The Real Self & The Ideal Self

I found myself quite attracted to this particular approach in psychology called the humanistic approach.  It's a theory, in essence based on the premise of an 'innate human capacity for creativity, growth and choice.' It's a theory which came out as a separate force in psychology in contrast to the other main forces of Psychoanalysis (Freud) and Behaviourism (Skinner).

Some of the names associated with this thinking are Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow (Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs ) and Victor Frankl ( Man's Search For Meaning)

                    

The self image of the person is understood as those attributes or areas of experience about which the person can say 'I am......'. It's about how honest and authentic is our self awareness. Then there's a sense of self as 'I would ideally like to be'. It's the human capacity to strive for fulfillment and greater integration. And this is the path to self actualization. 

The actualizing tendency is central; the person is always in process, always becoming, ever changing.

In this context, a great fit was this article I read this morning called 'Reclaiming Friendship'

Excerpts from 'I live my life in widening circles' - Rilke

"I envisioned a conception of friendship as concentric circles of human connection, intimacy, and emotional truthfulness, each larger circle a necessary but insufficient condition for the smaller circle it embraces.

Within the ether of strangers there exists a large outermost circle of acquaintances. Inside it resides the class of people most frequently conflated with 'friend' in our culture, to whom I’ve been referring by the rather inelegant but necessarily descriptive term person I know and like. These are people of whom we have limited impressions, based on shared interests, experiences, or circumstances, on the basis of which we have inferred the rough outlines of a personhood we regard positively.

Even closer to the core is the kindred spirit, a person whose values are closely akin to our own, one who is animated by similar core principles and stands for a sufficient number of the same things we ourselves stand for in the world. These are the magnifiers of spirit to whom we are bound by mutual goodwill, sympathy, and respect, but we infer this resonance from one another’s polished public selves — our ideal selves — rather than from intimate knowledge of one another’s interior lives, personal struggles, inner contradictions, and most vulnerable crevices of character.

Some kindred spirits become friends in the fullest sense — people with whom we are willing to share, not without embarrassment but without fear of judgment, our gravest imperfections and the most anguishing instances of falling short of our own ideals and values. The concentrating and consecrating force that transmutes a kinship of spirit into a friendship is emotional and psychological intimacy. A friend is a person before whom we can strip our ideal self in order to reveal the real self, vulnerable and imperfect, and yet trust that it wouldn’t diminish the friend’s admiration and sincere affection for the whole self, comprising both the ideal and the real.

It is important to clarify here that the ideal self is not a counterpoint to the real self in the sense of being inauthentic. Unlike the seeming self, which springs from our impulse for self-display and which serves as a kind of deliberate mask, the ideal self arises from our authentic values and ideals. Although it represents an aspirational personhood, who we wish to be is invariably part of who we are — even if we aren’t always able to enact those ideals. In this sense, the gap between the ideal self and the real self is not one of insincerity but of human fallibility. The friend is one who embraces both and has generous patience for the rift between the two. A true friend holds us lovingly accountable to our own ideals, but is also able to forgive, over and over, the ways in which we fall short of them and can assure us that we are more than our stumbles, that we are shaped by them but not defined by them, that we will survive them with our personhood and the friendship intact."