Understanding the Self PDF

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY,INC Laoag City, Ilocos Norte OBJECTIVES: At the end of this module, you will be able to: 1. explain why it is essential to understand the self; 2. explain the relationship between a...

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY,INC Laoag City, Ilocos Norte OBJECTIVES: At the end of this module, you will be able to: 1. explain why it is essential to understand the self; 2. explain the relationship between and among the self, society, and culture; 3. identify the different ideas in psychology about the “self”; and 4. differentiate the concept of self according to Western thought against Eastern/Oriental perspectives; 5. Introduction Before we even had to be in any formal institution of learning, among the many things that we were first taught as kids is to articulate and write our names. Growing up, we were told to refer back to this name when talking about ourselves. Our parents painstakingly thought about our names. Should we be named after a famous celebrity, a respected politician or historical personality, or even a saint? Were you named after one? Our names represent who we are. It has not been a custom to just randomly pick a combination of letters and number (or even punctuation marks) like zhjk756!! to denote our being. Human beings attach names that are meaningful to birth progenies because names are supposed to designate us in the world. Thus, some people get baptized with names such as “precious”, “beauty”, or “lovely”. Likewise, when our parents call our names, we were taught to respond to them because our names represent who we are. As a student, we are told to always write our names on our papers, projects, or any output for that matter. Our names signify us. Death cannot even stop this bond between the person and her name. Names are inscribed even into one’s gravestone. A name is not the person itself no matter how intimately bound it is with the bearer. It is only signifier. A person who was named after a saint most probably will not become a saint. He may not even turn out to be saintly! The self is thought to be something else than the name. The self is something that a person perennially molds, shapes, and develops. The self is not a static thing that one is simply born with like a mole on one’s face or is just assigned by one’s parents just like a name. Everyone is tasked to discover one’s self. Have you truly discovered yours? SS 103:Understanding the Self Page 16  NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY,INC Laoag City, Ilocos Norte Socrates and Plato Socrates was the first philosopher who ever engaged Unit 1 in a systematic questioning about the self; the true The Self from Various Philosophical task of the philosopher is to know oneself. Perspectives For Socrates, every man is composed of body and soul; all individuals have an imperfect, impermanent aspect to him, and the body, while maintaining that there is also a soul that is perfect and permanent. Plato supported the idea that man is a dual nature of body and soul. Plato added that there are three components of the soul: the rational soul, the spirited soul, and the appetitive soul. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas Augustine agreed that man is of a bifurcated nature; the body is bound to die on earth and the soul is to anticipate living eternally in a realm of spiritual bliss in communion with God. The body can only thrive in the imperfect, physical reality that is the world, whereas the soul can also stay after death in an eternal realm with the all- transcendent God. Aquinas said that indeed, man is composed of two parts: matter and form. Matter, or hyle in Greek, refers to the “common stuff that makes up everything in the universe.” Man’s body is part of this matter. Form, on the other hand, or morphe in Greek refers to the “essence of a substance or thing.” To Aquinas the soul is what animates the body; it is what makes us humans. Rene Descartes Conceived of the human person as having a body and a mind The body is nothing else but a machine that is attached to the mind. The human person has it but it is not what makes man a man. If at all, that is the mind. David Hume The self is not an entity over and beyond the physical body. Men can only attain knowledge by experiencing. Self, according to Hume, is simply “a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.” Immanuel Kant Things that men perceive around them are not just randomly infused into the human person without an organizing principle that regulates the relationship of all these impressions. There is necessarily a mind that organizes the impressions that men get from the external world. Time and space are ideas that one cannot find in the world, but is built in our minds; he calls these the apparatuses of the mind. SS 103:Understanding the Self Page 17  NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY,INC Laoag City, Ilocos Norte The self is not just what gives one his personality; it is also the seat of knowledge acquisition for all human persons. Gilbert Ryle Blatantly denying the concept of an internal, non-physical self; what truly matters is the behavior that a person manifests in his day-to-day life. “Self” is not an entity one can locate and analyze but simply the convenient name that people use to refer to all the behaviors that people make. Merleau-Ponty The mind and body are so intertwined that they cannot be separated from one another. One cannot find any experience that is not an embodied experience. All experience is embodied; one’s body is his opening toward his existence to the world. The living body, his thoughts, emotions, and experiences are all one. Sigmund Freud Freud’s most dominant influence has been in the fields of Psychology and Psychoanalysis Freud’s view of the self was multitiered, divided among the conscious, preconscious, and unconscious. Perhaps Freud's single most enduring and important idea was that the human psyche (personality) has more than one aspect. Freud's personality theory saw the psyche structured into three parts; the id, ego and superego, all developing at different stages in our lives. These are systems, not parts of the brain, or in any way physical. SS 103:Understanding the Self Page 18  NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY,INC Laoag City, Ilocos Norte Philosophy Explain - study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially in an academic discipline. - a particular theory that someone has about how to live or how to deal with a particular situation. - academic discipline concerned with investigating the nature of significance of ordinary and scientific beliefs - investigates the legitimacy of concepts by rational argument concerning their implications, relationships as well as reality, knowledge, moral judgment, etc. - Much of philosophy concerns with the fundamental nature of self. According to Ubuntu philosophy, which has its origins in ancient Africa, a newborn baby is not a person. People are born without ena, or selfhood, and instead must acquire it through interactions and experiences over time. So the "self"/"other" distinction that's axiomatic in Western philosophy is much blurrier in Ubuntu thought. As the Kenyan-born philosopher John Mbiti put it in African Religions and Philosophy (1975): "I am because we are, and since we are, therefore I am." “We know from everyday experience that a person is partly forged in the crucible of community. Relationships inform self-understanding. Who I am depends on many "others:" my family, my friends, my culture. The self I take to grocery shopping, say, differs in her actions and behaviors from the self that talks to my supervisor. Even my most private and personal reflections are entangled with the perspectives and voices of different people, be it those who agree with me, those who criticize, or those who praise me” (Birhane, 2017). Yet the notion of a fluctuating and ambiguous self can be disconcerting. We can chalk up this discomfort, in large part, to René Descartes. The 17th-century French philosopher believed that a human being was essentially self-contained and self- sufficient; an inherently rational, mind-bound subject, who ought to encounter the world outside her head with skepticism. While Descartes didn't single-handedly create the modern mind, he went a long way towards defining its contours. Descartes had set himself a very particular puzzle to solve. He wanted to find a stable point of view from which to look on the world without relying on God-decreed wisdoms; a place from which he could discern the permanent structures beneath the changeable phenomena of nature. But Descartes believed that there was a trade-off between certainty and a kind of social, worldly richness. The only thing you can be certain of is your own cogito — the fact that you are thinking. Other people and other things are inherently fickle and erratic. So they must have nothing to do with the basic constitution of the knowing self, which is a necessarily detached, coherent, and contemplative whole. SS 103:Understanding the Self Page 19  NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY,INC Laoag City, Ilocos Norte Few respected philosophers and psychologists would identify as strict Cartesian dualists, in the sense of believing that mind and matter are completely separate. But the Cartesian cogito is still everywhere you look. The experimental design of memory testing, for example, tends to proceed from the assumption that it's possible to draw a sharp distinction between the self and the world. If memory simply lives inside the skull, then it's perfectly acceptable to remove a person from her everyday environment and relationships, and to test her recall using flashcards or screens in the artificial confines of a lab. A person is considered a standalone entity, irrespective of her surroundings, inscribed in the brain as a series of cognitive processes. Memory must be simply something you have, not something you do within a certain context. Social psychology purports to examine the relationship between cognition and society. But even then, the investigation often presumes that a collective of Cartesian subjects are the real focus of the enquiry, not selves that co-evolve with others over time. In the 1960s, the American psychologists John Darley and Bibb Latané became interested in the murder of Kitty Genovese, a young white woman who had been stabbed and assaulted on her way home one night in New York. Multiple people had witnessed the crime but none stepped in to prevent it. Darley and Latané designed a series of experiments in which they simulated a crisis, such as an epileptic fit, or smoke billowing in from the next room, to observe what people did. They were the first to identify the so-called "bystander effect," in which people seem to respond more slowly to someone in distress if others are around. Darley and Latané suggested that this might come from a "diffusion of responsibility," in which the obligation to react is diluted across a bigger group of people. But as the American psychologist Frances Cherry argued in The Stubborn Particulars of Social Psychology: Essays on the Research Process (1995), this numerical approach wipes away vital contextual information that might help to understand people's real motives. Genovese's murder had to be seen against a backdrop in which violence against women was not taken seriously, Cherry said as cited by Birhane (2017), and in which people were reluctant to step into what might have been a domestic dispute. Moreover, the murder of a poor black woman would have attracted far less subsequent media interest. But Darley and Latané's focus make structural factors much harder to see. Is there a way of reconciling these two accounts of the self — the relational, world- embracing version, and the autonomous, inward one? The 20th-century Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin believed that the answer lay in dialogue. We need others in order to evaluate our own existence and construct a coherent self-image. Think of that luminous moment when a poet captures something you'd felt but had never articulated; or when you'd struggled to summarize your thoughts, but they crystallized in conversation with a friend. Bakhtin believed that it was only through an encounter with another person that you could come to appreciate your own unique perspective and see yourself as a whole entity. By looking through the screen of the other's soul," he wrote, "I vivify my exterior." Selfhood and knowledge are evolving and dynamic; the self is never finished — it is an open book. SS 103:Understanding the Self Page 20  NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY,INC Laoag City, Ilocos Norte So reality is not simply out there, waiting to be uncovered. "Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction," Bakhtin wrote in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929). Nothing simply is itself, outside the matrix of relationships in which it appears. Instead, being is an act or event that must happen in the space between the self and the world. Accepting that others are vital to our self-perception is a corrective to the limitations of the Cartesian view. Consider two different models of child psychology. Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development conceives of individual growth in a Cartesian fashion, as the reorganization of mental processes. The developing child is depicted as a lone learner — an inventive scientist, struggling independently to make sense of the world. By contrast, "dialogical" theories, brought to life in experiments such as Lisa Freund's "doll house study" from 1990, emphasize interactions between the child and the adult who can provide "scaffolding" for how she understands the world. A grimmer example might be solitary confinement in prisons. The punishment was originally designed to encourage introspection: to turn the prisoner's thoughts inward, to prompt her to reflect on her crimes, and to eventually help her return to society as a morally cleansed citizen. A perfect policy for the reform of Cartesian individuals. But, in fact, studies of such prisoners suggest that their sense of self dissolves if they are punished this way for long enough. Prisoners tend to suffer profound physical and psychological difficulties, such as confusion, anxiety, insomnia, feelings of inadequacy, and a distorted sense of time. Deprived of contact and interaction — the external perspective needed to consummate and sustain a coherent self-image — a person risks disappearing into non-existence. “The emerging fields of embodied and enactive cognition have started to take dialogic models of the self more seriously. But for the most part, scientific psychology is only too willing to adopt individualistic Cartesian assumptions that cut away the webbing that ties the self to others. There is a Zulu phrase, Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, which means "A person is a person through other persons." This is a richer and better account, I think, than "I think, therefore I am." (Birhane, A. 2017). The Self Is Multilayered: Freud Freud didn't exactly invent the idea of the conscious versus unconscious mind, but he certainly was responsible for making it popular. The conscious mind is what you are aware of at any particular moment, your present perceptions, memories, thoughts, fantasies, feelings, what have you. Working closely with the conscious mind is what Freud called the preconscious, what we might today call "available memory:" anything that can easily be made conscious, the memories you are not at the moment thinking about but can readily bring to mind. Now no-one has a problem with these two layers of mind. But Freud suggested that these are the smallest parts! SS 103:Understanding the Self Page 21  NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY,INC Laoag City, Ilocos Norte The largest part by far is the unconscious. It includes all the things that are not easily available to awareness, including many things that have their origins there, such as our drives or instincts, and things that are put there because we can't bear to look at them, such as the memories and emotions associated with trauma. According to Freud, the unconscious is the source of our motivations, whether they be simple desires for food or sex, neurotic compulsions, or the motives of an artist or scientist. And yet, we are often driven to deny or resist becoming conscious of these motives, and they are often available to us only in disguised form such as dreams. The id, the ego, and the superego Freudian psychological reality begins with the world, full of objects. Among them is a very special object, the organism. The organism is special in that it acts to survive and reproduce, and it is guided toward those ends by its needs – hunger, thirst, the avoidance of pain, and sex. A part – a very important part – of the organism is the nervous system, which has as one its characteristics a sensitivity to the organism's needs. At birth, that nervous system is little more than that of any other animal, an "it" or id. The nervous system, as id, translates the organism's needs into motivational forces called, in German, Triebe, which has been translated as instincts or drives. Freud also called them wishes. This translation from need to wish is called the primary process. The id works in keeping with the pleasure principle, which can be understood as a demand to take care of needs immediately. Just picture the hungry infant, screaming itself blue. It doesn't "know" what it wants in any adult sense; it just knows that it wants it and it wants it now. The infant, in the Freudian view, is pure, or nearly pure id. And the id is nothing if not the psychic representative of biology. Unfortunately, although a wish for food, such as the image of a juicy steak, might be enough to satisfy the id, it isn't enough to satisfy the organism. The need only gets stronger, and the wishes just keep coming. You may have noticed that, when you haven't satisfied some need, such as the need for food, it begins to demand more and more of your attention, until there comes a point where you can't think of anything else. This is the wish or drive breaking into consciousness. Luckily for the organism, there is that small portion of the mind, the conscious, that is hooked up to the world through the senses. Around this little bit of consciousness, during the first year of a child's life, some of the "it" becomes "I," some of the id becomes ego. The ego relates the organism to reality by means of its consciousness, and it searches for objects to satisfy the wishes that id creates to represent the organisms needs. This problem-solving activity is called the secondary process. The ego, unlike the id, functions according to the reality principle, which says "take care of a need as soon as an appropriate object is found." It represents reality and, to a considerable extent, reason. SS 103:Understanding the Self Page 22  NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY,INC Laoag City, Ilocos Norte However, as the ego struggles to keep the id (and, ultimately, the organism) happy, it meets with obstacles in the world. It occasionally meets with objects that actually assist it in attaining its goals. And it keeps a record of these obstacles and aides. In particular, it keeps track of the rewards and punishments meted out by two of the most influential objects in the world of the child – mom and dad. This record of things to avoid and strategies to take becomes the superego. It is not completed until about seven years of age. In some people, it never is completed. There are two aspects to the superego: One is the conscience, which is an internalization of punishments and warnings. The other is called the ego ideal. It derives from rewards and positive models presented to the child. The conscience and ego ideal communicate their requirements to the ego with feelings like pride, shame, and guilt. It is as if we acquired, in childhood, a new set of needs and accompanying wishes, this time of social rather than biological origins. Unfortunately, these new wishes can easily conflict with the ones from the id. You see, the superego represents society, and society often wants nothing better than to have you never satisfy your needs at all! Psychosexual Stage Theory The oral stage lasts from birth to about 18 months. The focus of pleasure is, of course, the mouth. Sucking and biting are favorite activities. The anal stage lasts from about 18 months to three or four years old. The focus of pleasure is the anus. Holding it in and letting it go are greatly enjoyed. The phallic stage lasts from three or four to five, six, or seven years old. The focus of pleasure is the genitalia. Masturbation is common. The latent stage lasts from five, six, or seven to puberty, that is, somewhere around 12 years old. During this stage, Freud believed that the sexual impulse was suppressed in the service of learning. I must note that, while most children seem to be fairly calm, sexually, during their grammar school years, perhaps up to a quarter of them are quite busy masturbating and playing "doctor." In Freud's repressive era, these children were, at least, quieter than their modern counterparts. The genital stage begins at puberty, and represents the resurgence of the sex drive in adolescence, and the more specific focusing of pleasure in sexual intercourse. Freud felt that masturbation, oral sex, homosexuality, and many other things we find acceptable in adulthood today, were immature. This is a true stage theory, meaning that Freudians believe that we all go through these stages, in this order, and pretty close to these ages. SS 103:Understanding the Self Page 23