consciousness, identity and self
DESCRIPTION
Lecture on influential conceptions of consciousness in psychology, social psychology and sociology and their relationship to ideas about identity and self.TRANSCRIPT
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INDIVIDUAL MIND AND SOCIETYLecture Number 6: Consciousness, Identity and Self
Lecturer: Dr Chris Till
Email: [email protected]
“O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams”William Shakespeare Hamlet
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Consciousness Awareness, subjectivity, thinking, feeling, a
sense of self Eg, critical self-reflection, comparing oneself to
others, thought and reflection of which we are aware
Unconscious Aspects and processed of the mind which are not
available to consciousness Eg, dreams, habitual though patterns, memories
which have been forgotten
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“Unlike other animals, we not only know; we know that we know. We are aware of being aware, conscious of ‘having’ consciousness, of being conscious. Our knowledge is itself an object of knowledge: we can gaze at our thoughts ‘the same way’ we look at our hands or feet and at the ‘things’ which surround our bodies not being part of them”
Zygmunt Bauman Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies
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“Self-awareness, reason, and imagination have disrupted the ‘harmony’ that characterizes animal existence. Their emergence has made man into an anomaly, the freak of the universe. He is part of nature, subject to her physical laws and unable to change them, yet he transcends nature; he is set apart while being a part; he is homeless, yet chained to the home he shares with all creatures…Being aware of himself, he realizes his powerlessness and the limitations of his existence”
Erich Fromm The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
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WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS? Descartes
Cogito ergo sum Evidence of senses could be misleading but the fact that I am
thinking and doubting must be evidence that my consciousness exists
Individual thought and consciousness came to be seen as central, essential and fundamental
“I thereby concluded that I was a substance, of which the whole essence or nature consists in thinking, and which, in order to exist, needs no place and depends on no material thing”
See Discourse on Method and Burkitt Social Selves, chapter 1. Nietzsche
“I think” assumes: An “I”, an “I” that can be the cause of something, a
relationship between cause and effect, “thinking” See Beyond Good and Evil Chapter 1, aphorism 16.
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THE INTERNAL WORLD
Every instinct which does not vent itself externally turns inwards—this is what I call the internalization of man: it is at this point that what is later called the ‘soul’ first develops in man. The whole inner world, originally stretched thinly as between two membranes, has been extended and expanded, has acquired depth, breadth, and height in proportion as the external venting of human instincts has been inhibited. (Nietzsche 2008: 65).
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CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS
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Freud to Jung on arriving in New York:
“They don't realize we're bringing them the plague”
See Jacques-Alain Miller
“The Desire of Lacan and his complex relation to Freud”
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THE UNCONSCIOUS
Human beings driven by animal instincts still existing in the unconscious mind
Instincts are transformed by society through repression and sublimation forming the conscious mind
From “pleasure principle”
To “reality principle”
Immediate satisfaction Delayed satisfaction
Pleasure Restraint of pleasure
Joy (play) Toil (work)
Receptiveness Productiveness
Absence of repression Security
Table adapted from Marcuse, H. (1969) Eros and Civilization. London: Sphere.
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CONSCIOUSNESS Child has no perception of separation between internal
world of mind and external world. Awareness of separation develops from obstacles placed
in the way of attainment of pleasure. Ego becomes disengaged from mass of sensations in
external world Gain sense of self and develop “reality principle” “An infant at the breast does not as yet distinguish his ego
from the external world as the source of the sensations flowing in upon him” 14
“Our present ego-feeling is, therefore, only a shrunken residue of a much more inclusive—indeed, an all-embracing—feeling which corresponded to a more intimate bond between the ego and the world about it” 15
See Civilization and its Discontents (particularly chapter 1)
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THE STRUCTURE OF THE MIND Id
Major part of the unconscious, disorganized, irrational.
Ego coherent organization of mental
processes, barrier between conscious and unconscious. Consistent with reason and common sense
Ego-ideal How we would like to be
Super-ego Largely unconscious, conscience,
contains ego ideal, produces guilt, aligned with parents, teachers, etc.
See Freud’s essays ‘Repression’, ‘The Unconscious’ and ‘The Ego and Id’
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CONSCIOUSNESS IN SOCIOLOGY
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ELIAS
Built sociogenetic approach onto Freud’s psychogenetic approach
Develop sense of self and individuality through internalization of social constraints
Manners and etiquette become more stringent over history
Social stability enabled people to look into their inner world – “internal pacification”
“Court Society” promoted Self-reflection “Objective” attitude towards self Seeing self as “one among many”
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ELIAS
Less complex societies, more direct connection between individual and environment, everything seems to be directly related to feeling, more “involved”
More complex societies we increasingly “conceal our passions” and “act against our feelings”. See ourselves as one among others, more “detached”.
Development of consciousness and repression of unconscious necessary for development of rationality
Greater detachment enabled development of rationality, empiricism and science
See Elias’ The Civilizing Process (handout) and Involvement and Detachment
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GEORGE HERBERT MEAD
“I” Response of the organism to attitudes of others
“Me” Organized set of attitudes of others which one
assumes Consciousness requires organized sense of self,
an object that can be reflected upon “…it is due to the individual’s ability to take the
attitudes of […] others in so far as they can be organized that he gets self-consciousness. The taking of all those organized sets of attitudes gives him his “me” ”
See G.H. Mead Mind Self and Society.
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THE CONSCIOUS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS IN SOCIETYRace, art and politics
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RACE AND DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS
W.E.B. Du Bois Double consciousness
American and “Negro” Black people in America are
“…born with a veil, and gifted with second sight” “One ever feels his twoness, - an American, a
Negro two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings”
See W.E.B. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk and Paul Gilroy The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness.
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AN
DR
E B
RETO
N
“Under the pretense of civilization and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices”
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SURREALISM AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
Revolution of the mind Unlock the unconscious through drawing on
imagery of dreams Sought to remove barriers from unconscious “The imagination is perhaps on the point of
reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights. If the depths of our mind contain within it strange forces capable of augmenting those on the surface, or of waging a victorious battle against them, there is every reason to seize them -- first to seize them, then, if need be, to submit them to the control of our reason”.
See Andre Breton Manifesto of Surrealism (1924)
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POLITICS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS Conservative - Philip Rieff
Repression of instinctual drives by society produced dissatisfaction, suffering and neurosis.
3 ideals dominated Western culture all “commitment” based Political Man Economic Man Religious man
Freud provides new “psychological man” Consolation based on release of instinctual
drives and private well-being rather than commitment to a cause.
See Gabriel Freud and Society
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POLITICS AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
Marcuse synthesised Freud and Marx Self-realization through satisfaction of individual
desires damages critical capacity producing “One Dimensional Man”
Marx’s concept of man was one who needs the world and whose passions lie in potential to collectively achieve goals.
“No longer used as a full-time instrument of labour, the body would be resexualized….The body in its entirety would become an object of cathexis, a thing to be enjoyed – an instrument of pleasure” Marcuse
See Herbert Marcuse Eros and Civilization and One Dimensional Man
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SUMMARY
Consciousness produced through self-awareness, taking oneself as an object
Separation between conscious and unconscious produced through internalization of social norms
Conscious and unconscious often in conflict Consciousness developed historically through
increasingly stringent social constraints Theories of consciousness and unconscious
influenced politics on the left and right
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TUTORIAL READINGS
Freud, S. (2004 [1930]) Civilization and its Discontents. London: Penguin. Chapter 1:
http://www.archive.org/details/CivilizationAndItsDiscontents
Marcuse, H. (1969) Eros and Civilization. London: Sphere. Chapter 1:
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/eros-civilisation/ch01.htm
Elias, N (2000) The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell (Volume II, Part 4, V: ‘The Muting of Drives: Psychologization and Rationalization’)
See photocopy
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TUTORIAL QUESTIONS
1. What is the relationship between consciousness, the unconscious and repression? To what extent do you agree that repression is a necessary part of society?
2. How does Elias develop Freud’s understanding of consciousness?
3. How is the notion of rationality related to consciousness in the work of Freud and Elias?
4. “Self-awareness, reason, and imagination have disrupted the ‘harmony’ that characterizes animal existence. Their emergence has made man into an anomaly, the freak of the universe” (Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness). To what extent do you agree with this quotation?