Year: 1994
Type: article
Abstract: The major focus of this dissertation is to render a clear and coherent account of the nature of the phenomena of interest to psychology and psychological therapy. It is argued that individuals' acquisition of a theory of self is central to the development of personal agency and the structuring of human psychology. Self is explicated as a theory through which one learns to structure and interpret experience. It is proposed that self, as a fundamentally social phenomenon, issues from two interlocking conditions necessary for its possibility. The first of these conditions is intersubjectivity. Self develops through one's participation in the social webs of conversation and practical interrelations carried on within a culture. The second condition concerns human morality. Requisite to selfhood, are historically cultivated, moral goods that confer some answer to inescapable existential questions about what gives human life meaning and value. Self arises by individuals taking up and identifying with morally sigdicant self-descriptions or self-theories that are countenanced and conveyed by cultures. In turn, these moral descriptions furnish an orientation for individuals' intentions and purposes. The implication is that interpreting the intentions and actions of human agents demands construing them in terms of inescapable moral questions and the partial answers, or self-theories, to which they are committed. If we fail t o find application for these questions, then we fail to find application for the notions of self, person, agency, and so forth. Self manifests the human aspiration to make sense of things, by giving form to that which matters for us. It confers meaning on one's life by sustaining the particular goods intrinsic to that meaning. From this perspective, self is to be construed as an animating metaphor shaped by moral concerns. These two conditions, the intersubjective and the moral, are elucidated respectively in terms of the social constructionist thesis of Rom Harre (1984,1986,1987a) and the moral philosophy of Charles Taylor (1988a, 1989,1991). The implications of this ontology are discussed in terms of the aims and conduct of psychological research and psychotherapeutic practice.
Source: Summit (Simon Fraser University)
Author: Jeff Sugarman
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W400891291