We work to make for ourselves
different images under which we can present and hide ourselves from other
people. It is a play of maximizing our personality which we play from our childhood
onward.
Though we clearly know that such
a play involve a lot of schemes of dissimulation, we are attracted to those
persons from whom we can get a similar image and we take it as their real
image. We ignore any legitimate suspicion that they have built their image like
we continually do.
This sudden ignorance may be
explained through the fact that the attractive image is partly our own work. We
agree to see it as an attractive image.
The anger we feel when our
expectations about someone’s image are betrayed can be likened with that we
feel when the results of a successful game are contested. That image is
accepted by us as the final result of a game, since we are not interested in discovering
how he or she has built it and how we contributed to its formation.
With a less inclination for dramatizing
our life, the betrayals and disappearances of those about whom we had formed
attractive images do not mean a real loss. Their images were already finished
from the beginning and they live so in our consciousness for a while.
Eventually, we learn to live with all of our own past images which never has
realized at full: the clever child, the daring young man, the responsible adult
and so on.
