Relevance: Sociology: Paper I: Sociological Thinkers: G.H Mead: Mead – Self and identity.
Theories of Socialisation
Development of self:
During the first months of life, the infant possesses little or no understanding of differences between human beings and material objects in the environment, and has no awareness of self. Children do not begin to use concepts like T, ‘me’ and ‘you’ until the age of about two or after. Only gradually do they then come to understand that others have distinct identities, consciousness and needs separate from their own.
The awareness of self arises in interaction with the social and non-social environment. The social environment is especially important. The development of our personal identity—or self—is a complicated process. The realisation of a distinctive personality is an even more complicated process, which continues throughout life.
The child learns to differentiate between various other people by names—Daddy, Mummy and Baby and he begins to use T which is a sign of definite self-consciousness—that he is becoming aware of himself as a distinct human being (Cooley, 1908). As time passes and social experiences accumulate, he forms an image of the kind of person he is—an image of self. This self develops gradually in the child.
How self emerges?
This is main focus of the problem of socialisation. Here, we shall discuss views of some celebrated authors.
Freud’s theory (psychoanalysis):
Sigmund Freud, the Austrian psychiatrist and founder of psychoanalysis, was not directly concerned with the problem of the individual’s socialisation (he has not used the word ‘socialisation’ anywhere in his writings), he nevertheless contributed amply toward the clarification of the process of personality development. Distinguished sociologist T. Parsons has also adopted Freud’s account of personality development to provide the psychological underpinnings of his theory of socialisation.
Freud challenged Mead and Cooley’s concept of socialised self who saw no separate identity of self and society. Freud believed that rational portion of human conduct was like the visible portion of an iceberg, with the lager part of human motivation resting in the unseen, unconscious focus which powerfully affects human conduct.
Process of personality development:
Freud’s theory of personality (self) development rests on the following process.
He divided the self (human mind) into three parts:
(1) The id,
(2) The ego, and
(3) The superego.
(1) The id represents the instinctive desires, which may be viewed as an unsocialised aspect of human nature. It is the obscure inaccessible part of our personality. It is the source of drives (animal impulses of man—hunger, aggression, and sexual drives) demanding immediate satisfaction in some way or the other. These impulses are controlled and partially repressed into the unconscious, while a reality-oriented conscious self or ego appears.
(2) The ego is the acting individual. It serves as the mediator between desires and action representing the urges of the id when necessary. It tries to mediate the resultant conflicting demands of the id and the superego.
(3) The superego (the conscience) represents the social ideals (norms, values, traditions, the idea of moral and immoral etc.). It is seen as internalised parental and social authority. The parent is no longer outside telling the child what to do, but is inside the psyche, invisibly overseeing the child’s thoughts and actions, praising what is right and making the child feel guilty for wrong doing. For Parsons, the Freudian superego is the key device by which society’s values are transmitted to the child. Thus society’s norms and values are passed down from generation to generation in this way.
The Freudian theory contends that people possess a number of drives or urges connected with satisfying basic needs, such as the need for food or sexual release. These urges, known collectively as the id, seek immediate satisfaction.
In society, however, instant gratification is rarely possible, and id must be controlled. This control is accomplished by what Freud called the superego, the part of the mind that incorporates society’s rules. The id and the superego are in continual conflict. When we are hungry, for example, our id urges us to satisfy’s our hunger in the quickest way possible.
Our superego, however, tells us that this is an unacceptable way to satisfy our hunger. Freud stated that normally developing children develop ego, which reconciles the demands of the id and superego as much as possible.
Freud presents the relation between the id and the ego as similar to that between a horse and its rider. The function of the ego is that of the rider guiding the horse which is the id. But, like the rider, the ego sometimes is unable to guide the horse as it wishes and perforce must guide the id in the direction it is determined to go or in a slightly different direction.
Evaluation of Freud’s theory:
Freud’s all theories have inspired bitter controversies and numerous interpretations. This theory (development of self) is opposite to the views of Cooley and Mead. Cooley and Mead have demonstrated that the very emergence of the self is a social process and not a psychological process as contended by Freud. They have viewed self and society as two aspects of the same thing, whereas Freud finds that the self and society are often opponents and self is basically anti-social.
There is always a clash between the impulses of the self and the restraints of society. Mead and Cooley, on the other hand, viewed self and society as merely different expressions of the same phenomenon. Cooley (1902) writes: “A separate individual is an abstraction unknown to experience In other words; ‘society’ and ‘individuals’ do not denote separate phenomena but are simply collective and distributive aspects of the same thing.” Moreover, it is very difficult to verify empirically the three layers of human mind—id, ego and superego as suggested by Freud.
Cooley’s theory of the ‘looking-glass self:
How does a person arrive at a notion of the kind of person he is? According to Charles Horton Cooley (1902), this concept of self develops through a gradual and complicated process which continues throughout life. He pointed out that when we refer to the self, when we use the word T (the social self is referred to by such words as I, me, mine and myself; the individual distinguishes his ‘self from that of others), we usually not referring to our physical body.
We use the word T to refer to opinions, desires, ideas, feelings, or evaluations of others with whom we interact. Whether one is intelligent, average or stupid, attractive or ugly, these and many other ideas of the self are learned from the reactions of our associates. Even, the elementary knowledge that one tends to be fat or thin, tall or short is a comparative judgment based on the opinions of others.
This process of discovering the nature of the self from the reactions of others has been labelled the looking-glass self by Cooley. Looking-glass self simply means how we see ourselves through the eyes of other people. The idea of looking-glass seems to have been taken from Thackeray’s book Vanity Fair in which it is said: “The world is a looking glass and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.”
Each to each a looking-glass,
Reflects the other that doth pass.
Just as we see our face, figure and dress in the mirror which gives an image of the physical self, so the perception of the reactions of others gives an image of the social self. We “know”, for instance, that we are talented in some field but less talented in others. This knowledge or perception comes to us from the reactions of other persons. Through play and other group activities, one is also helped to perceive the feelings of others and their feelings toward him.
Stages of formation of self:
According to Cooley, there are three steps (stages) in the process of formation of looking-glass self:
- The imagination of our appearance of how we look to others.
- The imagination of their judgment of how we look or how we think others judge our behaviour.
- How we feel about their judgment, i.e., our feelings (self feeling) about their judgments.
We know that we exist, that we are beautiful or ugly, serious or funny, lively or dull etc., through the way other people think of us, of course, but we can imagine how we appear to them and how they evaluate our appearance. We often respond to these imagined evaluations with pride, embarrassment, humiliation or some other feeling. In conclusion, the looking-glass self means that we see ourselves and we respond to ourselves, not as we are and not as other think we are, but as we imagine others think we are.
Evaluation of Cooley’s theory:
There is a difference of opinion among some scholars about the functioning of the ‘looking-glass self. Several researches have been done to seek empirical evidence of the correlation between one’s perception of responses of others and the actual judgments they have made of him. These studies find that there is often a significant variation between individual’s perception of how other pictures him and the views they actually hold. Clearly, it is our perception of the responses of others and not their mutual responses which self-image, and these perceptions are often inaccurate (Horton and Hunt, 1964).
Theory of G.H. Mead (I and me):
American philosopher and social psychologist George Herbert Mead (1934) developed his ideas about the same time that Cooley did in the early years of the twentieth century. He gave particular attention to the emergence of a sense of self. He emphasised the two-part structure of this self and represented this by the terms ‘I’ and ‘me’. He described in detail the whole process of child development and explained how children learn to use the concepts off and ‘me’.
The ‘I’ is the immediate response of an individual to others. It is the unpredictable and creative aspect of the self. People do not know in advance what the action of the ‘I’ will be. “The ‘I’ is the unsocialised infant—a bundle of spontaneous wants and desires” (Giddens, 1997). The ‘I’ reacts against ‘me’. The ‘me’ consists of the attitudes of others that the child adopts and makes his own. Thus, when a parent says things like ‘good child’ or ‘good behaviour’ and ‘bad child’ or ‘bad behaviour’, such communications from ‘significant others’ (parents, siblings, playmates, teachers, relatives) become increasingly patterned or organised into that part of the self that Mead calls the ‘me’.
In other words, the ‘me’ is the adoption of the ‘generalised other’, which according to Mead is the ‘social self. Individuals develop self-consciousness by coming to see themselves as others see them. For Freud this is the outcome of Oedipal phase, while for ‘me’, it is the result of a developed capacity of self-awareness.
In contrast to ‘I’, people are conscious of the ‘me’; the ‘me’ involves conscious responsibility. It is through the ‘me’ that society dominates the individual in the form of social control—the domination of the expression of the ‘me’ over the expression ‘I’.
Phases of the development of self:
Mead traces the genesis of the self through two stages in child development:
(1) Play stage:
At this stage infants and young children develop as social beings first of all by imitating the actions of those around them. In their play small children often imitate what adults do. They often play ‘house’ (Mummy-Papa) or ‘school’ (Teacher- Student), enacting the role of mother, father, teacher, student or any other person important to them—significant others. Mead calls this process as taking the role of others (role-taking)— learning what is to be in the shoes of another person.
By taking the role of these significant others, they can better understand their own roles as children, students, sons or daughters. By practicing the roles of others in play, children learn to understand what others expect of them, and they learn how to behave to meet those expectations. As a result of such play, the child becomes cognisant of himself and obtains a picture of himself by assuming the role of others. However, it is a limited self because the child can take only the role of distinct and separate others. They lack a more general and organised sense of themselves.
(2) Game stage:
It is the next stage of child development, which according to Mead occurs at about eight or nine, the child starts taking part in organised games. To learn organised games, one must understand the rules of the play, notions of fairness and equal participation.
The child at this stage learns to grasp what Mead terms the ‘generalised other’—the general values and moral rules involved in the culture in which he or she is developing. This generalised other is an individual’s total impression of the judgments and expectations that other persons have toward him. At this stage, the sense of the self in the full sense of term emerges.
In the play stage, children are not organised wholes because they play at a series of discrete roles. In Mead’s view they lack definite personalities. However, in the game stage, such organisation begins and a definite personality starts to emerge. Thus, for Mead, taking the role of generalised other, rather than that of discrete others, is essential for the full development of self.
Mead’s theory of development of self is less cumbersome than that of Freud. It has also been very influential, yet it has been criticised on the ground that the concepts used by Mead such as ‘taking the role of other’, ‘making a gesture to one’s self and the ‘generalised other’ are not clear enough. Not only this, the concept of self, which is a combination off and ‘me’, is also ambiguous. Moreover, the theory of Mead does suggest the method of studying social interaction.
Durkheim’s theory of collective representation:
Though Emile Durkheim has not directly talked anywhere in his writings about the development of the sense of self or the process of socialisation of the individual, he has definitely described the role of the society in the formation of personality (attitudes, beliefs and behaviour) of the individuals. In his theory of ‘collective representation’, Durkheim insisted that the individual becomes socialised by adopting the behaviour of his group.
He maintained that the individual’s thought and behaviour are determined by collective representation. By collective representation, he meant the body of experiences, a system of ideas, patterns of behaviour, attitudes and values held in common by a group of people.
Durkheim’s main interest in the relationship of the individual to the group was the group control over the individual. For him, socialisation is a one-way process because he focussed his attention on how society develops and moulds the individual to fit into the group. Durkheim’s conception left little room for individual’s initiative and freedom in the process of socialisation.
This is a great weakness of his theory of collective representation. Durkheim did not recognise any role of the individual in the process of socialisation. How do these representations become a part of the individual or how does collective representation exert pressure over the individual is not fully explained by Durkheim. He utilised his theory of collective representation (theory of socialisation) in explaining the causes of suicide, the social phenomena of religion and the concept of social solidarity etc.
For more such notes, Articles, News & Views Join our Telegram Channel.
Click the link below to see the details about the UPSC –Civils courses offered by Triumph IAS. https://triumphias.com/pages-all-courses.php
One comment