I experience myself as having an identity and others confirm that in their relations with me. We get occasional hints of this. I bought a four-wheel drive car and several friends were surprised. They did not think it was my sort of car, obviously. Upset your friends’ perceptions too much and they will worry about you. When I am underperforming, I say I am not myself today. Old friends may say, he is not the man he was. I could say of my wife, that she is not the woman I married.
We believe strongly then in this continuity of identity and take note of any deviations. There was a time, which peaked with Harold Wilson, I think, when politicians obsessively declared the consistency of their view of every matter of policy. This despite the fact that what we need in reality are politicians who are capable of changing their minds. ‘Changing their minds’, that is the clue. To have a new thought is to change your mind? It is as if you become a different person. No wonder Bion said that we have a hatred of thinking.
It is not quite the same now. We have now the phenomenon of the makeover, where one shamelessly constructs a new image of oneself. Older people look younger, puffing out their wrinkles like toads. So politicians now are always having to come up with new and younger policies, like adolescents who restlessly have to be uniquely different while slavishly following the conventions of their social group.