Choice as Imprinting, or Why We’re All Here Anyway
We choose, and we are chosen. But how, exactly? What delicate mechanisms fire in our unconscious that one person’s image lodges itself in our soul, while another stirs not the slightest response?
There are countless versions of an answer, since people have pondered this since time immemorial. Writers, poets, philosophers have offered hypotheses — and, it seems, every one of us has an opinion on the matter. We found our answer at the crossroads of biology and the psychology of the unconscious, and it goes by the name «imprinting».
From a biological standpoint, imprinting (from the English «imprint» — to leave a mark, to etch, to note) is a specific form of learning in animals and humans: the fixation in memory of the traits of objects — parents, sexual partners, food sources, perennial enemies.
The term was introduced by the renowned biologist of the first half of the twentieth century, Konrad Lorenz, who studied the behavior of domestic fowl. As it turned out, if a day-old chick is shown a rubber ball instead of its mother hen, it will go on treating the ball as its brood hen! And later it emerged that wild birds raised in captivity, surrounded by humans, never formed pairs: they simply did not perceive members of their own species as sexual partners. Some even tried to «mate» with humans.
Surprise: with humans, it’s exactly the same. The first unconscious impressions tied to love and sex take shape at a very young age (scientists call it the «sensitive period») and leave their mark on future partner choices. To put it simply and broadly: the image of a beloved person is formed in childhood from the most significant figure of the opposite sex.
Video: Konrad Lorenz — imprinting (psychologos.ru)
Carl Gustav Jung, for instance, wrote about this in his book «Memories, Dreams, Reflections»:
While my mother was away, our maid looked after me. I still remember how she picked me up and laid my head on her shoulder. She had black hair and a dark complexion, and she looked nothing like my mother. Even now I can see the line of her hair, her neck with its birthmarks, her ear. This type of girl later became part of my spiritual being, my anima.
People often say that young men choose girls who resemble their mothers, and girls choose young men who resemble their fathers. Though this isn’t quite accurate: the roles of father and mother can be played by other significant adults — like the nanny of little Carl Jung, the future psychologist — and the word «resemble» isn’t entirely precise either.
First, what gets imprinted can be the whole appearance or just one salient trait (say, the line of a profile or the scent of a perfume); second, there’s always the problem of description. In essence, no one can characterize the image with sufficient accuracy — it first has to be pulled from memory and interpreted, prepared for comparison. A psychologist skilled in working with their own unconscious can manage this (see Jung’s «Memories...»), but an ordinary person hardly can.
And what an intriguing — and promising — picture emerges! Suppose we have an algorithm that computes the ideal partner on the basis of imprinting: they resemble the «ideal image» embedded in us during childhood, and we resemble their corresponding image. There’s the possibility to chat and arrange a meeting. And... that’s it. In short, the task of finding a partner is solved — from there, it becomes a matter of personal attitudes and communicative competence, without which you can’t build a couple at all.
Well, we actually do have this algorithm. Or rather: it’s precisely what our service runs on! No trial and error: you only meet those with whom there’s a chance from the unconscious’s point of view.
That simple? And why didn’t anyone think of it before? Because no one had that goal. Try to recall who even explains the system of sympathies and filters in dating? This question is rarely posed by dating service creators or their users alike. Where that leads (spoiler: nowhere good) and why we’re different — we’ll tell you in the next articles.