Running Head : THE UNDESIRED SELF : DEADLY CONNOTATIONS The Undesired Self : Deadly Connotations

Two studies were conducted to examine the hypothesis derived from a juxtaposition of the undesired self and terror management theories that making aspects of the undesired self salient produces effects comparable to those obtained in response to making mortality salient. In Study 1, participants reminded of either death or aspects of their undesired self were more supportive of President George W. Bush and his policies in Iraq, relative to participants in exam salient or desired self salient control conditions. In Study 2, participants reminded of death or aspects of their undesired self showed greater accessibility of implicit death thoughts, relative to participants in pain salient or desired self salient control conditions. Implications of these findings for future theory and research are considered. The Undesired Self 3 The Undesired Self: Deadly Connotations And the guilt is all mine— can never be fixed on another man, no escape for me. Take me away, quickly, out of sight. I don’t even exist—I’m no one. Nothing. Creon (in Sophocles’ Antigone) At the turn of the 19th century, William James wrote, "man's interior is as a battleground for what he feels to be two deadly hostile selves, one actual, the other ideal" (1902, p. 135). Perhaps "deadly hostile selves" is a bit strong for the phenomenon James makes reference to, so it makes sense to soften his position somewhat by removing them from the battlefield. But, either way, at war or under conditions of cease fire, James set the stage for Carl Rogers' thinking about the real self and ideal self as residing on opposite ends of a single, measurable dimension (Rogers, 1954). "Measurable" is the key word here because Rogers (1954) developed a quantitative means for assessing the relationship between a person's real and ideal selves. His method was an adaptation of an exercise in which respondents sorted two stacks of identical cards: one from the vantage point of their real self (how they perceived their self at the time) and the other from the perspective of the ideal self (how they would ideally like to be). The degree of correspondence between the two was dubbed the self-discrepancy score. A high positive correlation was indicative of good functioning, whereas a low correlation was taken as an indication that the real self had some catching up to do. Rogers' contribution spearheaded three decades of selfdiscrepancy research that featured the juxtaposition of real and ideal selves in comparison with a variety of outcome variables. The Undesired Self 4 Breaking ranks with tradition, Ogilvie (1987) questioned the wisdom of using the ideal self as the sole standard for evaluating the status of the current or real self. He argued that a potential problem with ideal selves was that, in most instances, they are envisioned as abstract future selves that have no grounding in actual experience. Milan Kundera (1984, p.122) captured Ogilvie's concern in the following passage from The Unbearable Lightness of Being: "The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs to be married longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning, is always totally unknown to us. " How much credibility could be granted a number representing the distance between an individual and a phantom, the distance between one's "now" self and a self that is largely based on guesswork? The idea of another self, dubbed the undesired self, emerged in part from such considerations.