Identity and pretense.

This couch potato's favorite little Idaho is in front of a television watching movies, preferably some old classics or personal favorites. Engulfed by the images before me, I fantasize about becoming Gary Cooper, or, as occurred this week, about combining the best of Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn, and David Niven. I have also pictured myself as Sam Elliott astride his calvary mount at Gettysburg or as Henry Fonda being the quintessential American in any one of several dozen movies. Obviously, I am no piker when it comes to spending the currency of the imagination.

Most weeks involve Spencer Tracy or Humphrey Bogart (in his post-gangster movies), but my movie fixation and apparent need to become someone else have also led me to imagine myself as Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a fabrication that is at least anthropometrically somewhat reasonable. At times I even contemplate being Steven Spielberg, a fantasy that, though ethnically plausible, is totally unrealistic on account of body proportions and several million other characteristics.

My willingness to wonder about the joys (never the pain, mind you) of being someone else, particularly as depicted through the cleansing filters of media fantasy, is, I hope, not an obsession and within the bounds of reasonable escapism. Recently, however, I spent a little time pondering the issue of being someone else, and my first conclusion is that this is a topic to be contemplated only in the presence of headache remedies. We can live through the transformation of identities and the modification of self, but what is left if we totally and instantaneously transmute? Not much I guess, and that is why change comes not easily for many of us and why identity takes so long for us to forge. I suspect this also why the psychiatric and psychological literature on identity is as vast as the budget of a Bruce Willis movie (someone I never imagine being).

Movies spend time on character development, so we get to know the identity of the characters and can comprehend their motivations and find their actions plausible. I suspect much of our life, personal and professional, is similarly spent on character development. The pain of adolescence is all the more acute because we are searching for identity and fearful of never becoming ourselves, while never really knowing what that means. Identity is important, and in a perfect world we should, to a large extent, be able to define ourselves. In this world, we often find that we are too often defined by others, sometimes others with benevolent intent and sometimes those motivated by the dark side of the human experience.

I remember having a part of my identity forged for me shortly after my family and I moved into a new neighborhood. Two teenage boys asked this naive 7-year-old if he was Jewish. My affirmative response and their subsequent actions led to a lengthy discussion with my mother that night. And for the first time, I understood that anti-semitism was not something conquered on V-E day and that my identity, my Jewishness, evoked a hate I will never understand.

My response, like that of so many others, is to cling to an identity that others would take from me. The more someone attempts to deny me my identity or to denigrate it, the more forceful my defense. The pride of ethnic groups and the resurgence of the term "African-American" are all examples of people choosing to maintain an identity even when others argue that the identity carries negative connotations. We often rightly take pride in identifiers that others would use to mock us or to bring us down. When you suffer to be who you are, you are often intolerant of those who would pass as something other than who they are. So it is with our professional identity and the terms used to describe us. That is why I am offended by anyone within our profession who would use terms to create personae that primarily identify them as something other than a physical therapist.

Recently, I have noticed that some physical therapist students and faculty members use a strange artifice in describing the students. I have heard students in training to become therapists referred to as "graduate students," as in "I cannot afford to go out for dinner because I am a poor graduate student." Technically speaking, these students are graduate students, but I felt hurt and angered by the peculiar and pretentious terminology. If people are in school to become physical therapists, they should take pride in referring to themselves as "physical therapist students." These students are presumably in school because of their strong desire to become physical therapists, and, from my perspective, that should make them want to identify as strongly and as frequently as possible with the remarkable profession they are seeking to join.

I would also argue that students enrolled in postbaccalaureate professional programs have more in common with physical therapy students at all degree levels than they do with English and history majors seeking advanced degrees. As a strong proponent of postbaccalaureate entry-level education, my concern is not what degree students seek but rather what identity they seek to have and to present to others. Lawyers and physicians in training would convulse at the thought of calling themselves graduate students - their identities having been firmly wed to what they are studying, they call themselves law and medical students.

Our profession is only now coming into the national consciousness. Good people have struggled long and hard to make our profession what it has become and to create an identity of which we all can be proud. Students who will join our ranks should think twice before they choose to use seemingly aggrandizing terms to refer to themselves, and faculties should be similarly cautious. They should also be wary of terms that set groups apart and that highligh differences.

I know that when asked what I do for a living, I unhesitatingly say I am a "physical therapist" because that is who I am! I eschew the more grandiloquent terms of "professor" or "editor" because to me they are secondary to my professional identity. I, like you, have a professional identity and an identity beyond that, one that defines all aspects of my existence. Despite my forays into fantasy, I am reasonably proud of both identities and in search of no euphemisms for self-description - except on days when I prefer the term "stocky" to "over-weight," but that is another topic, and even then my euphemism has its limitations, and I preserve my professional identity by referring to myself as a stocky physical therapist!