Introduction

• Self is inherently reflexive – it reflects back on itself

• Willian James:

  • Self is what happens when “I” reflects back upon “me”

  • Self is both the I and the Me – it is the knower, and it is what the knower knows when the knower reflects upon itself

• Charles Taylor:

  • Self as a reflexive project

  • We work on ourselves, as we might work on any other interesting project

The Social Actor

• Human beings evolved to live in social groups

• Scientists have portrayed human nature as profoundly social

• As social animals, human beings strive to get along and get ahead in the presence of each other

• Sense of self as a social actor begins to emerge around the age of 18 months

• At 2 years old

  • Many children begin to use words such as “me” and “mine”, suggesting that the I now has linguistic labels that can be applied reflexively to itself: I call myself “me”

  • Children also begin to express social emotions such as embarrassment, shame, guilt, and pride

• Freud used to the term ego to refer to an executive self in the personality

• Erikson argued that experiences of trust and interpersonal attachment in the first year of life help to consolidate the autonomy of the ego in the second

• Mead suggested that the I comes to know the Me through reflection, which may begin quite literally with mirrors but later involves the reflected appraisals of others

  • I come to know who I am as a social actor by noting how other people in my social world react to my performances

• Traits and Roles

  • Main currency of the self as a social actor

  • Trait: capture perceive consistencies in social performance

    • Convey what I reflexively perceive to be my overall acting style, based in part on how I think others see me as an actor in many different social situations

  • Roles: capture the quality, as I perceive it, of important structures relationships in my life

  • Taken together, traits and roles make up the main features of my SOCIAL REPUTATION, as I apprehend it in my own mind

• To become a more effective social actor, you may want to take aim at the important roles you play in life

• When you try to change your traits or roles, you take aim at the social actor

The Motivated Agent

• To act with direction and purpose, to move forward into the future in pursuit of self-chosen and valued goals

• By age 1, infants show a strong preference for observing and imitating the goal-directed, intentional behavior of others, rather than random behaviors

• The person must first realize that people indeed have desires and goals in their minds and that these inner desires and goals motivate their behavior

• Theory of Mind

  • Occurs for most children by the age of 4

  • Once a child understands that other people’s behavior is often motivated by inner desires and goals, it is a small step to apprehend the self in similar terms

  • Children begin to construct the self as a motivated agent in the elementary school years, layered over their still-developing sense of themselves as social actors

  • Age 5-7 Shift: converge to suggest that children become more planful, intentional, and systematic in their pursuit of valued goals during this time

• Motivated agents feel good about themselves to the extent that they believe that they are making good progress in achieving their goals and advancing their most important values

• Identity

  • An integrated and realistic sense of what I want and value in life and how I plan to achieve it

  • Committing oneself to an integrated suite of life goals and values is perhaps the greatest achievement for the self as a motivated agent

  • Erikson: identity achievement is always provisional, for adults continue to work on their identities as they move into midlife and beyond, often relinquishing old goals in favor of new ones, investing themselves in new projects and making new plans, exploring new relationships and shifting their priorities in response to changing life circumstances

• Anytime you try to change yourself, you are assuming the role of a motivated agent

• To strive to change something is inherently what an agent does

• When you try to change your values of life goals, you are focusing on yourself as a motivated agent

• Changing values can influence life goals

The Autobiographical Author

• Involves achieving a sense of temporal continuity in life – a reflexive understanding of how I have come to be the person I am becoming, or put differently, how my past self has developed into my present self, and how my present self has developed into my present self, and how my present self will, in turn, develop into an envisioned future self

• Narrative Identity

  • An internalized and evolving story of the self that reconstructs the past and anticipates the future in such a way as to provide a person’s life with some degree of unity, meaning, and purpose over time

• Self typically becomes an autobiographical author in the early-adult years, a way of being that is layered over the motivated agent, which is layered over the social actor

• In order to provide life with the sense of temporal continuity and deep meaning that Erikson believed identity should confer, we must author a personalized life story that integrates our understanding of who we once were, who we are today, and who we may become in the future

• The story helps to explain why the social actor does what it does and why the motivated agent wants what it wants and how the person as a whole has developed over time, from the past’s reconstructed beginning to the future’s imagined ending

• Autobiographical Reasoning

  • A narrator is able to derive substantive conclusions about the self from analyzing his or her own personal experiences

• Emphasizes the strong effect of culture on narrative identity

  • Culture provides a menu of flavored plot lines, themes, and character types for the construction of self-defining life stories

  • Sample selectively from the cultural menu, appropriating ideas that seem to resonate well with their own life experiences

  • Life stories reflect the culture, wherein they are situated as much as they reflect the authorial effort of the autobiographical I

• Redemptive Narratives

  • Redemptive stories track the move from suffering to an enhanced status or state, while scripting the development of a chosen protagonist who journeys forth into a dangerous and unredeemed world

  • Redemptive stories support happiness and societal engagement for some Americans, but the same stories can encourage moral righteousness and a native expectation that suffering will always be redeemed

• Every culture offers its own storehouse of favored narrative forms

• No single narrative form captures all that is good (or bad) about a culture

Conclusion

• To “know thyself” in mature adulthood, then, is to do 3 things:

  • To apprehend and to perform with social approval my self-ascribed traits and roles

  • To pursue with vigor and (ideally) success my most valued goals and plans

  • To construct a story about life that conveys, with vividness and cultural resonance, how I became the person I am becoming, integrating my past as I remember it, my present as I am experiencing it, and my future as I hope it to be