What If the Self Were Shaped by Love, Not Lack?

In the last post, we asked: If Christ reorients our desires, then the inner structure of the self must be reformed as well. What would it mean to have a self shaped by love, not lack?

This question takes us to the very heart of mimetic anthropology — and to the mystery of what it means to be fully human in light of Christ.

The Mimetic Self: Shaped by Lack

In mimetic theory, the self is not autonomous. It is formed in and through desire — and desire itself is borrowed. We want what others want. We model our lives on others, often unconsciously. But at the center of this borrowed self lies a void — a perceived lack. Why?

Because when our desires are shaped by models who seem to possess what we don’t, the self is built around what it doesn’t have. It becomes organized by comparison, rivalry, and a longing for completion.

This is why so many of us live mimetic lives structured by absence: “If only I had X…”, “If only I were like Y…”, “If only they saw me as Z…” Desire, as Girard insists, is never simply about the object — “all desire is a desire for being.” What we long for in others is not just what they have, but who they seem to be. And that perceived being is what we feel we lack.

The result of defining ourselves by this lack is a fragile self, driven by the absence it cannot fill.

The Interdividual Self

René Girard coined the term interdividual to describe the fundamental relationality of the human person. We are not isolated individuals but selves constituted in and through relationships with others. The “interdividual” self is always already shaped by others — not only externally but internally, through the models of desire we have internalized.

To call the self “interdividual” is to recognize that what we call the individual is never truly separate. We are always already caught up in a network of desires, influences, and imitations. Mimetic theory gives language to this reality: our identity emerges not in a vacuum, but in the dynamic interplay between self and model.

Jean-Michel Oughourlian, Girard’s close collaborator and a neuropsychiatrist, extended this concept by showing how even the psyche and symptoms of the self are mimetically structured. For Oughourlian, the interdividual is not just a helpful metaphor—it is a clinical and anthropological reality. Our inner conflicts often reflect mimetic tensions among internalized models. What we think of as our most private struggles are often expressions of invisible relational dynamics.

When desire is oriented around lack and rivalry, this interdividuality becomes a source of instability and fragmentation. But it can be redeemed.

The Reformation of Desire in Christ

But what happens when Christ becomes our model?

Unlike all other models, Christ does not provoke rivalry. He does not withhold what we desire. Instead, He offers Himself — freely, fully, without threat. To desire like Christ is to desire with Christ. This is the reorientation.

Rather than a self organized around what is lacking, the self is drawn into a new pattern: one of abundance, of participation, of self-giving. This new configuration may feel less exhilarating than rivalry — and that’s part of the challenge. Rivalry often feels more energized, more dramatic, even more alive, because it revolves around trying to out-model our rival, to seize a heightened sense of being through conquest. But that melodrama is precisely the sign of disorder. Christ never enters into rivalry with us. He allows us to go our own way — like the prodigal son — and awaits our return without coercion. His presence, while infinitely more loving and generous, can feel quiet by comparison. Yet it is in that stillness, that non-rivalrous openness, that true transformation begins.

The model is no longer the rivalrous other. The model is the Crucified One, who forgives, who gives, who loves even when He is betrayed — and who waits eagerly for our return, calling us all the while.

From Composite Model to Composite Christ

If the self is a composite of models — layered from our earliest relationships onward — then conversion means not erasing those models, but reordering them. Christ becomes the gravitational center. Old rivalries may still echo, old desires still surface, but their orientation is changed.

To be shaped by love is not to forget our past, but to allow it to be healed and reconfigured in the light of the Cross.

In this new configuration, lack gives way to gift. The self is no longer defined by what it’s missing but by what it’s receiving — and what it’s called to give.

Love as Ontological Reformation

A self shaped by love does not mean a self free from struggle. But it does mean that the core is no longer empty. It means that the foundational desire is not for possession, but for communion. Not for rivalry, but for relationship.

The difference is ontological: the very structure of the self is transformed. It is no longer organized around what it can acquire, but around Who it can become.