When the child experiences the toy with seemingly innumerable pieces, the child seeks to make form of some kind out of the pieces because we as human beings feel drawn to making order out of chaos. We need form. The child seeks form externally and internally as well. Other animals and elements of the universe express their full being in large part from inherited instincts and earlier forces. Even in a quantum universe, a quantum exists as itself and has no discernable doubts about that. An animal comes complete with much of its sense of self in place and intact. This inherent structure also presents limitations. These entities don't exceed their essential qualities. They don't enjoy and suffer from a state in which their individual creation still operates.
We human beings, for good and ill, live within a life of possibly expanding forms of the self, a continuing creation of self, a becoming self. When we think about it, this becoming gift and sometimes curse settles on us as a very daunting if not overwhelming task. Everything else in the universe seems to exist with a complete future, a complete structure determined by its very existence. Every other living thing starts with a very substantial structure of being that makes for a very sure pattern of existence with some limited variations in some species. The idea of a determined being and therefore determined self has such an attraction that an entire school of philosophy has developed around the idea that everything, including us human beings, is determined. We don't need to argue whether determinism, so called, has it right. Suffice it to say that the child with the toy and all the rest of us don't experience our own determinism, so we remain stuck with the experience of free will and the becoming self.
At the same time we need to develop this inner, becoming self, an entity that answers and responds to our inner motivations and needs, we must also deal with the outside world in order to discover language and thought structures that will help us give form to our inner being. Without the outer relationships, the inner cannot fully form. At the same time, the outside relationships present any one of a number of difficulties and hindrances some of which we have discussed. That's a paradox of our becoming fully human and expressing the self within as fully as possible. We need the outside world to develop, and the outside world can make that development very difficult if not impossible feeling at times. Our identity comes into being, already waiting as part of our essential structure of being, to deal and interact with the outside world. Both our identity and the becoming self seek unconditional positive regard to make the world a safe place in which to develop. The unconditional doesn't happen as often or as fully as we want and need, so our ego forms around our identity to establish a kind of defensive barrier to what we feel as dangers to our identity and thus to the becoming self.
All of that makes our identity feel absolutely essential to our personal survival. Our ego treats our identity as essential and reaffirms its essential nature as part of its function. Our identity takes its cues from the outside world as to what the world and the people in it can relate to, can find acceptable. At the same time, our identity wishes to make a claim for itself, become identifiable as an independent being. Between these two impulses, we experience a great deal of tension and struggle. The tension can feel so great that we may feel willing to surrender part or all of our precious independent identity to a larger, dominating and conformist identity. Erich Fromm calls this unwanted but sometimes desired eventuality as an Escape from Freedom in the book of that name.
Part of that struggle comes in living with the meaning perspectives that became part of the form the world takes for us as we grew into our immediate family and the world around us. These meaning perspectives tell us how to see the world and, therefore, how to respond to the world. We do not question these perspectives because they simply formed with us, and we have no awareness of how they manipulate our way of perceiving the world, the basic way we have of making form out of internal and external chaos.[113]