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Article 81
October 1, 1991

Personal Labels

People consign themselves and others to "being" certain personality types and psychiatric diagnoses. A classic example is the person who labels himself as "an alcoholic". The idea is -- "alcoholic" is simply something he is and will always be, and once he realizes it, there are various ways of coping with it, but he can never stop being an alcoholic because genetics or environment have determined that that is what he is.

Labels rise and fall in popularity over the years. Recently, it has become fashionable to label oneself or another as a "co-dependent" or an "adult child of an alcoholic (ACA)". Earlier labels included "neurotic", "psychotic", "obsessive-compulsive", and "hysteric". There have also been less formal labels, such as "dingbat", "nut case", "space case", "old maid", "nerd", and "jock". Other personal labels belong to specific psychological schools of thought. Jungians like to speak of people as being "intuitives", "feeling types", "thinkers", or "emotional types". Others follow the current fashion of speaking of the nine personality types presented in the "Enneagram": the "go", the "venge", the "cow", etc. In fact, without making a great deal of effort, it is possible to find hundreds of current character typologies.

What's wrong with that? Certainly it is useful to label and categorize things. It helps us to think and communicate about them. Botany and zoology are useful disciplines for classifying plants and animals, so why not create a categorization for people? By labeling people, it would seem, we can understand them, predict their behavior, and help them effectively, much as by knowing what kind of bird one has as a pet, one can know how to care for it, what sort of food to feed it. Parakeets don't do well in the cold; canaries require a certain kind of birdseed, co-dependents need to get rid of guilt and live their own lives; alcoholics need to admit they are helpless and then do the other eleven steps.

What's wrong is that a person is neither a thing that he has nor an action that he does. In fact, a person has no fixed identity whatsoever. He is a being, potentially capable of assuming or shedding any identity for the purpose of coping with his environment. But no specific identity lies at the core of the being himself.

As I look at the Jungian character types, for instance, I see in each of them a way of being aware. And maybe I do tend to favor one of these over the others, but the type of awareness that I habitually use is not something that I am! The same applies to the enneagram types. I may be a macho "venge" type in certain circumstances, a cowardly "cow" in others, an extroverted "go" in others. None of these strategies is the real me, and by applying one of these labels to myself, I am unnecessarily limiting my repertoire. By putting that label on others, I am similarly limiting them -- or my perception of them.

Let us by all means use labels, but let us label things that are external to the being -- things such as environmental conditions or coping strategies. Let's not say that a person is this or that; let's say he sometimes has this or does that. By using the latter form of thinking and speaking, we grant to people the possibility of not doing or having that, and we thereby give them more freedom.

One of the things that amuses me is the way in which writers of pop psychology books make their case. They create a label like "ACA". Then they provide a list of the characteristics that such a person is supposed to have. Such lists usually include characteristics like:

• Depression
• Anxiety
• Dependence on others
• Desire to be needed by others
• Self-hate
• Compulsive behavior
• Volatile emotions

During my psychiatric residency I had to dictate a summary of the background of each of my patients. I found myself always saying that the patient had a "dominating mother" (supposedly a cause of neurosis and psychosis). But I became suspicious, and when I started thinking about it, I realized that every mother dominates her children to at least some degree. You can't be a mother (or a father) without dominating your children. So what is the value of the datum that "patient Joe Smith had a dominating mother"? Exactly nothing. It is like adding to the case history the datum that "Joe Smith has a head". True, but irrelevant.

The same is true of the criteria given for personal labels: people do have the kinds of difficulties and coping strategies mentioned in the above list, but since these are universal, you can't draw any earth-shattering conclusions from them.

Personal labels are a poor substitute for real comprehension of the conditions of life in which people find themselves immersed and of the ways in which they are trying to cope with them. A personal label is, in fact, a form of "anesthetic idea". Having labeled someone, I don't really have to get into communication with him; I need not become aware of what life is really like for him.

Personal labels are also commonly used punitively. When we call someone "a bastard", "a bitch", or "a cad", the intention is essentially anaesthetic. It is too painful to have to really try to understand them, so we label them instead. There are no real bastards, bitches, or cads. There are only perfect beings using imperfect coping strategies to deal with imperfect environments.

Perhaps the biggest challenge a being must face is to recognize what he is and what he is not. A being can assume or shed a wide variety of identities. One can at different times become a mother, a lover, or a doctor. There is no harm in that because she can also not be those things. The identity of being a doctor is not an essential part of the being. She can be something else when she is not being a doctor. But as soon as you take some role, strategy, or characteristic and identify that as the essence of yourself, you have just assigned yourself a fixed identity. Sally thinks that at the core of her being, she is a "sexy woman". So she can't help being that way all the time, even when it is not appropriate (e.g., when she should be being a doctor). Jim thinks that at his core lies the soul of a great artist. So he is always boring people with his aesthetic views of things. These are simply fixed identities -- and having a fixed identity is a real liability. To label oneself, then, is to debilitate oneself, and to label others is to begin to debilitate them

Even when we try to use personal labels to help, they are still a substitute for awareness and hence counterproductive. "Sue is a weak person," may impel one to pity and support Sue, but it also makes it unnecessary to crawl into Sue's skin and confront, with her, the real, intense pressures and stresses before which she is crumbling. Saying that Sue is "a person with poor ego strength" is similarly unenlightening.

If empathy be defined as the sharing of experience with another being, then a label precludes the possibility of empathy -- because it is intended to do so, to make it unnecessary to experience what another person is experiencing.

I happen to favor the concept of becoming more aware instead of less aware. If you also think that's a good idea, then stop putting yourself to sleep by assigning labels to others and to yourself. Think, rather, in terms of the different kinds of environments in which a being may find himself and the different ways in which a being may choose to cope with these environments. And you will find that much that is helpful will flow out of this way of thinking.

Frank A. Gerbode, M.D.
Director, IRM