8 Zany Selfies And What They Say About My "True Self"!

Maybe the more you say online about yourself, the less people will really understand you??

1. ¡Incommunicado!

In “Returning the Dream: In Memoriam Masud Khan,” psychologist Adam Phillips quotes object-relations theorist D.W. Winnicott: “At the center of each person is an incommunicado element, and this is sacred and most worthy of preservation.”

2. Whose Theology Are You Calling Negative?

Phillips interprets this as a “negative theology of the Self” and goes on to argue that in Winnicott, “the aim of intimacy is to sponsor the solitary unknowability of the True Self.”

3. Intimacy Not Mysterious

Social media posit a much different conception of intimacy: intimacy is established through connection and sharing, through precisely expressing the self, not treasuring its unique ineffability. The True Self is anything but incommunicado.

4. Help, My Inner Space Is Inside-Out!

Social media destroy intimacy, as Winnicott defined it, promoting instead an absolute knowability of the True Self as captured in profiles, updates, and timelines. Intimacy is a matter of thorough data collection, efficient circulation of shared material, diligent response to an intimate’s postings — not a matter of protecting a sacrosanct interior space that can’t be expressed but can be obliterated.

5. Existence Not Essence...

Again, this allows social media to sustain a subject that fits consumer-capitalist incentives — a productive self that communicates more to become more, a self that seeks recognition through possessing objects or some amount of quantified attention and exists in circulation rather than as a timeless essence.

6. Sharing Is So Essential

For social media to subvert this kind of consumer self — for them to support Winnicott’s negative theology of Self — they would need to be seen as expressing precisely what is inessential about ourselves.

7. Shedding Skins

Maybe this is already the case. The more we share in social media, the more clearly we define the negative space where the ineffable self resides. Sharing is a process of shedding, a place to purge what we think we know about ourselves, because what we know, what we can say, is always inherently wrong.

8. I Remember Nothing

Our “true self” can then be inferred in the silences, the gaps amid our busy social-media activity. Intimacy, then, is going over someone’s social media offerings and reassuring them, Yes, none of that seems much like you at all. The death of intimacy comes when your friends accept that you’ve got yourself pegged.