LIBERTY UNIVERSITY JOHN W. RAWLINGS SCHOOL OF DIVINITY
Self-association and Self-dissociation, and Permeability
A Paper Submitted to
the Faculty of the School of Divinity
in Candidacy for the Degree of
Doctor of Education in Christian Leadership (Ed. D) Department of Christian Leadership and
Church Ministries
By
Mary Gracias
Lynchburg, Virginia
10/2022
Self-association and Self-dissociation, and Permeability
I shall treat the fifth and sixth basic structures together, since they are so closely
interwoven. One striking feature of the New Testament psychology is the willingness to
multiply selves, to speak of the new self and the old self, the “inmost self” and the “flesh,” etc.
Another, related feature is that one person can permeate or be “in” another: Christ can be “in”
the believer, the believer can be “in” Christ, Christ is “in” the Father, the Father is “in” Christ,
the Holy Spirit dwells “in” the believer. At one point, Paul talks almost as though Christ’s s elf
replaces his own as he becomes more sanctified: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no
longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20).
But in the sequel he makes it clear that he has not really disappeared, ceding his body to a
reincarnated Christ: “And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who
loved me and gave himself for me.” So it is Paul who lives after all, but it is a different Paul, who
associates himself with Christ who is now “in” him. The Paul who lived independently of Christ
has died (though as we will see in a moment, he is still present, dissociated from Paul).
Heinz Kohut’s concept of a self object (Kohut & Wolf, 1978) gives us a model for
understanding how one person can dwell in another. In interacting with our parents, we take
them into our self, into our “heart,” to use Paul’s word. As potential selves, we are hungry for a
sense of our own worth, and in their approval, their empathy, their enthusiasm for us, we see
our worth “mirrored.” We are also hungry for orientation in “moral space” (the term is
borrowed from Taylor, 1989), for a sense of the direction of our life, a sense of what we are to
be and do.
By identifying ourselves with our parents, we get a free ride on their ideals (see Talbot, this
volume). In these ways, we “incorporate” our parents into our psyches. In Jesus Christ god
presents himself to us as accepting, merciful, forgiving, nurturing, respectful, empathic – as a
“mirroring self object.” We come to see our value reflected in God love. Thus we become a self
in a quite different way than we would be apart from the gospel; our self is constituted of God’s
regard for us. At least, this is one of our selves, on the Pauline psychology, indeed the truest
one, the one with which we ought to associate ourselves. And the bestowal of this self does not
just satisfy a generalized need to be loved but the specific need to be loved by God.
As God thus dwells in our hearts, we become spiritually his children. In being addressed
with God’s love and thus identified as God’s children, we are also called to do his work, to live a
certain life, to pursue certain goals. “.... And if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs
with Christ, provided we suffer with him....” (Rom. 8:17). In this too we identify ourselves, and
thus are formed as selves, in his terms. God our Abba becomes to us an ideal-bearing self
object as well. We take on God’s goals as our own, and thus find in ourselves divine value and
divine orientation, a self that was not there before. It is clear that the self object – human or
divine – “dwells in” us in this sense through the power of association, because we associate
ourselves, identify with, the divine or human parent. As Christians we grow by associating
ourselves with the new self that has been created by God’s loving address.
We see the phenomenon of self-association at work in marriages as well. A young
husband will find that he has two selves, an old bachelor self that is uncommitted, unattached;
and a married self that belongs to this particular woman. Each self has its own behavioral – and
emotional – response repertoire, its own sense of identity. The young husband may find
himself, at certain moments, confused about which set of dispositions to associate himself with
and may have to “yield” to the one or the other.
This yielding may be by default, or he may quite intentionally choose not to “go with the
flow” and choose instead to associate himself with his wife and his married self. As the
marriage matures, and he matures as a husband, his unmarried self will die or at least fade to a
mere ghostly presence. A negative example of the phenomenon is the son who keeps seeing, to
his dismay, traits of his father in his demeanor and affect, and consciously dissociates himself
from them, saying to himself, as it were, “that’s not me, not the real me.” Part of my point is
that this need not be “denial” in the sense of dishonesty; it may, instead, be a creative or
constitutive denial, an act that brings about a psychological reality: that these disposition
inherited from the father gradually cease to be part of the individual’s real self.
I think that Kohut’s Neo-Freudian psychology can help us understand one person’s
indwelling another, but the biblical concept also differs significantly from his. The Gospel of
John talks volubly about the Father being in the Son and the Son in the Father, and the Father
and the Son being in the disciples, and the disciples in the Father and the Son. But the one
relationship that is not described in terms of indwelling is that between ordinary human beings;
in the NT, indwelling always involves at least one divine person. We do not hear of Paul being
“in” Barnabas, or anybody’s mother or father being “in” him, etc., though of course Christians
are “member one of another,” and this comes close to some idea of being “in” one another.
I think we have to admit that the parent does not really indwell the child; it is rather the
child’s impression of the parent, in the form of impressions of memory, that is carried off by the
child, and with which the child may or may not associate himself. This impression is a
disposition of construal, disposing the child to construe himself, as well as both is actual parent
and other “parent figures,” in certain ways. When Jesus (John) and Paul speak of Christ dwelling
in us, or us dwelling in Christ, or Christ dwelling in the Father or the Father in Christ, the
expression is not metaphorical. It is Christ who is in the Father, and the Father himself who is in
Christ, and it is Christ himself who dwells in us. This is possible because Christ is God, and God
can be literally and always present to or in anyone; while human beings, when they are absent
from one another, can only be “present” to one another in some metaphorical sense. Thus the
indwelling of Christ or the Holy Spirit is a kind of fellowship, a real present relationship between
god and the believer.
Indwelling, then, seems to have the following characteristics: (1) it is a positive
relationship between two or more distinct individuals; (2) in Pauline and Johannine usage, at
least one of the individuals must be divine, though we can imagine a metaphorical extension of
the concept to relationships between mere human beings, (3) the identity of each individual is
profoundly and centrally affected by the indwelling (or “indwelling”) of the other(s); (4)
somewhat more speculatively, the indwelling is conditioned on the indwelt person’s associating
himself or herself (voluntarily or involuntarily, consciously or unconsciously) with the
indwelling person.
Thus Christ indwells people who associate themselves with him, and thus with the new
self that loves Christ and regards itself as loved by him. But when Paul speaks of sin dwelling in
him (Rom. 7:7-25), he dissociates himself from it. Two Pauls coexist here, one that delights in
the law of God and wants to do the good, and another that is in servitude to sin and lacks
respect for the law. The one Paul is a “body of death” to the other. But there is no doubt which
one is the real Paul: “I myself serve the law of God.” He even goes so far as to suggest that he
himself is not sinful, but is derailed by an alien power: “Now if I do what I do not want, it is no
longer I that do it, but sin which dwells in me” (v. 20). Most of us do not experience sin as such
an alien principle, because we do not dissociate ourselves so radically from the sin as Paul does.
We “dwell in” it, uneasily perhaps, or with only one foot; but we identify with it to some extent.
And the reason for this, I think, is that we do not associate ourselves as strongly with Christ as
Paul does. It is Paul’s passionate seriousness about Christ, and the strong sense he has of
belonging to Christ, of being “in” Christ, that gives him the impression that sin does not belong
to him – that is, not to the real Paul, not to Paul’s “inmost self.” And this is not just Paul’s
“impression,” but a true perception of Paul’s situation, a perception of it from God’s point of
view.
