Review of Arnold Ludwig's How Do We Know Who We Are? A Biography of the Self

 Slow on the heels of postmodernism--according to which all reading is a misreading and all interpretations equal--psychology has grown increasingly dazzled by illusion, inadvertently on the brink of declaring itself (and the mind) a sort of fantastic lie. We can't say whether memories are true or false. The sources of our actions elude us, so we make them up. The mentally healthy harbor assorted misperceptions about self and the world which the mentally unwell lack. And personality is a story, a narrative construction we invent sometimes out of thin air, more incredible than credible.

Arnold Ludwig's How Do We Know Who We Are? A Biography of the Self joins this conversation midway through, and represents a kind of proliferating summary of where we stand at present. It's a true, though not exactly new, predicament. Is this life a lie? Can we really pretend to know anything about another person or even about ourselves? Is multiplicity or unity of self the native state? Are there acts but no doer, thoughts but no thinker, just like the Buddha proclaimed roughly 2500 years ago? Or are we simply spinning our wheels, promiscuously doubting something implicit in the very act of doubting? Is the doubt itself just a symptom of exhaustion? The fundamental problem seems to be this--can we find anything about the self to believe in? It is easy enough to doubt, especially in this age of arch irony. The true challenge is to believe.

But Ludwig's book isn't about only the self. It's also about the self's biography. In exploring the latter, Ludwig has managed to assemble a bevy of noteworthy biographers--Leon Edel, Peter Gay, Donald Spoto, David McCullough, and others--whom he questions, somewhat Columbo-like (the niggling, nimbly skeptical psychologist), about their efforts. Formally speaking, this is a strength and a weakness. The reprinted transcripts of those conversations never fail to interest, and the responses offered by the biographers range from uncannily astute and subtle to remarkably psychologically naive. But interjected into the narrative as they are, they sometimes land on the page lumpily, uneasily assimilated into the flow of the prose. That can make for a kind of schizophrenic reading experience, and sometimes one begins to sense that the book is operating at cross-purposes. We look very much forward to hearing from these biographers--who function something like a Greek chorus, tethering abstractions to more mundane realities of unpacking a life and constructing its narrative organization--but leaving them to get back to the question at hand occasionally requires a fair amount of attentional refocusing. To his credit, Ludwig does not turn a deaf ear to this difficulty. His introductory comments record the struggle of finding a suitable format for the book. And to be gracious about it, the problem is mostly an embarrassment of riches. The interviews with biographers are too good not to include--they really do amount to a treasure trove of information not easily come by under ordinary circumstances--and so, short of writing two books, Ludwig seems to have accepted the best possible compromise. Two books in one is better than one bad book any day, provided the reader prepares for a unique posture of engagement with the text. I should add in this context that Ludwig's prose is delightfully informal given the density of the subject at hand. He writes far better than the typically tone-deaf psychologist. That fact makes the occasionally jarring transcript interviews easily forgiveable.

Ludwig devotes chapters to both Freud and Hitler, but the book begins with America's and biography's sphinx, Marilyn Monroe. And why not? She has been the subject of nearly 50 biographies or quasi-biographies yet we still feel, still insist, that we do not know who she is (being a member of the Madonna generation, I leave the subject of Marilyn's selenian appeal to more qualified others). Her case forces us to reckon with several problems endemic to the biographical enterprise, problems Ludwig returns to in later chapters, as well. For instance, Marilyn apparently lied about a lot of things, knowingly or not. Clinicians might call her an "unreliable historian." How do biographers deal with such lies? Is the lie the life story, as legitimate as any fact we may adduce, psychologically real but materially bankrupt, or is there a truer story, a story more attuned to concrete actualities? It also seems that each biographer has his or her own personal claim on the real Marilyn. If so, how do we decide between competing versions? Are all partially true, deserving of respect, or are we duty bound to reject those that, based on common sense criteria, seem relatively implausible? Ludwig wisely lets the biographers speak for themselves. He asks Gloria Steinem, "Since you use the term 'real self' with Marilyn, how did you get to know what it was?" "I emphasized her childhood," Steinem replies. "I tried to go back to her childhood and look at the ways it dictated the rest of her life" (14). When asked how he arrived at his distinctive image of Marilyn, Donald Spoto blithely declares, "By a simple presentation of the truth. . . The biographer simply tells the truth. That's how my book differs from those that have preceded it. It simply tells the truth about her life" (17). Childhood and truth. One can be forgiven here for a certain amount of eye-rolling. If psychologists have discovered anything at all about autobiographical recall and retrospection in general, it is that memories for remote events, especially those dating back to early childhood, can't be taken at face value. They are notoriously, consistently unreliable. And as for simply telling the truth in biographical narrative, what might that be? Spoto's is a non-answer. He apparently captured the truth of Marilyn by telling the truth of Marilyn. One wishes Norman Mailer had a chance to weigh in here. He saw Marilyn as constantly living a half-lie which she foisted off on everyone as absolute truth. That would leave the appropriately chary biographer with the "well-known philosophical conundrum of whether an inveterate liar is telling the truth when he says he is lying" (21).

Ludwig's contribution to the Marilyn melee is diagnostic. He shows that she probably suffered from "borderline personality disorder," a lifelong characterological inadequacy marked by fear of abandonment, identity disturbance, emotional instability, and recurrent suicidal behavior, among other things. Of course, as Ludwig sagely allows, mere diagnosis gets us nowhere. Labels are just shorthand descriptions, not explanations. Giving Marilyn a different "name" like borderline personality brings us no closer to an adequate biographical accounting. The riddle of the sphinx riddles on.

And what about the job of deciding between competing accounts of Marilyn's or anybody else's life? We could simply begin and end with a mystery--not a bad solution actually. Or maybe it makes better sense to winnow out demonstrably false claims from those worth retaining. Ludwig spends a fair amount of time on this very question. It's critical. In my view, it simply won't do to say that all interpretations are equal. That flies in the face of common sense. In life and in biography too, some accounts just seem more cogent than others. The question is, which accounts and why. Ludwig cites William Runyan, who in his book Life Histories and Psychobiography surveyed and scrutinized various attempts to explain why van Gogh cut off his ear. Runyan comes up with some useful criteria, including logical soundness, comprehensiveness, predictive value, survival in the face of attempted falsifications, consistency with available evidence and what is known about human behavior, and simple credibility. Ludwig, however, finds them falsely reassuring, partly because they all boil down to credibility, and what one person may find credible, another might not. We can't know what was in van Gogh's head, Ludwig argues. Even if he were to tell us why he cut off his ear, "we still couldn't say whether he was right, whether he believed he was right, or whether he was lying" (89). Plausibility becomes our only basis for judging, and even it "isn't synonymous with truth."

It's hard to disagree, but if we don't, what remains? Utter inscrutability? I can't accept that, and I don't think Ludwig can either. In fact, in a later section of the book in which Ludwig describes the hallmarks "of all sound biographies" and literary or therapeutic narratives, he mentions continuity with culture and times, consistency, coherence, comprehensiveness, organization, the accommodation of contradictions--all closely allied with or even recapitulating the criteria provided by Runyan, criteria Ludwig earlier had found wanting. Ludwig does say that even when narratives--therapeutic or biographical--meet these criteria, they still sometimes fail for various reasons. But they are much more likely to fail when they don't meet these criteria. The fact of the matter is, in life we judge interpretations daily. We use criteria in doing so either implicitly or, in difficult cases, explicitly. Rejecting criteria for evaluating accounts of lives is to lay down our arms, as Freud once remarked. Now, I wouldn't want to pretend than I can successfully understand anybody, but I wouldn't want to pretend that I couldn't understand anybody, either. I'm all for laying down my arms every once in a while. It can be salutary and nicely humbling. I just think preemptive, unilateral surrender makes very little common sense. Biography needs soldiers.

In the book's final two chapters, especially the last one, Ludwig begins to spell out his own particular ontology. First off, he rejects the idea of authenticity--a good move, in my view, since we are all, at all times, capable of becoming different versions of ourselves, multiplicity being far more common than coherence, durability, or consistency of self. One could make a decent case for multiplicity being the native state of mind. Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga spent many years studying hemispheric deconnection (people with split cerebral hemispheres). He speaks of a "sociology of mind," a modular brain made up of systems and subsystems, each with its own capacity for action, each specialized for performing certain sorts of functions--each, in other words, with a mind of its own. Whatever unity we think we possess is specious, the result of the brain's "interpreter" module, whose job it is to tell stories, to create a false coherence out of brain chaos. So the sense of authenticity is a story we tell ourselves and others about ourselves. To speak of an original mind is to imagine a mind before story, a pre-narrative mind. That's fine--Zen Buddhists cultivate Beginner's Mind--but it isn't really biography or psychobiography.

Ludwig claims--and I think rightly--that 99.9 percent of our conscious activities don't require consciousness per se. The brain makes many decisions before "we" do, automatically or unconsciously, whether we know it or not. All we control is the retrospective invention of causes. That is, we control our biography. We can't know the reasons why we do what we do, but we are free to make them up in ways that please us. "To experience a sense of personal control," Ludwig says, "you have to take credit for any self-correcting adjustments within by your self-system that are designed to promote homeostasis as your personal life plan unfolds" (257). We are free when we believe, when we own our actions, when we narrate. According to Ludwig, it isn't OK to ignore important information about yourself, but acting as your own biographer, you may judge which material to select or ignore, how much weight to give to culturally derived themes, goals, or plots. You can't be sure about the truth or completeness of your explanations, but by adopting a biographical perspective on yourself, you do actively become someone trying to make sense of who you are.

How does this vision of self affect the doing of biography? Well, like literary critics we can certainly unpack the stories our subjects tell about themselves. Or I suppose we can speculate about reasons that didn't occur to our subjects, stories our subjects might have told if they'd only been a bit more creative. That becomes a search for the best coherence, the hidden coherence, an inchoate story that might even absorb other articulated ones. We can make the implausible more plausible, in other words. But again, to hold out for such a possibility, criteria need to be in place for judging relative plausibility. Absent such criteria, it's hard to imagine how one story of a life--say the subject's--might be found less successful than another story of a life--say the biographer's or psychobiographer's.

The fact that Ludwig meets these questions head on, and never takes the easy path, persistently doubting every half-truth and every shibboleth that comes his way, makes for a bracing, sometimes vexing, but ultimately refreshing ride. How do we know who we are? Only when we tell ourselves who we are. And though what we tell ourselves may not be the truth, at least we've taken a stab at monologue. There is even a moral here. Either be a biographer, or be a biographical subject. If the former, this play is your play. If the latter, you are a character speaking lines that aren't your own.

Unlike a lot of books we feel we ought to read and pick up slightly grudgingly, battling through as if pushing our way into a crowded room, Ludwig's never seems heavy or daunting. The prose has personality. There is a delightedness about it which is rare for psychological writing. And while at times we may feel as if we've been given one too many reminders of how "impossible" biography is, the overall effect is mildly chastening--a good thing.