When complexities, conflicts, and ambiguities become endemic at the level of cultural scenarios, much greater demands are placed on the actor than can be met by the adaptive possibilities of interpersonal scripts alone. The need to script one’s behavior, as well as the implicit assumption of the scripted nature of the behavior of others, is what engenders a meaningful “internal rehearsal”, an internal rehearsal that becomes significant only where significant alternative outcomes are available. Intrapsychic scripting becomes an expanding part of the self process in proportion to the range and intensity of the internal dialogue. It is this problematizing of options for behavior that creates fantasy in a very rich sense of that word: the symbolic reorganization of reality in ways that make it complicit in realizing more fully the actor’s many-layered wishes.1
In social settings where most find it dif ficult to conceive of themselves as being anything but what they are (a triumph of the traditional model of socialization), the content and significance of the intrapsychic are limited. At best, it accounts for minor variations in performance. However, as human societies come to experience higher levels of differentiation and individuation, a distinct version of the self is created in the practice of asking which of these outcomes does he or she want to be. This imposed reflexivity transforms the surrounding social world from one in which external events or locations occasion desire into a landscape of potential settings for desires, occasioning a seeking out or creating of the events or locations appropriate to “desired” desires. The difference is partly that of reactivity and proactivity.
Another and equally important modification in the self takes place when, as must occur increasingly, that form of the question is applied to the “I” itself: What kind of I am l? What kind of I do I want to be? Such questions create the experience of a self distinct from the roles it may be required to play: the experience of a self autonomous in its interests and, of greater importance, seemingly autonomous in its desires (Simon 1972).
What is being touched upon comes very close to the conditions of increased uncertainty, starting at the Renaissance, that for Trilling (1972) virtually occasioned “a mutation in human nature”. The historic development he points to is that where signif icant numbers of individuals began to cope with what is among the most commonplace experiences for the contemporary world, significant interaction with others who for all practical purposes are strangers. An uncertainty that necessitates questioning the sincerity of others ultimately becomes the condition for the questioning of the self by the self. The subsequent emergence of what was experienced as the imperative claims of an “authentic self’, a self that might be represented in any one of its several roles but that need not be fully represented in any, might well be taken as a comparable “mutation” occasioned by the emergence of a “postmodern era”. This is an experience described most clearly by Merleau-Ponty when he observed,
It is incomprehensible that I, who am irreducibly alien to all my roles, feel myself moved by my appearance in the gaze of others and that I in turn reflect an image of them that can affect them, so that there is woven between us an “exchange”…in which there are never quite two of us and yet one is never alone.
(Merleau-Ponty 1970:14)
For Trilling, as for others, the conflict between the claims of sincerity and the claims of authenticity is seen as part of the traditional dialectic of the requirements of civilization juxtaposed against the urgencies of nature. What is currently perceived as the unanticipated enlargement of the claims or powers of the authentic self is commonly explained by reference to the weakening of agencies of socialization—in other words, a weakening of the forces of social control that allow the previously subdued residues of biological evolution to be heard with a heightened clarity. Implicit in this view is the argument that civilization may have drifted too far, may have turned against itself by unleashing the very dangerous propensities within the individual that commitments to sincerity emerged to protect against. However unattractive many of the postures and behaviors associated with the claims of authenticity may be, it may be a mistake to view this as a turn that brings us ever closer to our phylogenetic roots.
These same developments can be viewed as part of the continuing mutations that brought into being so much of the appearance of the human that Trilling found to be both attractive and critical to the Western tradition: the significance of the individual. Intrapsychic scripting thus becomes a historical necessity as a private world of wishes and desires, experienced as originating in the deepest recesses of the self, must be bound to social life: the linking of individual desires to social meanings.
Desire, in a critical sense, is not really desire for something or somebody, though it is often experienced that way, but rather what we expect to experience from something or somebody. Desire is not reducible to an appetite, a drive, an instinct. Desire does not create the self; rather it is part of the continuing process of creating the self. “Desire has its origin and prototype in the experience of satisfaction’ (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973: 317, emphasis in the original). And the experience of satisfaction, once past the earliest months of life, comes to us tainted with symbolic meaning, and it achieves its uncertain legacy for just that reason.