me, the modern-day monster

[anamacha]

I am really lucky.

I just read an article in Wired about experimental medical techniques, using electricity to get coma patients out of their vegetative state. It hit me really hard, because as you may know, I am a head trauma survivor myself

Comments

something like the following ...

[_rck_]

As an individual, you participate in multiple social systems: you are a legal agent in the social system "law", you are a buyer or seller in the social system "economy", you are a voter or representative in the social system "politics".

However, that basically splices your individuality up, so you as the individual have to figure out how to make these slivers that the social systems pull from you sum up into one whole personality.

As far as I understand it, that process is called identity formation and identity negotiation. As psychologists will gladly tell you, identity is a construction that combines the different aspects of your personality into something that feels whole and is balanced within itself (that's why the unhealthy error state is called shizophrenia and not single-minded dullness). This construction is not supported by the social systems, as we observed, so you work on forming an identity within the force fields of the social systems and you negotiate that individuality against the systems, who cannot do much with the aspects of your personality that they do not need.

I suspect that the social systems can sometimes try to manipulate your individual needs for their own purposes; playing the patriotism card during an election year comes to mind. The history of yourself and of the group that you feel allegiance to is a powerful element of how you define yourself, i.e. your identity formation; so exploiting that for the "voter" aspect of your self is a clever ruse of the political system.

Does that help?

Re: something like the following ...

[anamacha]

that helps in the context of telling me what identity formation and negotiation are, but I don't really see the connection to what I posted. Maybe it's just too obtuse for me at the moment; maybe I might get it later.

Are you suggesting, perhaps, that my feelings of not-normalness are precipitated by the presumed fact that I have not yet successfully undergone the process of identity formation and negotiation with the social structures in which I move?