Composite Models: You Are Not a Self-Made Man

There’s something appealing—and a little romantic—in the idea of starting from scratch. Reinventing ourselves. Cutting ties. Becoming new and unique.

And yet, it’s exhilarating in a terrifying way.

Beneath every declaration of being a “self-made man” is a forgotten cast of characters—parents, teachers, rivals, celebrities, enemies, mentors, saints, influencers, peers. We don’t just grow up around them; we grow up through them. Their gestures, preferences, fears, and dreams sneak into us. And if we’re not paying attention, we may never realize how thoroughly our sense of self is shaped by theirs.

The Myth of the Isolated Self

Modern culture often celebrates individuality as though it were a solo achievement. We are taught to "be ourselves," to "follow our dreams," to chart our own path. But that path is already carved with footprints—others’ ideas, others’ desires. Even the quest to be uniquely ourselves cannot escape this: how would we know we are unique, or different, without some imagined audience or comparison? The trap of pursuing uniqueness always involves a fascination with others—without them, uniqueness would be meaningless. When you first fell in love with writing, or the classics, or a specific version of success—it didn’t come from nowhere. You saw it modeled. Someone lived that love in front of you, and your desire for that object was awakened.

We don’t simply admire others; we mimetically internalize them.

What Is a Composite Model?

I first began developing the idea of Composite Models in 2008 while writing my master’s thesis at Dartmouth. One of the most common retorts to mimetic theory is deceptively simple: if all desire is mimetic, why do I not desire many of the things I see others possessing or pursuing? It seemed to me that this apparent gap needed addressing. The answer I found was rooted in memory, time, and the lasting influence of past models—not just present stimuli.

James Williams, in Girardians: The Colloquium on Violence and Religion, 1990–2010, gestures toward this issue:

“The child is initially completely dependent on her models, the mediators of her world or reality, and even as she grows up and becomes an adult this mimesis will continue to operate more or less dependently on models, although individuals vary greatly in the extent to which they exercise personal creativity and gain insight into this dynamic by which human existence takes form” (p. 10).

This is not a misreading of mimetic theory, but it highlights a space often left underdeveloped: how residual models—those once-powerful, now-internalized influences—continue to shape desire long after their original context has faded. It also leaves open the question of why it seems that we become less prone to overt imitation as we age, without assuming we have somehow moved beyond mimetic desire. Composite Models suggest that while surface-level imitation may decrease, deeper patterns of desire remain structured by remembered models, often guiding us precisely in what we no longer feel the need to imitate directly.

But this, I thought, still glosses too easily over the problem of residual models—those internalized layers of influence that remain operative even when no external model is presently provoking desire. It risks treating mimetic desire as a kind of childhood scenario, one that can be overcome through insight or maturity. A Composite Model is my answer to that problem: a remembered structure of desire that persists and shapes the field of possible attractions and aversions, even when no immediate model is in sight.

A composite model is not just a memory. It is a layered internal structure—an amalgam of the people whose desires you have absorbed and whose lives you’ve mirrored, often unconsciously.

Think of it as an invisible architecture of identity. Every person you’ve loved, admired, feared, or envied has added a layer. Some contribute gentle traces—a posture, a word choice, a longing. Others imprint more deeply. Over time, this layered structure becomes your frame of reference for what is valuable, possible, or threatening. The gravitational pull of new external models is now in competition with the gravity of these remembered and incorporated models, each playing off the other in subtle rivalries within your own mind.

This is why you can’t explain certain reactions. Why you flinch at praise. Or crave a particular kind of success. Or fear becoming your father. These aren’t abstract psychological patterns—they are the echoes of past models still reverberating in you.

You Are a Mirror With a Memory

The formation of our composite models is not incidental—it is central to the unfolding of our personhood. We come into being as relational creatures, shaped and re-shaped through those we encounter. If personhood is not an isolated project but a relationally constituted reality, then the way we carry, negotiate, and refine our composite models becomes the way we grow into mature personhood.

What we call “personality” is often a stable configuration of these mirrored relationships. What we call “character” is our ability to live within this configuration with integrity—holding together the tensions between inherited models, the pressures of the present, and the weight of our own choices.

This does not mean you are fake. It means you are formed.

To be human is to be impressionable—but not passive. The composite model isn’t a puppet-master. It’s a condition of being. Your desires are not less real because they are learned. They are more real—more human—because they are shared. This recognition keeps us humble when we aspire to good things, knowing that someone in our lives oriented us toward such noble goals. And it can also guard against despair, reminding us that even our ill desires are not hard-coded into us, but rather "caught" from others—and with better models, they can always be transformed.

This is one reason many people find relief in frameworks like Internal Family Systems (IFS), which treat the inner self as composed of different "parts"—voices, impulses, or perspectives that often seem to be in conflict. But perhaps what IFS calls "parts" are actually the remembered impressions of real or imagined models, still living within us. These are not random fragments of a broken psyche—they are the signs of a mimetic life.

The Crisis of Authenticity

We often think crisis comes when we betray ourselves. But more often, it comes when the composite model becomes unstable—when the models we’ve internalized contradict one another, or when the most influential one begins to collapse. A spiritual mentor fails. A rival is vindicated. A parental voice is replaced. Suddenly, the gravitational pull that once gave us stability breaks apart.

When this happens, we often try to assert ourselves. To double down on the myth of being “self-made.” But this only deepens the crisis, because the self we’re defending is already a construct of borrowed models.

Becoming Someone Else

Gil Bailie often emphasizes the role of the "constituting other"—the idea that our identity is not found in isolation, but is constituted in and through relationships. Identity is not something you discover within, but something you inherit—and eventually, something you must surrender. This surrender is not a loss but the beginning of genuine transformation.

In this light, Bailie often returns to the image from John’s Gospel: “I am the vine, you are the branches.” The branch has no life in itself. It draws its life from the vine. And the vine is not generic—it is the Person of Christ. The implication is profound: you are already formed by what you are grafted into. The only question is: which vine?

The challenge is not to escape modeling, but to choose better models. To edit your composite. To prune, recover, and re-align. In doing so, we do not merely improve ourselves—we participate in the slow, relational work of becoming persons in the fullest sense.

You are not a self-made man. You are a mirror with a memory, a vessel of remembered loves and rivalries.

But this is not a prison—it is the invitation and unfolding of personhood, grafted into the life of another, just as the branch draws life from the vine.

Next Thursday

In a future post, we’ll explore how memory, trauma, and conversion each interact with the composite model—and what it means to "change" without becoming a mimic of whatever model happens to be closest. Before then, sit with this:

Who lives in you, and why?