"I contradict myself. I am large. 1 contain multitudes."
Walt Whitman
At the heart of the self-help literature are two basic conceptions of how
we should see ourselves. Titles like Wayne Dyer's Real Magic, Thomas
Moore's Care of the Soul, and Deepak Chopra's The Seven Spiritual
Lazos of Success assume the existence of a changeless core inside us
(called variously the soul or the higher self) that guides us and helps us
to fulfill a purpose unique to us. In this conception, self-knowledge is
the path to maturity.
Then there are titles such as Ayn Rand's Atit? s Sbrugged, Anthony
Robbins'Azuaken tbe Giant Witbin, and Benjamin Franklin'sAuto
biography, which assume that the self is a blank slate on which you can
write thFstory of your life. There is no one better than Friedrich
Nietzsche to sum up this attitude
"ACtive, SUCCesslu/natures acc not according to the dictum 'knowthy
self', but as if there hovered before them the commandment: wilt a self
and thou shalt become a self."
The self-knowing and the self-creating person are, of course, only
abstractions a person will always be an interesting combination of the
two. Both viewpoints, nevertheless, contain the assumption that the self
is independent and unitary ("one"). Yet in the twenty-first century we
have multiple roles, are members of many communities, and express a
variety of personas, so our experience is of complexity. Where does
self-help 6t into such a context?
In his book Tbe Satu? ated Self, Kenneth Gergen suggested that the
old idea of the unitary self has had to evolve to take account of our
many-mindedness, or what he called the"mtiltiphrenic personality."
