The Postmodern Self

Abstract

Chandler, Lalonde, Sokol, and Hallett created the Personal Persistence Interview in an effort to determine how persons defend their sense of personal persistence. In other words, these researchers wanted to determine the means by which one’s present self and past self can remain subjectively similar in spite of change. A modified version of that research tool is presently used to obtain narratives not only of personal persistence but also of its absence. As of yet, there are no open-ended descriptions of how and why one’s past and present self-experience could be wholly different. These narratives are colloquially presented as they relate to change, time, and culture. Maturation and perspectival changes putatively induced more than half the sample of 177 college-aged participants to report an absence of personal persistence. Still, others, also acknowledging substantial change, continued to feel personally persistent. Change within early and late modernity, as well as change as it is expressed in theories of self, will be compared with change as it is present in these life narratives.

Keywords

personal persistence diachronic disunity self narrative modernity

The British Marxist historian Hobshawn (2005) identified the 289 years between 1500 and 1789 as the early modern era. During this era, there were at least three conspicuous changes that introduced contextual instability into the lives of early modern persons: First, people were progressively detached from ancestral lands. In England, for example, the closing of the commons dispossessed many independent yeomen lacking the means to add to their holdings and mechanize their husbandry (Brody, 2000). This had the effect of producing the vast laboring class which doubled and redoubled the populations of insalubrious cities in spite of horrific mortality rates (Bucholz, 2012). People became detached from extended family, from their people, and from their parish (Breitwieser, 1984). They increasingly lived in anonymous circumstances, sleeping in rented rooms and laboring in makeshift factories. Second, revolutions (Brewer, 2008; Dunn, 1999) and revolutionary publications undermined the great chain of being (Burgess, 1915; Jordan, 1993), which, while it enfranchised many politically (Fisher, 1897/2003), unmanned many psychologically (Fromm, 1941). Only in the wake of such times could a book like Fromm’s Escape from Freedom make sense. After Paine mocked kings and courts, God and angels, one no longer knew where to stand; increasingly meritocratic advancement replaced aristocratic preferment and the masses found self-government in republican and democratic rule (Dalberg-Acton, 1907/1993; Morgan, 2003; Tocqueville, 1835/2004). Third, Enlightenment science, when it did not directly challenge religion, presented confusing alternatives to religious orthodoxy which were idiosyncratically espoused from the pulpit and absorbed by the people (Ellis, 1973; Israel, 2009, 2011; Middlekauff, 1999). These are profound changes to take place in such a short period; and though many of these changes were beneficial, all were vertiginous.

It was in this early modern era that formal, philosophical accounts of the self were written. Perhaps the very articulation of a coherent and persistent self in the early modern era was a symptom of its being eroded, or at least substantively transformed. It is possible that, as secularization advanced in lockstep with modernization and industrialization, religious accounts of soul had to be supplemented with philosophical accounts of self (Martin & Barresi, 2006). It is more certain that change, which is negatively correlated with the persistence of self across time (Lampinen, Odegard, & Leding, 2004), was becoming the common state of affairs. Regardless, nearly all such emerging secular, philosophical accounts cast the self as both coherent and continuous, meaning that the self was, on one hand a single identifiable entity, and on the other hand a temporally persistent entity. For example, there are Descartes’s ego theory and Hume’s bundle theory. Descartes, in articulating his ego theory, represented the self as a single mental entity, equally capable of assessing the world and of reflexive self-assessment. Tye (2005, p. 133) summarizes the Cartesian understanding of self, stating that “persons are continuing, spiritual substances whose essence is consciousness.” Similarly, for Hume, wholeness and sameness are unified in mental history (Tye, 2005). Selves are bundled together, much as hay might be bundled into a bale. Again, as Tye (2005, p. 134) states, “. . . persons are nothing over and above temporally extended clusters of mental events. And subject unity is no more than sameness of mental bundle.”

Beginning in late modernity, defined by Hobshawn as the years 1900-1989, psychological theories undertook to more systematically define the self, without deviating from the precedents of early modern philosophical descriptions. Psychological theories continued to depict a self that was coherent and persistent across time, despite the dispossession, empowerment, and secularization introduced in the early modern period, and despite the amplification of these trends throughout late modernity. The first of these was the Jamesian self with its I or self as subject, which was persistent through time, agentic, and whole, and with its Mes or self as object, which were akin to interpersonally activated personae (Beike, Lampinen, & Behrend, 2004; Hermans, 2001; James, 1890/1950; McAdams, Josselson, & Lieblich, 2002). James’s self remained coherent and personally persistent (Chandler, Lalonde, Sokol, & Hallett, 2003) as did subsequent descriptions of self advanced by Carl Rogers. Rogers assumed a stable self, deviation from which marks a natural response to an unnatural environment replete with conditional positive regard, debasement, stress, and coercion (Hall & Lindzey, 1970; Rogers, 2012). While change and growth are therapeutic motives and marks of well-being, they are part of a process of becoming, a sort of teleological unfolding of the self, rather than an externally driven, undirected vacillation (Daniels, 1988). Inspired by Lecky (Barrett-Lennard, 1998) who is credited with developing the first mechanistic account of self-coherence (Ansbacher, 1981; Stevens, 1992), Rogers (1995, p. 213) conceived an “integrated person,” an ideal that often elicited comparisons between a real-self and a divided-self, or contrasted a deeper level experience with a conscious façade (Rogers, 1995, p. 166). Similarly, founding analysts such as Jung (Hall & Nordby, 1973; Jung, 1959) and Erikson (1968) described and defended a consistent and coherent self, or otherwise assumed one.

After Erikson, consensus breaks down. At the end of Hobshawn’s late modernity, whether one wants to call this subsequent period postmodernity or otherwise, distinctly different descriptions of self began to surface. These descriptions, though different from one another in other respects, all alike rejected the assumptions of coherence and persistence made by nearly all previous theories and theorists. Galen Strawson (2005), for instance, describes an episodic subjectivity with little emotional investment in the past and similarly limited concern for the future (Battersby, 2006). For Strawson, the experience of his past is largely devoid of the sentimentality, shame, grief, and pride generally associated with memories. Strawson (1999) likens his episodic self-experience (Battersby, 2006) to a string of pearls, fragments of time that are individually coherent, but collectively distinct. Also, Robert Jay Lifton (1993) articulated the Protean Self, which is meant to be descriptive of modern persons living in modern societies. The fluidity, plasticity, and adaptability of the Protean Self are cast as inevitable adaptations to societal conditions, which are equally fluid, plastic, and changing. Later theories of self, such as the Dialogical Self (Hermans, 2001) and the Polyphonic Self (Raggatt, 2000) similarly stress flux and multiplicity within postmodern selves. Moreover, such theories are consistent with contemporary philosophical writings, which judge present persons to be “uncontrolled, decentered, [and] multiplicitious” (Mitchell, 1992). As Searle (2004, p. 40) writes, “In the modern age, we have come to understand our own selves as composites, often contradictory, even internally incompatible. We have understood that each of us is many different people.”

Is it that, as Schacthter (2005) writes, “. . . self-actualization and adaptability are tragically pitted against self-sameness?” Have contemporary persons been subjected to so much change that they no longer can or should manifest personal persistence? Was there some critical threshold reached at the end of late modernity beyond which it was especially difficult to remain coherent and persistent? Are contemporary persons really fluid, plastic, and protean? Are phenomenological descriptions put forth by Strawson rare, and are people really becoming internally divided as a result of external change? And finally, are such theories innovative hyperbole, or do they more aptly describe present persons than do earlier philosophical and psychological theories of self?¹

Narrative research in the tradition of McAdams (McAdams, 1996, 2006; McAdams et al., 2002; McAdams et al., 2004) offers a starting point in answering these questions and in describing how modern persons apperceive the self and how they might remain internally coherent and personally persistent even as they change. The very act of constructing a narrative has a unifying effect. Narratives are storied methods of bridging time. The personal narrative thematically unifies past and present, creating a sense of personal persistence. As McAdams (1996) states, the principal utility of the narrative is amalgamation. It is the ordering and binding of constituent components into a presentable, structured, and coherent story of the self. The narrative serves as a statement against chance, arbitrary occurrence, meaninglessness, and entropy. Narratives offer a degree of consistency and coherence to the often random, disconnected events of life (Fireman & McVay, 2002). Through “atonement,” “upward mobility,” “recovery,” “enlightenment,” “development,” many narratives redeem and in doing so use the pains of the past in service of the present and future (McAdams, 2006). Narratives carry a coloring emotional tone, themes, imagery, and “nuclear episodes” all of which bind and order the change experience by the protagonist (McAdams, 1996). Rather naturally then, seminal research in personal persistence turned to the narrative tradition. A decade ago, narratives were used to more pointedly determine exactly how persons remained personally persistent in the face of change.

In 2003, using a narrative framework, Chandler, Lalonde, Sokol, and Hallett published a monograph titled, Personal Persistence, Identity Development, and Suicide: A Study of Native and Non-Native North American Adolescents. This was apparently the first systematic investigation into how, despite change, one can maintain personal persistence, the feeling of being the same person from one time to another. To investigate personal persistence, Chandler et al. developed an interview protocol: The Personal Persistence Interview. By highlighting change and challenging participants to reconcile their present self with a retrospective reconstruction of who they were 5 years ago, Chandler and colleagues obtained extended narratives, which they subsequently classified by quality as per the coherence of the argument mounted. These arguments were ordinally ranked from 1 to 5, such that the highest levels were assigned to those responses that most clearly demonstrated personal persistence in the face of change. The more sophisticated narratives, those described as Frankly Narrativist and Interpretive by Chandler et al., possessed a sense of purpose and agency; consequently, those that told these narratives seem to actively initiate change rather than passively suffering it. They also seem exceptionally skilled in weaving narrative threads into broader themes and plots, which might otherwise have remained dissociated events. Finally, these most sophisticated narrative responses display a sense of revisionist history (Chandler et al., 2003). Otherwise static events of the past were strategically recalled and co-opted in service of the present self. It is as Erikson (1958) said, “the adult is able to selectively reconstruct his past in such a way that, step for step, it seems to have planned him or better he seems to have planned it” (p. 112). Through all these means, change was rendered less arbitrary and destabilizing.

But not all narratives were so convincing. Some, called Simple Inclusion Accounts and Topological Accounts, were unsophisticated and ill conceived. This is especially true of Simple Inclusion Accounts in which change was dismissed rather than confronted. Topological responses acknowledged change only to circumvent its effects in some weak way. For instance, these respondents sometimes invented antecedents, implausibly altering accounts of their past self that had been submitted earlier. It is quite possible that all such respondents would abandon their weak arguments entirely if they were given a different protocol; a protocol that asks respondents if they are a different person, rather than asking them to demonstrate that they are the same person. Perhaps they failed to convince others because they were not convinced themselves. Perhaps they would say, I am a different person, and here is why. This is precisely what Lampinen et al.’s (2004) research suggests. Using a nonnarrative measure called the Diachronicity Scale, Lampinen et al. found that personal persistence was not at all an inevitable state of subjectivity. They measured change as well, showing that it was negatively correlated with personal persistence; as changed increased, personal persistence decreased. Lampinen et al. used the term Diachronic Disunity to describe a subset of their participants who showed an utter absence of personal persistence, so much so that they could no longer take the perspective or experience the emotions of their retrospectively reconstructed self.

Both Chandler et al. and Lampinen et al. were interested in self-persistence through time, and both asked participants to compare their present self with the self of 5 years ago. Still, Chandler et al. obtained narrative explanations, but without first asking whether or not personal persistence was present; Lampinen et al. asked whether or not personal persistence was present, but without obtaining narrative explanations. Consequently, there are still no narrative explanations of diachronically disunified subjectivity ² Accordingly, the present study uses narrative methods with the express intention of obtaining extended descriptions of self from those that distinctly lack personal persistence in a manner akin to Strawson or Lifton. Thematic results are presented from the entire range of obtained narratives and every 10th narrative is reproduced in full within the appendix.

Method

Participants

This study’s convenience sample of 177 college students ranged in age from 18 to 44 years (mean of 21.54 years). In all, 92% of participants were 25 years or younger; only 8 participants were 30 years or older. Corresponding with the anticipated demographics where the study was conducted, the existing sample of participants was largely female (73.4%) as opposed to male (25.4%). Two participants neglected to report their gender. The largest proportion of the sample reported being Caucasian (46.9%), the next largest category Asian (15.8%), followed by other (12.4%), Latino (11.3%), African American (10.7%), and Pacific Islanders (1.1%); three students (1.7%) chose not to indicate ethnicity. Eighty-six and a half percent of participants were undergraduates, 1.7% did not record their education standing, the remainder was composed of graduate students.

Materials

The original Personal Persistence Interview is a structured interview designed by Chandler et al. (2003) to elicit accounts of personally persistent reasoning. The Personal Persistence Interview, according to our personal reading of the protocol, is composed of six components, each of which guides or questions the interviewee: (1) Who were you? (2) Who are you now? (3) A confrontational statement asserting that the participant has changed. (4) What has changed? (5) Why do you see yourself as the same? (6) If the person of the past and the person of the present are one and the same, how can they behave so differently? The interview, in Parts 5 and 6, challenges the participant to establish personal persistence in the face of change. Implicit in this challenge is an assumption that precludes the participant, or at least inhibits the participant, from identifying him or herself as diachronically disunified. These features of the interview were purposefully designed by Chandler et al. (2003) to foster explanations of change and evoke accounts of personal persistence that could subsequently be qualitatively examined and classified. As useful as it was for its intended purpose, the Personal Persistence Interview impedes, though, again, it does not absolutely preclude, diachronically disunified narratives. Consequently, it was altered for the purposes of the present study to allow for such narratives.

As first described in Hertler, Krauss, and Ward (2015), the Adapted Personal Persistence Interview alters the original most obviously by converting it from a structured interview to an open-ended self-report measure. This facilitates mass administration. More significantly though, it was altered so that personal persistence is asked about rather than assumed:

First, I would like you to describe what sort of person you were five years ago. If someone didn’t know you, what could you say to help him or her understand the sort of person you were then?

Next, I would like you to describe the sort of person you see yourself as being right now.

Has the sort of person you are currently changed from the sort of person you were five years ago? If you believe that you have changed in some important way over the last five years describe these changes.

If you believe that you are the same person that you were five years earlier, despite any changes that you recorded, answer question number four and skip question number five. If you believe you have become a wholly different person over the last five years skip question number four and explain your reasons under question number five.

Explain your reasons for feeling like you are the same person that you were five years ago. What makes you the same person-just explain your reasons?

If you feel that you have become a different person over the last five years, how would you explain how all the changes that have taken place in your life have affected you? How might you explain to someone else that one and the same person could act in all of the different ways that you have described? How is it that you have become the person you are right now?

As can be seen in a reprinted version of the instrument above, the unnumbered routing statement attempts to categorically separate participants. The quantitative results of this dichotomization were presented previously (Hertler et al., 2015), showing that 63% of the sample classified themselves as diachronically disunified. Some eight participants incorrectly processed the routing statement and mistakenly presented themselves as diachronically disunified although they were not. Participant 120, whose response is contained in the appendix, can be viewed as an example of this error. Still more than half of the sample genuinely endorsed this position, showing that many modern persons distinctly lack a sense of personal persistence. The present article is the first to present the narrative statements obtained by the Adapted Personal Persistence Interview.

Procedure

The Adapted Personal Persistence Interview was presented in a bound packet on 5½ by 8½ pieces of paper, each of which contained the statement followed by some lines in which responses were to be recorded. This was presented along with other measures, the results of which can be found in Hertler et al. (2015). A demographic form and two other measures of personal persistence were completed before the Adapted Personal Persistence Interview and the Time Reference Inventory as well as a personality measure (NEO-FFI) were completed afterward. Packets were administered to classrooms from two urban college campuses during class time, taking most respondents 30 to 45 minutes to complete. The Adapted Personal Persistence Interview itself proved, for most respondents, to be the most time-intensive measure, taking approximately 10 minutes to complete. Gift cards, not exceeding 15 dollars in value, were raffled off at the end of some of the administrations.

Results

The Adapted Personal Persistence Interview recorded a diverse range of diachronically disunified responses. Most participants truly invested in the process, providing extended and thoughtful reports. Some cited changes in self-esteem: “I have become passive and less social, confidence has gone down.” Others cited their burgeoning independence: “Realizing that I need to make my own decisions and not living the life that others want me to live . . .” Some found faith in another world: “I believe that my life has changed and could only have been changed through an encounter with Jesus Christ.” While others lost faith in this world: “. . . my views are inwardly more cynical towards humanity and my sense of humanitarianism has dilapidated a good deal.” Some participants were flushed with hope for the future: “I was a depressed scared individual with no direction or hope. [Now], I am a happy confident person with hope[s], dreams and goals.” While others were haunted by the hardships of the past: “Became this person by being raised by two parents until I was 14. At 14 one parent died suddenly and the other became an addict.” Narratives of unmitigated loss were outnumbered by those tempered by redemption: “My father has been fighting cancer for the last four years and I had to start being responsible and taking responsibility for myself and my own life. Because of this I became a driven, goal oriented and independent person.” Nevertheless, all these themes were rather rare. Conversely, there were two ascendant themes that accounted for the majority of diachronically disunified responses: perspectival change and maturation.

Mutative perspectival change was an oft-cited theme in diachronically disunified participant responses. Just as one person sometimes may have trouble taking the perspective of another, the present self may not be able to take the perspective of the past self: “The change was time. I have become this person because I just see life differently. Things that were extremely important to me five years ago seem silly now . . .” Perspective shapes values in that it allows what is important to stand out in relief: “I learned to value the important things in life such as family, health and future planning.” Furthermore, education can alter perceptions; indeed this is its principal function: “Through education within psychology I have become more flexible and open to my environment.” Sometimes, when place changes, perspective changes; the following participant bears witness to the power of travel. As she journeyed across cultures, nations, and social strata, her perspective broadened: “A semester abroad four years ago opened my mind to many things. Graduating and surviving on my own, specifically in urban environments with little money has changed my focus and priorities.” Yet it is not necessary to move or to travel; the most powerful perspectival change comes from viewing differently what has always been viewed:

I have learned to appreciate the people I care about. In the past five years I have lost many loved ones. I have learned to live life day by day, and to appreciate the here and now and to know that tomorrow is not a promise.

With a mean participant age of approximately 21 years, the ubiquity of maturational themes was hardly surprising. Most participants directly discuss their new found maturity: “I have grown up and matured. I am a lot more responsible and caring and helpful to others.” Finding strength within, these young adults found that they no longer needed approval from without:

The things that have changed me over the last five years have affected me greatly. I feel that they have made me grow as a person and made me believe in myself. Not giving into peer pressure has made me stand up for myself and develop into the person I am today.

Some respondents recognized the transitional status that their age places them in: “I have grown up and while I still do not consider myself an adult, I really was a child five years ago.” With maturation comes introspective self-criticism. With reflection, respondents such as this one, have taken a different course and are on their way, as they see it, to becoming a different self: “All the changes in my life have made me more mature, less selfish; more aware of my faults so that I can fix them.” Subjected to maturational forces, participants have been transformed, morally, behaviorally and affectively: “I have grown up. I have taken responsibility, I have calmed down from partying. I know right from wrong. I have become more included in my family.” To be sure, many participants understand maturational forces to be externally imposed, rather than internally developed. For these persons, biologically driven cognitive changes are not even tacitly recognized. Instead, they see themselves shaped by new classes of external pressures they encountered over the past 5 years: “Working in a stressful field . . . working in healthcare has increased my level of personal responsibilities for others.” Still others neatly integrate internal and external maturational forces:

Through experience and education I have become who I am today. When you are younger your values are different, but as you mature and grow up you change the way you act and view things. The changes have made me a more well-rounded and respectable person.

There were striking similarities across diachronically unified and diachronically disunified responses. In content, theme, and phrase, they were sometimes indistinguishable. All these young persons, irrespective of their status on measures of personal persistence, are reckoning with driving developmental change. They are human; and humans of a particular age, responding during a time of change and growth. They are clearly a cohort, connected by innumerable cultural ties; they nearly all are maturing and sense that coming maturity; their perspectives are broadening and deepening; they are struggling to understand and establish themselves. Destabilizing changes of perspective and destabilizing maturation are expected given the mean age of the sample (21.54 years). Accordingly, all alike are in the process of becoming; they are attempting to understand themselves, to construct themselves. For all this, they answer these questions of personal persistence differently. The sample split on the relative importance of perspectival change and maturation. Those that were personally persistent routinely subordinated perspectival change and maturation to the stability of personality and morality. They sensed a set of traits or values that were reliably present and whose resonance could be felt through the static of temporal distortion. These personally persistent respondents seized upon more stable self-characteristics and anchored themselves with them. Just as the ballet dancer fixates on a single point during rotation, the personally persistent participant fixates on morality and personality during developmental flux: “You are always being inspired and changing your ideas, but in truth your personality remains the same.” Among the diachronically unified, such statements were commonplace and to demonstrate this point, the following four excerpts are submitted:

“I have the same easy going personality that I used to, but I just feel that I have more of a purpose for being.”

“My values and morals are also still the same, my level of responsibility and how I perceive it is the only thing that I feel has changed.”

“I am still the same person in the sense that I am still caring, very caring, I still have the same morals and ideals and personality traits. I think I have grown up and grown out of some things I used to do or be, but am still the same at the core.”

“I still have the same morals and I am still outgoing and courteous. I just have different priorities.”

Note how these participants acknowledge the developmental change so important to the diachronically disunified, but are able to pinion that developmental change into a relatively insignificant position with the combined continuity of morality and personality.

Discussion

Participant narratives show that most respondents searched deeply into their reconstructed past, conjured up crucial narrative elements, examined patterns of behavior, surveyed the phenomenological landscape, and evaluated autobiographical themes. Those who perceived themselves as personally persistent operate under the conviction that their present self, however historically morphed, matured, scarred, or improved, nevertheless persists intact across time. They indicated that their cognitive–affective experience of whom they were, whatever the subjective origins of that essence is felt to be, extended into the present. Alternatively, some did not effectively bridge present and past and could no longer directly reexperience their former self. Nevertheless, four themes dominated personally persistent and diachronically disunified responses alike: perspectival change, maturation, personality, and morality. Diachronically disunified participants emphasized the former two; diachronically unified responses emphasized the latter two in mitigating the effects of the former two.

Unlike the original Personal Persistence Interview, the Adapted Personal Persistence Interview provided personal, meaningful, and intimate explanations, not only of personal persistence but also of its absence. When overtly asked, more than half of the present participants self-identified as diachronically disunified, suggesting that many of the narrative responses of dubious quality in Chandler et al.’s research might never have claimed personal persistence if given greater latitude. Nearly every young participant reflected on maturational forces and perspectival change, but only those who apperceived the moorings of personality and morality weathered the developmental storm. To be sure, change is divisive; change and diachronicity were inversely related across and between measures in the two studies that simultaneously measured change and personal persistence (Hertler et al., 2015; Lampinen et al., 2004). The present narratives reinforce this view, as many explanations of diachronic disunity begin by recalling change: All the changes affected my life . . . or the changes that have taken place in my life have made me . . . Nevertheless, these narratives demonstrate that diachronic disunity does not ineluctably follow change. As was true in both studies, many respondents reported high degrees of personal persistence in the face of great change, defying the general statistical trend. We now have a preliminary explanation of diachronically disunified reasoning: The diachronically disunified have no sense of enduring personality traits or moral systems which might withstand change. Nevertheless, this is a proximate explanation that replaces one question with a second: Why do not diachronically disunified participants apperceive, or have not they developed, an enduring personality or moral system?

The majority of the sample having described themselves as diachronically disunified, does not exactly demonstrate that they are multiplicitious (Mitchell, 1992) or internally incompatible (Searle, 2004), but it does suggest that change compounds year by year, precluding many from maintaining a persistent sense of self across great segments of time. Having considered what the sample has said, it is interesting to consider what they have not said. As a rule, personally persistent participants did not invoke situational variables, such as place of residence, place of worship, or some stable role. When personal persistence was reported, it was most often founded on internal characteristics, as before mentioned. It is as if all these young persons are bereft of concrete external anchors on which to establish personal persistence, and the ones that manage in spite of this have sufficient abstract internal anchors to serve as substitutes. Accordingly, it is interesting to think how a premodern sample, having all the concrete externalities of inherited lands, predetermined positions, limited mobility, and religious instruction might have responded to the Adapted Personal Persistence Interview.

In some ways, self-theories can be interpreted as a barometer of self-perception. Perhaps the self was most internally coherent and temporally stable in the times when there was no explicit theory to describe it. If such an assumption has any validity, it follows that (1) philosophical self-theories of the early modern period were describing how coherence and persistence could and should be established even as persons were dispossessed, empowered, and secularized; (2) psychological self-theories of the late modern period, such as Jamesian self-theory, went to greater lengths in explaining away evidence of eroding coherence and persistence (the Jamesian Mes) through complex mechanisms (the Jamesian I); and (3) the most recent psychological theories of self developed in the midst of postmodernity, abandoned the effort altogether as the ground became untenable. Such a framework might explain why the phenomenological descriptions of Strawson have so much currency and meaning for so many academicians; why these theories are cropping up only over the past 20 odd years; why Chandler et al. and Lampinen et al. and the present researchers decided only in the past decade that personal persistence is a topic demanding empirical attention. In microcosm, this trend is evident within the annals of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, as in recent years the theme of personal persistence and its absence has been implicitly insinuated into discussions of myth and meaning (Feinstein, Krippner, & Granger, 1988), neuroscientific accounts of self (Motschnig-Pitrik & Lux, 2007), and descriptions of relational dynamics (Reeves, 2006), while it has been more explicitly treated within the context of trauma (Jaffe, 1985), existential threat (Rappaport, Enrich, & Wilson, 1982), and postmodern divisiveness (Hoffman, Stewart, Warren, & Meek, 2009).

Thus, there are two broad avenues of future research to be undertaken, one personological and one cultural. First, research should try to determine how some can remain personally persistent in spite of change. In other words, research should search for traits that enable some to successfully substitute concrete external anchors for abstract internal ones. Second, and most pertinent to the present article, research should focus on society and culture. We cannot travel across time to measure the extent and quality of personal persistence in the premodern period, but we can approximate the impossibility by traveling across cultures. The present study should be replicated within a traditional society; one that commonly inherits role, status, position, vocation, and abode; one in which traditional forms of religion and hierarchy are present, and one in which technology and travel are restricted. One might predict that such a sample would show higher rates of personal persistence and prominent use of external and concrete realities to warrant personal persistence.

Footnotes

Appendix

The following are exact reproductions of participant responses typed from handwritten originals. From the total of 177 participants, every 10th response is included. Starting from the left, the first column records the participant number, the second contains verbatim responses to the following question: First, I would like you to describe what sort of person you were five years ago. If someone didn’t know you, what could you say to help him or her understand the sort of person you were then? The third column contains responses to this statement: Next, I would like you to describe the sort of person you see yourself as being right now. The fourth column asks about change, containing responses to the following question: Has the sort of person you are currently changed from the sort of person you were? The fifth column contains participant answers to the routing statement, showing whether the participant answered Question 4, indicating that they felt personally persistent, or Question 5, indicating that they did not. Finally, the sixth column shows the final response and explanation of one’s personal persistence or lack thereof.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biographies

Steven C. Hertler graduated from Pace University in 2008 with a doctorate in clinical psychology. He serves as an adjunct-assistant professor of psychology for the College of New Rochelle, in New Rochelle, New York, while also teaching undergraduate and graduate classes for the College of Saint Elizabeth and Caldwell University, both located in New Jersey where he now lives. Across these three institutions, he has taught more than 10 courses ranging from Differential Diagnosis and Treatment Planning and Psychopathology to Biological Basis of Behavior and Social Psychology. Focusing on personality, evolutionary ecology, comparative psychology, and theoretical sociobiology, he has served as the sole or principal author for 11 peer-reviewed journal articles, as well as contributing to several Sage reference guides, and serving as a senior editor for Europe’s Journal of Psychology.

Herbert H. Krauss, BS, MS (The Pennsylvania State University), PhD (Northwestern University), is a clinical psychologist and a fellow of the American Psychological Association. He has held a number of academic appointments, most notably at Hunter College, CUNY (1971-2001) and Pace University (2001-2009). He was Chair of the Psychology Departments at both universities where he retired as Professor Emeritus. In addition, he held a clinical adjunct appointment at Cornell Medical School and Payne–Whitney Clinic and maintained a private practice. He is author or coauthor of more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and books on topics ranging from personality theory to psychopathology. He resides in Tucson, Arizona, where he is on the board of the University of Arizona’s Journal of Methods and Measurement in the Social Sciences.

Alfred W. Ward earned his PhD in experimental psychology in 1985 from Fordham University, and joined the Pace University faculty that same year. For more than 25 years, he has played a central role in the research training of undergraduate and doctoral students within the Department of Psychology. As an IBM Visiting Professor, he conducted management assessment programs for IBM and published a series of monographs in the area of organizational psychology. He has published in the areas of psychometrics and has coauthored articles and presented at conferences with both colleagues and students in areas ranging from clinical to social psychology. He was the recipient of the 2007 Kenan Award for Teaching Excellence. He coordinated doctoral research training within the New York City PsyD Program in School-Clinical Child Psychology for many years and has advised or consulted on more than 100 doctoral dissertations. While still teaching students and conducting research, he has assumed administrative responsibilities for Pace University’s Pleasantville campus, serving as an associate dean.

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