Disidentification Exercise for Authentic Creativity

Source: Gerd Altmann/Pixabay

Many of the issues we face in the practice of creating and performing arts are consequential to our worldview. In dynamic psychology, we discuss the structure of an individual’s Weltanschauung (worldview), which structures all experience into meaning. The idea is that through systematic examination of our Weltanschauung, we can come to better understand how we come to experience ourselves and the world in which we live.

Existential psychology and Buddhist psychology both share the notion of disidentifying with the habitually conditioned sense of self that manifests from our Weltanschauung. Through the process of disidentification, existentialists arrive at authenticity, whereas Buddhist theory arrives at an understanding that the self is a fiction we use to navigate our world and interact with others. Through the process of disidentification, we can gain awareness of the beliefs we have about ourselves and how they can affect our practice of creativity and performance.

James Bugental describes an exercise for disidentification that we artists can use to better understand our socially-conditioned self-structure and to gain insight into how our self-structure can be the foundation for performance anxiety, creative block, impostor complex, and many other issues that artists face. It is also the stuff that can be "creative gold." We can use the exercise to excavate the sediment of the self and to create and perform from a more authentic place.

The Disidentification Exercise

Begin by sitting in a quiet place and writing on eight index cards answers to the question, “Who am I?” Next, arrange the cards in order of the least to the most essential answer to the question. Finally, go through each card, and contemplate what it would be like to give up that characteristic of yourself.

Typically you would spend about five minutes meditating on each of the eight cards. Existential psychologist Irvin Yalom recommends that it is often helpful to conclude the exercise by re-integrating the sense of self through imagining oneself with each of the eight attributes. The goal is not necessarily to rid oneself of our character structure, but rather, to become more aware of the choice we have in maintaining it. The exercise provides us with an empowering awareness of our choices in what to keep and what to discard.

This disidentification exercise is deceptively simple. It often results in very strong emotional reactions as well as the consideration of central attributes we cling to in defining who we are. It is also central to how we wish others to view us. The risks we imagine when giving up each quality can be disturbing to us, as we come to a place free of ego-performance, a place of authentic being. We can feel vulnerable, stripped naked of our protective character armoring; the qualities of selfhood that we often cling to as an ego-defense to preserve our sense of self. This is not an exercise to be taken lightly, and the experience of authentic being is often one that leaves us with a sense of emptiness or angst; what Sartre called nausea.

Disidentification exercises such as this allow us to come into contact with our socially conditioned, habitual ways of being and permits us the opportunity to experiment with letting go of each characteristic. It affords the opportunity to evaluate not only the usefulness of each quality, but also the awareness that we choose to maintain or discard each quality. In making this volitional choice something is always lost as well as gained. Careful consideration of this tradeoff is an essential part of creating from an authentic place.