Examine "The Self as Social Emergent" from G.H.Mead's perspective. (20 Marks)
- In Mind, Self and Society (1934), Mead (Symbolic Interactionist) describes how the individual mind and self-arises out of the social process. Instead of approaching human experience in terms of individual psychology, Mead analyses experience from the “standpoint of communication as essential to the social order.”
- Individual psychology, for Mead, is intelligible only in terms of social processes. The “development of the individual’s self, and of his self- consciousness within the field of his experience” is pre-eminently social. For Mead, the social process is prior to the structures and processes of individual experience.
- Self is the peculiar ability to be both subject and object. The self presupposes a social process – communication among humans. Lower animals do not have selves, nor do human infants at birth.
- The self-arises with development and through social activity and social relationships. To Mead, it is impossible to imagine a self-arising in the absence of social experiences. However, once a self has developed, it is possible for it to continue to exist without social contact. The self is dialectically related to the mind. That is, on the one hand, the body is not a self and becomes a self only when a mind has developed. On the other hand, the self, along with its reflexiveness, is essential to the development of the mind. However, even though we may think of it as a mental process, the self is a social process. In this way, Mead seeks to give a behaviouristic sense of the self.
- The general mechanism for the development of the self is reflexivity, or the ability to put ourselves unconsciously into others’ places and to act as they act. As a result, people are able to examine themselves as others would examine them. The self also allows people to take part in their conversations with others. That is, one is aware of what one is saying and as a result is able to monitor what is being said and to determine what is going to be said next. In order to have selves, individuals must be able to get ‘outside themselves’ so that they can evaluate themselves, so that they can become objects to themselves. To do this, people basically put themselves in the same experiential field as they put everyone else. However, people cannot experience themselves directly. They can do so only indirectly by putting themselves in the position of others and viewing themselves from that standpoint. The standpoint from which one views one’s self can be that of a particular individual or that of the social group as a whole.
In Mead’s analysis, ‘Self’ is greatly dynamic because –
- It carries the capability to read the self of others
- It has capability to go for internal interaction between ‘I’ and ‘Me’
- It has capability to communicate with ‘mind’
- According to mead, ‘Self’ of an individual is a process and not a thing. It is not a biological phenomenon and individual is not born with a self, but it develops as individual grows in society and is developed through communication and interactions.
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