TALE: A Possible Theme called “Life (Self)”

A Unit of Analysis for Discussing Self and Life

On June 20, 2023, I published a possible theme called Context(Mind) which introduces the Ecological Practice approach to Mind. Today I am going to apply the same approach to Self.

I wrote a piece about the idea of Life(Self) in a previous article titled Themes in the Field: Self, Agency, and Activity (Part II). This post will detach it from the original article and attach it to a new theme.

Though the theme Life(Self) was born on June 2, 2023, this post is inspired by Carlos E. Perez’s thread about cross-cultural models of being and being in a relationship.

• Name: Life (Self)
• Clue: …
• Type: Knowledge Themes
• Contributors: Carlos E. Perez
• Reference: The Curated Mind, The Ecological Practice Approach
• Related themes: Context(Mind), Possible Persona, Mental Moves,

Originally, the idea of Life(Self) is the outcome of a rough literature review on self theories in the field of psychology.

A Rough Literature Review

The primary theme of the Personas Dynamics framework is “Self — Personas — Role” and its secondary themes are “Past — Present — Future”, “Possible — Actual” and “Activity”.

I selected Possible Selves Theory as the starting point of my journey of literature reviews. More specifically, I used a 2001 paper titled Possible Selves as the starting point for exploring the landscape of Possible Selves Theory on Connected Papers. See the screenshot below.

From the above graph, I found three milestones of the development of the theory.

• 1977: Self-schemata and processing information about the self (3828 citations)
• 1987: The Dynamic Self-Concept: A Social Psychological Perspective (2977 citations)
• 2001: Possible Selves (3487 citations)

Many years ago, I read the 2001 paper and some literature reviews about the theory. I roughly knew the historical development of the theory. In different stages, Hazel Rose Markus uses different terms for her theory:

• Self-schemata
• Self-Concept
• Self-knowledge

The significance of the theory is connecting Cognition and Motivation in order to research human anticipatory behavior.

Possible selves are the cognitive components of hopes, fears, goals, and threats, and they give the specific self-relevant form, meaning, organization, and direction to these dynamics.

Possible selves are important, first, because they function as incentives for future behavior (i.e., they are selves to be approached or avoided) and second, because they provide an evaluative and interpretive context for the current view of self.

What I really want to explore about the theory are the following two questions:

• What’s the relationship between Possible Selves Theory and Self-determination Theory?
• How did people use Possible Selves Theory to develop models or frameworks for intervention programs?

In fact, the first question led to a general view of the concept of “Self” in the field of psychology.

The second question is about connecting THEORY and PRACTICE which was the primary theme of my creative journey from 2020 to 2022.

Two Views of Self

I moved to read books and papers about Self-Determination Theory and found a helpful piece about the general view of Self in a book about Self-Determination Theory.

In a broad sense, there are two views of Self in the field of Psychology:

• Self-as-object
• Self-as-subject or Self-as-process

This typology was developed by Dan P. McAdams in his 1990 book The Person: An introduction to personality psychology.

In a 2017 book titled Self-Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness, authors Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci review various views of self in chapter 3 titled Human Autonomy: Philosophical Perspectives and the Phenomenology of Self.

They start with the following piece:

The term self carries quite distinct meanings in different psychological theories, and there is a particularly salient contrast between its meaning within social-cognitive perspectives and in organismic approaches. Most social-cognitive views can be traced to the tradition of the looking-glass self (Cooley, 1902; Mead, 1934), in which the term self is primarily employed to represent an object of one’s own perceptions.

In this tradition, the self is understood as a constructed concept, image, or representation (viz., self-concept) accompanied by a collection of mechanisms for governing action (viz., self-schemas) that are usually oriented toward verifying, enhancing, or protecting this representation. Thus the self referred to in the constructs of self-concept, self-perception, self-esteem, and many other hyphenated self- terms concern what McAdams (1990) referred to as self-as-object.

As Harter (2012) recently summarized, most of the attention in empirical psychology has historically been on this self-as-object or “me-self” idea, and it continues to be an active focus of research (e.g., Oyserman, Elmore, & Smith, 2012; Sedikides & Gaertner, 2001).

By contrast, the self of organismic psychologies has typically (though with some notable exceptions) concerned what McAdams (1990) characterized as the self-as-subject and what we refer to as self-as-process (Ryan, 1995; Ryan & Rigby 2015) — that is, the self that is phenomenally experienced as both a center of experience and as the initiator and regulator of volitional behavior.

(p.52)

It’s clear that Possible Selves Theory belongs to the camp of self-as-object.

Now I have to cope with a theoretical challenge: Can I use ideas from Possible Selves Theory and Self-Determination Theory in a knowledge framework such as the Persona Dynamics framework?

Since they have different views of self, I have to evaluate the value of adopting ideas from them for my frameworks.

I also notice that Dan P. McAdams’s 2013 paper offers a new framework about the psychological self.

The psychological self may be construed as a reflexive arrangement of the subjective “I” and the constructed “Me,” evolving and expanding over the human life course. The psychological self begins life as a social actor, construed in terms of performance traits and social roles.

By the end of childhood, the self has become a motivated agent, too, as personal goals, motives, values, and envisioned projects for the future become central features of how the I conceives of the Me.

A third layer of selfhood begins to form in the adolescent and emerging adulthood years, when the self as autobiographical author aims to construct a story of the Me, to provide adult life with broad purpose and a dynamic sense of temporal continuity.

An integrative theory that envisions the psychological self as a developing I–Me configuration of actor, agent, and author helps to synthesize a wide range of conceptions and findings on the self from social, personality, cognitive, cultural, and developmental psychology and from sociology and other social sciences.

The actor–agent–author framework also sheds new light on studies of self-regulation, self-esteem, self-continuity, and the relationship between self and culture.

Dan P. McAdams sees the I-Me configuration as a dynamic process. It seems that this new framework is a solution to bridge Self-as-object and Self-as-subject (or Self-as-process).

Self-System Therapy

My second question led me to find some new theoretical resources. I started with the following paper:

Possible Selves: Implications for Psychotherapy

The paper is devoted to the therapeutic applications of theories and research concerning self-regulation issues. The key concept here is possible selves, defined as an element of self-knowledge that refers to what a person perceives as potentially possible. The main idea of using knowledge about possible selves in psychotherapy is based on their functions as standards in self-regulatory processes. The problem of the changeability of possible selves and self-standards is analyzed in the context of their role in behavior change. The paper also presents the assumptions of Self-System Therapy — a newly developed cognitive therapy for depression, drawing directly on self-regulation theory and research.

To be honest, I am not familiar with the field of Psychotherapy because I don’t pay attention to the field. However, this paper shows me an example of from THEORY to PRACTICE.

The author Waclaw Bak uses “future-projected” and “cognitive representations” to describe the concept of Possible Selves.

According to Markus and Nurius’s (1986) classic approach, possible selves are a “future-projected” aspects of self-knowledge, which refers to what a person perceives as potentially possible with regard to himself or herself. Like all self-knowledge, possible selves are largely based on past experiences, but their essence lies in clear references to the future. They may be said to be imagined visions of oneself in the future (Erikson 2007; Hoyle and Sherrill 2006). As such, they are cognitive representations of hopes, fears, and fantasies regarding oneself.

If we only consider “future-projected” and “cognitive representations”, and remove “hopes, fears, and fantasies regarding oneself” from the concept of “Possible Selves”, then we can get a general version of “Possible Selves”.

Or, we can directly use a new term called “Anticipatory Selves” for the Persona Dynamics framework.

Markus and Nurius’s (1986) classic approach uses “hopes, fears, and fantasies regarding oneself” to define the content of “Possible Selves”. Though this model is useful for some situations, I think that we can use other types of content of “Possible Selves” for my framework.

In the second half of the paper, Waclaw Bak introduces Self-System Therapy.

Self-System Therapy (SST) is a proposal of therapeutic intervention aimed at people whose depression problems stem from ineffective self-regulation (Vieth et al. 2003). The theoretical basis of SST is Higgins’s (1987) Self-Discrepancy Theory, describing the relations between the structure of the self and emotions, as well as a somewhat later theory by the same author — Regulatory Focus Theory (Higgins 1997), describing the promotion-focused vs. prevention-focused self-regulatory styles. The originators of SST assume that one of the major sources of depression is chronic failures — repeated or individual but concerning very important life domains — in achieving desirable states of affairs. In the language of Higgins’s (1987, 1997) theory, this means those aspects of self-regulation that are realized using promotion-focused strategies — as opposed to prevention-focused ones, which govern the avoidance of undesirable states.

What’s the connection between THEORY and PRACTICE?

• THEORY: Higgins’s (1987) Self-Discrepancy Theory/Regulatory Focus Theory (Higgins 1997)
• PRACTICE: Self-System Therapy (SST)

How does the connection work? In a 2006 paper about Self-System Therapy, we can find the following answer:

SST incorporates techniques from a number of empirically supported psychotherapies (cf. Beutler, Clarkin, & Bongar, 2000), including CT, interpersonal psychotherapy, and behavioral activation therapy ( Jacobson, Martell, & Dimidjian, 2001).

However, SST was designed to translate the principles of regulatory focus theory into an intervention for examining and modifying the individual’s goals and strategies for pursuing them (Avants, Margolin, & Singer, 1994; Moretti, Higgins, & Feldman, 1990).

SST can be summarized in four questions: What are your promotion and prevention goals? What are you doing to try to attain them? What is keeping you from making progress? What can you do differently? SST was designed so that within an overall emphasis on self-regulation, specific interventions from other therapies could be incorporated easily, allowing the patient and therapist to bring a broad range of techniques to bear on the patient’s difficulties in goal pursuit.

For example, SST emphasizes the use of behavioral activation, as do behavioral activation therapy and other therapies. However, in SST, behavioral activation is used in the service of enhancing promotion goal pursuit — that is, “What can you do today that would help you make progress toward that goal?” To the extent that SST is differentially efficacious for depressed individuals with problems in self-regulation, such efficacy would derive from its overall emphasis rather than from any specific techniques or interventions.

From the above description, we can see a simple schema of psychotherapy:

• Principles
• Techniques
• Guiding Questions

Even Self-System Therapy uses some techniques from other psychotherapies, it still can establish its own uniqueness because the configuration of principles, techniques, and guiding questions can be different from other psychotherapies.

Carl Jung’s phenomenology of Self

In a 2017 book titled Self-Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness, authors Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci review various views of self in chapter 3 titled Human Autonomy: Philosophical Perspectives and the Phenomenology of Self.

The authors mention Carl Jung’s phenomenology of Self and his psychoanalytic theory.

Among the most complex of the dynamic psychologies of self is that developed by Carl Jung, who also viewed the self as an organismic endowment. Jung (1951, 1959) referred to the self (to distinguished from both ego and persona) as the center of the psyche that represents the potential for integration or unity of the whole personality. The self provides the impetus or spirit for realization of potentialities, which ultimately involves the unification and synthesis of the personality as a whole. For Jung, this tendency toward realization and integration, which he described also as individuation, was a vital principle so basic that it simply described the very propensities of life (Nagy, 1991).

(Source: Self-Determination Theory, 2017, p.61)

Jung used the term “Persona” to describe one of the personality components. The authors don’t offer more details about it. So I searched it on the web and found a related piece from a 2019 paper about the process of Self-Realization.

4) Archetypes. It is important to emphasize that the self is the integration and improvement of personality resulting from a continuous process of development that Jung calls individuation or the inherent unity of human being with its own nature (Brinich & Shelley, 2002) .

Individuation as a developmental process involves the differentiation and integration of such personality components as: the ego (the organizer of the conscious mind), the shadow (the unconscious aspect of the individual), the persona (the social mask adopted in response to the requirements of the environment) and the animus/anima (the male and female contradictions of the person).

By exercising the psychological functions of thinking, feeling and intuition, they gradually pass under the conscious control of the self, which constitutes the new, recent ego, so that the person attains self-realization, thus becoming an individual who feels the psychic fulfillment.

Jung can be called a precursor of transpersonal psychology as he confers the primordial role of the spirit in human actions and brings the soul and the spirit to the counseling room, offering invaluable concepts and techniques for the psychological work.

The need for individuation, this genuine “evolutionary process of personality,” is viewed by Jung as introspection, which it regards as “self-focusing” and which, far from subduing it, regards it as an integrative, unifying process: “Introspection or the need for individualization — which is the same thing — gathers what is scattered and multiple, elevating them to the original form of the One, the primordial man.

Through this separate existence, the Ego category is abolished, the circle of consciousness is widened and, through the awareness of paradoxes, the sources of conflict are exhausted” (Jung, 1994: pp. 167–168) .

There are four components in Jung’s theory of personality:

• the ego (the organizer of the conscious mind)
• the shadow (the unconscious aspect of the individual)
• the persona (the social mask adopted in response to the requirements of the environment)
• the animus/anima (the male and female contradictions of the person)

Source: Reddit/r/Jung

Jung used “social mask” to define “Persona”. It seems that he used the term “Persona” to describe passive behavior because it is caused by “response to the requirements of the environment”. In general, Jung used “Persona” as a concept to study the socialization of a person.

In contrast, I used the term “Persona” to describe active behavior because it is caused by “engaging with certain activities with positive subjective experience” in the Personas Dynamics Framework (v1.0).

We also have to compare Jung’s concept network with my concept network because the whole concept network offers the context for its members.

Jung’s concept network can be understood as a theory of Mind and a theory of Socialization.

• A theory of Mind = Shadow (unconscious mind) + Ego (conscious mind)
• A theory of Socialization = Self (true self) + Persona (social mask)

I didn’t incorporate a theory of Mind in the Personas Dynamics Framework (v1.0). So, my framework can be seen as a theory of Socialization.

• My theory of Socialization = Person + Persona + Social Role

How did I define these three concepts? See the table below.

My goal was to insert a new unit of analysis between “Person” and “Social Role”. My strategy is to discover the need for a new unit of analysis from the following aspects:

• Situations
• Duration
• Practice
• Interaction

The concept of “Persona” was used to highlight the following possibilities:

• Situations: Public and Private
• Duration: Short term
• Practice: Possible Practice
• Interaction: Exploratory Actions

You can find more details about Personas Dynamics frameworks in Themes in the Field: Self, Agency, and Activity (Part I).

The Landscape of “Self” Knowledge

In a broad sense, there are two views of Self in the field of Psychology:

• Self-as-object
• Self-as-subject or Self-as-process

This typology was developed by Dan P. McAdams in his 1990 book The Person: An introduction to personality psychology.

I used this typology to test the “Universal Reference for Knowledge Engagement” diagram. See the diagram below.

The Vertical group refers to the Degrees of Abstraction of “Knowledge”.

The “Theory — Practice” dimension is shared with the following pairs of concepts:

• The “Heaven — Earth” dimension
• The “Langue — Space” dimension
• The “Episteme — Empeiria” dimension

The “Langue” refers to universal concepts or vocabulary while “Space” refers to spatial structure and immediate embodied experience.

Langue and parole is a theoretical linguistic dichotomy distinguished by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics. Langue refers to the abstract system of language while parole means concrete speech.

From the view of “Self-as-Object”, there are a set of terms which is called “Self-concept”. We can place these self-concepts in the layer of “Langue (language).”

From the view of “Self-as-Process” (Self-as-Subject), the self can be seen in a process of dynamic development. At different times, we see a concrete content of an abstract Self-concept. So, we can place “Self-as-Process” in the layer of “Parole (speech)”.

Moreover, we can see a distinction between Researchers and Actors. While Researchers only care about the above two views, Actors only consider the third view: “Myself”.

From the perspective of researchers, “Myself” is a mystery for scientific work. They have to build a “DATA — HYPOTHESIS” formula in order to turn the “Myself” from original experience into scientific knowledge such as “Self-as-Process” or “Self-as-Object”.

From the perspective of a particular actor, “Myself” is not a mystery. He/she has his/her own Spontaneous Concept System of “Myself”. However, “Self-as-Process” and “Self-as-Object” refer to a large Scientific Defined Concept System.

These two types of concept systems don’t need fully fit at all times.

The Horizontal group refers to the Situations of Activity of “Engagement”. In the diagram of the landscape of “Self” Knowledge, the Horizontal group refers to a person’s real “Life”.

The “Means — End” dimension is shared with the following pairs of concepts:

• The “Birth — Death” dimension
• The “Attach — Detach” dimension
• The “Self — Other” dimension

The “Means — End” dimension is adopted from Activity Theory.

The “Birth — Death” dimension refers to the “alive” status of things. Actions and Activities are only “alive” when we are acting. At the end of an activity, the thing we worked on is produced. It’s done. It’s no longer alive. If we use it in a new activity, it becomes alive again.

The “Attach — Detach” dimension considers the reference space as a container. People attach their minds to the reference space and detach their minds from the reference space.

The “Self — Other” dimension is about the “Self — Other” Relevance.

These dimensions indicate that “Life” is the container of “Self”. We can’t understand the “Self” without understanding the “Life”. This insight returns to the Ecological Practice Approach’s basic model: Container (Containee):

Life (Self)

This is a significant insight! It means I can develop a theory about “Self” from the perspective of the Ecological Practice Approach. I can also apply “Life (Self)” to the Creative Life Theory project.

References:

• The Self (Jonathon Brown, 2007)
• The Perceived Self: Ecological and Interpersonal Sources of Self-knowledge (Edited by Ulric Neisser, 1993)
• Self-Determination Theory: Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness (Richard Ryan & Edward Deci, 2017)