The Conundrum of “Who Am I” and Genetic Inheritance

1. Does heredity have a very strong influence on personality? I have often wondered. Having now settled for the seventh of the ”8 stage theory of Erikson’s psychosocial development” (Generativity Vs Stagnation), my reflections have often lingered on the existential quest of “Who Am I “with a nagging suspicion whether this “I”, a “wired-in model” was simply passed over to the society by my parents.

2. I have started acknowledging tendencies in myself identical to those which I had unknowingly stored in my preconscious memory about my mother (less subtle) as well as of my father (mostly subtle). My subtle traits, which I now feel as mostly inherited, were conveniently packaged by my ego, labelled “self- earned “.

3. In my erstwhile stages of life, I remained deeply engrossed in seeking a sense of autonomy and independent identity in society. Unlike my subtle traits, which got packaged as per my ego, I failed to evaluate the source of my innate “not so good traits “. Now as my parents have gone, I resent the missed opportunity to enquire from them whether they were able to identify my unclaimed traits with that of the genetic model of their parents or their own or had simply decided to keep the realisation a secret for the fear of being caught in passing them over on the sly.

4. Nature vs Nurture has remained the most intriguing debate of human development. How I wish my twin brother, whom we lost when he was just five years old, was alive to enable me to share a reflective platform for assessment of human psyche and for enhancing my knowledge on this debate.

5. As parents, while we incessantly evaluate and judge our children with our competence, or incompetence, prisms, we forget to acknowledge the undesirable traits that we pass over to them that environment and nurturing cannot efface. As we go through our stages of life, we select, modify and create environments co-relating to our own genetic predisposition and what appears to be an environmental influence could be a reflection of our genetic influence. I do not claim myself to be a nativist, though. I continue to admire Plato and Descartes, who were nativists and suggested that certain characteristics are inborn and environmental conditioning can hardly influence them.

6. It would be interesting to get your comments on how often we identify traits of children with that of our own.