I.THE PROBLEM

Loss of identity and the resultant search for the inner person is a problem especially for those humanistic sciences desiring to help the individual and not just describe him. Psychotherapy as well as pedagogy, to name only two of the most important applied sciences, have become engaged in the same conflict dividing the social sciences. The struggle for identity encounters the fundamental question of how and whether the individual can be helped at all. This problem was articulated as far back as Plato who denied that goodness can be taught; and this is crucial for the social technologies of our day able to call upon that part of the Platonic teachings which propagates an educational dictatorship.

II.THE EXAMPLE OF PSYCHOTHERAPY

The diverse and often opposing schools of thought into which psychotherapy has splintered serves as a case study. At the Cconferenc for Psychotherapy in December 1985 in Phoenix - with over 7000 participants, among them most leading therapists, representative of the many factions - the conflict was apparent. Revealed through sometimes heated confrontation were the irreconcilable differences in basic methods and techniques of treatment. Very briefly, the status of the controversy can be described as follows. The patient or client is to be helped either by:

1.manipulation through adjustment to a role (and it doesn't matter that the role could be a mask), as the family therapists suggest;

2. by long-term search for the real and personal identity, rejecting all masks and criticising roles, as the psychoanalysts of the Freudian tradition propose; or

3. by open-end encouragement in the finding of a truth which the client chooses - as with a personal must, a whole, an identity no one can teach (Carl Rogers' concept for example).

III. WHAT CAN PHILOSOPHY DO?

Let us examine three different approaches. In Europe the most influential is that of Habermas' New Frankfurt School which elucidates the specific steps on the way to identity using the investigations of Piaget and Kohlberg as well as Erikson und Levita. Habermas guides us to the distinction between identity qua role and identity as communicative action.

But such a post-Hegelian understanding of identity lapses into linearity. According to Hegel a dialectical identity comprehends identity and non-identity on a new level. In a Hegelian sense there is never a personal identity without the life-world and nature, and the search for an inner person must be considered anthropocentric.

Withoug Hegel's desire for the whole Adorno of the genuine Frankfurt School reproached the struggle for identity for being a violation of the human life-style and for the domination of theory over praxis. Adorno's self was constituted through negation, as a fragment, and along these lines the post-modern philosophy from Foucault to Derrida regards identity as a dead principle.

IV. PHENOMENOLOGICAL DECONSTRUCTION

A phenomenological description of the problems seems suitable for de-constructing the origin and constitution of the search for the inner person. To this end we shall follow the three phenomena in which the inner person reveals or conceals itself: mask, role, identity.

A mask conceals the face and is not a part of the person. Masks seem to alienate people. We are urged to throw off our masks so as to come closer to identity. But the mask, too, has another side. It protects the personal identity in a social sphere so that no disadvantages arise for the individual acting in the interests of the community (so-called "Amtstragermasken", those masks which carry out an office within the communal system, especially that of judge or peacemaker). To that extent the mask reaffirms the right of identity and is its fitting expression in certain social situations.

The phenomenon of role is also ambiguous. The role must of course be performed by a person but its outline is prescribed by an external source. Outside the theatre the role of a woman can be filled only by a woman and yet it must not necessarily be her choice. A role can:

1.) describe identity formed through an essential process of socialization and through the acknowledgement and internalization of cultural technologies (eating, drinking, etc.);

2.) it can also mean the postponement of identity, even its destruction by a substitute identity such as an identification card; and;

3.) a role can help to differentiate between the external and the inner person whereby a forced or even a split identity can result. According to Janpeter Kob through the latter the individual sphere is distinguished from that of society, and limits are set.

Identity is, for its part, a controversial phenomenon. If the individual is at birth a "tabula rasa" then there is no identity without socially mdiated roles. Does the inner person exist at all, a subject transcending masks and roles, or is this - as Foucault assumes - merely a modern role? Doesn't one lead the patient, client, or even the student into a hopeless situation when one sends him on a searcdh for his identity? Surrogate identities only appear to be a way out, although the practitioner works well with them. It may serve the purpose of medicine and of our everyday dealings with one another to declare masks and roles to be identities, but this does not satisfy those willing to inquire further. The dilemma presented by this solution is apparent in Carl Rogers' client-centered therapy in which the client is encouraged to find his own truths. On the one hand, the patient is supposed to be clever enough to find these, but on the other, dumb enough not to see through them as surrogates!

The only thing certain about the question of identity is that it represents for everyone the greatest adventure, embarking on a journey leading to one's own self. This is not feasible for problem cases, those already living on the edge; suicide as a way out, with which the painful search would come to a quick end, is far too obvious. Often enough the letters are misread by those searching, often enough justice appears unjustifiably to be a humane principle- to name only one crucial example. The philosophers of our century who have risked this search for the inner person - mainly those from the realm of existential philosophy - no longer consider the sought after self (idem) to be `I', subject, or person. The early Heidegger called our identity "Dasein" (existence), and "Ereignis" (event) is the puzzle word of the late Heidegger for the same phenomenon. With "project" and "totalization" Sartre tried to grasp that which always eludes definition. The paradoxical process lies in the fact that identity - as Hegel saw - is a personal style in which the whole expresses itself. In his dialogue on "Gelassenheit" Heidegger called it looking away from the person in order to recognize him.

V. WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

Perhaps nothing. The inner and outer person could both be mere shells which we break in looking away. Can medicine be of help here? Shouldn't one instead ask in return: Can falseness heal? If it were so, there would be the criticism to consider which sees in medicine the illness it professes to heal. It seems to me that a medicine which understands itself as art and not science may perhaps be capable of bearing the risk of employing mask and role as remedies to be administered, like every poison, in special cases. But the healer as well as the helper should know when to discontinue the medicine, when to allow the patient to take off his mask, throw off his role and identity so that he can become a person renewed in the freedom of his ties to the world - which they open.

Philosophy & Technology Studies Center Polytechnic University, New York (Paper presented at the International Symposium on Phenomenology, Cambridge, Mass., 1986).