It has always seemed obvious to me that we think of the person as a single and self-sufficient entity, rather than an assembly and network of relationships in which different perceptions of, and by it, over space and actions with consequences interact. Some organisms can exist alone, but they can not have personhood without identity. Moreover, they can not have identity without inter alia comparison with other identities and the construction of a personhood that follows it as an act of mutual work.
In other words, there is no it [id] without comparative distinction from of a group of things, no I (ich) without projective identification of a its consciousness and no person without the collection of already scripted qualities of personhood, scripted, I would say in social relations.
No relationship can be entirely then positive or negative, for such binaries are constructions that make no sense. What we think of as positive for the self are forces that reinforce one particular partial construct that we chose to identify as us. Vice-versa, what we think of as negative is that we choose not to see ourselves as being. I don’t think we have these choices in reality. Our personality is a mutual construct that occurs in and between persons sensing and interpreting each other.
The relationships we see as negative constitute wishes that we were not as we are, those seen as negative those that delude us we are as we wish to be but aren’t.
That’s what I think anyway.
With love
Steven xxxxxxx
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