82. THE MEANING OF PERSONS — A

Physician-psychologist Paul Tournier wrote a seminal book entitled The Meaning of Persons. In this and the next post, I will translate some of Tournier’s thoughts that connect to the interest of this blog. For openers, Tournier made the following declaration:

“I can speak endlessly of myself, to myself or to someone else, without ever succeeding in giving a complete and truthful picture of myself.” There remains in each of us, he adds, “something of impenetrable mystery.” We cannot grasp the true reality of ourselves or of others, “but only an image; a fragmentary and deformed image, an appearance: the ‘personage.’” He differentiates the personage, which we present as “actors in a play,” from the persons that we truly are. Person and personage are linked together, but at the same time, they remain distinct.

It is difficult, says Tournier, to discover the true person that we are when we see only a variety of images of ourselves, including images from the environment to which we belong. And, he adds, we do not get the true picture of ourselves by adding all the false images together. To find our meaning as persons goes beyond composing a composite of those false images.

In his practice, Tournier did not focus on the personal fragments disclosed by his clients because those fragments would not reveal the person. When there is a real bond between two persons sharing a space — a bond based on the fruit of sincerity that emerges in what Martin Buber would likely call an “I-Thou” relationship — something insightful emerges. “There suddenly awakens within me the certainty that I am no longer learning, but understanding. It is quite different. It is not the sum of what I have learnt. It is a light which has suddenly burst forth from our personal contact.”

Observing all the physiological mechanisms of the body will not yield knowledge of one another. These types of observations will only lead to the personage, not the person. In another kind of relationship, in which his client revealed something from the heart that could be viewed as an attempt to be absolutely truthful, Tournier thought: “I felt as if I were confronted by something supernatural, something that overwhelmed me. … What happened at that moment was that I passed from information to communion. … Information speaks of personages. Communion touches the person.”

Having described much of life as a game, Tournier with grim words said, “We are slaves of the personage which we have invented for ourselves or which has been imposed on us by others. … ‘We strive continually,’ wrote theologian Blaise Pascal, ‘to adorn and preserve our imaginary self, neglecting the true one.’”

“The person is the original creation — the personage is the automatic routine. One effect of the increasing uniformity of life and of the crowding of people together in huge populations has been to mold vast numbers of them to a standard pattern. … For their part those who aspire to live like real persons and not like automata find themselves caught in the toils of a mass society, against which originality rebels for a time, and then grows weary and is extinguished.”

“How many people have confessed to me that at certain moments in their lives they have been afraid of themselves, afraid of the forces at work within them, of their instincts, their desires, their feelings, and of the actions of which they felt themselves capable!”

“People become used to suffering, even though they may rebel against it. Some experience an odd feeling of depression just at the point where difficulties from which they have suffered cruelly are resolved. It is as if they could no longer do without suffering, or as if they found themselves weak, because their strength depended on reaction against suffering. After a long period of rain, we find difficulty in believing that we shall ever see blue sky again, however much we may long for it. The same applies to the meteorology of the soul.”

Tournier seems to lean toward the concept of “integration” by which we realize our secret propensities and reach toward a lucid and courageous acceptance of the totality of our being with all its complications and contradictions.

Q: As you reflect on the difference between your personage and the person you are, how close to the person you are do you feel?