Aligning with My Anchoring Identity
An Exploratory Self-Analysis Using Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory
content disclaimer: mentions of child abuse, low self-esteem
I welcome any opportunity to self-reflect.
I believe it lends fruitfully to personal transformation.
And like on any journey of transformation, a guiding principle is helpful.
In the case of this essay, I have two:
the idea of an anchoring identity and
Freudian psychoanalytic theories
“Anchoring identity” as a term came to me the other day while on the toilet, where many an inspiring thought tends to present itself. I was considering what felt like finally landing at this stage and point in my life: training as a doctor of clinical psychology. After several careers in fashion business, English teaching, writing and composition, creative entrepreneurship, and birthwork, I have arrived at this place. And woven through those careers that are discernible to the public eye have been internal identities I’ve explored through relationships, creative and artistic expression, and simply as a creature of the Earth.
Well, I feel I’ve come to a place of desiring an anchor; a way to keep me stable and secure and grounded as I continue to explore. The anchor of a ship does not stop the water from flowing, the tides from rolling; it simply keeps the boat in place as life happens around it. And so let me explore this idea of an anchoring identity through the perspective of Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalytic theories. Knowing his perspective is Euro-centric, male-centric, and very white, I apply necessary liberties to my self-analysis.
I, myself, am an eclectic, and joy-full, African Woman.
In this essay, I’ll be exploring the roles of the conscious and unconscious minds, the structure of the psyche, psychosexual development, psychopathology, and Freud’s take on psychotherapy. In each of these domains, I’ll look at some configuration of my internal dynamics, my relational dynamics, and the dynamics of the wider cultural paradigm. So, let’s begin.
Sigmund Freud is often said to be the first psychoanalyst in the 19th century to position the power of the unconscious mind in psychic life as crucial to understanding how early life experiences are replicated in the present moment. Further, he took the unconscious mind to be foundational to how inner tensions influence our development as humans (Berzoff et al., 2022, p. 15). According to Freud’s formative theories, the human mind contains three distinct realms: the unconscious, the preconscious (or subconscious), and the conscious. The unconscious contains psychological material that is unacceptable, so therefore must be repressed or suppressed—a type of decisive or involuntary abstinence. The preconscious, or subconscious, contains acceptable psychological material that isn’t readily available to the conscious mind, but that can become conscious with minimal effort, like memory. The conscious contains material that is readily available in awareness at any given time (Mitchell & Black, 2016, p. 6). As such, Freud’s model of psychotherapy is rooted in making the unconscious conscious.
But, more on that later.
For now, I’d like to situate myself in this psychological framework of the layers of the mind, especially as I begin to consider awareness of my identity.
From early childhood, I’ve been aware of myself. And I have been aware of my conscious awareness. It’s strange to articulate, but I have, from very young, had the understanding that I was looking at life through a lens. It was almost like having an adult mind in my mind, showing me what was happening, though I couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing beyond what my psychological capacity was. As I grew, this conscious awareness always remained and even acted as a way to begin to create a life for myself based on my desires. For example, at age 10, I desired to be a fashion designer, and to attend a specific fashion school in New York City. It didn’t feel like a childish dream; it felt like a conscious way to frame my identity in the world. Eight years later, I was enjoying fashion classes in NYC, at the very school I had desired to attend, just like my conscious mind had mapped out.
Now, as much as I was aware of my conscious mind, especially when it came to creating my reality, I was completely unaware of the unconscious elements of life that were also working to create the reality I had identified with. And this didn’t stop with my identity as a fashionista. This unconscious force traveled with me throughout my life, guiding me to experiences directly connected to my conscious desires, but in ways that were often nonlinear or dreamlike. After all, according to Freud, the unconscious is the hidden aspect of the mind, driven by the pleasure principle and unconstrained by reality (R. Dumetz, lecture slides, September 14, 2026). So, when I would have a conscious desire to experience something, I feel my unconscious mind would get to work, organizing my unconscious orientation to life, the world, to people, to help me align with what I consciously desired.
Sounds convenient, right?
Sure. But lately, especially as life has been preparing me to journey to the identity of a psychologist, I’ve learned that the unconscious will likely organize my orientation to, specifically, the elements of my conscious life I have suppressed and repressed. And this is because, according to Freud, whatever is sent to the unconscious mind via suppression and repression must be expressed (R. Dumetz, lecture slides, September 14, 2026). For me, this expression of the unconscious often shows up in relationships. I feel this is the case for all humans because we are inherently relational beings. As an example, and this is a tender one, I suppressed the harsh treatment I underwent as a child from my parents, which I now understand to be child abuse, though through the lens of their generation of Nigerian parenting, they reared me to their better judgement.
This suppression of early-life abuse from authority figures expressed itself in a number of abusive bosses, supervisors, and workplaces in my early professional life. It didn’t matter what career I had—fashion professional or overseas English teacher, I’d somehow held the identity of a person who would accept abuse, internalize it, be a receptacle for poor treatment. This was unconscious, so all I felt in those years were pervasive shame and anxiety, low-grade fear and high-grade self-loathing, which I distracted myself from through immersion in various colorful activities.
Ways to identify with something else.
Anything else.
When so steeped in a psychological state of shame and self-loathing, it’s pretty easy to feel like a victim. And when we feel like a victim, it’s more challenging to see how the mind is working, and that the mind is working. Because, on some level, if we can see the mind’s workings, we can’t fully be a victim to external circumstances. We might still feel oppressed, stepped on, like shit, but if the mind has a process that is creating a certain psychological state, that means that mental process can be attended to in order to change the psychological state. And if we can change the state of our psyche, we have some form of power. This position of internal power was not one I was conscious of in my early 20s as a young professional.
Now, though, I’m able to consider frameworks, like Freud’s structural theory, to put my psychological functioning into perspective. This theory consists of the id, ego, and superego. The id contains impulsive, unrefined, and unstructured energy; the ego functions to regulate and control the id; the superego represents higher values and morals, which can often be critical of self and others (Mitchell & Black, 2016, p. 20).
By instinct, I can say I am a child of life who is happily driven by my id, if I transpose Freud’s theory onto my life. The id, like the unconscious, is said to be driven by the pleasure principle, and, moving through life, pleasure is what takes me to the next step. The desire to become a fashion designer was, on a superficial level, because the glamour was pleasurable, and I wanted that for life! When I left the US and chose to teach English overseas, I made that choice because traveling had brought me so much delight and thrill and pleasure, that I wanted to fully immerse myself in it. But, also like my experience of the unconscious, there was always some caveat in my self-exploration through life. As I lived and explored, I unconsciously and desperately tried to escape the harm from my early childhood that I found reflected in relationships with people in different corners of the world, and in the mirror. In this escapism, I often seemed to meet an expression of my identity that wanted me to face a truth. Yes, sure, I could “galivant” around the world traveling, and teaching, and making art. But I would eventually need principles and values, or else I would end up mirroring the hurt that I was reflecting in my relationships because of unhealed internal wounding.
The identity that wanted me to face a truth? My ego, according to Freud’s thinking.
The needed principles and values? My superego.
Curiously, I found my superego express itself to me over the past several years through my study of the ancient wisdom traditions of Yoga, Daoism, and Yoruba spirituality through Ifa. Though I yearn for more of the precolonial ancestral and spiritual wisdom of my people, the Igbos, I can see that perhaps there has been an unconscious need to circumnavigate ways to obtain that knowledge. Why? Because of the betrayal of my experience of child abuse. The superego, according to Freud, is “largely organized around parental imagoes” (Mitchell & Black, 2016, p. 20). As such, my organic need for internal “parenting” values and principles sought less threatening ways to gain traditional knowledge and wisdom: not from the ancestral roots of my parents who’d harmed me, but from the ancestral roots of peoples with similar collectivist identities, who did not directly harm me. Subconsciously, I knew I would find a way to connect with the wisdom and values of the precolonial Igbos.
I am still on this journey of remembering.
This development of my superego has been in a very significant transition from a dominant colonial control to a more subtle and deeply influential spiritual, ancestral, guidance through whispers of wisdom and embodied intelligence.
And as it happens in my individual life, I can see this shift taking place culturally here in the US. From my vantage point, I see this collective shift from the illusion of separation and authoritative regimes, rooted in a deeper desire for freedom. Some parts of the collective hold this desire in conscious awareness and thus act in alignment with the desired way of being: community care; shared resources; reclamation of provision, land stewardship, body and heart and sexual power. And I believe most of the collective holds this desire unconsciously and so creates more fragmentation, separation, and strife as a Freudian way to express the genuine need for union and reconciliation. To me, it appears the collective ego, which is “meant” to function as a control for the forces of the id in alignment with the superego, is marginalized. As such, the superego in its colonial dominance has subsumed the function and energetic drive of the id in trying to exact the superego’s fascist agenda. This means that fascism is not only an ideal or empty principle; it is mobilized by and also feeds into the pleasures and basic needs of those in executive control, the systems they create, and the people who adhere to those systems. The ego as a collective balancing force would be leaders who embody dynamic, egalitarian, and democratic principles in alignment with natural law, universal law, reverence for Spirit, human, and beyond human and who are mobilized by the basic pleasure principle to make sustainable executive change.
There is no specific anchoring identity I seek as I write this essay.
Rather, it is the exploration at hand that seems to allow an inner identity to reveal itself, for itself.
And perhaps this is an appropriate transition to a look into Freudian psychosexual development, specifically the oral stage. This developmental model is based on Freud’s theory of a human’s sexual and aggressive drives, originating in their infancy, and situating their various erogenous zones at the corresponding stages of development (Berzoff et al., 2022, pp. 25-26). In the oral stage, Freud’s thinking is that infants seek pleasure and aggression primarily through the erogenous zone of the mouth. According to Freud, because the mouth is the infant’s channel of and receptivity for connection (e.g. breastfeeding, bottle feeding, biting, sucking, tasting, licking, knowing), infants are seeking to have their basic physical and emotional needs met (Berzoff et al., 2022, p. 26). When basic needs are met in this stage, the person develops a capacity for trust of self and others, as well as self-esteem. When needs are not met in the oral stage, there may be a whole host of psychological issues as an adult that stem from unfulfilled needs in infancy, such as dependency, greed and insatiable hunger, eating disorders, narcissism, and impulse control issues, to name a few (R. Dumetz, lecture slides, September 28, 2026). I wanted to link my exploration of an anchoring identity to the oral stage here because I feel, in some way, my search for an identity to root me is a search for a home within myself that can continually provide my psychological and emotional needs of safety that were unmet in my upbringing.
Through the lens of Freud’s psychosexual development, the oral stage is about the desire of the infant to be met with some nurturance or connection often enough to root the child into trust. And as much as my parents have provided materially throughout my life—and they have provided plentifully—I have still experienced segregation from myself because of lack of emotional attunement as a child. So, I can see that part of my search for an anchoring identity is like the search for an inner caregiver whom I can return to again and again, in trust, as I continue to navigate the waters of life now as an adult.
However, as much as I can make this theoretical extrapolation, it feels grossly one-dimensional.
A more truthful, multidimensional, take on this linking would be that seeking an anchoring identity is me connecting with the elements of my parents that demonstrated their love and care for me, my siblings, our family, in the nuanced and complex and idiosyncratic ways they were wont to do—and able to do given their own unconscious inculcation into colonial violence as Igbos.
Before the child-rearing that was ultimately psychologically harmful for me, I imagine my parents stretching themselves to their capacities to provide for my needs in my infancy. It is what they did and what they do because it is who they are as Igbos coming from the humble and passionately loving families they come from. So, this is where this Freudian theory is like a paper towel rather than a mudcloth. The paper towel can target one issue and work with that one issue until it reaches capacity and is sopping wet and has to be discarded, only to require another single-use paper towel. A mudcloth is a representation of memory, history, wisdom, ancestral and Earth intelligence—it is not designed to fix issues, but to prevent needless disharmonies because within it lives the codes of Divine Harmony through our Earthly, human, existence.
At this juncture, with what has just been unearthed, it’s interesting to be present with Freud’s take on psychopathology, because it comes from a deeply subjective lens of individualistic internal conflict. As an individual being, I can see myself having internal conflict, and how this internal conflict is an expression of painful repressed experiences that struggle to reconcile themselves in my conscious reality (Berzoff et al., 2022, p. 23). But when I put this theory to the test of my African indigeneity, Spirit invites me to consider:
1) the various roles that are played in a conflict scenario, and
2) how individual internal conflict is a reflection of the collective conflict occurring in the collective one is most resonant with.
To consider Freudian psychopathology at face value would erase the collective intelligence and wisdom that arises from including all beings in the formation and cultivation of relationship, community, society, politic. Rather, then, I’m inclined to think of psychopathology in general as an issue of interdependent relationality that assumes the inherent worth and value of each being in a relational system, be it dyadic, triadic, or multiple-person. If I consider my own inner conflicts and the personal imbalances they create as the singular significant psychopathology to be with therapeutically, I reinforce the societal representation of independence that creates the emotional isolation, political inequality, and lack of accountability for harm done that the US is severely suffering from now.
So, on a cultural level, part of the psychopathology of the US is: conflict created from individualism on land precolonially stewarded to home healthy and harmonious interdependence. Industrial forces can build whatever machines they want, but Spirit is stronger than machine. And Spirit is what guides what happens on Her Earthly body. This is why the US is in a consistent psychological war with itself; Spirit will not allow the constant violation and disregard, denigration, of her Earthly body, and her emotional body (as expressed through our relationality as humans and beyond human), without demonstrating conflict to show the sheer disharmony, or imbalance, of our situation as beings at this time in existence, generated by our choices as humans.
If Freudian psychopathology makes us aware of an internal imbalance showing itself in internal conflict, whether individual or collective, psychotherapy is meant to help us bring about the balance needed to resolve the psychopathology. An element of psychotherapy considered “an essential part of the therapy and treatment” to Freud, was the transference-countertransference dynamic (R. Dumetz, lecture slides, September 14, 2026). Transference refers to the expression or projection of past experiences of the client onto the therapist in the present moment. Countertransference is the therapist’s organic response to the client’s transference, emerging from the therapist’s personal experience, worldview, and nuanced perception of the client and their unique provocation in relational dynamics (R. Dumetz, lecture slides, September 14, 2026).
This transference-countertransference dynamic is most interesting to me at this stage of my clinical training, and as a relational human being, because it is where we make the unconscious conscious. I get to weave my personal story with the stories of others and the larger, collective, story we are all both telling and living within. In my burgeoning identity as a clinician, I get to experience an interpersonal distance in the transference-countertransference dynamic with a client: I have the privilege of understanding the transferential scope with some amount of clinical knowledge, and I can help direct the healing with the knowledge I’m privy to.
As a relational human, I’m just as influenced by transference and countertransference in my non-clinical relationships as I am professionally, but the healing gets to be transparently bidirectional. Through transference-countertransference, I get to explore deeper layers of meaning of expression, reaction, sensation, memory, feeling, and intuitive knowing in my relationships to learn more about myselves and my history, about my relational partners’ selves and histories, and about the collective frameworks we live within. In this way, Spirit shows me that the healing is all here; no external technologies are needed to facilitate healing, transformation, and ultimately, balance.
Well… this exploration has been a journey. As a galivanter, I know how to journey, and it brings me great pleasure, as we are aware. But what I did not expect was to journey back to Spirit through this reflection.
To journey back to my indigenous African wisdom as my anchoring identity.
When I consider my African indigeneity as my anchoring identity, it is obvious, and it makes me cackle: “Duh!” But the colonized mind is a mind that is conditioned to experience the superficial as the substantial; to epitomize identity as only a career title or a credential. Tufiakwa! as my father would say in Igbo, meaning, essentially, “get that out of my sight!”
For me, this is an emphatic statement on the effects of colonization on the displacement of my/our indigenous, innate, worthiness with an artificial worthiness through the scope of capitalism, patriarchy, and the illusion of intellectual superiority through the academic-institutional complex.
If I harken back to each being playing a role in a conflict, and consequentially a healing, I would say that in the case of this essay, and my self-discovery, Freud’s psychoanalytic theories have created a purposeful tension for me at this stage of my doctoral learning, and my life.
So, I give thanks for the fodder for self-discovery and my Spirit-guided resourcefulness. Asé.
References
Berzoff, J., Flanagan, L. M., & Hertz, P. (2022). Inside out and outside in: Psychodynamic clinical theory and psychopathology in contemporary multicultural contexts. (5th ed.). Rowman & Littlefield.
Mitchell, S. A., & Black, M. J. (2016). Freud and beyond: a history of modern psychoanalytic thought (2nd ed.). Basic Books.
