Notes on Being and Becoming1

I dedicate this paper to the memory Tom Richardson.

The question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” masquerades as an inquiry concerning occupational goals, but in fact it is a question concerning the most fundamental aspects of one's states of being and becoming: “Who (what kind of person) do you want to be now, at this moment, and what kind of person do you aspire to become.”

“Growing up” requires force of will in concert with unconscious psychic work that can be achieved only with the help of parents who facilitate psychic development. The need to grow up constitutes an intense, unrelenting force within us that leads us to hurl ourselves against the walls of internal and external constraints in our effort to achieve increasing depth and breadth of who we are and who we might become. Those internal constraints, the limits of our present personality, against which we do battle, are many and various. It is difficult to let go of our belief in our parents' powers to magically protect us and in our own magical power to achieve idealized versions of ourselves. It is disturbing to recognize that, despite ourselves, we tenaciously hold on to what we feel to be destructive aspects of ourselves, of our internal and external parents, and of our social system and culture. Growing up, becoming more fully ourselves, requires that we not simply loosen our hold on identifications with both healthy and pathological aspects of our parents, we must “kill something vital in them — not all in one blow and not in all respects, but contributing to their dying” (Loewald, 1979/1980, p. 395).

As we throw ourselves against these external and internal constraints, we find ourselves experiencing not only feelings of fear and insecurity, but also feelings of exhilaration, as we revise (at times, overthrow) the mores, values, fears, and ambitions of our parents as well as the ways they had of expressing themselves. We experience feelings of joy and a sense of satisfaction and triumph in