom, and again, to put that, you know, that responsibility onto a child to be the all-knowing fount of wisdom, and we do that to teenagers as well, but when you look at the adolescent years, that identity formation becomes really the adolescent’s job. Who am I? So I’m not a child anymore. I’m developing into an adult. Who am I? And what teenagers do is they find their tribe, and they find, in a way, they integrate before they can individuate, because they find the tribe, and they were the same, and they speak the same language, and they like the same music, or now YouTube videos, and the rules, you know, we may mock this. You know, I’ve heard people mock it, but it’s absolutely right that, you know, it’s a stage of development, and now the only tribe that you might describe as any kind of counterculture is trans, having a gender and sexual identity, and there is no other tribe that children can join to show that they don’t conform, or that they’re a bit different, or that, you know, it’s only gender identity now. So if you want to be seen as boring, and conventional, and traditional, and conservative, and everything that a teenager doesn’t want to appear to be, then, you know, you have to join that tribe, and at least say, oh, I’m non-binary, or, you know, to be able to show that side of yourself, unless you’re really comfortable in the idea that you’re conventional, and you don’t have a problem with that. Yeah, well, that means that they’ve captured, so, you know, I’ll go in two directions with regard to what you said. Years ago, I did a study with a colleague of mine at Harvard on when tattooing and piercing first entered the cultural scene, and we were curious about whether that was a marker for psychopathology, or what was predicting the adoption of these new fashion trends, and what we found overwhelmingly was that it wasn’t associated with an increased prevalence of mental illness, it was associated with high trait openness, and that’s the creativity dimension from the Big Five trait openness, and when you see people with rainbow-colored hair, or, you know, multicolored hair, and piercings, and so forth, you’re looking at people who are on the creative end of the distribution, and the point you’re making is in part that the collapse of the entire domain of nonconformity into gender identity also entices the creative kids. Creative kids have more mutable identities, too, so they claim that, well, I’m a different person from day to day, is particularly germane to creative kids, because a creative person is quite different from day to day, that’s actually the definition of creativity, and if you’re creative and high in negative emotion, that’s even worse, because not only are you mutable on the identity side, that’s actually your identity, that mutability, you’re also very, very volatile in terms of your moods, and so the idea that identity is only mutable can be very, very attractive to you. Now, I also wanted to make a comment, technically, about self-esteem, so I spent a lot of time analyzing self-esteem psychometrically, because as a clinician, I was extremely skeptical of the social-psychological research purporting to indicate, for example, that there was even such a thing as self-esteem, because we bandy about these words, but that doesn’t mean they have a corresponding grounding in reality, so I looked at and conducted factor analytics studies, which were designed to assess what exactly self-esteem was, and it’s quite straightforward, and people who are listening might find this extremely useful practically. There’s no such thing as self-esteem. What there is is trait neuroticism, which is proclivity to anxiety and pain, essentially, emotional and physical, so people differ in their thresholds for being anxious and hurt, and if you’re more sensitive, well, then you’ll see threats before people who are less sensitive, and that can be useful, and if you’re less sensitive, well, then you’re more robust and maybe more daring, and that can be useful. No, there’s no way of saying what’s right in that situation. However, if you’re high in neuroticism, if you’re high in sensitivity to negative emotion, you do experience a lot of anxiety and depression. Okay, so self-esteem is basically neuroticism minus extroversion, and extroversion is the positive emotion dimension, and so highly neurotic people, so people sensitive to negative emotion, are more likely to be self-conscious and to think negative thoughts about themselves, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a fractured self-concept that’s driving the negative emotion. That’s simply not true. That negative emotional state is actually baseline temperament. You can measure it in infants. You can measure it in kids that are six months old, and you can ameliorate it to some degree if you have a child who’s sensitive to negative emotion, and you facilitate their exploration, their autonomous exploration. They can normalize their psychophysiology. Okay, so first of all, there’s no such thing as self-esteem. It’s basically trait neuroticism, and second, you do not remediate trait neuroticism by getting people to focus on their feelings. In fact, making people self-conscious about their feelings makes trait neuroticism worse, because there’s no difference between being self-conscious and being high in trait neuroticism.