DEVELOPMENTAL CRISIS IN EARLY ADULTHOOD: A ...

“Emotionally I am much more prepared to allow my emotions to come through and I
am now up to a point where I can recognise a feeling as it’s coming through and I can
decide what I want to do with it.” (Interview 2, p.10)
7.8 A Metaphor for Transformation: The Acorn and the Oak Tree
In order to portray his experience of how crisis related to the development that
he experienced over the same period, Guy used the metaphor of how an acorn must be
destroyed in order for the shoot that is inside of it to blossom out of it:
“The new me started to emerge. It’s like how the acorn drops from the oak but then
turns to mulch and just when it looks like its destroyed, then something blossoms out
of it, that to me seems like a very strong metaphor, because everything had to break
away, everything had to be washed away and then the new me could emerge out of
it.” (p.7)
Guy suggests in this metaphor that there had to be a breaking away, a washing away,
of the previous life structure, for the new one to take root. Positive growth simply
couldn’t occur in the pre-crisis life structure, which is portrayed as the hard restrictive
acorn in the metaphor. This had to be removed, and with it the narrow institutional
identity that he had developed, for growth to happen in a directional sense. The
evolving self that he experiences after the crisis is the blossoming tree in the
metaphor. The metaphor demonstrates clearly that Guy perceives his crisis
retrospectively as a developmentally formative episode with positive effects.
7.9 Discussion
Persona, Derealisation, Depersonalisation and Control
Several metaphors used in Guy’s narrative relate to Laing’s theory of the
persona/false self. Firstly, the metaphor of the self being “hijacked” is exactly the
kind of phrase Laing suggested would be used to describe the experience of adopting
a false self. A false self is constructed in accordance with the demands of others,
therefore it is experienced as being under their control, leading to the strange
experience of feeling as if the self has been “invaded” by an external force (Laing,
1965). This then makes the self feel like it is controlled from without, leaving the
person feeling he or she lacks a sense of self-determination. There is strong evidence
in this narrative that the loss of the persona and a re-emerging sense of personal
control are related. Guy links his post-crisis self that is no longer hijacked by the
demands of others with a greater sense of personal control:
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