I have been querying psychology literature to find out, and I haven’t found a good reason not to do it. My guess is platonic fetishism for a true self or that people with false selves are "therapy resistant" and that deflating those people is difficult.
If you have a goal of wealth, power, or influence, it seems like building a false self is a no-brainier. Facades like Multi Level Marketers and Tech Scammers are good at generating cash flow.
There is an occult term for this. We call this possession.
Theoretically, there is no such thing as a true self. The “self” is mainly composed of our initial awareness as something separate from the things around us, plus whatever thoughts and beliefs we build on top of that awareness over the course of our initial development, which then becomes our ego personality. These things, however, can be altered, and molded into something else, leading to a whole new sense of self, meaning what we consider ourselves to be is merely a creation of our own mind.
Psychedelics, trauma, sleep deprivation, brain damage, and forced brainwashing, have all been used to alter the self.
What’s a false self?
True self (also known as real self , authentic self , original self and vulnerable self ) and false self (also known as fake self , idealized self , superficial self and pseudo self ) are psychological concepts, originally introduced into psychoanalysis in 1960 by Donald Winnicott.[1] Winnicott used true self to describe a sense of self based on spontaneous authentic experience and a feeling of being alive, having a real self.[2] The false self, by contrast, Winnicott saw as a defensive façade,[1] which in extreme cases could leave its holders lacking spontaneity and feeling dead and empty, behind a mere appearance of being real.[1]
The concepts are often used in connection with narcissism.
I agree with @DarkestKnight though. What I want to know is why Winnicott and the rest of the psychoanalysts made this dichotomy in their model.
Because some of the selves we create feel hollow to us or incomplete, so in order for therapy to work, there has to be something deeper and more solid to grab on to, hence the concept of a “true self.” Telling someone in crisis that there is no such thing as an authentic self would cripple or even kill them because the ego and personality complex we build needs at least the idea of solid ground, not shifting sand, beneath it to continue standing.
A much safer way is just to utilize the ego state that already exists to fulfill the task you want. The idea of false selves and other mumbo jumbo of psychoanalysis is a confusing morass. Therapists especially those that take from schools of thought such as Fraud ahem I mean Freud or Jung tend to be rather dangerous and tend to do more harm than good only prolonging the conditions they claim to treat. Of course most are innocent of intentional harm and not fully aware of the history of therapy as a con artists means to scam money off poor wounded souls rather than actually fix them.
Suffice it to say I do not have much love for therapists though many other hypnotists share much the same thoughts even if they don’t admit it very openly. It can be considered the divide between the two schools of dealing with the mind.
I do really love Mandel’s work though. Very quick and easy to understand and explained quite well. He tends to be the first source I direct most people towards just for the fact his work is so easy to understand. I think you will find this matches the concept of false selves and deals with many of the falsehoods that separate them from the idea of the true self. I feel you would be much better served researching methods of hypnosis as that teaches how to actually use and control the mind to your advantage to change yourself something in which psychology alone does not.
Psychoanalysts try to sell me one therapy after another, none of them working, all of them my fault for not being effective. I just lost the 4th Sunday in a row ruminating. I am just wading through a swamp of marketing and virtue signaling. There is no actual path to victory.
You’ll lose everything that makes you human and will feed off of causing suffering to everyone around you to support the megalomania of the false self. If that sounds attractive to you be my guest. Ways to achieve this: go to a POW camp and get tortured so much your personality splits from trauma. Or become a human trafficking slave. The more trauma, the better. Good luck!
What did I have that made me human in the first place?
Never had any of those. I am diagnosed autistic. If energy includes their physical resources, absolutely! I need those to live, and I can’t depend on table scraps cause they are going to stop randomly.
Oh, so you are asserting that the current state of misery and suffering is dichotomously unreal compared to narcissism? Here is the thing, I don’t distinguish between real and fake except under the context of two conditions, what religious framework I am using and what universe I am interacting with. [1] My options are between being a starving soulless parasite and a satiated soulless parasite. I can’t distinguish between my current “fake” emptiness and your proposed “true” emptiness. I am not content with my current low caste, low status, low income, life of cleaning up after other people, in whatever shape shifting variant it takes form as. I fake it because I do need the money and I don’t have the support of being extraordinary or having an old boy network to support me, and I was told my best chances of changing thing was if I was already content.
[1] Oflameo's Doom Bunker - #18 by Oflameo Post 18-20
I used to be really hardcore into Thelema and Aliester Crowley’s mound of crap. He really knew how to write up a bunch of complex bullshit that people aren’t really interested in such as elaborate ceremonies that are a pain to set up, and a bunch of fake free masonic degrees that no one cares about anymore.
By hardcore, I mean actually doing the Star Ruby Ritual and Libre Samkeh everyday. I believed that the most important thing in life was to find my true will and only do that thing.
Don’t get me wrong, Thelema has some good, and in some cases, somewhat effective material, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t still sub-par and watered down. Eventually, I got to thinking about what he practiced in his life and how other Thelemites practice. I started to have some serious doubts about the whole thing.
1.) I noticed people generally didn’t really get better material lives, they mostly just stayed the same, and there wasn’t really any focus on success in the materiel world. Crowley didn’t really care about that cause he was born rich and always had lots of connections and knew how to talk to certain kinds of people.
2, I wasn’t keen on any of Crowley’s views on sex and marriage, a deal breaker when joining a lot of thelema groups for me. I decided I wanted to be monogamous and stay married to my husband, and I believe that marriage was sacred and not something to be gotten rid of on a whim.
All of that still didn’t stop my strong belief in this whole idea of of the true self, and if I could just somehow find my true will, and then do it, things would work out for me.
The gradual erosion of that idea started when I began to take the idea of working with demons seriously, and decided I had better take the relationships seriously and improve my communication with demons. I began that new journey with this forum and Belial, and experienced new depths and heights to my practice that I had never reached before. I thought that orders taught all the cool stuff about magic, but I became arrogant, and I thought that orders basically were not needed.
My even remote caring about the idea of true will basically ended when I decided to do a love spell on my husband to also bring him back from the messed up real life hell he had also dragged himself into with his mind. I would not have even chosen to do such a thing, nor was it foremost on my mind and then things happened that basically made me even question what was going on. (my husband got rid of my Crowley books, and then basically insisted on following the teachings that we had once both scorned)
So, now as far as true self and false self are concerned, I have become aware that we have more than one self, and conflicting, and sometimes even mutually exclusive desires that can really drive us up a wall. I used to think I should make up some sort of persona that would be acceptable to people and get them to like me. I have since realized what a poor idea that is, because any friends I made from doing that wouldn’t be real friends, it would all be fake so I wouldn’t receive any real benefits from that. I would end up doing a job I hate for people I hate just to “get people to like me” and it just isn’t worth it. Its more that I may not reveal my whole self and all my many facets to people, but I always try to be real and connect with people that I have at least one thing in common with, at least one shared value or interest.