James Hollis’s Concept of “Provisional Selves”
Reflection Questions
What versions of myself do I take on and off?
Who am I apart from my roles and history?
What remains unfinished in me?
What is seeking expression through me?
What links me to the larger? What is the larger?
Overview
James Hollis is a psychoanalyst and author. He posits all human beings naturally develop temporary stories to make sense of their world and temporary strategies, or ways of being, to meet the demands of their environment. He calls these provisional narratives and provisional selves - “provisional” meaning something that is temporary to serve a particular purpose.
Hollis argues that early life is dominated by the question, What does the world want from me in order for me to get my needs met? More specifically, we ask, What do my parents want from me? What do my teachers, employers, church, and social group want from me? We may also ask, What does this moment or this situation require of me? The answers vary, so we adapt.
The result is that we accumulate different false selves - not false because they’re a lie, false because they’re temporary and adaptive, in contrast to emerging from our nature. Hollis is quick to point out there’s nothing wrong with developing different selves to meet different situations. It’s just a reality of navigating a complex world.
But at some point, we may realize the adaptations, stories, and provisional selves we’ve accumulated over the years are no longer serving us. We may even feel like they were never really ours to begin with. And we may start to sense the presence of a Self behind or underneath all of our provisional selves. Hollis argues this is the protest of the psyche or soul, demanding recognition and expression. Unsurprisingly, Hollis argues this often happens in mid-to-late life when we become more reflective.
Hollis is a Jungian thinker (as in Carl Jung), but echoes the existentialists in emphasizing no one can live your life for you. Each of us has to pay attention to the protest(s) of our soul and take responsibility for ways we engage the unique window of responsibilities and opportunities we’re presented with.
So for Hollis the questions we have to ask is, What does the psyche (soul) want of me? What is it that is wishing expression in the world through me? He adds, “[The psyche] reminds us from time to time that we are charged from the beginning of the journey to its end with accountability to what is seeking its expression through us into the world, asking us only that we manage to be as courageous as possible, to show up as best we can, and to live that journey with as much integrity as we can muster.”
Finally, Hollis is keen to emphasize that there are no stock, universal scripts, and that we should keep asking questions because our situation is ever-unfolding. He states, “The path of personal growth and development is not found so much in finding the answers, which we all certainly wished for as youths, because the answers we do find at best serve only for a little while or are someone else's answers. Life is forever evolving, and yesterday's truth is tomorrow's prison. You may recall the old folk wisdom that no prisons are more confining than "those we know not we're in." Rather, I believe we get a larger life by asking larger questions and keeping those questions before us.”
Excerpts from A Life of Meaning
“From the first moment of our lives, profound questions are urgent: Who are you? Who am I? Are you safe, reliable, absent, punitive, invasive, abandoning? What sense can I make of what I'm experiencing? Because our well-being is tied to understanding, we began to "story" our world. We make a story out of an active process in service to constructing a predictable world for ourselves.
“Our stories are our provisional interpretations of what is going on and what it might mean to us. These provisional narratives are fueled with emotion within us and embodied in a somatic registry that never forgets. Thus, we all grow attached to a partial script - a script that may keep showing up in our later lives or might slip into oblivion to be replaced by other, more powerful scripts. No matter how competent we are in the outer world, how "successful" we are in the eyes of the world, most of us, most of the time, are on automatic pilot. In other words, we're in service to reflexive strategies that are designed to meet our needs, manage anxiety, and stay out of harm's way as best we can.
“Our systemic relational patterns arise from our earliest stories-stories with which we have lived so long that we consider them reality rather than provisional fictions, stories in which we are locked until we recognize them … But in every case, these messages, these stories, are playing a role in our life.
“Are we repeating them? Are we compensating for them, or were trying unconsciously to fix them? Therefore, we have to ask this question: What were the formative messages that show up still in my current life? And here's the pragmatic question: What do they make me do, or what do they keep me from doing?
“… Psyche is the Greek word for soul. Pathos refers to suffering. Logos means "word" or "expression." So psychopathology is literally the expression of the suffering of the soul. Wouldn't it make sense to stop and pay attention? And remember also the etymology of the word therapy. Therapeuein means "to listen or attend to psyche, the soul" - to pay attention to rather than suppress psychopathology and to ask, "What is the soul trying to say to me?" Psychopathology, of course, can get our attention and make us reconsider. Sometimes it even offers us a path through the dark wood to a different journey …
“Psychopathology, then, is the autonomous protest of our inner life to the conditions of our outer life, whether from our choices or whether imposed upon us by circumstances or others. So there's always the invitation to consider: What does the soul want? This question is not designed for our ego's comfort, for it often will put us in harm's way. It can lead us away from the consensual reality or community approval and sometimes make our journey very lonely. But most of the people whom we admire in history did not have easy lives; rather, we admire them for what they embodied through their lives. They won their way through, through the difficulties, to bring those values, those witnesses, into this world and thereby enriched all of us.
“So our job is to pay attention; therapeuein - to listen, to attend to. When we are in accord with the terrain of our inner life, we experience supportive energy, a feeling of confirmation, and most of all, most elusive but most necessary, a sense of meaning, fulfillment, and purpose. When we're off track, in service to those old adaptive patterns, we have to force matters and make things happen, and it gets harder and harder and harder. We know that's always the path to depression and burnout down the line …
“… Who am I apart from my roles? Who am I apart from my history? Who am I apart from my stories? Where do I go from here? And in service to what road maps? In service to what stories? Now remember, as we discussed in the previous chapter, we all accumulate stories as we're trying to make sense of the world: Who are you? Who am I? How are we dealing with each other? Is the world safe or unsafe? How do I manage this rather difficult transit we call life? We produce what the British psychiatrist D. W. Winnicott called "the false self." Not false because we’re hypocritical; false because it's adaptive rather than rising out of our nature. Often when the false self, or the provisional self, collides with the natural, spontaneous, instinctually grounded self that is wishing for change, then you realize that something else is wishing acknowledgment. Something else, some autonomous force within, has brought you to an accountability.
“This collision is inevitable, though sometimes it remains unconscious. It begins to leak through the floorboards as troubling symptoms. You do "the right things," and they just dont feel rewarding anymore. Or maybe you've achieved your goals and found that they're not satisfying; something else is nagging at you. Or perhaps you find difficulties in your relationships because things within you leak into those relationships, whether it's with children or an intimate partner or even at work. In those moments, you begin to realize something else is pushing from below and refuses to be ignored any longer.
“It's at that point that we really have to try to track these symptoms and ask, "All right, where are they coming from?" As I suggested in the last chapter, the symptoms represent the protest and constructive criticism of the psyche. We may not experience it at the time, and we may ask, quite understandably from an ego standpoine: How quickly do I get rid of these? What is the right technique or the right medication? Instead, we should ask: What is it that is wishing further expression in me? What is neglected or repressed or split off or cut off? What is it that wishes an audience with me?
“… I believe, even more today than ever before, that the quality of our lives will be a direct function of the magnitude of the questions we keep asking - questions we are now obliged to pursue for ourselves. When we were young, we all wanted and expected answers. Along the way, we learned that even good answers for today will be outlived by tomorrow. The more we hang on to the old answers, the more we're constricted by them. That's the dirty little secret of nostalgia. It takes us back to a place that never really existed and robs us of an emergent present. But we do have to ask these questions on our own because there is so precious little in our culture that does not elevate and privilege the banal, the distracting, and the trivial, all of which are affronts and diminishments of the soul.
“You have to find questions that matter to you, questions that open you to a further journey. Let me suggest a few of those questions for you. These are questions that I think about and reflect on, and I find that they keep evolving and new responses emerge. All of which again suggests a developmental process rather than a static stuckness. These are basic questions we've touched on in prior chapters: Who am I, really, apart from all that history, all those relationships, all those scripts and obligations? It's so easy to confuse the manifest presence of the outer life, our curriculum vitae, and think, That's who I am. I am my résumé.
“Ask yourself: What remains unfinished in me? What is still seeking respect? What is still wishing to be addressed? What is still challenging me? What fires my imagination still?
“That leads us to the question: What was left behind, that which still waits to be honored by me, still is asking for respect, still is asking me to pay attention? Also ask this question: What links me to the larger? What is the larger? How do you understand your journey in a larger frame, whether it's nature, a sense of the divine, your relationships in depth, the work of your hands or your mind or your imagination?