Reified

“The role compensates for a lack: ultimately, for the lack of life; more immediately, for the lack of another role.”

The MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) recognizes 16 separate personality types based on Jung’s four mental functions; sensing and intuition, thinking and feeling. The ability to detect a person’s inferior functions is the decisive step in determining the personality of an individual. Consequently, these aspects of one’s personality are thus regarded as “underdeveloped”. From a social perspective, a person suffering from an underdeveloped personality experience difficulties in fully adapting to social situations and has as of yet to learn how to fully integrate into society by way of behavior, thoughts, feelings and self-expression.

These inferiorities are discerned by applying a general cultural framework; the collective unconscious. The archetypes from which our culture stems from are abstract formations relating to an underlying cultural concept which inevitably manifest themselves in our everyday lives. The individuation process, that particular process where we accustom ourselves to our environment by sensing what individual qualities are promoted and which ones are scorned, is our way to come to terms with ourselves within the boundaries of the archetypes bestowed upon our lives. By unconsciously compromising our personalities we set in motion a complex psychological role playing game in which we repress certain aspects of our personality to experience successful integration within our environment. In short, we learn to fool ourselves by forcefully regressing our personalities only to act according to specific roles.

These roles have come to be the sole ground for all human relations and the only way for us to define ourselves. We act not according to who we really are but by what role society lends us. We learn to suppress our tendencies in order to condition ourselves for society. This sickening act of self-betrayal, the individuation process, is the only way which allows us to construct ourselves as an indivisible unit within our cultural boundaries. However, as soon as we allow ourselves to be surrendered by public opinion, afraid to step aside to judge our actions independently, instead succumbing to the path of least resistance, we forfeit all chances of individual development.

The yearning for true individuality is an ongoing process during our whole lives but only in certain pivotal moments does it evolve into an act of pure survival; when the ground on which we lie crumbles and we are forced to change perspective (which occurs for some sooner rather than later in life - for some not at all) we are thrown out of the zone of comfort within our current role and we desperately yearn to claim our individuality once more. In this struggle to find true personality some might might once more take refuge in the conventionality of compromising individualism in favor of the societal role play, an irrational albeit unconscious decision – and we will yet again find ourselves established on slowly disintegrating ground.

When adhering to the roles set by current society we lose all individuality. Our values become muddled, our thoughts become an external abstraction instead of an inherent feature by which we rationally lead our lives and we experience reality as a distorted entity into we are not yet fully integrated; we adapt to the order of things, we yet again make ourselves Others by means of adaptation. Recognition by society becomes the highest goal. The individual sets aside all inner longings and is once more faced by the endless struggle of impoverished reification. “The role is the self-caricature which we carry about with us everywhere, and which everywhere brings us face-to-face with an absence.”