Concepts of the Self. Anthony Elliott. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Anthony Elliott
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Социология
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781509538812
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couldn’t in principle be an answer. … We are not selves in the way that we are organisms, or we don’t have selves in the way we have hearts and livers. We are living beings with these organs quite independently of our self-understandings or interpretations, or the meanings things have for us. But we are only selves insofar as we move in a certain space of questions. (Sources of the Self, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990, p. 34)

      To emphasize the significance of an individual’s interpretations about their own sense of selfhood, however, is not to suggest that people can ever fully know all there is to know about the conditions of their lives. Many authors have argued that selfhood, in a sense, fails; such accounts emphasize that the stories we tell about ourselves fall short of the deeper truth of lived experience. The founding father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, is perhaps the central figure here. Freud’s theory of a self dislocated and fractured by repressed desire suggests that self-experience is radically divided, or split, between conscious, rational thought on the one hand and unconscious desire, fantasies and memories on the other. The Freudian conception of unconscious desire and motivation has entered sociology, political science, feminism and philosophy in important ways, principally in connection with the study of the dividing line between presentations and pathologies of the self. Psychoanalytic theories of the self are rich and challenging not only because they dethrone common-sense understandings of individual intentions and reasoning; what is valuable in psychoanalytic concepts of the self is the stress on emotional dynamics of loss, longing and mourning.

      This is not to say that the self is only fashioned, as it were, from the inside out. In forging a sense of self, individuals routinely draw from social influences, and maintain their sense of self through cultural resources. Social practices, cultural conventions and political relations are a constitutive backdrop for the staging of self-identity. But even this formulation is perhaps inadequate. The self is not simply ‘influenced’ by the external world, since the self cannot be set apart from the social, cultural, political and historical contexts in which it is embedded. Social processes in part constitute, and so in a sense are internal to, the self.