We have an issue knowing who we are, as previously discussed in my opening post to this series. We spend so much of our time wondering who we are, an ironic task at best, but a brutal journey if engaged with seriously. The problem is, we do not choose who we are. Our self begins to form without our consent and without our input in its earliest roots. Like an acorn planted in a field, we simply grow into ourselves without a choice in where we are planted or whether or not we actually want to grow. Accepting this premise: that the self begins before we are aware of it, is crucial to understanding the self as a whole.
So, where do we begin then?
Birth.
Some might argue that we pre-date birth in our souls, but if this is true, then this soul would not factor into our formation of self anyways because we clearly cannot know anything about ourselves before our bodily existence. Our goal is to know ourselves and about the self as they are now, not as they existed in a bygone age of perfection beyond our capability of understanding. Any such knowledge of a pre-existent soul would be meaningless without an understanding of the self in the present, so the discussion of the supernatural is irrelevant until we can grasp the natural to such a degree as to brush against the supernatural.
So, back to birth. Why does the self begin at birth and not at conception? (This conversation has nothing to do with the rights of a fetus, this is merely about the formation of the self) Before our birth, our bodies and our mother’s bodies are virtually the same. We cannot have any neurological firings that separate us from our mother until we are aware that the world around us is not merely an extension of ourselves. There must be a separation in order for the self to begin. Before birth, the world is a womb and some voices/noises. The environment that shapes our most basic neurological firings is the environment in which we do not have a self.
A sense of self, the sense that is hardwired into the neurology of self-referential loops within our brain, cannot be formed until we recognize that there are others in the world, and the first other we create is our mother. Our brains are forced to take in the information that there is a world besides the womb, and there are others besides ourselves at birth. This recognition draws a hard line between the neurons which have been firing as reactions to the information fed to us in the womb, all of which form a basis for our self, and new neurons which must begin to parse the information our senses are gathering about the new world we find ourselves in. So upon entry into the world outside the womb, we begin to form a self. This is the foundation of the id.
If your reaction to this is to say: “Well, this is a bunch of malarkey, I don’t have any memory of my birth and it doesn’t play a role in the actions I take or who I am.” I would respond that the self is not a cohesive structure that is always in agreement with itself. We have passions and desires that are inherent to our humanity that we do not always want or accept from ourselves. Our birth is the beginning, the root of self, and that root is the one we do not always want to acknowledge or give voice to. It is the id, the underlying instincts and desires that make us human. It is ultimately the desire to be free from the pain of being separate.
The issue with the departure from the mother is that our self is fundamentally dependent on her. Our entire identity as a separate entity from the doctor whose hands we arrived in and the hospital room we suddenly found ourselves in is based entirely upon the neurons that wired together while we were still a part of our mother. We are simultaneously inseparable from mom and irreconcilably separate from her. We can’t be unborn, and we can’t rewrite our existence as a self-existent being. This disgruntled beginning is a fundamental piece to understanding the human condition. We hate being alone in ourselves, but we can never be truly united to others either.
This only becomes worse as our identities become less complex and more defined. This only becomes worse as we develop an ego.