The Saturated Self

Looking into his life and out to the wider world, Kenneth Gergen writes about The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life, arguing that “social saturation brings with it a general loss in our assumption of true and knowable selves”. To flesh out his thesis, he offers a window into his life.

I had just returned to Swarthmore from a two-day conference in Washington, which had brought together fifty scholars from around the country. An urgent fax from Spain lay on the desk, asking about a paper I was months late in contributing to a conference in Barcelona. Before I could think about answering, the office hours I had postponed began.

One of my favorite students arrived and began to quiz me about the ethnic biases in my course syllabus. My secretary came in holding a sheaf of telephone messages, and some accumulated mail, including an IRS notice of a tax audit and a cancellation notice from the telephone company.

My conversations with my students were later interrupted by phone calls from a London publisher, a colleague in Connecticut on her way to Oslo for the weekend, and an old California friend wondering if we might meet during his summer travels to Holland. By the morning’s end I was drained.

The hours had been wholly consumed by the process of relating—face to face, electronically, and by letter. The relations were scattered across Europe and America, and scattered points in my personal past. And so keen was the competition for “relational” time that virtually none of the interchanges seemed effective in the ways I wished. And he goes on, noting that even ten years earlier none of these observations could have been made. Two decades later, each is even more true. In a sober summary, he states, “The fully saturated self becomes no self at all.” Yes, I feel numb . . . I no longer feel what I need to feel to be human.