Differentiation

• Differentiation is the link between attachment and identity.
• Attachment is genetically compelled and constrained with limited variation across all societies, cultures, and time. The baby is born not fully developed and someone must attach to that baby for that baby to survive; and that baby must attach back for that baby to grow, and that attachment must be replicated multiple times with multiple people for that baby to eventually complete its development.
• What is that development? Adult identity – an adult productive and procreative identity. That is the genetic determination for each one of us, especially women, who determine and define fertility.
• Attachment and identity are the two sacred propositions. Death comes later and soon enough, a secondary, and somewhat inevitable, belated afterthought. Attachment and identity are possibly more gendered than we know, and more powerfully defined by women than by men.
• It is arguable that identity is as constrained and corralled as attachment, possibly symmetrically so, socially, and psychometrically, and that differentiation is designed to be the path of maximum flexibility, dexterity and complementarity between these two symmetrical propositions of relative inflexibility, each sacred in its own way.
• Differentiation is not sacred – it is the functional link between these two esoteric and sacred parts of being human, the first part where we are driven by a powerful and desperate longing to survive, live, and replicate.
• Replication is central to who we are, and this is done in the attachment process primarily through women and later through the replication process, that is fertility, again through women.
• There are multiple pathways between attachment and identity, almost all of these peddling fundamental dualities such as constraint and license, inclusion, and exclusion, productivity and learning, sexuality and procreation, similarity and the difference, inequality and equality, love, and justice, me and we, obligation, and motivation, inside and outside, and so on and so forth.
• Running from birth until death as a mirror of the double helix are the twin pillars of morality – reciprocity and compassion – in an ever-widening gyre, that becomes an ever-narrowing coil as we approach the end – death. In the beginning, we are inducted into the attachment process that is then progressively made fully manifest in that differentiation process between attachment and identity – from 10/15 years of age through to 25/30 years of age in Western culture rapidly becoming global culture.
• Differentiation transforms this promising reciprocity and compassion into something that is fully functional and productive and capable of sustaining human replication. Unequal reciprocity and compassion guarantee the survival of the baby, conversely equal reciprocity and compassion produce the relationships that produce the baby. The entire differentiation process is designed to produce people who are able to participate in a fully reciprocal, give and take, in the family, in the community, in a way that is truly compassionate and empathic. However, not to everyone, only those people who are your village, your kin – the people who are likely to replicate you.
• It must be so that the differentiation process is brimming with multiple pathways across multiple social groupings and cultures that take us as humans from the inflexibility of attachment to the relative flexibility of identity. These are the multivariate ways of doing reciprocity and compassion – these multiple pathways must carry the seeds of transformation in identity. Transforming identity against requirements of the broader context, the economics, the desert, prosperity, drought, wealth, pandemics, abundance, and disease. Identity must be able to take full advantage of those circumstances and against the ravages of those circumstances. It must be true that identity must be transformative. We must be no different to any other species in terms of survival, like the fish whose breeding grounds humans destroy, go in search of new breeding grounds in perhaps safer places.
• Our task is to sketch the multiple pathways for differentiation and the advantages and risks that each of these carries. The most obvious is the way in which differentiation is managed by the privileged and the wealthy and how such privilege and wealth runs the differentiation process into producing greater in flexibility; or how the differentiation process is managed in the migration and refugee process. How a problem of differentiation in one place may become a point of inflexibility or flexibility in another.