I will explore Luft’s working fictions in several different ways throughout these essays. First, I will examine the “fiction” that each of us is transparent to other people. This is a fiction that enables us to believe that Quad Three (Luft’s Hidden Self) is actually Quad One. We don’t realize (or want to realize) that we are hiding things from other people. A second fiction concerns the belief that other people don’t want to know more about us. We believe that we are giving other people what they want, when, in fact, we are hiding (Quad Three-I) important information about ourselves. We don’t realize (or want to realize) how guarded we really are. There is a third fiction that concerns Quad Two (Luft’s Blind Self). These are window panes that are open to other people—and we’re not aware of them and don’t have direct access to the information about us that is contained in this quadrant. We are transparent in ways of which we are not aware. At the heart of the matter is a fundamental, over-arching fiction that somehow we control what we reveal to other people.
These three working fictions suggest that the nature and dynamics of internal and external locus is most easily understood in this first quadrant. There are typically few “hidden agenda” or mixed motives associated with this quadrant. We simply choose to present ourselves in certain ways (Quad 1-I: presentational self/persona). However, at the same time we can’t help but “leak” other parts of ourselves. When we are able to minimize the “leakage,” we have more control over our image; however, we may seem “stiff,” formal or unnatural. We “hold our cards too close to our vest.” Conversely, when the inadvertent self tends to dominate, we are likely to seem out-of-control, but also spontaneous. Other people can “read us like a book.”
