The psychology of self is the study of either the cognitive and affective representation of one's identity or the subject of experience. The earliest formulation of the self in modern psychology derived from the distinction between the self as I, the subjective knower, and the self as Me, the object that is known.[1]
Current views of the self in psychology position the self as playing an integral part in human motivation, cognition, affect, and social identity.[2] It may be the case that we can now usefully attempt to ground experience of self in a neural process with cognitive consequences, which will give us insight into the elements of which the complex multiply situated selves of modern identity are composed.
Maslow Self-Actualization
How Maslow developed his conception of the self-actualized person.
Maslow interviewed people he both knew and admired.
He would :
1. Interview a sample of people he thought were self-actualized.
He would write down a list of traits he felt each person possessed. (Common traits)
2. He would use the trait list from 1 and then see how a second sample of self-actualized individuals matched up with the key traits.
By refining his trait list again and again, he eventually came up with what he felt was a stable list of attributes which would define the self-actualized individual.
Famous People which Maslow felt were self-actualized :
Thomas Jefferson
Abraham Lincoln
Albert Einstein
Jane Addams
Willliam James
Albert Schweitzer
Aldous Huxley
Elanor Roosevelt http://homepages.rpi.edu/~verwyc/MASLOWOH.htm
Heinz Kohut[3] initially proposed a bipolar self compromising two systems of narcissistic perfection: 1) a system of ambitions and, 2) a system of ideals. Kohut called the pole of ambitions the narcissistic self (later, the grandiose self[4]), while the pole of ideals was designated the idealized parental imago. According to Kohut, these poles of the self represented natural progressions in the psychic life of infants and toddlers.
Kohut argued that when the child's ambitions and exhibitionistic strivings were chronically frustrated, arrests in the grandiose self led to the preservation of a false, expansive sense of self that could manifest outwardly in the visible grandiosity of the frank narcissist, or remain hidden from view, unless discovered in a narcissistic therapeutic transference (or selfobject transference) that would expose these primitive grandiose fantasies and strivings. Kohut termed this form of transference a mirror transference. In this transference, the strivings of the grandiose self are mobilized and the patient attempts to use the therapist to gratify these strivings.
Kohut proposed that arrests in the pole of ideals occurred when the child suffered chronic and excessive disappointment over the failings of early idealized figures. Deficits in the pole of ideals were associated with the development of an idealizing transference to the therapist who becomes associated with the patient's primitive fantasies of omnipotent parental perfection.
Kohut believed that narcissistic injuries were inevitable and, in any case, necessary to temper ambitions and ideals with realism through the experience of more manageable frustrations and disappointments. It was the chronicity and lack of recovery from these injuries (arising from a number of possible causes) that he regarded as central to the preservation of primitive self systems untempered by realism.
By 1984,[5] Kohut's observation of patients led him to propose two additional forms of transference associated with self deficits: 1) the twinship and, 2) the merger transference. In his later years, Kohut believed that selfobject needs were both present and quite varied in normal individuals, as well as in narcissistic individuals. To be clear, selfobjects are not external persons. Kohut and Wolf, 1978[6] explain:
"Self objects are objects which we experience as part of our self; the expected control over them is, therefore, closer to the concept of control which a grownup expects to have over his own body and mind than to the concept of control which he expects to have over others. (p.413)"
Kohut's notion of the self can be difficult to grasp because it is experience-distant, although it is posited based upon experience-near observation of the therapeutic transference. Kohut relied heavily on empathy as a method of observation. Specifically, the clinician's observations of his or her own feelings in the transference help the clinician see things from the subjective view of the patient—to experience the world in ways that are closer to the way the patient experiences it. (note: Kohut did not regard empathy as curative. Empathy is a method of observation).
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D. W. Winnicott distinguished what he called the "true self" from the "false self" in the human personality, considering the true self as based on a sense of being in the experiencing body: 'for Winnicott, the sense of being is primary, the sense of doing an outgrowth of it'.[7] As he memorably put it to Harry Guntrip, 'You know about "being active", but not about "just growing, just breathing"'.[8]
Nevertheless, Winnicott did not underestimate the need as well for a false self, seeing indeed 'the False Self...as a necessary defensive organization, a survival kit, a caretaker self, the means by which a threatened person has managed to survive'.[9]
'Winnicott postulates that there is a continuum of false self development ',[10], distinguishing indeed five levels of organization of the false self:
As for the true self, 'Winnicott's conception of the self became increasingly that of a "hide and seek self"', in his growing concern about the possibility of 'thefts of the child's or the patient's creative ownership of their own knowing, in their own time'.[16]
Winnicott believed that 'in health there is a core of the personality which corresponds to the true self', and which 'must never be communicated with or be influenced by external reality. The question is: how to be isolated without having to be insulated?'.[17]
'Abstracting ideas from many theoretical perspectives - including concepts from Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Heinz Kohut and the school of object relations and self-psychology' - Sam Vaknin emphasises the self-made nature of the narcissist's self, stressing how narcissists 'create an inner dialogue to maintain consistency with their grandiose or omnipotent self'.[18] This inner dialogue takes precedence over external input in self-formation - 'just carrying on a dialogue within a narcissistic structure'.[19]
The narcissistic personality - still according to 'Vaknin, an expert on this personality type' - attempts to 'protect the vulnerable self by building layers of grandiosity and a huge sense of entitlement'.[20] He sees the roots of the condition as lying in childhood self-formation: 'the child represses his needs and develops the protective grandiose image or false self rather than his true self' - hence the reason 'Vaknin comments on the importance of early detection and treatment'.[21]
Failing intervention, once the narcissistic personality is established, 'a narcissist will always prefer his false self over his true self. No one can convince the narcissist that his true self is far more lovable and intriguing than his grandiose, inflated false self (Vaknin, 2006)'.[22]
Eric Berne distinguished the personality's ego states - Parent, Adult and Child - from what he called 'the real Self, the one that can move from one ego state to another'.[23] Berne considered that 'the feeling of "Self" is a mobile one. It can reside in any of the three ego states at any given moment, and can jump from one to the other as occasion arises'.[24]
Nevertheless, Berne saw the Self as the most valuable part of the personality: 'when people get to know each other well, they penetrate into the depths where this real Self resides, and that is the part of the other person they respect and love'[25]
In Jungian theory, the Self is one of several archetypes. It signifies the coherent whole, unifying both the consciousness and unconscious mind of a person. The Self, according to Jung, is realized as the product of individuation, which is defined as the process of integrating one's personality. For Jung, the self is symbolized by the circle (especially when divided into four quadrants), the square, or the mandala. The Wise Old Woman/Man can also serve as 'a symbolic personification of the Self'.[26]
What distinguishes Jungian psychology from previous iterations is the idea that there are two centers of the personality. The ego is the center of conscious identity, whereas the Self is the center of the total personality—including consciousness, the unconscious, and the ego. The Self is both the whole and the center. While the ego is a self-contained little circle off the center contained within the whole, the Self can be understood as the greater circle.
The Self besides being the centre of the psyche is also autonomous, meaning that it exists outside of time and space. Jung also called the Self an imago dei. The Self is the source of dreams and often appears as an authority figure in dreams with the ability to perceive the future or guide one in the present.
'Selfhood' or complete autonomy is a common Western approach to psychology and models of self are employed constantly in areas such as psychotherapy and self help. Edward E. Sampson (1989) argues that the preoccupation with independence is harmful in that it creates racial, sexual and national divides and does not allow for observation of the self-in-other and other-in-self.
The very notion of selfhood has been attacked on the grounds that it is seen as necessary for the mechanisms of advanced capitalism to function. In Inventing our selves: Psychology, power, and personhood, Nikolas Rose (1998) proposes that psychology is now employed as a technology that allows humans to buy into an invented and arguably false sense of self. In this way, 'Foucault's theories of self have been extensively developed by Rose to explore techniques of governance via self-formation...the self has to become an enterprising subject, acquiring cultural capital in order to gain employment',[27] thus contributing to self-exploitation.
It is suggested by Kohut that for an individual to talk about, explain, understand or judge oneself is linguistically impossible, since it requires the self to understand its self. This is seen as philosophically invalid, being self-referential, or reification, also known as a circular argument. Thus, if actions arise so that the self attempts self-explanation, confusion may well occur within linguistic mental pathways and processes.
As for the theorists of the self, 'Vaknin has his detractors. Some people have criticised him for recreating narcissism in his own image':[28] - his "narcissistic self" is only his own self writ large. Winnicott too has his critics, suggesting that his theory of the way 'the False Self is invented to manage a prematurely important object...enacts a kind of dissociated regard or recognition of the object'[29] is itself rooted in 'his own childhood experience of trying to "make my living" by keeping his mother alive'.[30]
One view of the Self, following from John Locke, sees it as a product of episodic memory.[31] It has been suggested that transitory mental constructions within episodic memory form a self-memory system that grounds the goals of the working self,[31] but research upon those with amnesia find they have a coherent sense of self based upon preserved conceptual autobiographical knowledge,[32] and semantic facts, and so conceptual knowledge rather than episodic memory.[32]
Both episodic and semantic memory systems have been proposed to generate a sense of self identity. In this personal episodic memory enables the phenomenological continuity of identity, while personal semantic memory generates the narrative continuity of identity.[33] "The nature of personal narratives depends on highly conceptual and ‘story-like’ information about one’s life, which resides at the general event level of autobiographical memory and is thus unlikely to rely on more event-specific episodic systems."[33]
Symbolic interactionism stresses the 'social construction of an individual's sense of self' through two main methods: 'In part the self emerges through interaction with others....But the self is a product of social structure as well as of face-to-face interaction'.[34]
Social psychology acknowledges that 'one of the most important life tasks each of us faces is understanding both who we are and how we feel about ourselves'.[35] However, rather than absolute knowledge, it would seem that 'a healthy sense of self calls for both accurate self-knowledge and protective self-enhancement, in just the right amounts at just the right times.'[36]
In dynamical social psychology as proposed by Nowak et al., [37] the self is rather an emergent property that emerges as an experiential phenomena from the interaction of societies of psychological perceptions and experience. This is also hinted in dynamical evolutionary social psychology by Douglas Kenrick et al. [38] where a set of decision rules generates complex behaviour. [38]