2. the psychologist november 2018 genealogy
Family trees,
selfies and our
search for identity
Paula Nicolson looks at developing identities
in the 21st century
S
ome time ago, I became interested in
why long-dead family members appear
to spark emotional responses in so many
people. Would the same information
have that effect on me? I had the
opportunity to find an answer to this
when I eventually left my full-time
university post. This process of exploring
my family history deepened my fascination and I began
to understand the emotional triggers apparent on those
popular television shows. I wanted to know more.
True to habit I turned the methods used to explore
aspects of the lives of others towards generating data
about myself and my origins – a scary undertaking.
So, using a range of documents, conversations,
photographs, family myths or stories, memories and
texts, I planned to expand my knowledge and
understanding of the psychosocial and historical/
temporal experiences of my own ancestors.
This look to the past informs our sense of identity
and our place in contemporary culture, geographical
and historical space, in several ways. Firstly, we can
interconnect in a reflective way with material from
archival databases, word-of-mouth family stories,
photographs and other sources. Secondly, family
histories can link with our ongoing psychological
‘project of the self’, including the relationship
between the ‘selfie’ and family photos of old. Thirdly
and perhaps most crucially, it is worth considering
that these family history narratives might have a
therapeutic benefit with potential to influence our
wellbeing.
Of course, for social scientists, and psychologists
in particular, focusing on our self, or our identity, is
neither new nor exclusive to those exploring their
roots. It is integral to how we all live our lives in the
present. Consider the 21st century enthusiasm for the
selfie and personal status on sites such as FaceBook
or Instagram. Posting our status to the outside world
reflects varying degrees of confidence in our own
narrative of selfhood. Who hasn’t wanted friends to
Discovering family roots,
or genealogy, has become
a favourite pastime for
many. The sheer volume
of TV programmes,
magazines and ‘how to’
books bears witness to
this. Genealogy fascinates
because knowledge of
family history provides
some understanding of
our ancestors’ day-to-day
experiences, life chances
and expectations. But why
do we care? Why has the
exploration of family origins
become so engaging in
recent years? And what
are the psychological
dimensions to this
enterprise?
3. 30
know you are out enjoying a particular nightspot,
have grown orchids in your hothouse or are on a
walking tour of the Scottish Highlands? Who hasn’t
sneaked a glance at a photo self-portrait? Attention to
how often others ‘like’ what you are doing, how you
look, where you are doing it and who is doing it with
you, is apparently integral to personal satisfaction as
well as the ongoing story we construct about who we
really are. And in this way our ancestors are similarly
integral – whoever they turn out to be. As we construct
ourselves in order to make sense of our lives, we may
also construct our family histories to make sense of
our identities. We make sense of ourselves by what
is around us and how it responds to us. But does
discovering more about our backgrounds and family
networks actually develop the narrative? Does this add
substantively to our self-awareness and understanding?
Expanding knowledge
The pursuit of family history has become relatively
easy (which partly explains its popularity). We can
become involved in our past simply sitting at our
computers and checking public records. We begin
to appreciate that ancestors had names, addresses,
employment, husbands, wives, children, lodgers…
these people were real, whether or not we had ever
heard them featured in family stories. Each one of
them is part of how, and perhaps why, we are here
today. Their lives shaped ours. These poignant,
emotional connections lie behind the tears that flow
when ancestors’ lives are revealed
on celebrity genealogy television
shows. But does the identity of our
dead predecessors – who they were,
where they lived and died and what
they did with their lives – really
influence our own sense of who
we are? That is where psychology
comes in, and some answers are
already available within social and
developmental research and theory.
I had a relatively sparse and
partial understanding of my own
family until I began to put some of
the fragments I discovered during
my formal search together in my
mind. My parents were each aged
40 when I was born; my father,
being the youngest of five children
and my mother the tenth child
of eleven others. This limited
my personal experience of older
generations because they had
mostly died by the time I was able
to interact meaningfully with adults.
So, for instance, the youngest of my
first cousins is 13 years older than
me and another first cousin died
in 2017 when she was almost 101.
This distance in age, and to an extent status, denied me
first-hand awareness of my origins.
When I read the social historian Alison Light’s book
(Common People: The History of an English Family),
where she gives an account of seeking her own family
origins, I felt a rush of jealousy. Light had been able to
talk to people with key knowledge of her family’s past,
and she herself had been immersed in the geographical
places where they had lived and worked. What was
particularly interesting for me was that she was able
to draw a link between her ancestors and English
working-class culture and history through developing
her understanding of their lives.
Subsequently Antonia Bifulco’s analysis of
three generations of a Polish family teases out the
psychological consequences of war, hostile occupation
and peace across history and cultural change upon
individuals’ identity, attachment and resilience. These
works both demonstrated to me how family history
enables all of us to learn from the past, realising greater
emotional depth in that project than we might imagine
possible. We can learn about ourselves in an intimate
and emotional way, but we are also able to learn
about the socio-historical-political conditions of our
ancestors that draw links to a wider understanding of
history and our own psychology.
Erikson and Bowlby
The psychological histories of two well-known
psychologists reinforces these points. Erik
Erikson, the psychoanalyst, provided an overarching
explanation of how the complex relationships between
culture, geography and biology all contribute towards
the development of our identity. Erik Erikson’s life,
and resulting model of psychosocial development,
exemplifies the same multidisciplinary content that
saturates all of our lives and influences our interests
as psychologists. Erikson studied and practised in
Europe before moving to the United States. His life
and interest in identity was a product of his own family
background. His mother was a Jewish woman from
Denmark estranged from her Jewish husband some
months before Erik had been conceived, so that the
only information Erik had ever had about the identity
of his biological father was that he was Danish but not
Jewish. On confirmation of her pregnancy, Erikson’s
mother moved to Germany and later married a Jewish
paediatrician, Theodor Homburger. Homburger
adopted Erik, who always used Homburger as his
middle name. Much later when Erikson moved
to the United States, he married and converted to
Christianity. His interests in identity, culture and
biology are unsurprising.
Key sources
Bifulco, A. (2017). Identity, attachment
and resilience: Exploring three
generations of a Polish family. London:
Routledge.
Erikson, E.H. (1994). Identity: Youth and
crisis. New York: Norton.
Light, A. (2014). Common people:
The history of an English family.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Reavey, P. & Brown, S.D. (2006).
Transforming past agency and action
in the present. Theory and Psychology,
16(2), 179–202.
Warfield, K. (2014). Making selfies/
making self: Digital subjectivities in the
selfie. KORA: Kwantlen Open Resource
Access. Retrieved 24 January 2018 from
http://kora.kpu.ca/islandora/object/
kora%3A39/datastream/PDF/download/
citation.pdf
Young, M. & Wilmott, P. (2013). Family
and kinship in East London. London:
Routledge.
Zerubavel, E. (2011). Ancestors and
relatives: Genealogy, identity, and
community. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
4. the psychologist november 2018 genealogy
“…knowledge and
understanding of
our ancestors may
become integrated into
and contribute to our
conscious, or unconscious,
sense of self-identity”
One of the drivers of my
family history quest came
through attending a seminar at
the Tavistock Clinic in London to
celebrate the life of John Bowlby.
What lingered in my mind was
how the young John Bowlby’s
interest in attachment must have
come directly from his personal
experience. Bowlby’s family
history contained many examples of separation and
loss. His parents had led largely independent lives,
reflecting their own expectations based on their own
family backgrounds. Bowlby’s mother and siblings
lived mostly in Scotland. His mother left the childcare
to nursery staff and nannies. When his first loving
nursemaid left his parents’ employ, and his care was
taken over by a nanny, in line with the predominant
upper-class culture, there was concern not to ‘spoil’
him. He later wrote that this apparent withdrawal
of affection had left a lifelong
emotional scar. His father, a
surgeon, lived and worked in
London, so that when his mother
visited her husband she was away
from the children and the nannies
for months at a time. Bowlby’s
paternal grandfather had been
killed in action when Bowlby’s own
father was five. This must have
influenced his father’s maintenance
of an emotional distance from
his children and possibly from
his wife. While Bowlby’s father may not have focused
overtly on his own early loss, it was something that
intrigued Bowlby himself. Bowlby also believed that
intergenerational behavioural and emotional patterns
might have significance beyond immediate face-to-face
relationships.
In my view, both Erikson and Bowlby identified
connections between disturbed family backgrounds
and how these are translated psychologically and
emotionally across generations that had never
physically known each other. Would they have settled
on their research and clinical concerns without this in
their family tree?
The project of the ‘self’
A strong motive for our absorption in genealogy is that
discoveries are part of the ongoing project of the ‘self’ –
gaining, developing and understanding a sense of who
we are.
This mission occurs because
the self is not simply a passive or
a fixed entity but continues to be
shaped by our interactions and
interpretations of the environment,
the influence of other people and
institutions. Does this indicate that
knowledge of our ancestors might
also be part of this interaction?
As individuals, we act to
promote our self, developing a
story, or narrative, of who we are,
who we have been and who we
plan to become. The psychological
mechanism that enables this is
reflexivity – thinking specifically
and, as we might see it, objectively
about our self in such a way as to ‘hold conversations’
with ourselves while working out our place in a variety
of everyday and longer-term contexts. This ongoing
conversation potentially reaches into our genetic and
social family pasts to identify our place within our
psychosocial, historical, cultural and political worlds.
Our self, or identity, forms the basis of how we
interact with our social and physical environments,
and psychological development is the consequence.
We, as active and responsive social agents, continue
to make sense of who we are
over time. This means that as
we process and reflect upon
ongoing information about our
biological, psychosocial and
wider life contexts, we manage
the story we tell ourselves of who
we are, and attempt to project it
to those around us. This reflexive
project of the self then consists of
actively sustaining coherent, albeit
continuously revised, biographical
narratives. Thus, as we gain
more experience and understanding of our social,
intellectual and physical/embodied capacities, our
discursive consciousness of self-identity evolves.
As a result, knowledge and understanding of our
ancestors may become integrated into and contribute
to our conscious, or unconscious, sense of self-identity.
In our digital era, the selfie is one way in which
people sustain and revise these biographical narratives.
The selfie might sometimes (perhaps unconsciously)
be self-abusive, and there is evidence that some
young women in particular use it as a means of
gaining approval for their physical self. Much of
the contemporary research literature on the selfie
focuses upon this aspect. There is also evidence that
genealogical searches might also be employed to
enhance social status, claiming descent from royalty
or other famous or infamous individuals (witness
how delighted Danny Dyer was on Who Do You Think
You Are? to discover he is related to two kings of
England). However, the family search might equally
Paula Nicolson is Emeritus
Professor at Royal Holloway,
University of London, and author
of Genealogy, Psychology and
Identity: Tales from a Family
Tree (2017, Routledge)
paula.nicolson@rhul.ac.uk
5. 32
be disappointing or even disruptive for those of us
who discover humdrum or even unpleasant family
roots. Each of us will bestow a value judgement on the
genealogical and the social media data we discover and
the responses we obtain. While the selfie and other
forms of social media that document our lives, bodies
and behaviours provide self-generated narratives to
add to the quest for an authentic self, genealogical
information does not, although we may also edit the
data to fit our desired model of who we are.
So the selfie and the family
tree are arguably different
pathways to similar ends. Just
as the selfie provides a self-
portrait, possibly airbrushed, in
the context of a person’s temporal
and geographical spaces, social
networks and physical appearance,
the genealogical project equally
locates us in time, space, social
status and physicality. They are
both contemporary projects of the
self – who we really think we are,
aspire to be and construct ourselves
through the prism of how others
act, exist and have existed around
us. Through looking at our family
origins we can now extend the project of the self and
take in historical, cultural and biological evidence to
enhance the narrative.
Some reasons to be careful
As a social and critical psychologist, I am deeply
aware of pernicious uses of family origins in eugenics,
explicit in the views of Francis Galton (Charles
Darwin’s cousin): that genius is passed on through
family and the ‘genetic stock’ of a society can be
improved by only letting the better-looking, intelligent
or generally ‘fit’ people breed. In the 1930s the Nazis
put this into practice through forced marriage between
‘typical’ Aryans, and the murder of those who did
not fit this model. Investigation of our ancestors
will include inquiry into ethnic and racial origins as
central to our identities, and most commercial online
genealogical databases provide opportunities for
DNA analysis, particularly focusing upon ethnic and
geographical origins.
Ethnicity and race do seem to be of interest for
most of us concerned with identity. There have been
examples in the popular press of people who believed
they were from one ethnic group who then discovered
that they were not, with further instances of those
who knowingly claimed false ethnic origins, which
have caused resentment and confusion. One of the
first people I worked with clinically, many years ago
now, was a Polish devout Catholic woman who was
depressed, experiencing psychotic episodes that left
her unable to cope. Anya (as I shall call her) was
educated in a convent, where she had lived through
the Nazi invasion and occupation of her country
only to learn many years later that the people she had
believed were her parents had actually rescued her,
a Jewish child, following the murder of her biological
parents. Anya never really recovered from this shock
– it challenged everything she had
believed herself to be. Anya’s case
is an extreme example invoking
symptoms of post-traumatic stress.
However, for all of us, investigating
who we are is a delicate, difficult
and potentially problematic
practice. Awareness of political
and culturally sensitive issues
frequently falls away in the face of
what we see of ourselves when we
focus on our family histories.
Conclusions
Psychologically, family history
research offers the reflective space
to think about our own behaviour, personality and
expectations based upon those who went before.
Physically we often attribute our appearance and
personality to specific family members; but more than
that, our health status and potential risks bear some
relation to our family’s past. On occasion, what we
learn about some forbears can be upsetting or uplifting
– all families have some secrets and it takes no time
at all to trace Victorian ancestors, where so much
about normal human life had to be concealed but
much was also recorded. So, for example, I discovered
that my paternal grandparents had not been able to
marry. My grandmother previously had been in an
abusive relationship that had taken several years to
dissolve. The divorce papers were available to read but
no subsequent marriage to my grandfather had been
registered.
We can become angry on our family’s behalf if we
learn of their disadvantaged hard lives, discover the
death of a young person during war or through disease
caused through poverty and infant deaths through
epidemics and poor health care. We might learn of
enduring unhappy and violent marriages or crimes
committed against or by one of our predecessors.
These often provoke tears on popular television shows.
There are of course tales of happiness and success in
most family trees too. But is the same true for selfies?
How far do we achieve a sense of who we really are
when we examine the airbrushed images? Looking
back over previous selfies, what do we discover about
those we are holding close? Have they remained part
of our lives? I’ve little doubt that some of these pictures
make us draw breath too.
“We can become angry
on our family’s behalf
if we learn of their
disadvantaged hard lives,
discover the death of a
young person during war
or through disease caused
through poverty and infant
deaths through epidemics
and poor health care”
6. the psychologist november 2018 genealogy
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