self and identity

• Cultural psychology


  • "universalism without uniformity" (Shweder & Sullivan, 1993)
  • Integrative, seeking to fuse individual and cultural levels of analysis (Moghaddam, 2002)
  • Acknowledges the possibility of universal processes but the content of these processes varies (emics v/s etics)
• The original perspective (individualistic v/s collectivistic or independent v/s interdependent) is too broad and does not allow to understand the complex depth of the individual experience of identity development in cultural context
• Identity


  Ideology recognized through the individual engagement with discourse, made manifest in a personal narrative constructed and reconstructed across the life course and scripted in and through social interaction and social practice. The content of identity is inherently ideological, assuming a narrative structure and realized in and through social experience
• Identity is an ideology
• Erikson (1958)


  Claimed identity is primarily connected to processes of ideological identification that are themselves connected to the intergenerational transmission and social reproduction of a culture
• Erikson connected processes of individual identity formation— in the form of ideological identification—to larger sociohistorical movements
• Luther's (the case of a young adolescent he presented) ideological rebellion is tied to his struggle to form an identity that would fulfill the basic function of psychological security
• "In this case, ideology was the social institution which is the guardian of identity" (Erikson, 1968, p.133)
• Personal ideology


  Associated with a person's values, beliefs about human nature, beliefs about religion and politics, the nature of remembered life event
• Personal ideology possesses emotional correlates and is therefore central to the formation of identity as it offers value-laden content to the life story associated with identifications (religious, political etc...)
• Bringing Erikson's and St. Aubien's theories together, Mc Adams et al. (1997) found that generativity was associated with the ability to offer a concise personal ideology
• Ideological identity


  • Cultural component
  • Individual cognitive component
• If ideology provides the basic cognitive content of identity, it is in narrative that ideological identifications assume a coherent structure
• It is through the construction of personal narrative that the life course achieves its coherence, its continuity in social, cultural, and historical time (Cohler, 1982)
• To fully know a person, we must know more than just his or her "traits" or "personal concerns"; we must know his or her identity (McAdams, 1995)
• Conceptualizing identity as narrative may be especially useful in the context of competing discourses created by a globalized, postmodern world because identity becomes increasingly a reflexive project (Giddens, 1991)
• The stories of a culture—stories of national identity, struggle, suffering, and resilience—become the stories of an individual as he or she constructs his or her own personal narrative, fusing elements of daily experience (themselves dependent on his or her particular social identity and its status in a larger social order) with the experience of a collective to which he or she perceives some affinity
• The degree of this affinity will vary as a function of the relative perception of collective identity threat and hence the perception of a need to affiliate with the group at all costs (Bar-Tal, 2004; Pettigrew, 2003)
• The self is constituted by or in terms of social process and are individual reflections of it = importance of interaction and social mediation (Mead, 1934)
• Identity development is connected to mediated action and symbolic tools such as such as language
• The act of narrating one's life story involves the transformation of inner speech into social speech, offering an expression of identity = it is a social process
• Self and society are linked in a cyclically reproduced pattern of activity that both produces and is reproduced by individual selves