Self in Society Robert Harsh

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Course Unit Guide

Individuation

   This course unit will focus on the process of individuation in which a person "self-consciously" chooses behaviors, values, beliefs, relationships, and commitments that shape her or his personal growth. We will also consider how this process may in turn be shaped by physiology; genetic inheritance; family and social environments; ethnicity; race; gender; and other social and environmental factors.

Personality

• personality–"The fairly stable patterns of thought, feeling, and action that are typical of an individual." (Ian Robertson, Sociology)

• personality–the culture of the self

• character–the moral quality of a personality; the congruence of beliefs, values, and actions in the presentation (Goffman) and behavior of the self

• deviance–"Behavior or characteristics that violate significant social norms and expectations and are negatively viewed by large numbers of people in consequence." (Ian Robertson, Sociology)

• deviance–is culturally relative, politically defined, and socially constructed

• mental disorder–"A psychological inability to cope realistically and effectively with the ordinary challenges of life." (Ian Robertson, Sociology)

Topics

• theories and dynamics of personal development–"ages and stages"–cognitive (Piaget, Perry), adult years (Sheehy), emotional (Erikson, Chickering), spiritual (Merton, St.John of the Cross), ethical/moral (Maslow), gender-specific (Gilligan)

• theories and diagnoses of mental disorders–Susanna Kaysen,Girl, Interrupted;

    Dr. Carol Shuttleworth, guest lecturer

• the role of physiology in personal development and personality–three articles

• sexuality and identity–lecture and handout

• gender issues in personal development and identity–lecture and handout

• race and ethnicity–symbolic interaction–lecture and handout

    reading and discussion - Shelby Steele,  The Content of our Character

    reading and discussion - Claude Steele, Atlantic Monthly article, "Thin Ice: 'Stereotype Threat'          and Black College Students"

Mental Health/Illness Perspectives

• also note differences, similarities of "crazy" behavior–"mental illness"–"mental disorder"–deviance –eccentricity as socially-constructed labels, descriptions

   Within whichever model/paradigm we chose to conceptualize a lifetime, several "elements" or dynamics inform the way we live our lives, shape our lifestyles, choose our behavior, and evaluate our achievements and characters. And though these elements operate both consciously and unconsciously and can vary considerably across gender, culture, class, and other differences, they nevertheless seem to inhere in the process of personal growth and individuation.

• integrity the congruence or "fit" between values and actions; a reliable, cohesive pattern of commitments and decisions through a lifetime

• grace the unexpected and unearned coincidence of goals and circumstances; the quiet, inward assurance of meaning and integrity in oneself and the world around you

• transcendence bridging life's discontinuities by rising above frustration and disappointment; glimpsing a higher order or meaning in previously difficult circumstances

• control/letting go the determination to shape life circumstances and create opportunities through individual effort and power (control) or to acknowledge and trust that life will reward your efforts on its own terms (letting go)

• discontinuities life circumstances that present challenges or difficulties that cannot be easily overcome by individual abilities and will power; new environments and/or relationships that share few-if any-similarities with previous experience; asymmetrical coincidence

• symmetry/asymmetry  experience, relationships, education that are consonant/continuous (symmetrical) or dissonant/discontinuous (asymmetrical) with previous experience; finding identity through shared realities (symmetry) or through difference (asymmetry)

• epiphanies  moments or events in a lifetime that become "symbolically loaded" as foci of memory and meaning; occurrences that come to represent significant life themes, commitments, and decisions

• heroism  the persistent determination to confront and transcend apparently insurmountable difficulties or discontinuities. Heroism can be either "exemplary" in singular acts of courage or "incremental" in daily, habitual efforts.

• biological identity, "sex" - most physiologically determined

• femininity/masculinity, sex roles - most socially constructed

A.H. Maslow on Healthy/Functional Sexuality

"...Sex can be wholeheartedly enjoyed, enjoyed far beyond the possibility of the average person, even at the same time that it does not play a central role in the philosophy of life. It is something to be enjoyed, something to be taken for granted, something to build upon, something that is very basically important like water or food, and that can be enjoyed as much as these; but gratification should be taken for granted. ...It is cheerful, humorous, and playful - and not primarily a striving, it is basically an enjoyment and a delight."                            A H. Maslow, Motivation and Personality

• race–genetic, geographic

• class–share the same status, social position–sociological, economic

• gender–both biological and role-bound (socially constructed)

• color–both biological (skin color) and cultural–socially contructed

• culture–living environment: family, school, neighborhood–socially constructed and relative

• ethnicity–nationality, culture, language

• minority/majority–demographic, geographic, cultural, relative

• racism–an ideology, belief used to rationalize prejudice and discrimination

• prejudice–an attitude and resulting unequal treatment (discrimination)

• discrimination–unequal treatment, actions–can be either negative or over-compensatory

• "race" a powerful but obvious superstition

• racial divisions functionally a color line

• discrimination, prejudice, slavery create a veil of invisibility

• ethnicity, minority status, prejudice engender a double consciousness

See lecture notes, handout.

Shelby Steele, The Content of Our Character

[emphasis added]

• note that Steele, like Mead and Goffman, explores social/symbolic interaction in its racial/political dynamics

• seeing for innocence–"Seeing for innocence is, in this way, the essence of racism–the use of others as a means to our own goodness and superiority. (8)

• innocence as power–"Like all victims, what blacks lost in power they gained in innocence–innocence that, in turn, entitled them to pursue power." (14)

• race-holding–"using race to keep from looking at [ourselves]" (24)

• the anti-self (narcissistic wounding)–"The anti-self is a hidden aggressive force that scours the world for fresh evidence of our unworthiness." (41)

* "Racial vulnerability is best thought of not so much as the wound of our oppression as the woundedness we still carry as a result of it–our continuing openness to inferiority anxiety and to racial debasement and shame." (57)

• dynamics of racial guilt–"Guilt that preoccupies people with their own innocence blinds them to those who make them feel guilty. This, of course, is not racism, and yet it has the same effect as recism since it makes blacks something of a separate species for whom normal standards and values do not automatically apply." (87) (compare Dubois's veil and over-compensatory discrimination [above])

• diversity and a democracy of colors–"Diversity is a term that applies democratic principles to races and cultures rather than to citizens, despite the fact that there is nothing to indicate that real diversity is the same thing as proportionate representation. Too often the result of this on campuses (for example) has been a democracy of colors rather than of people, an artificial diversity that gives the appearance of an educational parity between black and white students that has not yet been achieved in reality." (115-116)

* the politics of difference (identity politics)–"What has emerged on campuses in recent years–as a result of the new equality and of affirmative action and, in a sense, as a result of progress–is a politics of difference, a troubling, volatile politics in which each group justifies itself, its sense of worth and its pursuit of power, through difference alone." (132)

Cornel West and Shelby Steele

political polarities in "race matters"

liberals/conservatives

liberal structuralists/conservative behaviorialists

"preemptive" legislation/individual effort, achievement

Eric Foner

[See link to Foner's and others' perspectives at the end of this unit guide (below).]

civil, constitutional equality - hierarchical (class), market-economy, nativist inequalities

Racial Scripting and the Social Construction of Hate and Prejudice

Denise Grady, Not a Simple Case of Health Racism (New York Times)

Peter Manso, Chronicle of a Tragedy Foretold (New York Times Magazine)

Andrew Sullivan, What's So Bad About Hate? (New York Times Magazine)

Claude Steele, "Thin Ice: 'Stereotype Threat' and Black College Students"

an interactional perspective on related academic issues

Web Discussion (click here) of Diversity and Minority Issues in College Admissions (including Eric Foner and Claude Steele perspectives [above])

     "A sense of self as we have defined it in the West since the Enlightenment turns in part upon written records. Most fundamentally, we mark a human being's existence by his or her birth and death dates, engraved in granite on every tombstone. Our idea of the self, it is fair to argue, is as inextricably interwoven with our ideas of time as it is with uses of language. In antebellum America, it was the deprivation of time in the life of the slave that first signaled his or her status as a piece of property. Slavery's time was delineated by memory and memory alone. One's sense of one's existence, therefore, depended upon memory. It was memory, above all else, that gave a shape to being itself. What a brilliant substructure of the system of slavery! For the dependence upon memory made the slave, first and foremost, a slave to himself or herself, a prisoner of his or her own power of recall. Within such a time machine, as it were, not only had the slave no fixed reference points, but also his or her own past could exist only as memory without support, as the text without footnotes, as the clock without two hands. Within such a tyrannical concept of time, the slave had no past beyond memory; the slave had lived at no time past the point of recollection" (100-101).

        Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self  (New York: Oxford, 1987)

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This page last modified 09/15/2006