The problem of «I» in psychology
Eavesdropping on life in everything,
They are in a hurry to deafen the phenomenon,
Forgetting that if you break them
Inspirational connection
There is nothing more to listen to.
Goethe
Unlike philosophical theories that claim to reveal the “true nature” and “essence” of the “I” as a whole, psychology tries to break this problem into its component parts that could become the subject of experimental research. However, the classification of the corresponding psychological theories presents great difficulties, since they are differentiated along various lines.
First, on the subject on which the main interest of researchers is concentrated. Some are primarily interested in the subjective properties of the individual, the internal sources of his activity, which were designated above as identity and «Ego». Such, for example, are personalistic psychology, Freudianism, existentialism, egopsychology. Others are mainly occupied with the “image of the Self” as an element of self-consciousness.
Secondly, psychological research differs in the theoretical context, the angle of view from which the problem of «I» is considered. Where personality theory serves as the starting point, the self is most often conceived of as a structural unity, and its regulative functions attract the most attention. In the context of the theory of consciousness, the cognitive features of the processes of self-consciousness, the adequacy of self-assessments, etc. come to the fore.
Thirdly, the methodological research strategy differs significantly. So, the approach to the study of self-assessments, this most valuable source in understanding the “I-image”, varies depending on whether they are considered by the researcher as direct components of the “I-image” or only as indicators of some deep and not realized by the personality qualities (for example, self-esteem ). A psychologist who considers a personality to be just a sum of traits can be satisfied with a descriptive-component analysis and say that the “image of the Self” is made up of the individual’s ideas about his body, mind, abilities, social status, etc. For system-structural thinking, such a strategy is fundamentally unacceptable , the genesis of self-consciousness is drawn to him much more complex.
The first steps in the scientific and psychological analysis of the human «I» were associated with the development of natural-scientific thinking and the struggle against idealism. Idealistic theories of the psyche, which considered the «I» the source of all human actions, equated it with the «soul», or non-material «internal agent», which directs the behavior of the individual, and which itself can neither be deduced, nor reduced, nor explained. Naturally, scientific psychology sought to expose this «ghost», in the words of I. M. Sechenov, to reduce it to some kind of material processes. But to what exactly?
Most XNUMXth century psychologists saw in the «I» a sensual image, formed on the basis of self-perceptions and associations fixed by memory. So, J. St. Mill associated the appearance of the «I» with the memory of a perfect action. According to C. Pierce, the «I idea» arises in a child as a result of the association of the fact of moving things with the movement of one’s own body, which is recognized as the cause of the movement. W. Wundt understands the «I» as a sense of the connection of all individual mental experiences, attaching special importance to kinesthetic sensations in its genesis. This trend had a materialistic orientation, was oriented towards experiment, and contributed to the development of a number of important studies (for example, how a person is aware of the scheme of his own body). Particularly valuable in this regard were the works of I. M. Sechenov.
“A child,” wrote Sechenov, “receives from his body many times the sum of self-sensations while standing, sitting, running, etc. In these sums, next to homogeneous members, there are also various ones that specifically characterize standing, walking, etc. Since these conditions are very interspersed with each other, then there is a darkness of conditions for their comparison in consciousness. The products of the latter are expressed by the thoughts: «Peter is sitting or walking.» Here Petya, of course, does not mean the abstraction of the permanent members from the changeable members from the sum of self-perceptions … but the thought nevertheless corresponds to the separation of his body from his actions, already clear in the mind of the child. Then, or perhaps simultaneously with this, the child begins to separate in his consciousness from the rest those sensations that constitute the urge to act; the child says: «Peter wants to eat, wants to walk.» In the first thoughts, the state of one’s body is expressed indifferently as an integral self-perception; here, the separateness of two self-sensations is already recognized … Since these states can occur while sitting, while walking, etc., they must be compared with each other in consciousness. As a result, it turns out that Petya either feels food hunger, or a walk; now he walks, now he runs — in all cases, Petya is that common source within which sensations are born and from which actions emerge.
However, the limitations of the psychophysiological and associationist approach to the problem of «I» was that he did not see the social aspects of self-consciousness.
Of course, even the authors of the classic Robinsonades, not to mention the psychologists of the XNUMXth century, understood perfectly well that a person lives in society and depends on it. But society, like space in Newtonian physics, was conceived only as a condition, a frame, an external environment for the development of an individual. The content of the reflective «I» seemed to be directly given (well-being) or formed as a result of self-observation. But what prompts a person to self-reflection, what are the criteria for his self-assessments, and why does he focus on some aspects of his own experience to the detriment of others?
A person is first of all aware of those properties of his that someone or something draws his attention to. This is true even of elementary physical properties. It has been noticed that when drawing a verbal portrait of another person or a self-portrait, adolescents are much more likely than children and adults to include skin properties in these descriptions. The fact is that changes in the skin that appear in connection with puberty involuntarily attract the attention of others, causing a lot of trouble for adolescents.
Already a simple description, the fixation of this or that quality, for the most part, includes the moment of evaluation and comparison. Hardly anyone measured the length of their nose in centimeters. However, everyone knows whether his nose is big or small, beautiful or ugly. This is achieved through comparison.
Diligent, smart, strong, handsome, quick-tempered, obedient, diligent — all these definitions have an evaluative meaning and necessarily involve comparison with someone. It is almost impossible to distinguish between the awareness of many of their mental and even bodily properties from their social, moral or aesthetic self-esteem.
Although the “image of the Self” always includes a certain set of components (the idea of one’s body, one’s mental properties, moral qualities, etc.), their specific content and significance vary depending on social and psychological conditions and conditions. In addition, a person not only “learns”, “discovers”, but also actively forms himself. Awareness of some of his abilities changes his self-esteem and the level of claims, and these abilities themselves are not only manifested, but also formed in activity.
Understanding this gradually led psychologists, as happened earlier with philosophers, to an understanding of the social nature of the «I». The first step in this direction was the recognition that, along with the biological, bodily «I», to the realization of which the individual comes «from within», thanks to the development of organic well-being, the «image of the I» includes social components, the source of which is the interaction of the individual with other people. . The most famous version of this model was the theory of William James. Jeme begins by distinguishing between the «knowing self,» the «stream of conscious thought,» which he designates with the English word «I» (literally, «I,» the first person singular pronoun), and the «experiential self,» denoted by the word «me » (literally — «me», which does not have an adequate grammatical form in Russian to convey it as a noun). «Me» is «the sum total of everything that a person can call his own, including not only his own body and psychic powers, but everything that belongs to him — clothes, home, family, ancestors and friends, reputation, creative achievements, landed property and even a yacht and a checking account.” «Empirical I» James, in turn, subdivides into three components: «material I» — the body, clothes, property; «social I» — what others recognize this person (each person has as many different «social I»s as there are separate groups or circles whose opinion he cares about); «spiritual I» — a set of mental abilities and inclinations.
Despite the “bourgeoisness” of this model, in which the current account is as important a component of the “I” as the body, the inclusion of social characteristics in it was undoubtedly a step forward. In a bourgeois society, property, property status really constitute an important component of the individual and his self-consciousness (let us recall the brilliant arguments of K. Marx about how the attractive power of money neutralizes and outweighs the repulsive power of ugliness).
However, the social and individual-natural components of the «I» remain side by side in James’ scheme. Meanwhile, awareness of individual natural qualities also has its own social prerequisites. It is quite natural, therefore, that in the subsequent «sociologization» of the problem of «I» was continued.
At the beginning of the XX century. Sociologist Charles Horton Cooley formulated the theory of «mirror self», according to which a person’s idea of himself, «the idea of uXNUMXbuXNUMXbI», is formed under the influence of the opinions of others and includes three components: the idea of how I appear to another person, the idea of how this the other evaluates me, and the self-esteem associated with this, a sense of pride or humiliation. The “I-idea” is formed already at an early age in the course of the interaction of the individual with other people, and the so-called primary groups (family, peers, etc.) are of decisive importance.
In the 40s and 50s, the theory of the “mirror self” became the basis for many experimental studies that found out the dependence of the “image of the self” or private self-assessments on the opinions of others. The results of these studies showed that under the influence of favorable judgments of others, self-esteem increases, unfavorable — decreases, and often changes the self-esteem of those qualities that were not evaluated by others. Thus, praise received from a group that is authoritative for an individual can contribute to an increase in the general level of its claims.
Since the theory of the «mirror self» in its original version focused on the dependence of the formation of the «image of the self» on the opinion of the «significant other», the human «self» looks passive in it: it only reflects and summarizes other people’s opinions on its own account, and the interaction of people in the process of their joint activities is reduced to an exchange of views. In fact, each individual communicates with many different people who perceive and evaluate him differently. In addition, different people (and groups) are not equally significant for the individual. For example, in some cases, parents, family can have a greater influence on a teenager, and in others, peers and friends. Finally, a person does not mechanically assimilate other people’s opinions about himself, but more or less independently comprehends and selects them, using his own criteria.
The formation of the human «I» in the process of real interaction of an individual with other people within certain social groups and depending on the roles performed by the individual was studied by the American scientist George Herbert Mead (1863-1931), the founder of the interactionist (from interaction — interaction) orientation in social psychology . In contrast to those who believed that the «image of the Self» is given to the individual directly or is formed by generalizing self-perceptions. Mead argues that self-awareness is a process based on the practical interaction of the individual with other people. “The individual does not know himself as such directly, but only indirectly, from the particular points of view of other members of a given social group or from the generalized point of view of the whole group to which he belongs, for he enters into his own experience as I or as an individual not directly and directly … but only by becoming for himself the same object as other individuals are for him. He can become an object for himself by accepting the relations of other individuals to himself, within the framework of the joint social activity in which they are involved. In order to successfully interact with other people, it is necessary to anticipate the partner’s reaction to one or another of your actions. Reflection on oneself is, in fact, nothing but the ability to put oneself in the place of another, to learn the attitude of others towards oneself.
The simplest model of this process is, according to Mead, the psychology of children’s play. At first, the child simply imitates the behavior of the people around him. He acts either in the role of an educator, making comments to someone, or in the role of an educated person — he himself fulfills the instructions just given. But these rotating roles are not yet integrated into a definite system. At every given moment, the child imagines himself to be someone else. Hence the outward inconsistency of his actions, which can only be understood by knowing who he imagines himself to be at the moment and how he defines his role. He can imagine himself not only as a person, but also as an animal and even an inanimate object (for example, a locomotive). In relations with people, the child does not so much «take on the role» of the other (puts himself in his place), but rather identifies with him, assimilating his attitude towards himself, or just as unequivocally ascribes his own motives to the other.
As the child’s play activity becomes more complex, the circle of his «significant others» expands, and his relations with them become more and more selective. This also requires more complex internal regulation of behavior. In order to participate in a collective game (for example, football), a child must learn a whole system of rules governing relations between players and be able to coordinate swap actions with all other team members. This means that he no longer orients himself towards individual concrete others, but towards a certain “generalized other”. To master the role of a goalkeeper means to learn the rules of the game and those expectations (expectations) that all members of the team place on the goalkeeper. Accordingly, the self-assessment of oneself as a goalkeeper (whether I am a good goalkeeper or a bad one) depends on how much this individual meets these expectations. But this pattern exists not only in the game. In principle, a person cannot understand and describe himself without the help of categories denoting his gender, age, social affiliation, occupation, marital status, etc. Each such characteristic (“man”, “adult”, “teacher”, “father ”) designates the social position occupied by the individual and the system of mutual expectations associated with this.
In Mead’s concept, the «I» appears as a derivative of the group «We», which it indirectly includes, and the content of the «I» is no longer determined by the opinions of other people, but by real relationships with them, their joint activities. In addition to individual “significant others”, a generalized, “generalized other” appears, which can be not only a family or a play group, but also society as a whole. The «individual self,» Mead emphasized, but simply «comprises» individual social components, but the whole of it «is essentially a social structure that grows out of social experience.»
The description of the personality and its “I” through group affiliations and social roles, in fact, only translates into the language of psychology what philosophers have long ago arrived at (recall the Hegelian scheme of the transition from individual self-consciousness to the universal, Feuerbach’s discovery of “I” in “You ”and, finally, the statement of K. Marx about Peter and Paul). However, the use of the term «role» in this case should not be interpreted, which often happens, as a direct reduction of the individual to the totality of social functions performed by him or, even worse, to false, acted-out behavior.
“Of course, the child learns how he should behave with his mother, let’s say that she needs to obey, and he obeys, but is it possible to say that at the same time he plays the role of a son or daughter? — asks the famous Soviet psychologist A. N. Leontiev. It is just as absurd to speak, for example, of the «role» of a polar explorer «accepted» by Nansen: for him it is not a «role» but a mission. Sometimes a person does play a particular role, but it still remains only a “role” for him, no matter how much it is internalized. «Role» is not a person, but rather an image behind which she hides. But if the “role”, as follows from the definition of A. N. Leontiev himself, is a program “that corresponds to the expected behavior of a person occupying a certain place in the structure of a particular social group”, or “a structured way of his participation in the life of society”, then it cannot possibly be an «image» of a face. Otherwise, one will have to admit that the individual exists not only outside of society, but even outside of his own social activity. After all, “a structured way of participating in the life of society” is nothing but the structure of human activity.
The source of this contradiction lies in the logical substitution of concepts, more precisely, of the frame of reference. Social psychology, which is criticized by A. N. Leontiev, considers the objective process of the interaction of individuals in society, deriving their self-consciousness from it. A. N. Leontiev, on the other hand, means how the individual himself perceives and evaluates his actions. A child can be sincerely loving and obedient, or only pretend to be, and the difference here is quite significant. But this does not negate the fact that there is a certain social definition of the child’s role, in the light of which the behavior of a particular child is evaluated and which cannot but be refracted in his own self-consciousness (“I am good because I obey my mother”).
The «role» description of the dialectics of the individual and the social is carried out at three different levels: within the framework of an impersonal macrosocial system (the sociological level), within the framework of direct interpersonal interaction (the socio-psychological level), and within the framework of individual motivation (the intrapersonal level).
In sociology, the subject of which is the social system, the «social role» is understood as an impersonal norm, a function associated with a certain social position and independent of the personal properties of the individuals occupying this position; The “role” of a teacher, engineer, or father of a family is sociologically determined by the social division of labor and other objective processes that do not depend on the will of an individual. Although the requirements for a person occupying this position are far from always formulated as unambiguously as in a military charter or job description, they are nonetheless quite objective. In order to understand, for example, the correlation of paternal and maternal roles in a modern family, one must first of all take into account the real division of labor between a man and a woman, the correlation of their family and extra-family responsibilities, family structure, ways of raising children, etc. The opinions of specific men and women women on this issue, for all the significance of individual variations, will only be a reflection of the stereotypes of mass consciousness, behind which, ultimately, are the laws of the social structure.
Social psychology, to a certain extent, leaves these macro-social relations «outside the brackets», understanding the «role» as the structure of direct interpersonal interaction. Habitual norms of behavior are inevitably standardized and reinforced by a system of mutual expectations. A person who has shown wit several times is expected to continue to entertain his comrades, and this «role of a joker» is somehow included in his «image of I».
Finally, in the study of intrapersonal processes, the word «role» denotes a certain aspect, part, side of a person’s activity, calling it in this case «interiorized», that is, a role that has been learned, entered «inside» the personality. Attention here is focused primarily on how the individual himself perceives, recognizes and evaluates this or that function (activity), what place it occupies in his “image of the Self”, what personal meaning he puts into it. «Internalized role» is a component of self-awareness, the attitude of a person to some aspect of his own activity.
Thus, the concept of «social role» seems to link the activity of the individual and his self-consciousness with the functioning of the social system, and the starting point here is not the individual, but the society. But this distinction is to some extent arbitrary. Bourgeois sociologists, following everyday consciousness, often divide the life of the individual into two parts, of which one — formal, frozen, dead — is attributed to the «impersonal» world of social roles, and the second — «personal», emotionally colored — represents what the individual is «himself». on its own, regardless of social conditions. In everyday life, to say about a person; that he is «acting» as a father or teacher is like saying that he is «pretending» that he is «not a real» father or teacher. To the individual himself, only such an activity seems to be “role-playing”, which he perceives as something more or less external, peripheral, conditional, “acted out” for others, in contrast to the “true Self”, without which he simply cannot imagine himself. But regardless of whether the individual considers his work a trade, a vocation, or even a mission, although this is very important for himself, as well as for his moral and psychological assessment of him as a person, sociologically he in all cases plays a certain “professional role”. And if there are no enthusiasts for this type of work, and society cannot do without it, such completely objective mechanisms as material incentives, state distribution of specialists, etc., begin to operate.
The interpenetration of social role and individual-personal principles can be observed in all spheres of human life. — Take, for example, Marx’s analysis of the process of exchange. In principle, the relationship between buyer and seller is completely impersonal. The seller is just a personified commodity (say, a loaf of sugar), while the buyer is personified money (gold). “Once a loaf of sugar becomes gold, the seller becomes the buyer. These definite social roles do not flow from human individuality in general, but from the exchange relations between people who produce their products in the form of commodities. The relations that exist between the buyer and the seller are so non-individual that they both enter into them only because the individual nature of their labor is denied, precisely because it, as non-individual labor, becomes money. But these impersonal economic roles are not exactly the opposite of individuality, since these roles, like this individuality, are the product of history. «… These economic bourgeois roles of buyer and seller … are the necessary expression of individuality on the basis of a certain stage of the social process of production.»
And this is the case not only in practice, but also in self-consciousness. A person cannot define himself without regard to the system of his «social roles»; she can merge, identify with them or move away, distance herself from them, even oppose herself to them, but in all cases, when defining her “I”, they seem to serve as a starting point for the personality.
The richer the structure of an individual’s life activity, the wider the range of his social affiliations, the more complex and differentiated his self-consciousness will be.
First, a person is faced with the fact that his various responsibilities and roles, for example, professional and family, do not coincide, and sometimes even contradict each other. These inter-role conflicts activate the work of self-consciousness, prompting a person to hierarchize different aspects of his life, to subordinate them, respectively, to some scale of values.
Secondly, each «social role» is an attitude that its participants can define in different ways (for example, the requirements for a teacher by school administration, colleagues, parents and students can differ significantly). These intra-role conflicts imply the need for an independent, individual definition of one’s own role with all the ensuing measure of responsibility.
Thirdly, the attitude of the individual to the roles performed is not the same: some functions and activities are experienced and recognized as organic, inseparable from one’s own «I», others — as more or less external, peripheral, «artificial». The degree of psychological alienation of an individual from his «roles» depends on many reasons, both social and psychological.
The socio-psychological approach to personality, proposed by the interactionists, undoubtedly opened up new perspectives for studying the problem of the «I». However, it is characterized by a certain one-sidedness.
As L. S. Vygotsky rightly noted, “a personality becomes for itself what it is in itself, through what it presents for others … Social relations, real relations of people genetically stand behind all higher functions, their relations.” Vygotsky called the functions of self-consciousness “tertiary” functions, meaning that they are derived both from the direct social communication of the individual and from his already internalized and in this sense “secondary” mental functions. Interactionists, on the other hand, see predominantly the first — direct interpersonal communication, leaving in the shade both the biological foundations of individuality and broader social determinants, in particular the subject content of an individual’s activity.
It is precisely these omissions of interactionism that have become the subject of criticism from the side of Marxist sociological and psychological science in the first place. Marxist sociologists emphasize the illegitimacy of reducing the social determinants of the personality and its self-consciousness to the direct interaction of individuals, the need to take into account the different objective significance, subordination and «rank» of the «roles» assimilated by the individual. Psychologists, on the other hand, oppose the underestimation by Mead and his followers of the emotional premises of self-consciousness, bodily experiences and self-perceptions. Representatives of the French school of genetic psychology (Henri Ballon, Rene Zazzo and his collaborators) emphasize that the genesis of self-consciousness, being a social process as a whole, has, however, biological prerequisites, which are especially noticeable when studying the emotional aspects of the “I” (well-being, self-perception), in particular the development of a «sense of self». This side of the matter is especially important for understanding the phylogeny of self-consciousness.
Understanding the versatility of the problem contributed to further differentiation of the topics of psychological research on the genesis of self-consciousness in general and the individual’s ideas about himself, as well as the improvement of their methodology and techniques.
To refer to this phenomenon in the psychological literature, a number of terms are used: “I-idea”, “I-image”, “I-concept”, “I-concept”. Some authors use them as synonyms, others try to establish their hierarchy according to the degree of generalization and stability: “the image of the Self” means something that depends on the situation, the “concept of the Self” is conceived as a stable structure of self-consciousness, etc. Since the possibility of a strict distinction between the meaning of these terms seems doubtful, to refer to the individual’s ideas about himself in the following presentation, we will use the collective term «I image».