Oneself Becoming Another

Abstract

Many present-day studies focus on identity, which is ascribed to individuals (e.g. “his teacher identity” and “her science identity”) and their positionalities. The individuals of interest are said to construct their identities (positionalities) and then, using their personal selves as models, construct their notions of the other. In contrast, the poet author of the first introductory quotation suggests that the I is another. Prior to any construction of the other based on the conception of a self, this I already is an other to itself. Consistent with this alternative approach is the realization that classical psychological phenomena, such as dependency, aggressiveness, or pride, are not individual characteristics at all. Instead, all these “words have their origin n what happens between persons, not in some something-or-other inside the person” (Bateson 1979, 133). A similar take was flagged by the social psychologist L. S. Vygotsky, who, as the second introductory quotation shows, conceived the psychological nature of human beings, personality, as the ensemble of societal relations. That is, the entire psychological nature of human beings is a function of relations with other people, relations that are characteristic for the particular society in which a person grows up. Independently, G. H. Mead already suggested that self and personality are the result of relations, where the self is stimulating its own social conduct and attitudes by playing out the parts which this social conduct calls out in the generalized other. The ensemble of relations constitutes the personality in a process that does not finish but continues to pass from one phase to another phase of life. The formation of personality begins in the family, other groups (e.g. school). Play, which progresses into game, are important aspects of a child’s life constitutive of personality because it is here that the sense of the generalized other has its origin. Mead, much more so than Vygotsky, provides the theoretical means for understanding the (continued) development of personality arising from participation in the different spheres of societal life.