Defiance

Last Kierkegaard, I thought this was an apt description of a particular type of personality disorder, you can guess which:

The Despair of Defiance
Unlike the despair of weakness, the despair of defiance is the despair of wanting in desperation to be oneself. Here despair is conscious of itself as an activity. The self 's identity comes not from "outside" but directly from the self. It is rooted in the consciousness of an infinitude, of being related to the infinite, and it is this self the despairer wants to be. In other words, such a self severs itself from any relationship to the power that has established it.

It wants desperately to rule over itself, create itself, make this self what it wants it to be, and determine what it will have and what it will not have. The one who lives in defiance does not truly put on a self, nor does he see his task in his given self. No, by virtue of his own "infinitude" he constructs his own self by himself and for himself.

The defiant self recognizes no power other than its own. It is content with taking notice only of itself, which it does by means of bestowing infinite interest and significance on all its enterprises. In the process of its wish to be its own master, however, it works its way into the exact opposite; it really becomes no self, and thus despairs. As it acts, there is nothing eternally firm on which it stands. Yes, the defiant self is its own master, absolutely (as one says) its own master, and yet exactly this is despair.

Upon closer examination it is easy to see that this absolute ruler is a king without a country. He really rules over nothing. His position, his kingdom, his sovereignty, is subject to the dictates of rebellion at any moment. This is because such a self is forever building castles in the air, and just when it seems on the point of having the building finished, at a whim it can – and often does – dissolve the whole thing into nothing.

When confronted with earthly need, a temporal cross, a thorn in the flesh that grows too deep to be removed, the defiant self is offended. It uses the suffering as an excuse to take offense at all existence. Such a person wants to be himself in spite of suffering, but not in "spite of it" in the sense of being without it. No, he now wants to spite or defy all existence and be himself with it, taking it along in steely resignation with him, almost flying in the face of his agony. Does he have hope in the possibility of help? No!

Does he recognize that for God everything is possible? No! Will he ask help of any other? No! That for the entire world he will not do. If it came to that, he would rather be himself with all the torments of hell than ask for help.

Ah, demonic madness! Such a self wants to be itself in hatreds towards existence, to be itself according to its own misery. It does not even want so much as to sever itself defiantly from the power that established it but in sheer spite to push itself on that power, importune it, hold on to it out of malice. In rebelling against existence the defiant self will here nothing of the comfort eternity offers. This comfort would be to his undoing, an objection to the whole of his existence. It is, to describe it figuratively, as if a writer were to make a slip of a pen and the error to become conscious of itself as such and then wanted to rebel against the author. Out of hatred for Him, the error forbids the author to correct it and in manic defiance says to him “No, I will not be changed, I will stand as a witness against you, a witness to the fact that you are a second-rate author.” Yes, this is the despair of defiance, and what despair it is!

The Cipher

I liked this other passage from Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death regarding another loss of sense of self. This one is interesting to me because I have just recently come to know someone who fits this description. I otherwise would have never believed that this type of person existed, because it seems so odd to react to the uncertainty and risks of life by giving up one's sense of agency and power in exchange for the peaceful burden-free life of victimhood. (Probably because I reacted in the opposite way myself.)

Regarding the despair of weakness:

But the despair is essentially that of weakness, a passive experience; its form is, in despair at not wanting to be oneself.
***
The despair of weakness is the despair of not wanting to be oneself. This kind of despair is a passivity of the self. It’s frame of reference is the pleasant and the unpleasant. What matter is what happens or does not happen to oneself. 

True despair is to lose the Eternal, but this kind of despair does not occur to the one who despairs in weakness. He is too preoccupied with securing his earthly existence. To lose the earthly is not true despair, yet that is precisely what this person calls despair. He is turned around and what he says must be understood backwards. He stands there pointing to something that is not really despair (a loss of some kind); he is explaining that he is in despair, and yes, sure enough, the despair is going on, but it is behind him and he is unaware of it. If everything suddenly changes and his wishes are fulfilled, then happiness returns to him. When help comes from outside happiness is restored to him and he begins where he left off. Yet he neither was nor becomes a self. He simply carries on living merely on the level of what is immediate and what is happening around him. 

This form of despair consists of not wanting to be a self. Actually, it consists of wanting to be someone else! Such a self refuses to take responsibility. Life is but a game of chance. Hence, in the moment of despair, when no help comes, such a person wants desperately to become someone else. And yet a despairer of this kind, whose only wish is the craziest of all wishes — to be someone else — is in love with a fancy that change can be made as easily as one puts on another coat. Or to put it differently, he knows himself only by his coat. He simply doesn’t know himself! He knows what it is to have a self only in externals. There could hardly be a more absurd confusion, for a self differs precisely, no infinitely, from those externals. It is impossible to draw a picture of him that is not comic.

"What if I were to become another, were to get myself a new self?" 

Yes, but if he did become another, I wonder if he would recognize himself again! It is related of a peasant who came cleanly shaven to the Capital, and had made so much money that he could buy himself a pair of shoes and stockings and still had enough left over to get drunk on -- it is related that as he was trying in his drunken state to find his way home he lay down in the middle of the highway and fell asleep. Then along came a wagon, and the driver shouted to him to move or he would run over his legs. Then the drunken peasant awoke, looked at his legs, and since by reason of the shoes and stockings he didn't recognize them, he said to the driver, "Drive on, they are not my legs." So in the case of the immediate man when he is in despair it is impossible to represent him truly without a touch of the comic.

A girl has no name

What happens to people with personality disorders to make them the way they are? Speaking from personal experience, but also saying something that can easily generalize much more broadly, there is a genetic component but it is also triggered. When you are little, instead of developing a sense of your own identity, you learn to think of yourself as a cipher. You do it because there is no advantage to you in being a particular someone (much less the particular person you are), and every advantage in being whatever the situation calls for, in blending in with the background, in being the strings that pull other people rather than being a person yourself. Kierkegaard speaks of something similar:

For every man is primitively planned to be a self, appointed to become oneself; and while it is true that every self as such is angular, the logical consequence of this merely is that it has to be polished, not that it has to be ground smooth, not that for fear of men it has to give up entirely being itself, nor even that for fear of men it dare not be itself in its essential accidentality (which precisely is what should not be ground away), by which in fine it is itself. 

***

[But when the sense of self is lost] he may nevertheless (although most commonly it becomes manifest) be perfectly well able to live on, to be a man, as it seems, to occupy himself with temporal things, get married, beget children, win honor and esteem -- and perhaps no one notices that in a deeper sense he lacks a self. About such a thing as that not much fuss is made in the world; for a self is the thing the world is least apt to inquire about, and the thing of all things the most dangerous for a man to let people notice that he has it. The greatest danger, that of losing one's own self, may pass off as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, that of an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc., is sure to be noticed.

***

But while one sort of despair plunges wildly into the infinite and loses itself, a second sort permits itself as it were to be defrauded by "the others." By seeing the multitude of men about it, by getting engaged in all sorts of worldly affairs, by becoming wise about how things go in this world, such a man forgets himself, forgets what his name is (in the divine understanding of it), does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too venturesome a thing to be himself, far easier and safer to be like the others, to become an imitation, a number, a cipher in the crowd.

So a personality disordered person might lose their sense of self, but it can actually be as empowering as it is tragic. Without a self, there isn't the same potential for ego hurt -- we no longer live a life motivated largely by fear. The most vulnerable and valuable part of us has already died. What is left is a cipher, a thing that can take the form and shape of whatever is most convenient in the moment.

GAME OF THRONES SPOILER ALERT

So it's with interest that I wonder where Game of Thrones is going with the Arya plot line. The quick summary is that she is a noble born girl hell bent on revenge for the death of her parents. She's become an accomplished killer, but has also gotten caught up in this sort of cult in which she is being asked to become "no one" -- to leave her old identity behind and instead have the capability of wearing any number of masks and appearing like any number of different people, a lethal assassin. Repeatedly she is asked what her name is, and repeatedly she must answer "a girl has no name" as part of her further depersonalization.

In the books, regarding Arya it says "She could feel the hole inside of her where her heart had been" and "She would be no one if that is what it took. No one had no holes inside of her."

This video explains the psychological changes she undergoes, and how she can hardly function like a person because she cannot trust, all she knows is killing and survival.