Lecture
identity is not merely recognizing oneself as «someone», but rather gaining a certain meaning of one’s existence, a sense of meaningfulness in one’s own life, i.e. finding oneself
According to Erikson, possessing identity means:
experiencing one’s being as a person as unchanging, regardless of changes in situation, role, or self-perception;
it means that the past, present and future are experienced as a single whole;
it means that a person senses a connection between their own continuity and the recognition of this continuity by other people
The need for identity arises from the fact that every person needs order in their life activity, which they can obtain only within a community of other people.
To achieve this, they must voluntarily accept the elements of consciousness, tastes, habits, norms, values and other means of communication prevailing in that community, accepted among the people around them.
Assimilation of all these manifestations of the group’s social life gives a person’s life an orderly and predictable character, and also involuntarily makes them part of a specific culture.
«Who am I?»
In trying to answer the question «Who am I?» people inevitably substitute the original «Who?» with a reified «What?» or «What am I?».
People offer us their stories, which are stories of identifications
identification - the practice of signifying and self-designating individuality, constituting the person as an «I». Naming procedures make it possible to chronologize «now» and localize «here» within the open space of culture
Premature identity
The conflict-free acquisition of role models that do not become essential is an appropriated, poorly conscious identity
A. Waterman believes that identity is linked to a person having a clear self-definition, including the choice of goals, values and beliefs that a person follows in life. A. Waterman calls goals, values and beliefs the elements of identity. They form as a result of choice among various alternative options during a period of identity crisis and serve as the basis for determining life direction and the meaning of life.
Achieved identity - possessed by a person who has gone through a period of crisis and self-exploration and formed a certain set of personally significant goals, values and beliefs. Such a person knows who they are and what they want, and accordingly structures their life.
Awareness of difficulties does not diminish the desire to adhere to the chosen direction.
Such a person experiences their goals, values and beliefs as personally significant and providing them with a sense of direction and meaningfulness in life. This is a constructed identity.
Premature identity
The overwhelming majority of people live «asleep», representing enacting programs of perception-behavior that do not depend on their will and desire. In other words, contemporary humans have stereotyped, template reactions in response to incoming signals from the external environment; moreover, both thoughts, emotions, and bodily movements have a template-like nature.
Contemporary humans are permeated with a contract, according to which their life is viewed as a continuous passage through connected, sequential, socially legitimized boundaries, each of which has its own criteria — age-related, physiological, social. And public opinion constantly pressures a person, starting from infancy, so that their criteria for self-assessment correspond to socially established ones. As a result, rigidity grows, as does the mechanistic nature of existence, in which the share of rationality keeps diminishing.
SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM
G. Mead distinguishes conscious and unconscious identity.
Unconscious identity is based on unconsciously accepted norms and habits. It is the set of expectations, accepted by a person, coming from the social group to which they belong.
Conscious identity arises when a person begins to reflect on themselves, on their behavior. The transition from unconscious to conscious identity is possible only in the presence of reflection. A person becomes aware of their identity by reflecting on themselves with the help of language acquired through social interaction.
Conscious identity and freedom
Conscious identity does not mean the autonomy of the individual from society: it is formed with the help of categories developed in language. The presence of conscious identity signifies a moment of relative freedom of the individual, since the person stops following the ritualized unfolding of actions and begins to think about the goal and tactics of their behavior.
The relationship between social determination and self-determination of personality
G. Mead resolves this by distinguishing the aspects of identity «I» and «me».
«Me» describes a person as a being determined by socially given conventions and habits. It is, as it were, society's representative within the individual: it consists of internalized «generalized others».
«I» describes a person as a being capable of responding to a social situation in their own individual, unique way.
Types of identity
E. Goffman distinguishes three kinds of identity:
1) social identity — the typification of a person by other people on the basis of the attributes of the social group to which they belong;
2) personal identity —the individual features of a person: for example, fingerprints and a unique combination of the facts and dates of their life history;
3) ego identity — an individual's subjective sense of their life situation, their continuity and distinctiveness. Personal identity is also a social phenomenon: the perception of personal identity occurs on the condition that information about the facts of a person's life is known to their partner in interaction.
«The struggle of identities»
R. Fogelson's model of the «struggle of identities»: four types of identity are distinguished:
1) real identity — an individual's self-report about themselves, their self-description of «myself today»;
2) ideal identity — the positive identity that an individual strives for, how they would like to see themselves;
3) negative, «fear-inducing» identity, which the individual seeks to avoid, how they would not want to see themselves;
4) presented identity — the set of images that an individual conveys to other people in order to influence their assessment of that individual's identity.
A person tries to bring their real identity closer to their ideal identity and to maximize the distance between the real and negative identities.
The development of identity proceeds from an unconscious identity to a conscious one.
For G. Mead, the aspects of «I» and «me» embody the coexistence of the principles of sociality and individuality.
On the one hand, society determines the individual's identity, setting the norms and laws for its existence;
on the other hand, the individual shapes their own environment in the sense of choosing goals, values, and needs.
The success of maintaining identity depends on a person possessing the following abilities: the ability for role distancing, for empathy, tolerance for contradictions, and successful presentation of one's identity.
Krappman L. Soziologische Dimensionen der Identitat. Stuttgart: Klett, 1969.
Self-categorization
J. Turner introduced the concept of self-categorization — the cognitive grouping of oneself with a certain class of identical objects.
Three levels of self-categorization:
1) self-categorization of oneself as a human being (human identity);
2) group self-categorization — social identity;
3) personal self-categorization — personal identity.
According to self-categorization theory, the process of identity formation contains three sequential cognitive processes:
1) the individual self-defines as a member of a certain social category;
2) appropriation of common group characteristics for oneself and the assimilation of the norms and behavioral stereotypes of membership groups;
3) attributing to oneself the assimilated group norms and stereotypes, using them as regulators of one's own behavior.
Personal identity is a product of social identity, but, once formed, begins to actively influence the latter.
The development of identity is carried out through two main processes:
1) assimilation and accommodation: new components are selected into the structure of identity, and then the structure is adapted to these components (restructuring);
2) evaluation — determining the significance and value of the contents of identity, both new and old.
These processes are interrelated: the process of evaluation can influence the selection of content for assimilation and the form of accommodation. On the other hand, the values that set the criteria for evaluation are themselves also assimilated. The interaction of these processes over time leads to the formation of the substantive and value dimensions of identity.
L.S. Vygotsky: «the entire psyche is built on the model of an instrument that chooses»
Traditional science has been accustomed to viewing psychological phenomena «as a status rather than a process, as a state rather than a becoming».
To understand the mechanisms by which a person and their identity («the Self») are constructed, a special way of perceiving social reality is required — one that P. Bourdieu called «relational thinking», which represents the social world as a set of relations, rather than as a «positive substance» conceived as a system of «things».
It is necessary to focus one's attention on practice.
social constructivism (Berger, Luckmann) proposed considering the dialectical relations between the individual and society by means of the triad «externalization — objectivation — internalization».
Identity
The bearer of identity is the subject; outside the subject there is no identity.
Identity has an objective existence and a subjective realization.
Identity is subjective in nature, but is objectified in being.
Identity is the result of the subject's self-categorization and self-objectification through the image of the “Self”, and it characterizes a person's self-referentiality in their uniqueness and singularity. The generating mechanism is self-awareness. The executive mechanism consists of the processes of identification-alienation.
Reification
It is necessary to consider the material and symbolic worlds comprehensively, in their unity
the reification of symbolic (social) representations implies the essentialization of qualities and notions that exist only on the symbolic level.
Reification — objectification, i.e., the process of turning abstract concepts into supposedly really existing phenomena, attributing substantiality to them, as a result of which they come to be thought of as something material. Reification, in logic, is the logical error of treating an abstraction as if it were a real thing.
Identity
Identity is not a fixed reality, but rather an ongoing problem, or problematicity.
This is asking oneself a question about oneself.
Such an identity should be understood not as a «substrate», but as a process.
the ideal of a fixed or stable identity is a fantasy
Nomadic identity
Rosi Braidotti considers identity using the concept of «nomads» («wanderers»). This concept refutes the possibility of a stable identity existing.
To be a «nomad» - to live without borders, to be in a constant state of movement, and to refute the possibility of a stable identity existing.
Nomadic identity - is a trans-identity; it consists of transitions, shifts, changes. The image of the nomad rejects any idea of fixedness.
Nomadic consciousness presupposes a definition of the meaning of identity based on facts and circumstances as they have taken shape, rather than fixed ones. Nomadic consciousness is coherent and mobile. It rejects any type of identity as permanent and is not aimed at creating a stable identity.
a person's life is a continuous process of life-creation, which manifests itself as an equally continuous «expansion of the world, expansion of life relations»
The human Self is stable not only with respect to time, but also with respect to the vital (mental) space of human existence.
Reconfiguring the problem requires a transition from binary constructions to ternary constructs, to recognizing that the problem of identity cannot be approached without addressing the problem of the dynamics of the multidimensional life-world — the regularities of its formation in ontogenesis as the sequential formation of «dimensionalities», which conditions a corresponding transformation of the Self, and the subsequent dynamics, manifested in the expansion of a person's multidimensional world in the process of life-realization.
New attitudes of the post-nonclassical level
the boundary between the personality and the social environment is being erased, and it becomes genuinely unclear «where the person ends and the cultural artifacts surrounding them begin», and it still needs to be understood how «the world bursts into us, completing and expanding the space of our Self»
What ensures a person's stability in a changing world?
Self-realization of the personality serves as the basis for its self-development, since the transition to a new qualitative state of the personality is possible only when the individual acts and, in the process of their actions, produces a result.
The processes of creative self-realization are aimed at a fuller realization of the person as an individual (self-embodiment). They are connected with a certain level of self-awareness, critical thinking, and the ability and readiness for self-determination, self-expression
self-development is understood as «developing myself»
A child becomes a personal-social unit, a subject, a bearer of socio-human activity only when he himself begins to perform this activity. At first with the help of an adult, and then without one.
Changing views on the nature of self-identity
Four basic tendencies:
1. The tendency toward the permanent actualization of the problem of personal identity;
2. The tendency toward overcoming binary thinking;
3. The tendency to understand the problem of identity in transtemporal dynamics;
4. The tendency toward a processual understanding of identity
In an era of social change, the dialectic and metaphysics of human individuality look different. Conceptions of individuality are transformed to such an extent that at times there is a complete loss of clarity in understanding the boundaries between subject and object, the individual and the social, the perceived and the created.
The era of social change is characterized by the fact that change ceases to be a circumstance or attribute of a situation (that is, changes cease «to happen») and instead become a product of psychological (subjective) life (of expectations, choices, projects).
Contemporary man not only turns out to be non-identical to himself, caught up in the stream of being, but must become non-identical to himself under his own personal responsibility. Under such circumstances, special kinds of risk arise, caused not only by the danger of losing identity, but also by the danger of forming an illusory, invented identity.
The identity of a person as an open self-developing system turns into a fundamental relation and a form of a world-project, into a psychological condition for a person's stability and steadiness, into a form of the reproduction and formation of the human in the world.
Social changes, often revolutionary in their essence but occurring «in an everyday way,» transform the structural parameters of life-worlds, their substantive, value-and-meaning content, creating a deficit of communicability, and turn people into «contemporaries out of sync».
In an era of social change the established system of communications is restructured, through which the social space of human being is transformed into the mental space of a person, corresponding to his unique conception of himself (self-image), of the world (image of the world), and of what he does in this world (way of life), which together determine what in psychology is customarily called the self-concept or identity.
A person living in an era of social change is a person seeking support, a foundation for self-determination between the stream of being and his own detachment, psychological distancing from that stream.
in earlier eras it was assumed that in order to attain identity a person had to immerse himself in the stream of being, or conversely, distance himself from that stream.
Earlier it was identity itself, its features and forms, that appeared problematic
Statement of the problem of the formation of identity
how a contemporary person ensures the stability of his being in a multidimensional world, both in its substantive and in its dynamic aspect, preserves the integrity and fullness of his own self, his selfhood, changes without betraying himself, without losing the world.
How does a person become and remain a contemporary person?
Sociocultural transformations of social space are occurring today so rapidly and irreversibly that situations of identity loss are arising everywhere – a rupture between new realities and the system of a person's conceptions of himself, ways of understanding and evaluating himself, and mindsets that had formed under the influence of communicatively mediated cultural effects
Specific risks associated with practices of forming and restoring personal integrity, personal potential, and personal competence while caught up in the stream of being and the stream of change
There arises the problem of a special kind of psychic rigidity, caused by immersion in the process of «chronically becoming someone» combined with an insufficient ability «to be someone» in time, which leads to a person's inability to respond adequately to the challenges and paradoxes of reality.
The problem of the excessive stability of self-concepts, which in situations of change become self-illusions (that is, forms of experience that are not phenomenologically reflected upon and not dynamically assimilated), largely accounts for the ineffectiveness, unconvincingness, and inefficiency of psychological and social practices (G.V. Zalevsky, E.V. Galazhinsky), and for the difficulties in achieving a successful career.
The socio-psychological landscape of the contemporary world
The world of postmodernism, post-religiosity, and post-nonclassical scientificity opens up new possibilities and imposes new demands, arising in the process of reconsidering ideas and approaches to studying the psychology of personality, communication, social cognition, and identity.
In psychological research on human development and behavior, the focus shifts to social practices, channel factors and subjective interpretation, narratives, the principles of systemic determination, self-organization, and the synergetic foundations of the processes of psychological homeorhesis (maintaining constancy within a developing system).
At the «high speeds» of self-organization of psychological systems, empirical experience, which serves as the basis for rational understanding of problem situations, must be systematically supplemented by existential experience — that is, the experience of decisions, expressed in self-descriptions, in the concepts and terms of the development of a person's identity.
In an era of social change, it is not only existential experience that requires rational confirmation, as was the case before, but also objective, rationally grounded experience that requires confirmation by existential experience (V.V. Znakov)
Identity in an era of social change becomes a necessary condition for the reproduction of possibilities and the assumption of responsibility, and the development of identity becomes the basic relation (essence) of practices of understanding.
The problem of identity has always been relevant, but whereas before a person had to change in accordance with how the environment changes while preserving or creating the values and meanings of life — that is, to adapt and to recover — today a person needs to change in accordance with how their own and other people's personal and social plans for the medium and near future are changing — that is, to become a more responsible being.
Today it is not enough to put much effort into practices of self-improvement and self-development (that is, to have many resources, to know a great deal).
Today what is needed is both intensive practices of self-becoming – immersion in the flow of being (defining a value-and-meaning position) – and the ability to timely distance oneself from the flow of being – to change one's level of thinking.
To be modern, a person needs to believe not only in their own choice, but also in their own world, which, owing to the intensity of change, is becoming increasingly problematic
The development of identity today is no longer a means of adaptation or development, but is becoming a condition of existence, an ontological foundation and an existential relation.
Understanding of identity in the 20th century
In the theories of the last century, identity was understood primarily as a product and form of the mental reflection of reality, a scheme of self-awareness, a result of reflection, a form of representation of subconscious processes, a means of maintaining stability, a structure mediating essence and behavior.
The problem of the development of identity was linked to the phenomenon of identity crisis.
The development of the personality came to be associated with passing through specific stages, in the course of which the person finds themselves, and the result of which is the formation of identity.
The contemporary understanding of identity
the development of identity is no longer a process of overcoming crises, but is at the same time also an element of everyday life.
the development of identity must now be understood in terms of the dynamics of self-organization, and not only in terms of the dynamics of adaptation to change.
the development of identity determines the meanings and structures of psychological practices.
a tendency to understand the boundaries of identity as the boundaries of responsibility, freedom, and openness
The development of identity
The development of identity is the process of the subject's identification-disidentification with themselves, with experience, with reality.
The development of identity is the process of recognizing and hierarchizing oneself.
The development of identity is the process of socialization, identification with a significant other, and of separateness, distancing from a significant other.
The development of identity is the process of achieving constancy, the stability of the personality over time, and of qualitative change, the emergence of a new level of organization, a new order, an objective identity.
The problem of the «invisibility» of a person amid the reality of their possibilities
L.S. Vygotsky:
«Realized behavior is a negligible fraction of what is possible. At every moment a person is full of unrealized possibilities. These unrealized possibilities of our behavior … are the most perfect reality, just as much as the reactions that have triumphed»
Non-classical methodology points to: the impossibility of accepting theoretical constructs as reality and living in accordance with them; pluralism of concepts as a way of supporting different types or aspects of activity.
Post-non-classical methodology, criticizing foundational knowledge, points to the reality of language and time as the only reality that allows one to understand the process by which primary experience is transformed into a system of knowledge, and proposes viewing social psychology as the history of individuals' self-narration, pointing to the performativity of the psychology of social change.
When the world around us changes, one cannot remain oneself without taking part in this process.
In stable periods of social certainty, a person is obliged to follow the imperative: "become what you are meant to become, and you will be yourself».
In a situation of change, an opposite imperative is added to it: "Be yourself at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end, and you will become yourself».
Both imperatives constitute a life paradox, the resolution of which lies in responsibility and freedom.
Social and personal identity
An individual cannot be identical to themselves over time outside of social cognition, without certain efforts on their own part and confirmations from society.
social identity is a person's identification of themselves with social imperatives, and
personal, or personal identity, is a person's identification of themselves with their own, "inner" aspirations
with a possible self is what the individual identifies with while experiencing transitions between states of social reality
From the standpoint of systems analysis, identity is a system of self-reference of a person within a situation.
"we define identity as self-referentiality (from the Latin referre, 'to report'), a report to oneself, based on the sense and awareness of the uniqueness of one's being and the singularity of one's personal traits, about who I am and what is Mine, given one's belonging to social reality in the form of specific life situations."
Novelty of the approach
Identity acts as a construct that reconciles two opposing epistemological contexts: the context of understanding personality as a set of attributes of the individual, and
the context of understanding personality as modes of being, tendentiality, and the relation of being-in-the-world.
All variants of identity, represented by means of a set of attributes (for example, gender, professional, or ethnic identity) or by means of selected modes of being (for example, role-based, age-based, or cultural identity), are fixed (embodied in consciousness and in the world) forms of temporal identity (potential ones).
Novelty of the approach
When we turn our attention to temporal identity as such (a person's identification with their possible selves), a new context of cognition inevitably arises, one previously invisible or nonexistent – a context of renewal, becoming, and creative self-expression.
This context is characterized by the performativity of speech, meaning that the psychological reality perceived at this time does not reflect or represent actuality, but transforms it, giving it new meanings, statuses, and boundaries.
The new context is experienced as a period characterized by instability and uncertainty, which in turn gives rise to a new order
The construct of temporal identity allows us to pay attention not only to the acceptance of uncertainty, but also to how a person identifies a situation as uncertain (for this, they relate the actual situation to a possible identity, and it is precisely the possible identity that serves in this process as a stable foundation).
The becoming of identity as a situation in which the individual identifies with their existential practice.
This kind of identity exists exclusively in consciousness and represents a meaning-based correspondence.
When three aspects of experience
– the experience of individualization (generalizing communication),
the experience of transcendence (generalizing thinking) and
the experience of relation (generalizing awareness) are defined as identical to one another with respect to the parameter "mine", we can posit that a fully formed temporal identity has emerged
The postulate "being determines consciousness" is significantly refined: consciousness is determined by the experience of assimilating and realizing social practices.
An individual's identification with social practices (on the scale of an entire life – identification with the cause of one's being, with the work of one's life, existence, the meaning of life) represents a process of reconciling temporal identities
in the structure of consciousness temporal identities exist in the form of possible «selves»: what I could have been, what I might become).
Temporal identities make it possible to coherently constitute situations of a person's presence under conditions of change
Coherent reflection
understanding identity requires coherent: reflection of the object (empirical experience),
reflection of the process of understanding the object (rational, cognitive experience), and
reflection of the mode of existence (existential experience).
Likewise, a consistent reflection is needed of essence, being and existence, of objectivity, object and presence
Coordination of reflections
The main thing is the principle of coordinating the orders of reflection, that is, the phenomenological method, which reflects the deepest level of reflection among those considered in contemporary psychology.
It should be supplemented by propositions on symphonization (intentional synchronization), and the coordination of the orders of reflection and identity.
Using this method, we can explain the multiplicity of different types of identification
Phenomenological approach
The phenomenological approach relies on subjectivity and reflection on the mode of cognition
Higher levels of complexity and orders of increasing complexity of psychic organization cannot be exhaustively understood through the categories of lower levels, that is, through methods of reductive analysis.
Understanding complex psychological phenomena requires a phenomenological interpretation – a way of seeing, as a whole, what is, was, will be, could have been, and may become, and of expressing this in comprehensible language
A phenomenological description of psychological phenomena must take into account not only
factual characteristics and dimensions, but also hypothetical ones (characteristics of a possible, risk-bearing reality).
Of particular importance is the dimension of temporal (chronotopic) correspondences
The phenomenological method implies the «verticality» of times, that is, the nesting of durations of different scales within one another.
This nesting of times (possible durations) within one actual time (within the current duration) is called transtemporality.
The transtemporal approach
Allows one to see quality not by itself, but quality in quantity (duration, repeatability, regularity of the time of practice).
What is considered is not simply experiences, but a system of socio-psychological practice-experience,
Phenomenological research in the transtemporal aspect relies on a methodology for understanding the experience of correspondence of three components of human presence:
experience (quality),
practice (responsibility)
language (determinacy)
The integrity of life's times gives rise to the understanding that behavior and experience are different sides of a single whole – the system of practice-experience.
This is especially important in the study of life-changing experiences, where what is at issue is the relationship between a person and the world, mediated by the social context
Characterizing and problematic components
problems of psychic rigidity (excessive stability of psychological systems),
flexibility (optimal mobility of psychological systems),
intentional openness (temporal coherence of psychological systems),
value-meaning orientation in the psychology of understanding and the psychology of being.
The transtemporal approach
The main principle and condition allowing one to obtain reflexive data is not simply empathy
The main principle of correspondence, as sufficient conditions, is the commonality of socio-psychological practice – coherence of behavior, experience and speech, and jointness.
In this respect, an important condition is taking into account the level, degree, time, meaning and other characteristics of jointness.
The work of the psychologist
The psychologist acts under specific circumstances that set the level of intensity of life and reflection. They are included in the situation of dialogue and must «follow the other person's thinking», neither lagging behind nor running ahead. It is necessary to be understood in time. It is necessary not to discard but to use theoretical assumptions as additional data
Theoretical propositions should be regarded as the result of reflection that took place earlier and has «fossilized» within its own time
The work of the psychologist (at present) implies immersion in the uncertainty of existing theoretical propositions
preference for ordinary descriptive language. Ordinary language allows one to capture many nuances that are lost when translating a narrative into some categorical language
the position of preferring a language that strives to preserve fluidity and the stream of consciousness is strengthened, but not by denying categorical language, that is, language that strives to reduce description to a set of several categories, but by overcoming categoriality through understanding that categories were once metaphors and names, thereby restoring the ontological meaning of categories, words, and concepts.
Linguistic deconstruction
The capacious commonly accepted categories in use should be placed in the uncertainty of socio-psychological practice, made a pretext for the transcendent self-criticism of consciousness.
This will make it possible to reproduce the meaning of categories, to «revive» them, to place them in the intense reality of experience.
Ordinary speech will not be transformed into a form less alive and further removed from experience, but will become formal speech with the status of life-changing, providing time
the phenomenological method
1. The collection stage of naive descriptions.
2. The analysis stage of naive descriptions, with the identification of the structural components of experience.
3. Compiling a report that gives clear, articulated descriptions of the phenomenon of interest (experience)
The transtemporal relation adds to this the establishment and description of socio-psychological practice, the context of social and life changes. At the outset, the psychologist must clearly articulate the basic form of time – the meaning of the psychological practice, and thereafter continually correlate the experience of reflecting on experience with the experience of practice. This action must be carried out at the very beginning of the study and reproduced at all subsequent stages.
The general form of understanding at this stage may be as follows: «By participating in …, the subject experienced ….».
As units of meaning, one should isolate not just any meanings, but temporalities – durations of experience that are homogeneous in their meaning. (Temporality – the time, the duration of a specific experience)
it is necessary to study the tendencies and structures of transitions and coordination of temporalities. (in one's narrative, moving from the experience of one duration to another) This allows one to understand the person in their readiness to be, to understand the meaning of their experience in the context of their existence. It is proposed that one should obtain not lists of themes, but descriptions of the tendencies of the becoming of human being in the world in terms of concrete experience
we combine different sources of data
reflective descriptions,
the researcher's self-reflection,
general cultural texts
into a single system of practice-experience
the problem of identity – is the problem of a person's stability in a changing world
the basic context for the formation of identity is the context of witnessing (supervising).
It is witnessing, as a social practice, that ensures the unity of the stability and uniqueness of the personality
The phenomenon of performance – a form of presentation in which the spectator plays the main role
Communication and communicative processes are conceived not simply as processes of becoming, exchange, and interaction, but as space-forming, world-forming, approach-forming phenomena in psychology and the social sciences
The self-determination of people and groups changes the meanings and content of social practices, forms of interaction, and life.
The search for answers to life's questions becomes specifically problematic, since it becomes precisely a search for identity, and not merely a search for a suitable solution
representativeness and presentability characterize only one aspect of understanding communication.
Another important aspect is performativity
Communication is not only a process and condition for the transformation of human identity, but communication itself is also transformed in the course of the becoming of the human being and human presence.
Not only is the personality, the property, and the quality of a person and human activity explained through the properties and qualities of communication, but we ourselves, in becoming Human, explain, create, and transform communication.
Performative communication - communication that is transforming and being transformed by us
The main meanings and characteristics of performative communication
Performative communication can be contrasted with representative communication in that the expressive means used is not signs or symbols, but space itself.
Often the human body and the space of perception serve as means and channels for transmitting information.
Human identity is transformed (a temporal, possible identity is formed), whereas in formative (representative) communication identity is formed and remains unchanged (that is, it is fixed as a rigid structure, a prolonged state, a durable, fairly stable social, personal, and similar identity).
In the events of performative communication, a person first becomes deindividualized
the core meanings and characteristics of performative communication.
In performative communication, events preceding and following the observed action are included in the event itself, but not as past and future, rather as their acceptance by the person here and now, within the event, in the act.
The structure of a performative communication event is determined by the presence of the observer. Even a silent or presumed observer is the principal communicator, regardless of what talent and merit the subject actively expressing himself before that observer possesses.
Performative communication corresponds to an understanding of human being as spheres and possibilities of presence nested within one another. Time in this reality is understood as the time of a person becoming himself in the world.
Performative communication
Helping psychological practices have long been created as forms of performative communication. Only the term itself was not used.
Forms of performative communication can be considered to include both the mysteries of the ancient world and contemporary examples of psychotherapy
Forms of performative communication use not only the person's identity but also the communication itself to turn a natural social community into a therapeutic transformation, and they rely not on models, symbols, and means, but on the person's space and body
within the context of classical scientism, which regards only representative communication as real, all authors were compelled to arrive at the understanding that psychological practice is closer to art than to science and technology.
In art, the search for a form of expression matters more than the search for specific content
What leads to changes in personality?
Real changes in life are brought about not by the moments of crisis, intimacy, or revelation themselves, but by a person's persistent continuation of efforts toward the tendential repetition and continuation of these moments in their experiences, thoughts, identities, in accordance with becoming, that is, in the retention of multidimensionality, ensuring the stability and uniqueness of their being
The main characteristic of the formation of temporal identity is a person's discovery of their self (identity) as a condition
of simultaneity (more precisely, contemporaneity),
of uniqueness, and
of stability of their being
To have oneself, to be oneself, and to become oneself
– these are three tasks that a person must solve simultaneously within the concrete time of their life.
that is, having oneself, to be and to become oneself,
Becoming oneself, to be and to have oneself,
Remaining oneself, both to become and to have oneself.
This is possible only when such a possibility is embedded in the nature and dynamics of human development
Authentic variants of identity are conditioned by the shifting of the boundaries of responsibility from the zone of experiencing problems into the zone of experiencing risks and managing risks
Identity as a condition for ensuring a person's stability in the dynamics of becoming
The becoming of identity is realized through the construct of temporal identity, which expresses the tendentiality of the synthesis of chronotopes of identity carried out by a person in the context of the phenomenon of readiness to be.
Identity can be reduced to the phenomenon of readiness to be oneself in the world at the cost of the necessary changes.
Self-identity can be defined as a meaning-of-life relation of the contemporaneity of one's losses and gains of self in the world.
The qualitative characteristics of the becoming of identity are determined by temporal correspondence in a person's fulfillment of their existential obligations of reviving the past and proclaiming the future.
Excessive fixedness of the form and content of identity, as well as excessive changeability, hinder the becoming of an authentic existence and can be classified as a specific form of psychic rigidity, reflecting a problem (crisis) in relation to the conditions of life, a disruption of the historical-psychic foundations of being
Identity, in its dynamic and substantive fullness, is not experienced within concrete actual experience, but rather stands as a requirement (an imperative) for the increasing complexity and elevation of the level of self-development.
Identity is intensely experienced in the experience of reflexive interpretation in the context of social change, with the center of responsibility shifting from the domain of problem-solving to the domain of risk management of life-creating activity
«Knowledge is not acquired passively — it is actively constructed by the knowing subject»
Identity is sustained through ongoing processes of resignification.
Intelligibility
Judith Butler speaks of standards of intelligibility
the formation and maintenance of relations of coherence and unity
Through language, intelligibility is continually created and refuted.
The process of signification is a regulated process of repetition that allows for the establishment of new possibilities for the individual (identity).
J. Butler speaks of the possibility of refuting old hierarchical codes and establishing new discursive practices .
Categories of identity are never merely descriptive,
identities are always normative and as such engage operations of exclusion
The specificity of identity lies in its mutability and its susceptibility to the influences of social transformations. Being a subject of relations, a person is constantly included in a system of evaluation by others regarding conformity to normative standards and to their own measures (ideal models) .
What matters most is that identity signifies the continuity of a person's psychic life.
A sense of identity allows me to understand who I am, allows me to combine the various manifestations of my multifaceted personality that arise in the course of my social interactions with other people in various situations.
Social psychologists often make a serious mistake in considering identity to be a result of behavior. In doing so, they forget a person's ability to build a system of relations within themselves, in the process of modeling possible relations (both desired and avoided).
It is precisely this manipulation of meaningful images that turns into the narrative of identity.
A new problem
When a person's own «I» awakens within them, it forcefully separates them from their immediate surroundings.
But at the same time, isolation can grow into a sense of being lost, causing a feeling of unbearable anxiety.
Escapism
Escapism is a characteristic of the activity of a person who «escapes» from the real, everyday world into a world of daydreams, fantasies, and illusions.
Forms of escapism can include reading books, watching television or films, video games, communicating on the Internet, music, sports, career-building, creative work, the use of alcohol and drugs, and much more. Religion has served as the «classic» form of escapism since ancient times. It allows one to endure the calamities and dreariness of this world more calmly through prayer, communion with God, and hope for eternal life. Faith allows a person to feel their connection with some other world that is better than the everyday world.
This is, as a rule, an escape from negative experiences, from dissatisfaction with one's life, from routine. Sometimes escapism is expressed as passive behavior — a flight followed by nothing — however, as a rule, escapism is precisely an activity, a creative form of engagement. Escapist activity of this kind is always characterized by the formation of new self-images.
Escapism
The drive toward escapism is a characteristic feature of contemporary society. This is linked, on the one hand, to the increase in leisure time, and, on the other hand, to the absence of stable ideals. A person who has a purpose in life, faith in something constant, unchanging, and intrinsically valuable, is less prone to «falling into» escapism. Escapism is characteristic of those who, feeling a lack of something in everyday life, seek that «something» elsewhere.
As for the influence of escapism on the formation and maintenance of a stable identity, here too it plays an important role, since for identity, the events of our immediate real life play a role equally important to that of the events of our inner world, including fantasies — provided they seem important to us
Mass media
Contemporary mass media exert a significant influence. They not only allow a person to feel their connection with the whole world, they also supply them with streams of information, only a small part of which is relevant and necessary to them.
Contemporary people are drowning in these information streams, unable to process them and separate the wheat from the chaff. The main point of reference for the identification of the average person becomes the standards of living imposed on them, as demonstrated in advertising, and identification occurs according to the principle «I am what I consume».
The media level out the value of a person's private life, putting the stories of "celebrities" on display while also actively inviting "ordinary people" into various reality shows. In this way, the individual becomes alienated from his own private life, at least in its traditional sense
Another consequence of the spread of the media is the mass replication of stereotypes and misconceptions (since there is no censorship by common sense), which increases the population's ignorance (at the same time, the media also perform an educational function, but given the already-mentioned inability to "filter" information independently, the former outweighs the latter).
On the other hand, a person develops distrust toward information in general, since the media have repeatedly been caught lying.
This last circumstance again leads to difficulty in identification - how can I identify with something if I cannot believe in anything or anyone?
"Proteanism"
The American psychiatrist R.J. Lifton develops the theme of identity crisis in detail, proposing the term "protean" identity and "proteanism."
Proteus is a deity from ancient Greek mythology, constantly changing his shape and able to retain his true form only when captured.
Modern man, like Proteus, is forced to change constantly; his identity simply can no longer remain stable. (Media, social crisis)
In search of stabilizing his identity, a person always seeks stability outside himself, something he can orient himself by.
All the aforementioned factors lead to a person developing a feeling of "homelessness" or "fatherlessness" (Lifton's terms).
The protean self must struggle with these feelings, and despite its constant changeability, it must be able to combine and hold together a number of hard-to-reconcile elements.
Another aspect of "proteanism" is that a person begins to feel especially acutely the possibility of the "end of the world" along with his own direct involvement in it. For the first time in human history, a person begins to realize the possibility that the "end of the world" could become the work of his own hands.
This creates a certain background of anxiety.
Protean identity
In its formation, the protean self relies on things created by people and on people's opinions.
It presupposes the possibility of several selves existing at once, even to the point of being fully opposite to one another (multimind), yet each of which is constantly ready to come into action.
Lifton, who devoted one of his books to studying the psychology of Nazi doctors who worked in concentration camps, cites the researcher Heinz Kohut, who speaks of "doubling" - the formation of a second "functional" self in Nazi doctors to adapt them to the evil they were inflicting. In such a case, contradictions within the self and an unwillingness to accept some part of it ultimately lead to the disowning of unwanted qualities into a fictitious other self. It is therefore assumed that the Nazi doctors felt as though the inhuman experiments they were carrying out were not actually being performed by them, but by some Other.
The resulting feeling of "homelessness" can lead to
A) a tragic outcome of the identity crisis,
B) a positive outcome - when a person sets out in search of a new "home." Here, "home" can be understood in a broad sense - from simply a geographic change of residence to a change in the psychological structure of the personality.
Is a stable identity possible, or is a person doomed to be an eternally changeable Proteus, a weathervane that spins ceaselessly, obeying a multitude of crosswinds?
Protean identity does not assert the loss of identity and the self. On the contrary, it is aimed at the search for its meaning. The protean self strives to be simultaneously fluid and solid.
This is a balancing act between constant metamorphoses and the striving for wholeness.
Irony
An important quality of the protean personality, Lifton notes, is irony.
Irony is the ability to call any self into question.
In irony, the implied and the actual meaning are clearly distinguished, and the self renders an independent judgment.
Irony contains within it the capacity to form this multifaceted personality. It allows one not to become fixated on a single manifestation of the self, and at the same time, being an independent authority, it allows different self-images to be linked with one another.
This is the most important quality for a person forced to live in the era of postmodern relativism
The structure of the self is becoming more complex than it has ever been before, which is why the question of identity is also becoming most acute - after all, the more self-images there are, the more difficult it is to preserve their connectedness and consistency, that is, identity itself, the awareness that each of one's self-images belongs to a single, unified self-complex.
«Normal identity» is a balanced system of the Self, in which all self-images are correctly connected to one another, and the individual recognizes all of them as belonging to him and reflecting part of his consciousness.
Crisis identity is expressed in a disruption of the connections between various self-images, in the fact that some self-images no longer fit into the existing system, and reformation and restructuring of the Self are required. However, this complexity simultaneously contains the path to the individual's fullest development.
The human Self consists of a multitude of self-images, each of which corresponds to a particular aspect of external reality and the person's inner individuality, but only together, by combining their pictures of the world into a single picture, do they create a complete human personality and make it possible each time to grasp any specific aspect of reality from different points of view, thereby obtaining, from the totality of these points of view, the fullest possible picture of the world.
The inability to engage in multi-positional cognition leads to dogmatism and rigidity of thinking.
Thus, it makes sense to speak of the existence of a multitude of self-positions, united by the cognizing subject into a cumulative individual experience, which corresponds to the unified Self. The organization of the Self as a unified structure is an active activity carried out by the cognizing subject both at the conscious and at the unconscious level. The multiplicity and diversity of self-positions are no less important for cognition than the unified Self that brings them together.
Wanderings in the labyrinth are endless
The problem of identity turns into the problem of organizing multifaceted individual experience.
As long as a person is alive, he is in search. His identity is constantly undergoing change; it is a living, ceaselessly developing organism, and therefore escape from the labyrinth of identity is impossible - the labyrinth keeps expanding and drawing us ever deeper into its depths.
The modern sociocultural situation demands greater activity from the subject than in previous eras - the modern person must choose for himself exactly how, on what foundation, and from what elements to construct his Self and his identity, and exactly how he will lay out the labyrinth in which he is to wander.
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