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?

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Laoag City, Ilocos Norte

Socrates and Plato

• Socrates was the first philosopher who ever engaged in a systematic
Unit 1 questioning about the self; the true task of the philosopher is to know
The Self from Various oneself.
• For Socrates, every man is composed of body and soul; all individuals
Philosophical Perspectives 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.

John Locke
 He believe that perception and experiences of a person is important in the establishment of you
the person can become.
 His work on self is most represented by the concept “Tabula Rasa” which means a Blank Slate; A
person is born with knowing nothing and that is susceptible to stimulation and accumulation of
learning from experiences, failures, and observations of the person.

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.”

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Laoag City, Ilocos Norte

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.
• 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.

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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