The Divided Self
For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what
the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed
to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want.
—St. Paul, Galatians 5:171
If Passion drives, let Reason hold the Reins.
—Benjamin Franklin2
I first rode a horse in 1991, in Great Smoky National Park, North Carolina.
I’d been on rides as a child where some teenager led the horse by a
short rope, but this was the first time it was just me and a horse, no rope. I
wasn’t alone—there were eight other people on eight other horses, and
one of the people was a park ranger—so the ride didn’t ask much of me.
There was, however, one difficult moment. We were riding along a path on
a steep hillside, two by two, and my horse was on the outside, walking
about three feet from the edge. Then the path turned sharply to the left,
and my horse was heading straight for the edge. I froze. I knew I had to
steer left, but there was another horse to my left and I didn’t want to crash
into it. I might have called out for help, or screamed, “Look out!”; but
some part of me preferred the risk of going over the edge to the certainty
of looking stupid. So I just froze. I did nothing at all during the critical five
seconds in which my horse and the horse to my left calmly turned to the
left by themselves.
As my panic subsided, I laughed at my ridiculous fear. The horse knew
exactly what she was doing. She’d walked this path a hundred times, and
she had no more interest in tumbling to her death than I had. She didn’t
need me to tell her what to do, and, in fact, the few times I tried to tell her
what to do she didn’t much seem to care. I had gotten it all so wrong because
I had spent the previous ten years driving cars, not horses. Cars go
over edges unless you tell them not to.
Human thinking depends on metaphor. We understand new or complex
things in relation to things we already know.3 For example, it’s hard to think
about life in general, but once you apply the metaphor “life is a journey,”
the metaphor guides you to some conclusions: You should learn the terrain,
pick a direction, find some good traveling companions, and enjoy the trip,
because there may be nothing at the end of the road. It’s also hard to think
about the mind, but once you pick a metaphor it will guide your thinking.
Throughout recorded history, people have lived with and tried to control
animals, and these animals made their way into ancient metaphors. Buddha,
for example, compared the mind to a wild elephant:
In days gone by this mind of mine used to stray wherever selfish desire
or lust or pleasure would lead it. Today this mind does not stray and is
under the harmony of control, even as a wild elephant is controlled by
the trainer.
Plato used a similar metaphor in which the self (or soul) is a chariot, and
the calm, rational part of the mind holds the reins. Plato’s charioteer had to
control two horses:
The horse that is on the right, or nobler, side is upright in frame and well
jointed, with a high neck and a regal nose; . . . he is a lover of honor with
modesty and self-control; companion to true glory, he needs no whip,
and is guided by verbal commands alone. The other horse is a crooked
great jumble of limbs . . . companion to wild boasts and indecency, he is
shaggy around the ears—deaf as a post—and just barely yields to horsewhip
and goad combined.
For Plato, some of the emotions and passions are good (for example, the
love of honor), and they help pull the self in the right direction, but others
are bad (for example, the appetites and lusts). The goal of Platonic education
was to help the charioteer gain perfect control over the two horses. Sigmund
Freud offered us a related model 2,300 years later.6 Freud said that
the mind is divided into three parts: the ego (the conscious, rational self);
the superego (the conscience, a sometimes too rigid commitment to the
rules of society); and the id (the desire for pleasure, lots of it, sooner rather
than later). The metaphor I use when I lecture on Freud is to think of
the mind as a horse and buggy (a Victorian chariot) in which the driver (the
ego) struggles frantically to control a hungry, lustful, and disobedient horse
(the id) while the driver’s father (the superego) sits in the back seat lecturing
the driver on what he is doing wrong. For Freud, the goal of psychoanalysis
was to escape this pitiful state by strengthening the ego, thus giving
it more control over the id and more independence from the superego.
Freud, Plato, and Buddha all lived in worlds full of domesticated animals.
They were familiar with the struggle to assert one’s will over a creature much
larger than the self. But as the twentieth century wore on, cars replaced
horses, and technology gave people ever more control over their physical
worlds. When people looked for metaphors, they saw the mind as the driver
of a car, or as a program running on a computer. It became possible to forget
all about Freud’s unconscious, and just study the mechanisms of thinking and
decision making. That’s what social scientists did in the last third of the century:
Social psychologists created “information processing” theories to explain
everything from prejudice to friendship. Economists created “rational choice”
models to explain why people do what they do. The social sciences were uniting
under the idea that people are rational agents who set goals and pursue
them intelligently by using the information and resources at their disposal.
But then, why do people keep doing such stupid things? Why do they
fail to control themselves and continue to do what they know is not good
for them? I, for one, can easily muster the willpower to ignore all the
desserts on the menu. But if dessert is placed on the table, I can’t resist it.
I can resolve to focus on a task and not get up until it is done, yet somehow
I find myself walking into the kitchen, or procrastinating in other ways. I
can resolve to wake up at 6:00 A.M. to write; yet after I have shut off the
alarm, my repeated commands to myself to get out of bed have no effect,
and I understand what Plato meant when he described the bad horse as
“deaf as a post.” But it was during some larger life decisions, about dating,
that I really began to grasp the extent of my powerlessness. I would know
exactly what I should do, yet, even as I was telling my friends that I would
do it, a part of me was dimly aware that I was not going to. Feelings of
guilt, lust, or fear were often stronger than reasoning. (On the other hand,
I was quite good at lecturing friends in similar situations about what was
right for them.) The Roman poet Ovid captured my situation perfectly. In
Metamorphoses, Medea is torn between her love for Jason and her duty to
her father. She laments:
I am dragged along by a strange new force. Desire and reason are pulling
in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the
wrong.
Modern theories about rational choice and information processing don’t
adequately explain weakness of the will. The older metaphors about controlling
animals work beautifully. The image that I came up with for myself,
as I marveled at my weakness, was that I was a rider on the back of an
elephant. I’m holding the reins in my hands, and by pulling one way or the
other I can tell the elephant to turn, to stop, or to go. I can direct things,
but only when the elephant doesn’t have desires of his own. When the elephant
really wants to do something, I’m no match for him.
I have used this metaphor to guide my own thinking for ten years, and
when I began to write this book I thought the image of a rider on an elephant
would be useful in this first chapter, on the divided self. However,
the metaphor has turned out to be useful in every chapter of the book. To
understand most important ideas in psychology, you need to understand
how the mind is divided into parts that sometimes conflict. We assume
that there is one person in each body, but in some ways we are each more
like a committee whose members have been thrown together to do a job,
but who often find themselves working at cross purposes. Our minds are
divided in four ways. The fourth is the most important, for it corresponds
most closely to the rider and the elephant; but the first three also contribute
to our experiences of temptation, weakness, and internal conflict.