Solid Self vs. Pseudo Self: Belonging Without Losing Yourself

In 1936, a shipyard worker in Hamburg kept his arms folded while hundreds of men around him raised theirs for Hitler. Luke Burgis, author of Wanting and The One in the 99, wants to know what it takes to become that person — and he traces the answer back to the family. Drawing on psychiatrist Murray Bowen’s distinction between the solid self and the pseudo self, Burgis shows how anxiety and opinion pass through groups by contagion, and how our screens have multiplied the crowds we have to stand within.

The following is an edited transcript of a conversation with Luke Burgis, founder and director of the Cluny Institute.

Chapter 1: Distinguishing a Solid Self from a Pseudo Self

What happens after you find your tribe?

Every year, it seems, ten books get written on how to find your tribe — how to find your people, how to find people you can be comfortable with. But we live in a world where finding tribes is easier than it has ever been, especially with the internet. We are immersed in tribes all of the time.

The big question is: what do you do once you’ve actually found your tribe? How do you exist within it in a healthy way so that you don’t lose yourself? That, to me, is the most important question of our time in an age of social contagion. Sometimes we find new tribes on a daily basis — different tribes to validate what we think and what we feel. We pick and choose tribes as we need them.

The far more important skill is not just how to leave a tribe, though that can certainly matter. The harder skill is how to be part of any strong community without losing yourself.

A healthy tension

Nobody likes being treated as a number in a crowd. We want to be known by name, recognized for our uniqueness. At the same time, we have a fundamental drive for communion — we don’t want to be alone. These two drives exist in tension, but it is a healthy tension. When we run from it, we tend to fall, as people and as a society, into either individualism or collectivism.

When a person learns to sit in that tension, healthy community emerges. Tension is a sign of life, and when we lose it, things can start to go haywire.

The process through which an individual belongs to a community in a healthy way is a process of differentiation. That does not necessarily mean leaving the community or becoming alienated from it. It means becoming differentiated within it — maintaining your own distinctiveness while remaining in communion with others. When people are able to do that, it leads to healthier communities and healthier groups.

What worries me about our world today is that we are losing this ability. We are fleeing any form of tension and abandoning the rites of passage that allow people to differentiate themselves. By definition, a rite of passage involves three stages: a separation stage, a liminal stage where a person’s identity is somewhat in flux, and then a reintegration phase where a person returns to their community in a new and more mature way. Holding the tension between individuality and belonging — without letting either one go — is the essential work of maturing as an adult.

“The harder skill is how to be part of any strong community or any tribe without losing yourself.”

What makes a tribe

According to Joe Forgas, one of the world’s leading researchers on tribalism, tribes share a few defining characteristics. When we are part of a tribe, we have in-group loyalty — we default to favoring anyone in our group. There is a shared narrative that every member accepts. And there is some expectation of conformity: to belong, you are expected to conform your behavior around certain norms.

All of these traits can be taken to extremes and become unhealthy. Usually when we hear the word “tribalism,” we are referring to something that has crossed that line. One of the simplest ways to identify it is to ask whether the tribe helps people mature, grow, and become themselves — or whether it requires them to dissolve themselves into the group, surrendering their own will to something larger.

How little it takes

One of the alarming things about tribes is how easily humans form tribal associations without any conscious thought. In a famous study conducted in the 1970s, psychologist Henri Tajfel set out to discover the minimum conditions needed for people to engage in tribal behavior. He went into a classroom, had students perform some arbitrary task, and then divided them randomly into two groups — labeling one group “overestimators” and the other “underestimators.” The assignment was entirely made up and bore no relation to anything the students had actually done.

He then gave students resources to distribute among members of either group. Despite the arbitrary and meaningless basis for their grouping, students immediately began favoring their own side. They became so tribal that they would accept worse absolute outcomes for themselves as long as it widened the gap between their group and the other — behavior that an economist would call irrational.

That is all it really takes. There appears to be something deeply ingrained in us: even when labels are randomly assigned, we internalize them and begin behaving in tribal ways that may not serve our own interests or the interests of the group at large.

This should concern us, because the moment we log onto the internet, we are grouped by others. Algorithms do it for us — they tell us who our people are without us having much say in the matter. Most of us accept this labeling without noticing it. We get filtered into and out of groups without understanding how it is happening, and we feel no tension at all.

Perhaps the real problem today is not that we cannot find tribes. It is that finding them has become too easy, and we have become too comfortable inside them. When we stop asking “What do I believe? What do I think?” — when we stop reaching for the “I” rather than the “we” — it may be a sign that we have surrendered our will to something we do not fully understand.

Chapter 2: Murray Bowen and the Family System

The psychiatrist who changed how we see families

Murray Bowen was a family psychiatrist who was active in the 1950s and 1960s, later based at Georgetown University, where he had a breakthrough in 1966 by applying systems theory to the family unit. Before Bowen, when individuals sought therapy, they were treated as isolated cases. A psychiatrist would typically try to understand their problems through a Freudian lens — focusing on specific pathologies or a particular parental relationship.

Bowen argued that you cannot understand what is happening with an individual unless you understand the full family emotional system they came from. His first question was always: “Tell me about your whole family.” He wanted to know about grandparents, siblings, parents — how each person handled different situations, what happened when a conflict or crisis arose.

Through that approach, he came to see that a family functions as a system. He initially described it as an “undifferentiated ego mass” — a striking phrase that captures how family members tend to fuse emotionally, losing track of where one person’s feelings end and another’s begin.

Differentiation and the spread of anxiety

Bowen’s central concern was how people differentiate themselves within their families. In the family, he argued, we first learn the difference between ourselves and everyone else. We acquire a basic level of differentiation of self — an understanding of where our own emotions end and another person’s begin. We carry that level of differentiation out with us into the world: into the workplace, into political life, into every community we join.

Bowen once said that the world’s anxieties and conflicts are really just the sum total of unresolved differentiation in people’s families. The reason is that anxiety within a family spreads like electricity through a circuit. If a parent or sibling carries anxiety about something, that anxiety is transmitted by contagion to almost everyone else in the family — especially those with a low level of differentiation. It moves through the system until it finds the person who can absorb it most easily, and that person often ends up carrying the emotional weight for everyone else, because the family as a whole has not learned to own it directly.

Our first community

In trying to understand the volatility we see today between individuals and groups — why it has become so hard to exist in community without going to extremes or losing ourselves within it — Bowen’s framework offers a powerful starting point. The answer likely begins in the very first community any of us ever belongs to: our own family.

From the earliest stages of life, we are born into a system in which we are completely undifferentiated. It is the first place we learn who we are in relation to others, and the quality of that learning shapes how we navigate every community that follows. The capacity to stand in a crowd and keep your arms folded — to remain yourself even under enormous social pressure — is built, or broken, long before the crowd ever forms.