RICHARD SENNETT
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But the "counter culture" here is only an expression of the larger
ordinary culture as is evident in the realm of sexuality. In this area , belief
in a protean self suggests to people that "who" they are depends on who
their lovers are: love thus becomes another mirror of the self. In the last
century, Lamartine could put forward as a poetic conceit the notion that
"who I am depends on whom I love today," but that conceit has been
transformed in this century into a commonplace . And as a result of the
acceptance of this notion , sexuality has been burdened with tasks of self–
definition and self-summary which are inappropriate to the physical act
ofmaking love with another person.
There are many studies of the anxiety with which people approach the
matter of sexual selection of a partner, and some evidence that this anxiety
has replaced the rather different anxieties of two generations ago about the
experience in bed the partners might later have . If the act of lovemaking
itself has lost its terror, the prior selection of partners seems to have absorbed
that same terror. For all the talk in the popul6J media about promiscuity,
there is little evidence that free-floating sexuality is on the rise. Rather the
reverse; " mate-selection" (as the sociologists call it) seems to be becoming
a tense process because the choosing of someone to sleep with is a reflexive
act: it tells who
you
are. Thus, in the Van Burgh researches, for example,
there appears a consistent worry about whether' 'this person is right for
me," a worry which crowds out such questions as "is he or she attractive? "
or "do I like him or her?" Once the self becomes a protean phenomenon,
the reality of the other person is erased as an Other; he or she becomes
another "resource" for inner development, and loving the other person for
his or her differences recedes before a desire to find in that person a defini–
tion of oneself.
The belief in protean selfhood treats intimate interchanges like a
market of self-revelations. You interact with others according to how much
you
tell them about yourself; the more confessions
you
have made, the more
"intimate"
you
have become. When the partners are out of self-revelations,
the relationship all too often comes to an end : there is nothing more to say.
Making human contact by marketing confessions in this way easily results
in boredom, or it forces people to start all over again in a relationship once
they have shown themselves to each other. Thus, psychologists, for instance,
usually have to start over when training as diagnostic interviewers. The tyro
interviewer is convinced that to treat another human being with respect,
he must match whatever is revealed to him with a similar experience of his
own. This shows that he "understands," that he "sympathizes. " In fact,
this card game leads neither to understanding nor sympathy;
if
he is any
