IDENTIT Y45And so, I am di�rent, sometimes dramatically so, with my patients than I am with my family, friends, or students. For one, I am far more serious with my patients. Although I retain a sense of humor when I am doing psychotherapy and can sometimes even be playful, I am not as loose. I suspect that some very old friends of mine, knowing me as the person who likes to sing and pun and kid and laugh, and even as the person who can zone out quickly if there a football game on, wonder how I can sustain serious attention with patients. But I do. It a di�rent part of me, one that friends, even good friends, may not see (or even have trouble imagining), but one that is clearly part of who I am. As Billy Joel insightfully noted (ummer, Highland Falls�: e are always what our situations hand us.�Many individuals like to drink or otherwise get high in order to access parts of themselves that aren so available when they are soberexiness perhaps, or maybe even sadness. A sense of self is comprised of many parts, some of which are quite di�rent than others and emerge at very di�rent times. This diverse presentation is neither a case of manipulation nor hypocrisy; it just the complex nature of the self in a complex world. In oth Sides Now,�when Joni Mitchell sang t life illusions I recall,�she may have been referring not just to the sense of unreality that life sometimes hits us with, but rather the constancy of change in the world. The basic illusion may be that of stability. And thus, n a world that constantly changing�(The Young Rascals, ow Can I Be Sure?�, the question, ho am I?�may be answered in a somewhat di�rent way on an almost constant basis.
