Class #7, September 10 Classnotes
Self

Terms
self
personality
id
ego
superego
Freud
symbolic interaction
conversation of the I and the me
generalized other
significant other
cognition
socialization

1. The notion of "self" is fundamental in sociology and it is distinguished from the psychological concept of "personality"
   1. Self is socially constructed
      1. Emerging in response to social interactions we have with important others in our world
      2. It is a product of social action
      3. Being shaped by feedback we receive from others
      4. Saying self is socially constructed, a key aspect is that it changes throughout our lives as a consequence of the roles we play and the situations we live in, situations that are sometimes coercive and force us to reconstruct our sense of who we are, our self.
   2. Personality is a concept more used in psychology that refers to basic, unchanging features of your identity
      1. We tend to think that personality is heavily shaped by genetics and biology---influencing such things as intelligenc and emotional styles or reactions
      2. We also tend to think that personality is heavily shaped by experiences in the first years of life and that these qualities of personalities rarely change over the course of the life span.
      3. As we see in our text, Luhman, sociologists also emphasize the formative effects of early childhood experiences so we do not mean to say that personality is wrong or an incorrect idea promoted by psychologists
      4. Sociologists emphasize the changability of self because it places the emphasis on how one's social world shapes one's identity
         1. We recognize that socialization within institutions like Bucknell or the training received by student doctors is powerful and that it shapes identity in real and significant ways
         2. We also recognize that powerfully coercive institutions like prisons or mental hospitals have the capacity to tear down our former sense of self and to force us to reconstruct self in a way that conforms with the institution's mission and values.
2. Self is built through developmental processes of experiencing, theory building, and advancement through predictable stages that involve emotion, cognition, and social interaction
   1. A theorist we use to understand how emotion develops and moves through stages is Sigmund Freud, a physician from Vienna who lived at the end of the 19th century and into the 1930s who developed the psychological therapy technique we call psychoanalysis
      1. Freud believed that the energy and central dynamic in the development of our sense of self came from innate biological drives that we learn to harness and "repress" in ways that allows us to participate in society in acceptable and productive ways
         1. The innate, underlying emotional drives that give energy to behavior Freud called the "id" and he connected this energy to three sources of gratification, oral, anal, and genital gratification
         2. Freud believed the major stages of self development came as we overcame patterns we expect of infants and adopted behavior we expect of mature people, and psychological problems are associated with not making these transitions in a fulfilling and self-satisfying way
            1. Overcoming our desire to suck is associated with weaning and we can be traumatized if our mother too early takes away breast feeding so that we become obsessed with gaining oral gratification (by eating, smoking, or otherwise doing things that involve gaining pleasure by putting things in our mouth)
            2. Overcoming anal pleasures involves toilet training and being treated overly harshly by parents who want to hurry this process can make us obsessed with holding onto our possessions
         3. While genital pleasures are urges we work to master during adolesence (well, maybe always!), the main theme has to do with overcoming our feeling that we alone posess our cross-sex parent, and the stage at which we realize there is adult competition for our ownership in the form of our same sex parent; the competition between child and same sex parent is called the Oedipus Complex for boys and the Electra Complex for girls.
      2. The main sociological idea we gain from Freud is that to participate in society we must learn to restrict and channel primal emotional pleasures so that our behavior can be acceptable to others
         1. This is partly a matter of learning to conform and behave acceptably, lessons we learn most directly in the family and in our early childhood relationships with parents
         2. However, Freud also saw the restriction and channeling of the id as positive and central to our capacity to work hard and with passion on any project; thus he saw intellectual work fundamentally as a rechanneling of our sexual drives.
         3. In Freud, the concept of "maturity" refers to our ability to do positive, necessary adult things by redirecting our basic emotional urges
   2. Emotional development points us to look at the way all development moves through stages that we share in common because we all share basic aspects of the human experience. Jean Piaget is a Swiss psychologist living in the first decades of the twentieth century who emphasized stages of development when he in particular studied the development of cognition, or analytic thinking processes.
      1. For Piaget we all start with an essentially blank slate of knowledge and go through successive stages of exploring and experimenting with unknown aspects of our world, then gradually gaining control of that feature and integrating or assimilating it into our realm of competence.
      2. Mastering one level of performance always opens up new tasks, opportunities, and perceptions that were invisible to us at the lower level but that set off a new round of experimenting, developing skills, and integrating or mastering them.
      3. Where the development of thinking or cognition is concerned, we all must make the same discoveries and we all have the same raw materials, so we progress in a standardized, step-wise fashion through a series of stages that we can describe as shared in common by all children as they develop.
      4. It is critical to see that it is the child who is discovering and building theories about the world; the child is an active creator and the stages are not simply pre-coded or determined by biological imprinting. This idea that children are actively creating theories of their world is shared with Freud and also with sociological thinkers.
   3. George Herbert Mead is a sociologist we use for understanding how the process of social interaction fosters our development of self and identity.
      1. His basic idea is that our sense of self is shaped by our interactions with, our expectations of the reactions given by, groups we call significant others whose feedback becomes a general principle for how we understand others, or what Mead calls the "generalized other".
         1. Like Piaget, Mead thinks of the child starting with a blank cognitive and emotional slate and that with Freud thinks that the basic drive for self development is achieving gratification.
         2. Mead emphasized that the main way we achieve gratification in the world is by learning to operate in it and control it through specific, planful actions.
         3. We learn that we can manipulate things in the world by personally identifying with their mode of operation and by abstractly imagining the way they function as we plan to carry out actions in the world and learn to effectively identify objects and then to control them.
         4. In Mead, nothing in the world is objectively given but it only becomes real when we find a use, designate the thing as an object, and define it in terms of functions that we can imagine.
         5. We come to understand people and our capacity to influence them and to gratify ourselves in the same way.
            1. We recognize that people like our mother are separate from ourselves because we want to get things done to achieve gratification
            2. We learn to influence people by learning to imagine how they will respond to different actions we might choose, and in this way we are treating them as objects we can manipulate much like objective objects in our world
            3. The difference where people are concerned, of course, is that their reactions to us do not stay fixed and they give us different feedback based on how they perceive us and what they want in order to be gratified.
         6. They way we achieve gratification in the social world is by imagining how others will respond to us if we carry out various alternative actions. This imagining of interaction happens in the abstract, and so we have the important sociological term symbolic interaction.
      2. Because we shape our interactions based on the significant people in our lives, our significant others, who we are comes to be shaped by the way that they respond to us and by the mental plays or scripts we run through in calculating how different people perceive us and will respond to us.
         1. Mead described this process of calculation as "the conversation between the I and the Me."
         2. In his framework, the "I" is our subjective self, the source of desires and urges that (like Freud's id) simply bubble up from our underlying, unarticulated biological identity.
         3. The "me" is the direct object, or ourselves as we perceive others see us.
         4. Since our gratification in the world is based heavily on how we think others view us, and our sense of comfort has to do with whether the I can be gratified by our imagining the me in a managable and satisfying way, the way we set up the conversation between the I and the me is central to the way we build a sense of self.
         5. Furthermore, the sense of self is going to be strongly tied to or conditional upon the social surroundings that we are in; a coercive or radically different social environment and set of significant others can force us to dramatically change our sense of what we must do to achieve desired resulsts. This amounts to a change in the character of self.