I have been reading The Cultural Psychology of the Self, and I can highly recommend this book, although it is quite expensive unless you buy the Kindle version, as I did (new: $123.70, used: $104.26, Kindle: $18.86).
One of the things I really like about Cultural Psychology as a relatively new model is that it combines cognitive neuroscience with developmental stage models and interpersonal, cultural contexts to look at how the Self develops and makes sense of itself. With a few tweaks, it could be a truly integral model of psychology, at least as far as a psychology of the Self.
Another element that I really like is that Ciarán Benson spends a whole chapter in his book looking at the development and manifestations of the narrative self.
Here are a few quotes from the chapter that I found interesting (I've added some links within the citations where appropriate).
The story or stories of myself that I tell, that I hear others tell of me, that I am unable or unwilling to tell, are not independent of the self that I am: they are constitutive of me. This is a central claim of the cultural psychology of selfhood.*****
How much of me is in the telling? Is there a ‘me’ apart from a telling? Is the story I tell of myself or hear told of myself a record of what I am and have been or is it a fabrication or construction which can never really hit the mark? These are the sorts of question asked by philosophers and psychologists interested in narratives. The identity of an individual or of a community is the answer to the question, ‘Who did this?’. The answer comes in the form of a proper name which designates a life which is the same life from birth to death. But what justifies us in thinking that this life is ‘constant’ or the same throughout its existence? A narrative identity says Paul Ricoeur. He writes that ‘this narrative identity, constitutive of self-constancy, can include change, mutability, within the cohesion of one lifetime. The subject then appears both as a reader and the writer of its own life, as Proust would have it.’ (pg. 45-46)
One of the newer developments in psychotherapy is the use of these narratives of Self as a tool in the therapeutic process. How and what we tell of our stories says a LOT about who we are right now, especially in how we take different perspectives on how we have come to this point.
If I review my life at a certain stage in order to understand its shape over time, then I will always do so from a particular perspective, the viewpoint of that time in my life from which I choose to look back and re-view the things I have done or those that have happened to me. I am likely to think of my life in terms of a metaphor like ‘a journey’ leading eventually to some goal of fulfilment, or ‘a path’ which destiny has chosen for me much as Alan Bullock has shown to be a crucial similarity between Hitler and Stalin, or I may think of my life as wasted and of myself as the innocent victim of malign forces.3However I do it one thing is inescapable, I must make choices. I must select what to tell and what to leave unspoken and I must do so now in the particular moment of its telling. I must have a felt sense of what is relevant. As it unfolds discursively over time the tale told is the result of a rich succession of choices and selections governed and shaped by the dynamics of the many nows and ‘present thoughts’ which make up the stream of experience which is my particular life. My ‘life’ will always be an edited version.*****
This of course assumes that ‘I’ have the necessary powers to know what is there to be selected in my life and to choose among them as I wish. But there is much psychological evidence to show that the patterns and forces at work in shaping my experiences, and my ability to know and control them, can often be more apparent to other people than they are to myself. Psychologists invoke concepts like ‘the unconscious’ to name this territory of personal ignorance. In the Freudian sense this unconscious system has a major say in shaping my subjectivity, the ways in which it feels as it does to be me. At the base of my warm personal life is a strong, often destabilising, impersonal base which in Freud’s original sense was ‘the It’ (Das Es). How then will I ever know that what I say of myself is not grossly distorted by the means by which the unconscious defences do their work in protecting ‘me’ from anxiety by censoring or twisting what I find myself thinking it is important to say? Such defences are, in cultural psychological terms, reticences about how we speak to ourselves about ourselves.4 For even this to be a consideration in my telling my story I must think it important not to deliberately or unintentionally distort my narrative. I need to be sophisticated enough to realise that there is more to ‘me’ than meets the ‘I’. (pg. 47-48)
Benson points out that the need or impulse toward reviewing our narratives often rises in response to some sort of crisis. In my forthcoming eBook on coping with crisis, I suggest the use of narrative as a way to contextualize the current struggle (whatever that may be) and to create a modicum of distance from the turmoil of the change process.
The urge explicitly to narrativise oneself in an effort to ‘take stock’ frequently occurs when people are in deep personal pain, often bereaved, and desperately seeking to re-assume control of their lives in order to start living satisfyingly again. Much psychotherapy can be understood as a process leading to a satisfactory narrative of one’s selfhood where ‘satisfactory’ means enabling the next phase of self-construction to proceed. Stuart Sutherland’s account of a disintegration in his own life, Breakdown, uses his critical tools as an experimental psychologist in an act of autobiographical writing to restore himself to a control of his own life. Similarly, Lewis Wolpert uses his skills in scientific argument to begin with his own experience of depression in MalignantSadness and to analyse contemporary understandings of that affliction, in part as a means of understanding what happened to himself. William Styron deployed his skills as a writer in Darkness Visible to offer an account of his depression. (pg 48)*****
In many ways, the narrative of Self incorporates the all-quadrants approach of Ken Wilber's integral theory. We are physical beings in a cultural context, with interior states and experiences, and at the influence of social dynamics.
As an autobiographer himself, Jerome Bruner is intimately aware of the complexities of autobiography as a psychological process. It is extraordinarily complex. In some ways all the strands of psychology integrate in the act of telling one’s story or, better still, the series of stories which may make up an individual human being’s life as a self. Since a cultural psychological conception favours an understanding of self as a continuously self-integrating process negotiating its stability through all the changes of location and demand that make up a human life, it should come as no surprise that this problem of achieving stability of self should present itself as a core problem for psychology.Clearly then, although narratives can incorporate and encompass all quadrants, the perspective taken is inherently subjective (a 3rd-person presentation of a 1st-person experience) - ultimately, it is a personal story with an unreliable narrator (to use a term from literary criticism) in that we all have blind spots or unconscious motivations that will impact the content of the narrative. This creates issues of reliability and truth both for the narrator and the listener.
William James formulated this with his metaphor of consciousness as a stream. How do I know I am the same self today as I was yesterday? I have after all lost consciousness for about eight hours between then and now while I slept. And what about the links between me as I am now and me as I was twenty years ago? What is the nature of that linkage? As we have seen, James thought that this had to do with each present thought appropriating its predecessor, owning it, as it were, and blending it into the ongoing flow of consciousness. In this way the stream has the subjective quality of being all of a piece, of being a single stream, my stream.
Bruner identifies this problem as lying at the heart of the psychology of autobiography. Notwithstanding what he calls the ‘robustness’ of selves over time, they also exhibit an instability when observed over extended periods. Selves change. Sameness and change must both be accounted for. The universal changes of ordinary human development (infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle adulthood and old age), the particular changes of individual lives (personal successes and failures, griefs and joys), and the structural changes of the societies to which people belong (periods of peace and stability, war and terror and dispossession, growths and collapses of economic/ moral/religious systems) must all be accounted for in an adequate psychology of autobiography.
Bruner endorses and develops William James’s idea that abilities of narration are a distinct mode of cognitive functioning. They contrast with and complement the abilities of another mode which he calls paradigmatic or logico-scientific thinking which ‘attempts to fulfill the ideal of a formal, mathematical system of description and explanation’. The way of checking whether or not an argument is true and therefore convincing in the paradigmatic mode of thinking is by appealing to established procedures which if properly applied lead to formal or empirical proof.
Narrative thinking, on the other hand, functions differently and does so to quite a different end. As Bruner puts it, if arguments are about truth, stories are about verisimilitude or life-likeness. Each involves a different kind of causality. Paradigmatic thought aspires to establishing universal truth conditions whereas narrative thought looks to likely connections between particular events. The one is concerned with verifiability and replicability within high-level abstractions of the world, the other with plausibility and convincingness within the particular worlds of living engaged individuals. Bruner argues that story making is ‘the mode of thinking and feeling that helps children (Indeed, people generally) create a version of the world in which, psychologically, they can envisage a place for themselves – a personal world.’ (pg 50-51)
However, as a representation of the Self-system, the narrative reveals as much by what is left out as it does by what is included. In the therapeutic situation, there are times when we must question the narrative of the client as far as its truthfulness, yet we accept the story as it is, acknowledging that it may or may not be objectively true - the subjective truth of the experience, however, is generally assumed.
*****
In psychology, we tend to talk about "owning our emotions," or "owning our lives," but this is a much more complex idea than most people recognize.
One way we can take ownership of our lives is through the creation and telling of our personal narratives. In some very real sense, the most important element of the therapeutic relationship is in the telling of one's story, but also that there is a listener, someone who hears our story and reflects back to us the truth (such at it is) of our experiences. In this relationship, ownership of our experience becomes much more real by its telling in social context (this, in part, also explains the incredible effectiveness of group support in the therapeutic process).
To think about your self and about your life as the way in which you have become yourself is a creative act. What it creates is your self and its life. Bruner’s conclusion that ‘autobiography is life construction through “text” construction’ follows from the identification of narrative abilities as a natural mode of human thinking, albeit much neglected until recently by psychologists. Cognitive neuroscience’s ideas on a ‘left brain interpreter’, as we have seen, support this idea of a distinctive form of narrative thinking.*****
It is the application of this type of thinking to one’s own life that ensures its sense of being continuous as the story of my life. Both these ideas, that of ‘story’ and that of possessing, as in ‘my story’, need further comment. Let me take the idea of ownership first and acknowledge a debt to Nicholas Humphrey’s perceptive discussion of its nature and primitive origins.
The everyday concept of ownership is social and involves the idea of a ‘right’. Owning something means having the right to do with it as one wishes including allowing someone else to use it, or giving it away. Humphrey extends this idea by suggesting that the idea of owning private property is a metaphorical extension of the sense of ‘my body’. Owning my body is my primary sense and sphere of ownership. The violation of this sense is one reason why slavery is so abhorrent. How does this basic sense of ownership arise? Humphrey argues that what I as a voluntary agent indubitably own are my volitions. I come to own my body to the extent that I come to control it. My limbs are mine because I can move them when I wish. Even if I were motorically paralysed, but not I think sensorily paralysed, I may still own them if Humphrey is right in arguing that sensation is a form of activity. On this view control, either by way of socially legitimated rights or by way of more foundational acts of coming to own one’s own body in infancy, is a key part of ownership.
The manner in which a narrative becomes ‘my story’ will itself be a history of control, as will the struggle over the rights to history-making of any group or community wishing to be the tellers of ‘their own story’. One way in which Bruner addresses this issue is via his use of the category of metacognition of which meta-narrative is an instance. In everyday language this has to do with the ways in which a person comes to reflect upon why her life or some aspect of it has come to be as it is. It also has to do with the resources available to her to pull the diverse accounts of segments of her life together under the umbrella of a single story, the story of her life. (pg. 51-52)
One last quote (although I could easily post many more).
What Bruner does to support his view that we are the stories we tell of ourselves is to draw out the analogy between the structure of a typical story, on the one hand, and the criteria we use to identify the presence of a self in any human activity on the other.In the end, because the Self is always in process, the narrative is always tentative and subject to revision. This brings me to an important tangent.
First the structure of a story. His simplified account of the structure of a narrative is this:
An Actor with some degrees of freedom;
An Act upon which he has embarked, with
A Goal to whose attainment he is committed;
Resources to be deployed in the above, with
A presupposition of Legitimacy,
Whose violation has placed things in Jeopardy.
The other part of this analogy is the answer to this question: When we listen to other people talk about themselves, or when we read what they write about their lives, what are the signs we look for to establish the presence of a self? The following are the ‘indicators of self’ which we use to answer the question: An agent with some freedom to choose, who shows commitment to a line of action (rather than just reactiveness to momentary demands), who has resources to further this commitment, who refers socially to other people in the process, who can evaluate how things are progressing, who feels (qualia) and has a personal subjective sense of the situation, who can reflect (metacognition) on himself and the context, who positions himself in the social order, and who integrates all the relevant elements of his life into some sort of coherence.
Bruner notes a striking similarity between the elements that compose the core of a narrative and those indicators which identify the presence of a self. They seem to be isomorphic or homologous. Are they convertible into one another? Is self actually a narrative? Bruner’s view is that it is. With Kalmar he writes: ‘Self, then, is a narrative construction, and as such, operates under the same constraints as narrative constructions in general.’19 This is a view that would, I think, find support from other thinkers who have seriously addressed the complexities of ‘self’ as a psychological problem. When Rom Harré speaks of self as a ‘theory’ and the development of self as the process by which the theory that is self is acquired he would be happy, I think, to have Bruner’s concept of self as story in mind. For Harré autobiographical skills are a crucial element in the construction and maintenance of self. Ken Gergen would similarly find much to agree with in Bruner’s arguments, as does Charles Taylor whose work I will introduce in the next chapter. (pg. 52-53)
In Buddhism, the Self is a fiction that we construct to make sense of our worlds. More than 2,500 years ago, the Buddha and his followers came to some of the same conclusions about the nature of the Self that psychologists are just now beginning to fathom. It's no wonder some elements of Buddhism are finding their way into psychotherapy, such as mindfulness or the concept of not-self (generally referred to as no-self, but many people prefer not-self as a more accurate translation).
The "left brain interpreter" mentioned above is tasked (by the brain) with creating a coherent sense of self, and one of the most powerful ways of doing that is to create a narrative. But when we meditate and get to know our minds, it becomes increasingly harder to find a Self amid the thoughts and feelings we experience. This does not mean we have dismantled or transcended the Self, but rather, we have shown it to be what it has always been, a "construct" of the rational mind, not "a real thing" in any absolute sense.
Here is how Caroline Brazier describes the Self, from an Amida Buddhist and practicing psychotherapist (from Buddhism on the Couch):
Buddhist psychology shows how people are constantly recreating themselves out of the patterns of reaction into which they fall. It shows how these patterns are self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating. Although psychologists refer to the self as if it were an entity, in fact this use of language reifies a process that does not result in anything substantial at all. Rather, the self is collection of experiences that constantly forms and re-forms. Like a flock of birds or ripples on a pond, it creates patterns and shapes that often repeat, giving an impression of substance, but it is ultimately non-substantial or empty. (pg. 39)With this quote in mind, does that mean everything I have already posted here is pointless? Not at all.
Knowing that the Self is a fiction we compose to make sense of experience, that it is merely an evolutionary "kluge" that the brain has developed to ensure its survival and the survival of our individual genes, is important to understanding how we might "undo" this process.
Buddhism suggests, rather convincingly, that much of our suffering is due to the belief that this notion of the Self is real and the corresponding attachment to the things it wants (both to have and to avoid). And it offers meditation practices (the various yogas) to dissolve this illusion. However, as Brazier's quote shows, and as one can learn from Dan Siegel's new work on "mindsight," Western psychology is beginning to catch up with what Buddhism has long known.
For me, Cultural Psychology is also an important step in the right direction, but from a much more integrated perspective. It includes the neuroscience and interpersonal elements that Siegel is working with, and it goes further into how we create our sense of self not only from the wiring in our brains, nor only from our interpersonal context, nor from our interior subjective experience, but also from social forces and other environmental factors (our bodies as objects in space - the self/not-self polarity is equated with the here/there polarity, as well as the inside/outside polarity).
More to come on this great book as I get further along.
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