As one who lived near the World Trade Center in New York City, I experienced that personally on September 11, 2001, and in the months that followed. New York is called a melting pot, but the different elements tossed into the pot often don’t melt, or even blend very well with one another. The city is perhaps more like a stew made of diverse ingredients—bankers and bakers, young and old, black and white, rich and poor—that may not mingle and sometimes distinctly clash. As I stood beneath the north tower of the World Trade Center at 8:45 a.m. on that September 11, among the bustling crowd of immigrant street vendors, suited Wall Street types, and Orthodox Jews in their traditional garb, the city’s class and ethnic divisions were amply apparent. But at 8:46 a.m., as that first plane hit the north tower and chaos erupted, as the fiery debris fell toward us and a horrific sight of death unfolded above us, something subtle and magical also transpired. All those divisions seemed to evaporate, and people began to help other people, regardless of who they were. For a few months, at least, we were all first and foremost New Yorkers. With thousands dead, and tens of thousands of all professions, races, and economic status suddenly homeless, or jobless because their place of work had been shut down, and with millions of us in shock over what those in our midst had suffered, we New Yorkers of all kinds pulled together as I had never before experienced. As entire blocks continued to smolder, as the corrosive smell of the destruction filled the air we breathed, and as the photos of the missing looked down on us from buildings and lampposts, subway stations and cyclone fences, we showed a kindness to one another, in acts large and small, that was probably unprecedented. It was the best of our human social nature at work, a vivid exhibition of the positive healing power of our human group instinct.
CHAPTER 9
Feelings
The nature of emotions … why the prospect of falling hundreds of feet onto large boulders has the same effect as a flirtatious smile and a black silk nightgown
Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us.
IN THE EARLY 1950s, a twenty-five-year-old woman named Chris Costner Sizemore walked into a young psychiatrist’s office complaining of severe and blinding headaches.1 These, she said, were sometimes followed by blackouts. Sizemore appeared to be a normal young mother, in a bad marriage but with no major psychological problems. Her doctor would later describe her as demure and constrained, circumspect, and meticulously truthful. He and she discussed various emotional issues, but nothing that occurred over the next few months of treatment indicated that Sizemore had actually lost consciousness or that she suffered from any serious mental condition. Nor was her family aware of any unusual episodes. Then one day during therapy she mentioned that she had apparently gone on a recent trip but had no memory of it. Her doctor hypnotized her, and the amnesia cleared. Several days later, the doctor received an unsigned letter. From the postmark and the familiar penmanship, he knew it had come from Sizemore. In the letter, Sizemore said she was disturbed by the recovered memory—how could she be sure she remembered everything, and how could she know the memory loss wouldn’t happen again? There was also another sentence scrawled at the bottom of the letter, in a different handwriting that was difficult to decipher.
On her next visit Sizemore denied having sent the letter, though she recalled having begun one that, she said, she had never completed. Then she began to exhibit signs of stress and agitation. Suddenly she asked—with obvious embarrassment—if hearing an imaginary voice meant she was insane. As the therapist thought about it, Sizemore altered her posture, crossed her legs, and took on a “childishly daredevil air” he had never before seen in her. As he later described it, “A thousand minute alterations of manner, gesture, expression, posture, of nuances in reflex or instinctive reaction, of glance, of eyebrow tilting and eye movement, all argued that this could only be another woman.” Then that “other woman” began to speak of Chris Sizemore and her problems in the third person, using “she” or “her” in every reference.
When asked her identity, Sizemore now replied with a different name. It was she, this person who suddenly had a new name, she said, who had found the unfinished letter, added a sentence, and mailed it. In the coming months Sizemore’s doctor administered psychological personality tests while Sizemore took on each of her two identities. He submitted the tests to independent researchers, who were not told that they’d come from the same woman.2 The analysts concluded that the two personalities had markedly different self-images. The woman who’d originally entered therapy saw herself as passive, weak, and bad. She knew nothing of her other half, a woman who saw herself as active, strong, and good. Sizemore was eventually cured. It took eighteen years.3
Chris Sizemore’s was an extreme case, but we all have many identities. Not only are we different people at fifty than we are at thirty, we also change throughout the day, depending on circumstances and our social environment, as well as on our hormonal levels. We behave differently when we are in a good mood than when we are in a bad one. We behave differently having lunch with our boss than when having lunch with our subordinates. Studies show that people make different moral decisions after seeing a happy film,4 and that women, when ovulating, wear more revealing clothing, become more sexually competitive, and increase their preference for sexually competitive men.5 Our character is not indelibly stamped on us but is dynamic and changing. And as the studies of implicit prejudice revealed, we can even be two different people at the same time, an unconscious “I” who holds negative feelings about blacks—or the elderly, or fat people, or gays, or Muslims—and a conscious “I” who abhors prejudice.
Despite this, psychologists have traditionally assumed that the way a person feels and behaves reflects fixed traits that form the core of that individual’s personality. They’ve assumed that people know who they are and that they act consistently, as a result of conscious deliberation.6 So compelling was this model that in the 1960s one researcher suggested that, rather than performing costly and time-consuming experiments, psychologists might collect reliable information by simply asking people to predict how they would feel and behave in certain circumstances of interest.7 Why not? Much of clinical psychotherapy is based on what is essentially the same idea: that through intense, therapeutically guided reflection we can learn our true feelings, attitudes, and motives.
But remember the statistics on Browns marrying Browns, and investors undervaluing the IPOs of companies with tongue-twister names? None of the Browns had consciously set out to choose a spouse who shared their name; nor did professional investors think their impressions of a new company had been influenced by the ease of pronouncing that company’s name. Because of the role of subliminal processes, the source of our feelings is often a mystery to us, and so are the feelings themselves. We feel many things we are not aware of feeling. To ask us to talk about our feelings may be valuable, but some of our innermost feelings will not yield their secrets to even the most profound introspection. As a result, many of psychology’s traditional assumptions about our feelings simply do not hold.
“I’VE GONE THROUGH years of psychotherapy,” a well-known neuroscientist told me, “to try to find out why I behave in certain ways. I think about my feelings, my motivations. I talk to my therapist about them, I finally come up with a story that seems to make sense, and it satisfies me. I need a story I can believe, but is it true? Probably not. The real truth lies in structures like my thalamus and hypothalamus, and my amygdala, and I have no conscious access to those no matter how much I introspect.” If we are to have a valid understanding of who we are and, therefore, of how we would react in various situations, we have to understand the reasons for our decisions and behavior, and—even more fundamentally—we have to understand our feelings and their origins. Where do they come from?