IDENTITY - A PUZZLE OF PUZZLES

In the précis of their book, Hargreaves, Miell and MacDonald state that William James, one of the founders of psychology, was perhaps the first theorist to try and understand the self. In his work The Principles of Psychology, first published in 1890 he writes:

“The empirical life of Self is divided as below into:   

	Material	Social	Spiritual
Self Seeking	Bodily Appetites and instincts Love of adornment, foppery, acquisitiveness, constructiveness, love of home etc.	Desire to please, be noticed, admired etc. Sociability, emulation, envy, love, pursuit of honour, ambition etc.	Intellectual Moral and Religious aspirations, conscientiousness
Self Estimation	Personal vanity, modesty etc. Pride of wealth, fear of poverty	Social and family pride, vainglory, snobbery, humiliation, shame, etc.	Sense of moral or mental superiority, purity etc. Sense of inferiority or of guilt.

James

Having summed up in the above table the principal results of the chapter thus far, I have said all that need be said of the constituents of the phenomenal self, and of the nature of self regard. Our desks are consequently cleared for the struggle with that pure principle of personal identity which has met us all along our preliminary exposition, but which we have always shied away from and treated as a difficulty to be postponed. Ever since Hume’s time, it has been justly regarded as the most puzzling puzzle with which psychology has to deal; and whatever view one may espouse, one has to hold his position against heavy odds.”

Mead

They go on to refer to sociologist and social philosopher George Herbert Mead, who makes a distinction between the personal and the social aspects of self in describing the ‘I’ and the ‘me’. Mead saw language as the supreme symbolic system for communicating and for negotiating interactions, in that it allows people to carry on ‘internal conversations’ with themselves and to anticipate the responses of other ‘actors’. This was the essence of ‘symbolic interactionism’, which pre-figured social constructionist theory.

Schwaiblmair

Frauke Schwaiblmair in her piece Infant Research and Music Therapy – The significance of musical characteristics early mother-child interaction for music therapy she comments:

In how far is it possible to learn and teach genetically determined abilities, here Infant Directed Speech (IDS) or “motherese”?

Universal elements in the interaction between adults and infants were described and substantiated by infant researchers. Papousek, Stern and Trevarthen believe that it is possible to approach or disclose congenital competences. Intuitive behaviour may be learned as part of a reflective process that permits to employ such behaviour deliberately. This process is known from therapy training in practice. Consequently, important effects of music therapy interaction and treatment (compare significance of melodic gestures, tuning of dynamics and rhythm in mother-child interaction) appear to be independent of the basic psychotherapy concept. Music therapy has witnessed methodological advances of those universal elements, since genetically determined effects of melody, and patterns of harmony and rhythm were adapted and expanded for therapeutic purposes.

What is the position of intuition between conscious and unconscious behaviour, and is it possible to teach intuitive behaviour?

Unconscious behaviour is either congenital or learned and occurs irrespective of inner attitude or state of awareness. Conscious behaviour is behaviour to which attention is given. Intuitive behaviour is biologically determined behaviour that occurs in dependence on inner attitude, or the willingness to respond to any event or development. Intuitive behaviour may be inhibited or concealed for a variety of reasons. Willingness to respond to a partner in interaction is of particular importance in the process of discovering one's own intuitive competence. It enables us to "empathize" with the needs of the other person and to act upon intuition. The ability to open up to the other person, to perceive him or her with all senses and respond accordingly is the object of intensive schooling in psychotherapy with regard to processes of reflection and supervision.

Bakhtin

The view of the self is also expressed by Russian philosopher and semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin who stated:

I am conscious of myself and become myself only while revealing myself for another, through another, and with the help of another . . . every internal experience ends up on the boundary . . .‘To be’ means to communicate . . . ‘To be’ means to be for the other; and through him, for oneself.  Man has no internal sovereign territory; he is all and always on the boundary.

What all this seems to boil down to is that humans are in a perpetual liminal state. We are forever on the threshold of some undiscovered country. We seem to be forever signposting the places we have been, leaving identifiers all over the place, like Hansel and Gretel leaving pebbles behind them, yet we will never go back over the same trail. So what are the signs for? It is indeed the puzzle of puzzles.