NASTENKA AND MARFUSHENKA: TWO SIDES OF SPLITTED IDENTITY

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

NASTENKA AND MARFUSHENKA: TWO SIDES OF SPLITTED IDENTITY

Conflict of social and individual

in the intrapersonal dynamics it unfolds between "I need" and "I want"

Problems arise when someone

begins to believe that the Day is more valuable than the Night …

In psychotherapeutic practice, it is often necessary to deal with examples of non-integrated identity in the personality of clients. In this case, one can observe a lack of integrity and harmony in their self-image.

The criteria for this can be:

• Categorical attitude towards yourself and other people;
• Integrity, adherence to strict rules;
• Pronounced evaluative thinking: bad - good, good - evil, friend - someone else …
• Polarity of judgments: either-or.

Such features of a person deprive him of his creative adaptation, create difficulties in relations with other people and with himself.

A typical example of the described phenomenon is denial and rejection in oneself and in other any qualities or feelings. Not accepting oneself and not accepting others are interdependent processes. However, it is easier to notice what is unacceptable in oneself through the attitude to others: “You cannot see the logs in your own eye…” At the same time, the unacceptable sides of the personality are projected onto other people, and the person begins to negatively turn on them.

In therapeutic work with such clients, they gradually begin to develop an unacceptable, rejected part of I, from which the client tries in every possible way to get rid of: "I am not like that / not like that!" The presence of such a denied part of the I takes a large amount of energy from a person - it has to be carefully hidden both from others and from oneself. However, the rejected part of the I requires "justice" and wants to be represented in the I-image. She periodically "breaks onto the stage", takes revenge on Ya.

In my opinion, the manifestations of this phenomenon can be successfully observed in the fairy tale "Frost".

In a fairy tale based on the example of two female heroines - Nastenka and Marfushenka - we meet with two polar I-images, for clarity, presented in different characters. In real life, this kind of conflict is often contained within the individual.

Let us consider the psychological content and conditions for the formation of the self-identity of these fairy-tale characters.

Development conditions

They are fundamentally different. Nastenka lives with her stepmother and her own father. The father, judging by the description, is a weak person who does not have the right to vote in his family. The stepmother, on the contrary, is a strong and domineering woman.

Nastenka's living conditions are, to put it mildly, unfavorable.

- Everyone knows how to live with a stepmother: you turn over - a bit and you will not trust - a bit.

The function of unconditional love is traditionally associated with the mother in the family. The father is responsible for conditional love. In the fairy tale, we see how, through the literary method of reinforcement, the mother is “turned” into a stepmother, thereby accentuating the impossibility of receiving unconditional love by the child.

Marfushenka's developmental conditions are completely different. She lives with her own mother and is fully saturated with unconditional love and unconditional acceptance.

- And my own daughter does whatever she does - pat on the head for everything: clever.

They have a similar situation with regard to the father and the opportunities to receive conditional love. The father, due to his weak position in the family, cannot fulfill this function.

Conditional and unconditional love

In the popular psychological literature in recent years, you can find many texts devoted to the importance of unconditional love in a person's life. And I also will not dispute this statement, which has already become practically an axiom.

Unconditional love in personal development is really extremely difficult to overestimate. It is the foundation of the personality on which all its subsequent constructions are adjusted. Unconditional love is the basis of self-acceptance, self-love, self-esteem, self-esteem, self-support and many other important self-, around which the basic vital identity is built - I am!

On the other hand, the value of conditional love should not be underestimated either.

In matters of the significance-value of unconditional-conditional love, it is important that the type of parental love is appropriate for the tasks that the child-person solves in his individual development.

In the first years, as I said above, when the vital identity is being formed, unconditional love is that nutritious broth in which the basis of individual identity, the basis of I, self, I-concept is laid. This is a deep feeling: I am, I am what I am, I have the right to this and the right to my want!

However, personality is not limited to individual identity and self-concept. A priori personality is also inherent in social identity, the basis of which is the concept of the Other.

But the appearance in the consciousness of the Other is already a function of conditional love. Here, in the life of a child, it is necessary! And this is a very important condition for the development of personality. Conditional love launches decentric tendencies in personality development, destroying the initially formed ego-centrism - I am in the center, Others revolve around me! It is not only that in my universe, besides the I, the Other, not the I, appears! The I, among other things, also ceases to be the center of this system, around which all other not-I revolve. This event in the life of a child is comparable in importance to the transition of mankind from the geocentric position of the universe (Earth in the center) to heliocentric (the Sun is in the center, the earth revolves around it).

The logic of individual development is such that conditional love replaces unconditional love. And unconditional love in a parent-child relationship is successively replaced by conditional love. This does not mean that unconditional love completely disappears from the parent-child relationship. It remains as the basis for the unconditional acceptance of the child in the basic issues of his existence, remains the background that allows the child to experience the value of his I.

However, let's return to our fairy-tale heroes.

Behavior patterns

Nastenka in the described fairytale family turns out to be deprived of unconditional love and unconditional acceptance, and her vital identity (I am, I am what I am, I have the right to do this and the right to what I want!) Is not formed. Its very existence is directly related to the will of other people. Survival in this kind of situation is possible only by rejecting one's own I, which she demonstrates in a meeting with the Other - in a fairy tale, this is Morozko.

The girl sits under the spruce, trembles, chills through her. Suddenly he hears - not far off, Morozko crackles through the trees, jumps from tree to tree, clicks. He found himself on the spruce under which the girl sits, and from above asks her:

- Are you warm, girl?

- Warmth, Morozushko, warmth, father.

Frost began to descend lower, crackles more, clicks:

- Are you warm, girl? Is it warm for you, red?

She breathes a little breath:

- Warmth, Morozushko, warmth, father.

Morozko went down even lower, cracked more, clicked harder:

- Are you warm, girl? Is it warm for you, red? Is it warm for you, honey?

The girl began to ossify, moving her tongue a little:

- Oh, warm, dear Morozushko!

Nastenka in this episode demonstrates a complete lack of self-sensitivity, which also extends to bodily sensations. By killing in herself all manifestations of mental life (psychological death), she provides the possibility of physical survival in an extremely toxic, rejecting environment. Psychic anesthesia here acts as a defense against physical destruction. Dostoevsky's well-known expression "Am I trembling creature or do I have the right?" in the case of Nastenka, it has an unambiguous answer.

In a similar situation, another heroine of the fairy tale, Marfushenka, leads in a completely different way.

The old woman's daughter is sitting, chatting with her teeth.

And Morozko crackles through the forest, jumps from tree to tree, clicks, looks at the old woman's daughter:

- Are you warm, girl?

And she told him:

- Oh, it's cold! Don't creak, don't crack, Frost …

Morozko began to descend lower, more crackling, clicking.

- Are you warm, girl? Is it warm for you, red?

- Oh, hands, feet are frozen! Go away, Morozko …

Morozko went down even lower, hit harder, crackled, clicked:

- Are you warm, girl? Is it warm for you, red?

- Oh, completely chilled! Get lost, get lost, damned Frost!

Marfushenka demonstrates good physical and mental sensitivity. She's doing well with her personal boundaries and the aggression necessary to defend them. Her bodily and behavioral reactions are quite adequate to the situation in which she found herself. What she lacks is social and emotional intelligence in order to “read” a situation, which in a fairy tale is a kind of test of loyalty to the Other and to society.

Consequences

Nastenka, having shown complete insensitivity to herself and maximum loyalty to the Other, in the end turns out to be generously rewarded.

The old man went into the forest, reached that place - under a large spruce sits his daughter, cheerful, ruddy, in a sable coat, all in gold, in silver, and around - a box with rich gifts.

She knows how to "read" what others want from her. And it is not surprising, since this is a condition for her survival. She successfully passed the social test for loyalty and “got a ticket” to her future life. But such a life without the presence of the I in it is unlikely to be filled with joy.

For Marfushenka, her sensitivity to herself and focus on her feelings cost her her life.

The gate creaked, the old woman rushed to meet her daughter. She turned her horn away, and her daughter lay dead in the sleigh.

Society reacts harshly and sometimes harshly to those who do not want to accept its rules.

On the example of the models of behavior of two fairy-tale characters, we meet with a conflict in the personality of the individual and the social. The social and psychological messages of the characters' images do not match. The social message sounds like this: Give up yourself, be loyal to society and you will live and enjoy its benefits. The essence of the psychological message is as follows: if you are insensitive to the needs of your I, it will lead to psychological death and psychosomatics. In the image of Nastenka, this contradiction is resolved in favor of a social message through the rejection of the individual. Marfushenka resolves the above contradiction between the individual and the social in favor of the individual.

If we take the intrapersonal dynamics, and consider the fabulous images of Nastenka and Marfushenka as parts of one personality, then the conflict flares up between “It is necessary” (the social in me) and “I want” (the individual in me).

Nastenka “makes” her choice in favor of “Must”. Of course, the image of Nastya is socially approved. The task of any social system is to form an element convenient for this system. The fairy tale also fulfills, among others, a social order. And here the social message of the tale is dominant. It is not surprising that the tale contains an explicit assessment of the behavior of the heroines with specific indications of its possible consequences. Society through "fairy tales" literally programs the individual to reject the individual in himself: One must be such and such …

Extremes are dangerous

However, in real life, an explicit emphasis on the individual "I want" is just as dangerous for the individual as an excessive fixation on the social. The emphasis on the individual strengthens a person in an egocentric position and does not allow the appearance of the Other, Not-I, in his mental space. This is fraught with the emergence of sociopathic attitudes in him with an inability to empathy, attachment and love. Strategies in therapy with an emphasis on the individual, such as "I want and I will!" are not suitable for all clients, but only for neurotically organized personality structures, where the voice “I Want” is drowned in the harmonious polyphony “You need to! You should!".

Towards integration

Each of us has both Nastenka and Marfushenka. They are like night and day. And the truth is that they are both valuable and necessary, that each time of day has its own important functions, not excluding, but complementing each other. Problems arise when someone begins to believe that the Day is more valuable than the Night, or vice versa.

A similar situation arises in relation to parts of your personality, when some part of a unified system is for some reason subjectively more valuable, more significant than another, for example: Intellect is more important than feelings! This is also true in relation to some individual qualities of the I or feelings. Moreover, the same qualities in different people can be both desired and rejected. So, for example, aggressiveness in different people can be both a valuable quality and undesirable, unacceptable.

The integrity of the personality becomes possible due to the integration of all its parts into a single I-image. In psychotherapy, this goal is realized through the following sequential tasks:

• Meeting with your shadow or unacceptable side of personality
• Getting to know her
• Working out introjects or developmental traumas that formed the disintegration of identity. This step has its own specifics, depending on what we are dealing with - with a trauma or an introject.
• Search in the unacceptable part of the resources for me
• Integration of rejected qualities into a new holistic self-identity

The super-task here is, if you really do not accept, then at least be more tolerant of your unacceptable part of I. Neither Nastenka nor Marfushenka are integral, harmonious personalities, since they are rigidly fixed at the poles of the social or the individual. Their personal identity, although stable, is one-sided.

Love yourself! And the rest will catch up)