10u | CR Book IV, Chapter 3

The multiple selves which make up the person
fall into 3 kinds, as shown in book i ch. 3.
They may originate from occupations (if
fairly exclusive), from goals, purposes, aims
(conscious or unconscious, dreamt or attempted,
self-imposed or self-accepted), complexes, im-
pulses and instinctual tendencies, emerging from
the 'IT', racial memories (formed by participat-
ion in the racial unconscious), identifications
with individuals, or with groups (x belongs to me,
because I belong to Gr), impersonations, attitu-
des acquired in social situations, formed in
response to social requirements, traits attrib-
uted by others, or defined in contradistin-
ction to others.

c) As long as a men wishes for a self, he will
find it. The deceptive self will never be sat-
isfied that it can be adequately described as
a mere continuity of events. When we attempt, by
stages, to reduce its pretensions to this rook
bottom of fact by provisionally breaking up the
'I' into a multiplicity of selves, the inveter-
ate habit of I-making will continue to cling
to the illusion of a 'total self' lurking behind
the part-selves.

The totality of present states would be too
narrow a definition of the total self. Not to
mention the future, it must at least comprise
its own past. If then the self is to be equat-
ed with all that it 'can' remember, it will com-
prise, on principle, not only everything that
ever happened to it (an innumerable multitude
of forgotten incidents), but also everything
that can be recalled under conditions unusu-
al expansion of memory (at the moment of death,
racial memories, former births). The total self
would thus be a swollen monstrosity, unrecog-
nisable and offensive to the very narcissism
which is so keen on conjuring it up. The con-
ception of his 'total person' which the indivi-
dual cherishes is really incomplete save
for the gaps of amnesia in it. Whatever that
conception may be, it is not the total self.
Perhaps the fact of 'pain' might offer some ob-
jective justification for this hankering after
a total self. In pain we seem certainly more
than a loose conglomeration. In pain I may with
considerable definiteness distinguish my own