Forever Becoming: Self-development

Left hemisphere - Right hemisphere
Separate - Connected
Centrifugal - Centripetal

Rights - Responsibilities

Morals - Rules

Inner - Outer

Individual - Collective

Masculine - Feminine

Father - Mother

Symbolic - Real

1. Revealed Self

The self is uncovered by emancipating it from givens, e.g. parents, tradition, psychopathology, etc. Relates to the Orthodox Christian notion of the self being essentially good, and made bad by earthly influences.

2. Developed Self

The self is moulded to a desired pattern by outside influences. Relates to the Heretical notion that the self is essentially bad and in need of guidance to be good.

Personality: the supreme realization of the innate idiosyncrasy of a living being.

Personality can never develop unless the individual chooses his own way, consciously and with moral deliberation.

A man can make a moral decision to go his own way only if he holds that way to be the best. If any other way were held to be better, then he would live and develop that other personality instead of his own. The other ways are conventionalities of a moral, social, political, philosophical, or religious nature. The fact that the conventions always flourish in one form or another only proves that the vast majority of mankind do not choose their own way, but convention, and consequently develop not themselves but a method and a collective mode of life at the cost of their own wholeness.

The smaller the personality, the dimmer and more unconscious it becomes, until finally it merges indistinguishably with the surrounding society, thus surrendering its own wholeness and dissolving into the wholeness of the group. In the place of the inner voice there is the voice of the group with its conventions, and vocation [the path of the inner voice] is replaced by collective necessities.

Conventions are soulless mechanisms that can never understand more than the mere routine of life. Creative life always stands outside convention. That is why, when the mere routine of life predominates in the form of convention and tradition, there is bound to be a destructive outbreak of creative energy.

The mechanism of convention keeps people unconscious, for in that state they can follow their accustomed tracks like blind brutes, without the need for conscious decision. This unintended result of even the best conventions is unavoidable, but is no less a terrible danger for that.

[C.G. Jung]
The Essential Jung, p.195, 198, 202

'Has due recognition been given', Winnicott asks pointedly, 'to the need for everything to be discovered afresh by every individual analyst?'

It was a position reactive to a Society which had, in Winnicott's view, equated development within a tradition with an uncritical compliance to the tradition.

[Adam Phillips]
Winnicott, p.91

[...] we cannot expect him always to be the aristos. We are all sometimes of the Many. But he will avoid membership.

There can be no organization to which he fully belongs; no country, no class, no church, no political party. He needs no uniform, no symbols; his ideas are his uniform, his actions are his symbols, because above all he tries to be a free force in a world of tied forces.

[John Fowles]
The Aristos, p.212

[On 'modern-minded man']

His highest hope is to think first what is about to be thought, to say what is about to be said, and to feel what is about to be felt; he has no wish to think better thoughts than his neighbours, to say things showing more insight, or to have emotions which are not those of some fashionable group, but only to be slightly ahead of others in points of time.

Quite deliberately he suppresses what is individual in himself for the sake of the admiration of the herd.

To be pointed out, admired, mentioned constantly in the press, and offered easy ways of earning much money is highly agreeable; and when all this is open to a man, he finds it difficult to go on doing the work that he himself thinks best and is inclined to subordinate his judgement to general opinion.

[Bertrand Russell]
Unpopular Essays ('On Being Modern-minded'), p.78, 79

There is no such thing as an effective segment of a totality.

By that I mean that I personally do not believe in the word style.

Why? Because, unless there are human beings with three arms and four legs, unless we have another group of beings on earth that are structurally different from us, there can be no different style of fighting.

Why is that?

Because we have two hands and two legs. Now the unfortunate thing is that there's boxing, which uses hands, and judo which uses throwing.

I'm not putting them down, mind you - but because of styles, people are separated. They are not united together because styles become law.

The original founder of the style started out with a hypothesis. But now it has become the gospel truth, and people who go into that become the product of it.

It doesn't matter how you are, who you are, how you are structured, how you are built, or how you are made...it doesn't seem to matter. You just go in there and become that product. And that, to me, is not right.

So styles tend to not only separate man because they have their own doctrines, and the doctrines became the gospel internal truth, that you cannot change, you know?

But if you do not have style, if you just say, "Here i am, as a human being, how can i express myself totally and completely?" - that way, you won't create a style, because style is a crystallization, as opposed to a internal process of continuing growth.

Man, he is constantly growing and when he is bound by a set pattern of ideas or way of doing things, that's when he stops growing.

[Bruce Lee]

The YELLOW MEME thinks and acts from an inner-directed core. The individual gyroscopes that enable the person to keep balance in a paradoxical world spin within the principled, knowledgable self. Such people have strong ethical anchors of their own reasoned choosing, derived from many sources but are not entrapped by rigid rules based in external dogma or mandates of authority.

[...] one develops confidence in the self-generated messages and instructions that emanate from one's core beliefs.

[Don Edward Beck & Christopher C. Cowan]
Spiral Dynamics, p.278

So often in our lives, we act as though there were only one set of rules. For instance, in cooking we tend to follow recipes with dutiful precision. We add ingredients as though by official decree. If the recipe calls for a pinch of salt and four pinches fall in, panic strikes, as though the bowl might now explode.

Thinking of a recipe as a rule, we often do not consider how people's tastes vary, or what fun it might be to make up a new dish.

[Ellen Langer]
Mindfulness, p.16

When you’re stuck with a set of absolutes when you’re a kid - you know, you go to this kind of church, you do that kind of thing, and you think this way - if you have any sense of imagination I think that you fall out fairly quickly with absolutes; and you want to see as many avenues as are possible in life.

And I think, for my part, I got to a place where […] I could pick bits and pieces of each of those avenues. Its not essential to take one avenue as the gospel. No one man is right about anything - or even one group of people - are not right about everything.

I would pick and choose little bits of everything; a little bit of Buddhism maybe, a little bit of this, a little bit of that … to kind of give me some basis, some kind of explanatory platform for my life. And that in itself is an enjoyment.

[David Bowie]

I looked back on the past and recalled my people's old ways, but they were not living that way any more. They were traveling the black road, everybody for himself and with little rules of his own [...]

[Black Elk]
Black Elk Speaks, p.215

I could look up creativity in The Oxford English Dictionary, and I could do research on all that has been written on the subject in philosophy and psychology, and then I could serve it all up on a dish. Even this would be garnished in such a way that you would exclaim: 'How original!' Personally, I am unable to follow this plan.

I have this need to talk as though no one had ever examined the subject before, and of course this can make my words ridiculous.

But I think you can see in this my own need to make sure I am not buried by my theme. It would kill me to work out the concordance of creativity references.

Evidently I must always be fighting to feel creative, and this has the disadvantage that if I am describing a simple word like 'love', I must start from scratch. (Perhaps that's the right place to start from.)

[D.W. Winnicott]
Home Is Where We Start From: Essays By A Psychoanalyst ('Living Creatively'), p.41

The decisive point is not what is thought but how it is thought.

The thought that is the result of active thinking is always new and original; original, not necessarily in the sense that others have not thought it before, but always in the sense that the person who thinks, has used thinking as a tool to discover something new in the world outside or inside himself.

[Erich Fromm]
The Fear of Freedom, p.167

Since the "world of origins" is closed to us, we must accept the fact that we are dependent -- doomed, if you like, to being forever meta. There is no shame in this. We are all contingent, all referring to things which, themselves, refer to other things (parents descended from parents, phrases from phrases).

Humperson did, however, see the possibility of originality via errors, mishearings and misunderstandings. He enjoyed playing Chinese Whispers, especially in later life, when he grew rather deaf.

[Momus]
http://imomus.livejournal.com/468556.html

Parents, deliberately or unaware, teach their children from birth how to behave, think, feel and perceive.

Liberation from these influences is no easy matter, since they are deeply ingrained and are necessary during the first two or three decades for biological survival.

Indeed, such liberation is only possible at all because the individual starts off in an autonomous state, that is, capable of awareness, spontaneity and intimacy, and he has some discretion as to which of his parents' teachings he will accept.

At certain specific moments early in his life he decides how he is going to adapt to them. It is because his adaptation is in the nature of a series of decisions that it can be undone, since decisions are reversible under favourable circumstances.

First ... the weight of a whole tribal or family historical tradition has to be lifted ... then the influence of the individual parental, societal and cultural background has to be thrown off. The same must be done with the demands of contemporary society at large, and finally the advantages derived from one's immediate social circle have to be partly or wholly sacrificed.

In essence, this whole preparation consists of obtaining friendly divorce from one's parents (and from other Parental influences) so that they may be agreeably visited on occasion, but are no longer dominant.

[Eric Berne]
Games People Play, p.161

[...] even the individuals whose initiation into certain secrets has marked them out in some way are fundamentally obeying the laws of group identity, though in their case the group is a socially differentiated one.

The secret society is an intermediary stage on the way to individuation. The individual is still relying on a collective organisation to effect his differentiation for him; that is, he has not yet recognised that it is really the individual's task to differentiate himself from all the others and stand on his own feet.

All collective identities, such as membership in organisations, support of "isms," and so on, interfere with the fulfilment of this task. Such collective identities are crutches for the lame, shields for the timid, beds for the lazy, nurseries for the irresponsible; but they are equally shelters for the poor and weak, a home port for the shipwrecked, the bosom of a family for orphans, a land of promise for disillusioned vagrants and weary pilgrims, a herd and a safe fold for lost sheep, and a mother providing nourishment and growth.

[C.G. Jung]
Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.375

[for] a lot of clinical psychologists [of a pronounced Western orientation] one of the fundamental presuppositions is that part of the hallmark of positive psychological development is the creation of an individual that’s capable of acting independently.

I would say that’s an implicit ideal that lurks at the bottom of the clinical presuppositions of […] classic psychologists […]

[Jordan B. Peterson]
'2017 Personality Lecture 01: Introduction to the Course' (30:55)

Kohlberg (1969), in his extension of the early work of Piaget, discovered six stages of moral judgment, which he claimed formed an invariant sequence, each successive stage representing a more adequate construction of the moral problem, which in turn provides the basis for its more just resolution.

The stages divide into three levels, each of which denotes a significant expansion of the moral point of view from an egocentric through a societal to a universal ethical conception.

With this expansion in perspective comes the capacity to free moral judgment from the individual needs and social conventions with which it had earlier been confused and anchor it instead in principles of justice that are universal in application. These principles provide criteria upon which both individual and societal claims can be impartially assessed.

In Kohlberg's view, at the highest stages of development morality is freed from both psychological and historical constraints, and the individual can judge independently of his own particular needs and of the values of those around him.

When […] the sole precursor to the intimacy of adult relationships is the trust established in infancy and all intervening experience is marked only as steps toward greater independence, then separation itself becomes the model and the measure of growth.

The infusion of feeling into their judgments keeps [women] from developing a more independent and abstract ethical conception in which concern for others derives from principles of justice rather than from compassion and care.

The observation that for women, identity has as much to do with connection as with separation led Erikson into trouble largely because of his failure to integrate this insight into the mainstream of his developmental theory.

[Carol Gilligan]

‘In a Different Voice’, Harvard Educational Review, Vol. 47, No. 4, p.483-4, 509

Dupré (1993) is […] correct in proposing that we think of free will as human ability to project meaningful distinctions into behavior. To act top-down from the intentional level in which meaning is embodied is thus to exercise free will […]

Because all self-organizing systems select the stimuli to which they respond, behavior constrained top-down is to that extent increasingly autonomous of forceful impacts from the environment. Self-organized systems act from their own point of view.

The more structured the entity, the more complex its organization and its behavior, and the more decoupled from and independent of its environment: the more autonomous and authentic, in short.

[Alicia Juarrero]

Dynamics in Action, p. 249

But even […] lordship of the few is far removed from the ancient freedom — witness Frederick the Great's saying: “I am the first servant of my state.

Hence the desperate efforts of the 'exceptional’ man to keep himself inwardly free. Here, and only here, begins the individualism that is a reaction against the psychology of the mass. It is the last uprising of the carnivore soul against its captivity behind the bars of culture, the last attempt to shake off the spiritual and intellectual limitations that are produced by, and represented by, the fact of large numbers.

Hence arise the types of life typified by the conqueror, the adventurer, the hermit, and even certain types of criminals and bohemians. The wished-for escape from absorption by the masses takes various forms - lordship over it, flight from it, contempt for it.

The idea of personality, in its dark beginnings, is a protest against humanity in the mass, and the tension between these grows and grows to its tragic finale.

[Oswald Spengler]

Man and Technics, p. 59

Aristocracy, Tocqueville wrote, “links everybody, from peasant to king, in one long chain. Democracy breaks the chain and frees each link … Thus, not only does democracy make men forget their ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries.

Each man is forever thrown back upon himself alone and there is a danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”

Tocqueville perceived the way in which "fractured time" generates individualism, which in turn would have profound social, political, and economic consequences as the underlying logic of liberal democracy advances. He fretted especially about the inability of a liberal democratic people to see their own lives and actions as part of a continuum of time, and hence to consider long-term implications of their actions and deeds as part of a long-term human community.

[…] while cultures are many and varied, their common features almost always include a belief in the continuity between human nature and the natural world; the experience of the past and the future as embedded within the present; and assurance of the sacredness of one's place, along with depths of gratitude and responsibility to the care and preservation of one's places.

Liberalism was premised upon a rejection of each of these constitutive aspects of culture, since to recognize continuity with nature, the debts and obligations attending the flow of time and generations, or a strong identity with one's place was to limit one's experience and opportunity to become a self-making author.

[Patrick Deneen]
Why Liberalism Failed, p.74-5, 90

For any individual, the social universe is divided into two categories: those who are "kin," "relations," or "family" (walytja), and those who are not kin, who are often described as "not men" or "different men" (munuwati).

The term walytja specifies a sense of belonging together or shared identity. It is used to refer to (1) possessions, (2) "kin," (3) "one's own" (my own), (4) a wider sense of belonging, and (5) "oneself," as in the phrases "he did it himself" or "she is sitting by herself."

This reflexive use of walytja as "self" suggests that the critical notion of relatedness is rooted in the givenness of the individual, extending outward from a spirit whose identity derives from The Dreaming.

The concept asserts a relationship between oneself and persons, objects, or places; it recognizes as fundamental in Pintupi life the identity extended to persons and things beyond the physical individual.

[Fred R. Myers]
Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self, p.109

The imaginary father empowers a new psychic space premised on the distinction between internal and external, self and other.

The breaking in of the signifier inaugurates individuation, the assumption of bodily form and corporeal unity, and thereby entails loss of the maternal body. In Kristeva's view, matricide, repression of the maternal body, is a necessary event on the way to subjectivity. The bodily exchange between mother and child can serve as a barrier to love, imprisoning the child in an overwhelming bond.

The loving mother provides the first approach to language and law by demonstrating love for an object who is not the child, a third outside this dyad who makes the dyadic relationship itself possible and releases the emotional pressure of it. The loving father proffers a kind of promise, even as he disrupts fusion with the mother, allowing and encouraging the child to represent itself.

Kristeva's thought here follows Lacan's idea that a mother whose only object of desire is her child will produce a child who cannot move beyond the psychosis of being the phallus for her.

The generation of the ego out of expulsion, the division of unity, is not simply a mournful moment, but also potentially a joyous one, in which the advent of language, the promise of the father, offers reparation and life with a world of others, so that words can provide the nourishment that the breast previously had. The father makes it possible to fill the void with language and the formation of signifying bonds.

[Emily Zakin]
‘Psychoanalytic Feminism’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Psychotherapists of different persuasions appear to share at least one basic hypothesis: the notion that the individual human being is of value, and that it is important that each individual should be able to develop his own personality in as unrestricted and complete a way as possible.

[Anthony Storr]
The Integrity of the Personality, p.22

The creation of self, however, must not be self-centred; it has to take place against the backdrop of a social horizon of meaning that gives the act of self-creation a relevance that transcends the self […]

Contrary to Taylor's assumptions, however, authenticity is in fact the enemy of community. The narcissism of authenticity undermines community. In terms of its content, what is crucial is not its reference to a community or some other higher order but its market value, which effaces all other values.

Thus, the form and content of authenticity coincide: both concern the self. The cult of authenticity shifts the question of identity from society to the individual person. Within the cult of authenticity, the production of self becomes a permanent activity. Authenticity thus atomizes society.

Taylor's moral justification of authenticity ignores that subtle process, within the neoliberal regime, by which the ideas of freedom and self-realization are transformed into vehicles for more efficient exploitation. The neoliberal regime exploits morality. Once it is able to present itself as freedom, domination becomes complete.

Authenticity is a neoliberal form of production. You exploit yourself voluntarily in the belief that you are realizing yourself.

In the cult of authenticity, the neoliberal regime appropriates the person himself and turns him into a highly efficient site of production. The whole person is incorporated into the production process.

When some one person is judged to be authentic, or when society as a whole is described as creating problems of human authenticity, the language reveals one way in which social action is being devalued in the process of placing more weight on psychological matters.

The compulsion of authenticity leads to narcissistic introspection, a permanent occupation with one's own psychology.

Communication is also organized psychologically. The society of authenticity is a society of intimacy and exposure. The nudism of the soul into which we are encouraged lends society a pornographic character. Social relations are more genuine and authentic the more intimate they are, the more they reveal what was private.

[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.17-18

The empire of signs also dispenses with the moral signified. It is dominated not by law but by rules, by signifiers without the signified.

Ritual society is a society of rules. It is based not on virtues or conscience but on a passion for rules. Unlike the moral law, rules are not internalized. They are simply obeyed. Morality presupposes a soul, and a person who works on its perfection. The more a person advances on the path of morality, the more self-respect she is due. Such narcissistic inwardness is wholly absent from the ethics of politeness.

Rules rest on agreement. They are formed through immanent sequences of signs, and therefore do not possess deep truth or transcendence. Rules do not have a metaphysical or theological foundation. The law, by contrast, presupposes a transcendent authority, such as God, that compels and prohibits.

The pleasure derived from obeying a rule differs from the pleasure one takes in obeying or violating a law. The former is owed to a passion for play and for rules […]

There is no soul to infect the holy seriousness of ritual play. The place of psychology is taken by a passion for rules, a passion of form. This empire of signs is opposed to today's empire of souls who expose themselves and constantly produce themselves.

The ceremonial empire of signs makes it possible to conceive of another form of life, another society, which would be free of narcissism because, in it, the ego [das Ich] would immerse itself in the ritual play of signs. The passion for rules de-internalizes the self.

Contemporary society is characterized by constant and relentless moralizing. But at the same time society is becoming more and more brutal. Forms of politeness are disappearing, disregarded by the cult of authenticity. Beautiful forms of conduct are becoming ever rarer.

In this respect, too, we are becoming hostile towards form. Apparently, the ascendancy of morality is compatible with the barbarization of society. Morality is formless. Moral inwardness dispenses with form.

One might even say: the more moralizing a society, the more impolite it is. Against this formless morality, we must defend an ethics of beautiful forms.

[Byung-Chul Han]
The Disappearance of Rituals, p.65-8

The adolescent tells his group what he did, and they usually agree that this is the way he is, however surprising it is. Their whole attitude is pragmatic, almost experimental: “This is what happened. This is the way things are. This is the way I am.”

They are engaged in a search for themselves as individuals, something they were called upon to do in the early grades of school, thanks to the misconceptions of John Dewey, and they are quite alien to any theory that the self is a creature of trained patterns and is not a creature of discovered secrets.

Now, in the 1960’s, this opinion of man’s nature is changing and, as a consequence of George Orwell, mishmash conceptions of brainwashing, and the revival of Pavlovian psychology through the work of men like Professor B. F. Skinner of Harvard, the idea of personality as something trained under discipline to a desired pattern is being revived.

With this revival of a basically Puritanical idea of human nature reappears the usual Puritan errors on the nature of evil and acceptance of the theory of the evil of human nature (as preached in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies).

[Carroll Quigley]
Tragedy and Hope, ‘The Future in Perspective,’ p.803

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