Definition
The Abandoned and Chosen Identity is a psychological duality central to Steve Jobs’s character, where the trauma of being given up by biological parents (abandoned) coexisted with the profound sense of being special because his adoptive parents intentionally selected him (chosen).
Why It Matters
Understanding this duality reveals how profound personal trauma can be transmuted into a sense of world-changing mission. It demonstrates that our greatest insecurities often provide the “distorted” psychological fuel required to ignore conventional boundaries and rewrite reality.
Core Concepts
- Specialness over Scars: Jobs’s parents, Paul and Clara, reinforced the narrative: “We specifically picked you out.” This instilled a sense of being “chosen” and “special,” which Jobs prioritized over feeling abandoned.
- Independence as Defense: Friends noted that the knowledge of his adoption fostered a “beat of a different drummer” independence, as he felt detached from the world he was born into.
- Need for Control: Longtime colleagues linked his desire for complete control over his products and environment to his status as an adoptee; he sought to control what he made as an extension of himself.
- The Abandoner Loop: Chrisann Brennan (mother of his first child) observed that “he who is abandoned is an abandoner,” noting Jobs’s initial abandonment of his own daughter, Lisa, at the same age his biological father abandoned him.