Mead: Quotes about Embodiment, the Self, and the Interaction between the “I” and the “Me”
mkoole, · Categories: Identity, PhD Studies, Research · Tags: phd, readings, references, symbolic interactionism, theory(Note: Converted from Livescribe Pen via MyScript. Possible typos.)
“The self has the characteristic that it is an object to itself, and that characteristic distinguishes it from other objects and from the body” (p. 136).
“The parts of the body are quite distinguishable from the self. We can lose parts of the body without any serious invasion of the self. . . the body does not experience itself as a whole, in a sense in which the self in some way enters into the experience of the self” (p. 136).
The word self is reflexive: ”oneself”. As such, Mead suggests that the self can be both subject and object” (p. 136-137).
| Subject “I” | Object “Me” |
| – focused on outside activity
|
– focused on memory and imagination (internal to the individual) |
| – ”the response of the organism to the attitudes of the others” (p. 175)
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– self-consciousness: self viewed from the standpoint of other members of the social group |
| -active adaptation (p. 214) | – “responding to oneself as another responds to it” p. 140)
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| – the act in the social situation (p. 279) | – the social situation in which the act can express itself [Interesting: this idea seems to fit with Harré’s notion of the individual as a location for speech acts.]
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| – ”a source of the unity of the Whole” (p. 279) | – “the organized set of attitude as of others which one himself assumes” (p. 175)
|
“The ‘I’ of this moment is the present in the ‘me’ of the next moment. . . It is as we act that we are aware of ourselves” (p. 174).
The GENERALIZED OTHER: “how the community exercises control over the conduct of its individual members” (affects the individual’s thinking) (p. 155).
ATTITUDES: “organized sets of responses” (p. 161).
Community: “A person is a personality because he belongs to a community, because he takes over the institutions of that community into his own conduct. . . The structure, then, on which the self is built, is this response which is common to all, for one has to be a member of a community to be a self” (p. 162).
“We cannot have rights unless we have common attitude” (p. 164).
“Selves can only exist in definite relationships to other selves” (p. 164).
The self as a “structural process” (p. 165).
Institutional Form ”. . . the whole community acts toward the individual under certain circumstances in an identical way” (p. 167).
References:
Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self & society: From the standpoint of a social behaviorist. (C. W. Morris, Ed.) (Vol. 13). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
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