Your Inner World and the Lost Magic of “Chumship”

Last updated on: May 26, 2016 at 3:34 pm by Kyle Roberts

Your Inner World and the Lost Magic of “Chumship” 2016-05-26T15:34:14-05:00 Kyle Roberts

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Sometimes it feels like the carefree days of youth have slipped too far behind me. Adulthood has wrapped over me like a too-heavy, scratchy blanket.

CC0 Public Domain, via Flickr

I was given new words for that feeling recently, thanks to the wisdom and wit of Ernest Becker’s The Birth and Death of Meaning:

Only during one period in our lives do we normally break down the barriers of separateness, and that is during the time that the psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan called the “preadolescent chumship.” It is then that we are striving hardest to establish this integral domain of our inner identity, and our chum helps us.

Remember that time? Sitting around on the curbstone with your friend and communicating so directly in what you are thinking and feeling, hoping and dreaming. And you understand everything you communicate about your mutual insides. It is uncanny. Unhappily, the years pass and one goes into the late teens and into the career world. The “outer” or public aspect of our lives takes over: we being to deal in exteriors, in shirts and ties and calling cards, in salaries and ranks.

One of the reasons that youth and their elders don’t understand one another is that they live in “different worlds”: the youth are striving to deal with one another in terms of their insides, the elders have long since lost the magic of the chumship. Especially today, the exterior or public aspect of the adult world, its jobs and rewards, no longer seem meaningful or vital to the college youth; the youth try to prolong the adolescent art of communicating on the basis of internal feelings; they may even try to break through the carapace of their own parents, try to get the insides to come out.

But usually it is too late; the inner world has been isolated and dumb for years, blocked off by the exterior facade. Even the parent himself now has difficulty making contact with his own inner feelings, his hopes and dreams. He wonders who he really is inside his fleshy casing. Periodically he stops himself in a mirror to scrutinize the face to which “all this” is happening. What do the blue eyes mean, the wrinkles? (p. 30).

The Mona Lisa painting in the Louvre has a protecting glass cover: visitors rarely fail to catch their own image in it before plunging into an absorption with Leonardo’s art. “Who is looking?” is as important a lifetime quest as “What is being looked at?” And it is even more difficult” (30-31).

One of the side benefits of reading the great writers of yesteryear–besides the depth of insight and provocativeness–is coming across words like “chumship,” “curbstone,” and carapace.”

But aside from that, do Becker’s words ring true? How can we as adults maintain the vitality and energy of the genuine expression of self, keeping contact with your “inner world” as the outer world takes over?

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