In American Bioscience Meets the American Dream, Carl Elliott makes a fascinating point:
Even as we use medical technologies to transform ourselves, often in the most dramatic ways — face-lifts, personality makeovers, extreme body modifications — we describe these transformations as a way of finding our true selves.
Some examples:
The transformation in Fussell’s appearance is astonishing. Photographs in his memoir show a shy-looking 22-year-old man, bony and longhaired, legs crossed and seated in a lawn chair. Several years later, they show a man so changed it is difficult to imagine it is the same person: an enormous, oiled, steroid-enhanced bodybuilder with a buzz cut, muscles bulging freakishly, eyes glazed, veins popping out all over his body, strutting and preening on a stage in southern California. But how does Fussell describe the change? As a transformation into his true self. It was his need to discover and reveal himself that drove him to steroids. “I, for one, couldn’t wait three or four or five more years to become myself,” Fussell writes. “I was so uncomfortable not being me that I had to have (steroids) now.”
[...]
When Williams began giving public interviews about his condition several years ago, it was as a paid spokesman for GlaxoSmithKline, the makers of Paxil, the first antidepressant approved by the Food and Drug Administration for social anxiety disorder. Williams explained to the press that medication had allowed his true identity to emerge. “As part of my treatment program,” Williams said, “my physician prescribed the antidepressant Paxil, in combination with therapy. Soon thereafter I was able to start acting like the real Ricky Williams.”
[...]
“I have been born again,” he told the astonished group. “I have been through a psychiatric experience which has completely changed me.” The psychiatric experience to which Grant was referring was the result of LSD, which he claimed to have used more than 60 times. As he sat tanning himself on the deck of a pink submarine, Grant described the way that LSD had put him in touch with his inner self. “I found I was hiding behind all kinds of defenses, hypocrisies and vanities,” Grant said. LSD allowed him to get past the mask that had hidden his true nature. “I had to face things about myself which I had never admitted,” Grant said. “I was an utter fake.” Only with LSD was he able to overcome this fakery and become who he really was inside.
[...]
“I know this is not a personality flaw,” said one executive who had begun taking stimulants. Many people concluded that stimulants had restored to them a true self that had been hidden by pathology. One patient taking Ritalin told Time magazine, “I had 38 years of thinking I was a bad person. Now I’m rewriting the tapes of who I thought I was to who I really am.”
I left off the examples of sex-reassignment surgery and voluntary amputation.