The Undesired Self: A Neglected Variable in Personality Research

Concrete Word M Word M Word M Word M Peaceful 5.56 Sensitive 4.56 Fat 1.50 Energetic b 2.43 Artistic 5.56 Serene 4.50 Bad tempered 2.13 Cruel 2.50 Creative 5.54 Awkward a 4.50 Impatient 2.19 Conceited 2.50 Intelligent 4 . 8 8 Withdrawn ~ 4.44 Organized b 2.19 Nervous 2.56 Satisfied 4.81 War m 4.44 Tired 2.25 Spoiled 2.63 Good-natured 4 . 8 1 Open-minded 4.43 Messy 2.31 Rude 2.63 Happy 4.81 Raw ~ 4.43 Sloppy 2.38 Grumpy 2.63 Liberal 4.75 Hopeful 4.38 Active, b 2.38 Lazy 2.68 Well-rounded 4.63 Open 4.31 Stupid 2.38 St ubborn 2.69 Erratic ~ 4 . 5 6 Sentimental 4.31 Honest b 2.38 Friendly b 2.69 a Words from list of undesired-self features. b Words from list of ideal-self features. pendent, needy, and selfish. His primary goal in life is to be constantly available for the unselfish help of others and, thereby, to become a living contrast to his undesired self. In this instance, it is likely that his ideal self was derived from his undesired self and not vice versa, and it is suspected that this is the normal course of events. This revised way of thinking about the self-system has implications for therapists. Rather than focusing on making goals more realistic (e.g., breaking up the "tyranny of the should"), more rapid insight might be gained by working with the equally nonrational "tyranny of the should not.'" This might be especially useful for persons who appear to be propelled through life by the push or avoidance of unwanted emotions and undesired conditions of life--emotions and conditions that provoked anxiety in the past but, in fact, have no objective bearing on the present. However, caution must be applied to unrestrained speculation. For instance, the question of the generalizability of these results is unanswered. The data used in this study were gathered from students who volunteered to participate. Several motives, including a desire to please the instructor, a belief that noncooperation would affect one's grade (despite clear statements that it would not do so), and a desire to learn more about themselves, may have made participators different from nonparticipators in ways that made them unrepresentative of the general population. Setting aside this problem and assuming that the sample was a representative one, one must note that the sample was only representative of college students. One thing distinctive of many students is that they are in the process of reevaluating their relationships with their parents and are forming new relationships with peers. They are also reassessing their goals, and by virtue of having to select courses to take and deciding on majors, they are determining new directions for their lives. In sum, they are in the throes of identity formation at a level beyond the identity issues faced by adolescents. Thus, the results of this study may hold for only 19to 2 l-year-olds attending college. Next, a few comments on the procedures and methods used in this research. In terms of procedures, all identities and all features used by subjects were self-generated. These identities and features provided the context for ratings of their undesired, ideal, and real selves. This enabled subjects to describe the particulars of their lives in their own terms. The self-generative emphasis of this study makes it similar to and different from the Q-sort technique used by Rogers in his research on the real and ideal self. A strength of Rogers's study was that his subjects created their own self-sorts and ideal sorts. However, the contents of the cards to be sorted were experimenter generated and may have included items that were irrelevant to the lives of his subjects and excluded items of central importance. Finally, the method of matrix analysis used discards assumptions of linearity and symmetry. Stated simply, the algorithms do not force inconsistent or contradictory data into a mold of consistency. For example, several subjects gave the same ratings to their ideal selves and to their undesired selves on several features. One subject, for instance, rated herself as a flirt and a compulsive thinker on the category how I hope to never be. Later, she gave the same ratings to flirt and compulsive thinker when making judgments of how I would like to be. The algorithm cared not about such contradictions and, instead, computed a statistic that described a degree of overlap between the undesired and ideal selves; a statistic that described a paradox that made sense only in the subjective experience of the subject. In summary, the results of this study suggest that the past tendency to theorize about the relation between the real and ideal selves has diverted us from another dimension of personality herein called the undesired self. It has been proposed that the undesired self is an implicit baseline individuals use to subjectively measure their well-being. This view challenges the heretofore preferred notion that satisfaction is mostly a function of drawing close to one's construction of an ideal self. Evidence has been given that this more comprehensive view of the self may warrant further attention by personologists.