Phenomenological and Social Psychoanalytic Approaches to the Self
How we define ‘self’ is one of the questions in social psychology that is not only of interest to the practitioners themselves, but is also central to everyone on a more personal level. Even when we do not directly contemplate the meaning and how we have come to define ‘self’, we are nonetheless in the process of establishing our own meaning of the term and using it in our constructs of how we fit in the world. That the simple word “I” is always in the top twenty most common words used in the English language1 is no coincidence—we are central to our framework of the world, and therefore our ‘self’ is of great importance to everything we do and think. Whether self is a set of attitudes, roles or characteristics and how much of those stem from our own individuality and how much from how we fit into society, is key to understanding the impact and influence that our self-images have on our lives.
If you were asked to define your ‘self’, how would you do it? Would you say, “I am a mother, I am a daughter, I am a doctor”, using your roles in smaller and larger societies to define yourself? Or would you choose instead to define yourself by the individual characteristics that serve to set you apart from your group and the world en masse—”I am funny, I am kind, I am shy”? As central as the question of self may be, there is surprisingly little empirical research in social psychology on how we define ourselves. In the main, this can be attributed to the inability to agree on whether self is a set of attitudes or if it is otherwise constructed. Kuhn and McPartland (McPartland, 1954), however, did attempt to develop an experiment that would begin to clarify some of these questions. They asked 288 undergraduate students to answer “who am I?” twenty different ways, in a short amount of time. As sociologists, they looked at their results from a different perspective than social psychologists, but it is still of interest to see how the students responded in ways that held up the
If you were asked to define your ‘self’, how would you do it? Would you say, “I am a mother, I am a daughter, I am a doctor”, using your roles in smaller and larger societies to define yourself? Or would you choose instead to define yourself by the individual characteristics that serve to set you apart from your group and the world en masse—”I am funny, I am kind, I am shy”? As central as the question of self may be, there is surprisingly little empirical research in social psychology on how we define ourselves. In the main, this can be attributed to the inability to agree on whether self is a set of attitudes or if it is otherwise constructed. Kuhn and McPartland (McPartland, 1954), however, did attempt to develop an experiment that would begin to clarify some of these questions. They asked 288 undergraduate students to answer “who am I?” twenty different ways, in a short amount of time. As sociologists, they looked at their results from a different perspective than social psychologists, but it is still of interest to see how the students responded in ways that held up the
References: Holloway, W. (2007). Chapter 1: Social Psychology: Past and Present. In W. Holloway, H. Lucey, & A.Phoenix, Social Psychology Matters (pp. 3-29). Maidenhead: Open University Press. Holloway, W. (2007). Chapter 5: Self. In W. Holloway, H. Lucey, & A. Phoenix, Social Psychology Matters (pp. 119-144). Maidenhead: Open University Press. Jopling, D. A. (1996). Sub-Phenomenology. Human Studies , 19 (2), 153-173. Lucey, H. (2007). Chapter 3: Families. In W. Holloway, H. Lucey, & A. Phoenix, Social Psychology Matters (pp. 65-92). Maidenhead: Open University Press. McPartland, M. H. (1954). An Empirical Investigation of Self-Attitudes. American Sociological Review, 19 (1), 68-76. Ryle, G. (1949). The Concept of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.