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Books > Social sciences > Psychology > The self, ego, identity, personality
In this pathbreaking and provocative new treatment of some of the oldest dilemmas of psychology and relationship, Gordon Wheeler challenges the most basic tenet of the West cultural tradition: the individualist self. Characteristics of this self-model are our embedded yet pervasive ideas that the individual self precedes and transcends relationship and social field conditions and that interpersonal experience is somehow secondary and even opposed to the needs of the inner self. Assumptions like these, Wheeler argues, which are taken to be inherent to human nature and development, amount to a controlling cultural paradigm that does considerable violence to both our evolutionary self-nature and our intuitive self-experience. He asserts that we are actually far more relational and intersubjective than our cultural generally allows and that these relational capacities are deeply built into our inherent evolutionary nature. His argument progresses from the origins and lineage of the Western individualist self-model, into the basis for a new model of the self, relationship, and experience out of the insights and implications of Gestalt psychology and its philosophical derivatives, deconstructivism and social constructionism. From there, in a linked series of experiential chapters, each of them a groundbreaking essay in its own right, he takes up the essential dynamic themes of self-experience and relational life: interpersonal orientation, meaning-making and adaptation, support, shame, intimacy, and finally narrative and gender, culminating in considerations of health, ethics, politics, and spirit. The result is a picture and an experience of self that is grounded in the active dynamics of attention, problem solving, imagination, interpretation, evaluation, emotion, meaning-making, narration, and, above all, relationship. By the final section, the reader comes away with a new sense of what it means to be human and a new and more usable definition of health.
The fields of social behaviour and personality had for the most part been studied separately, originally published in 1986, this title was one of the first to consider them together. Social behaviours and contexts are analysed and distinctions are suggested. Social behaviours not previously seen as similar are linked. This a great opportunity to rediscover the work of Arnold Buss one of the greats in Social Psychology.
This text addresses the interface of sociology and psychology which, it argues, is the key to political change. Offering a comparison of a range of psychotherapeutic theories of human nature, including those of Freud and Anna Freud, Klein and Kleininans and Lacan, humanisticpsychology, and feminist, trans-cultural and other radical psychotherapies, the book focuses on each theory's psychological concept of health and its political implications.
Designed for professionals and graduate students in the personality/social, military, and educational psychology, and assessment/evaluation communities, this volume explores the state of the art in motivational research for individuals and teams from multiple theoretical viewpoints as well as their effects in both schools and training environments. The great majority of education and training R&D is focused on the cognitive dimensions of learning, for instance, the acquisition and retention of knowledge and skills. Less attention has been given in the literature and in the design of education and training itself to motivational variables and their influence on performance. As such, this book is unique in the following montage of factors: * a focus on motivation of teams or groups as well as individuals; * an examination of the impact of motivation on performance (and, thus, also on cognition) rather than only on motivation itself; * research in training as well as educational settings. The data reported were collected in various venues including schools, laboratories and field settings. The chapter authors are the researchers that, in many cases, have defined the state of the art in motivation.
Originally published in 1984, this title looks at the development of temperament in early life. At the time of publication there were three major perspectives of temperament: paediatrics, individual differences in infants and inherited personality traits that appear in early life. Whatever the diversity of these perspectives, they converge on personality traits that develop early in life, hence the title of this book. The authors start by looking at the main research in this field, then go on to discuss their own approach to temperament, building on their original theory from 1975.
Recently, research on the ways in which goals, affect, and
self-regulation influence one another has enjoyed an upsurge. New
findings are being published and new theories are being developed
to integrate these findings. This volume reports on the latest of
this work, including a substantial amount of data and theory that
has not yet been published. Emanating from a conference exploring
affect as both a cause and effect in various social contexts, this
book examines some of the complex and reciprocal relationships
among goals, self structures, feelings, thoughts, and behavior. The
chapters address:
Originally published in 1981, this volume presents the domain of personality as a fuzzy set that includes features previously identified with cognitive and social psychology. Few of the individual contributions are centrally concerned with individual differences and cross-situational stability, but these traditional themes certainly appear in several of the chapters. The remaining chapters deal with the general processes mediating the interaction between the person and the social environment, filling out the fuzzy set of personality psychology. Part 1 seeks to locate contemporary trends in the cognitive psychology of personality against a backdrop of historical events. The chapters in Part 2 discuss some of the cognitive processes mediating social behaviour. Part 3 contains contributions concerned with the rules by which people make judgments about objects in the social world. The self, a dominant topic in personality theory and research, is treated extensively in Part 4. Although many of the chapters are explicitly concerned with the relations between cognition and action - after all, most human interaction takes the form of judgments and communication - the contributions in Part 5 make the links to overt behaviour. Finally, Part 6 offers two discussions of the previous contributions from the perspective of cognitive psychology.
This book is about the experience of individuals who have been abused or who have abused others, but it also traces the way an abusive experience can organize a family or professional system so that changes Are difficult to achieve. Arnon Bentovim has been in the forefront of the child abuse field for many years, and he discusses in this volume the way his thinking has changed to incorporate the ideas from the feminist movement and the constructionist family therapists. He looks at the way victimizing actions and the traumatic effects of abuse combine to create a trauma-organized system, which includes the individual, the family, the professional helpers, the community, and the cultural values. procedure to help the workers plan the treatment. In order to help such a family, he proposes that interventions need to be made at the different levels of this system, and the book outlines various treatment approaches, such as group work for victims and perpetrators, marital and family therapy, and individual work, particularly to clarify the issue of personal responsibility. The book is illustrated by case studies and transcripts from therapy sessions to clarify the specific techniques Bentovim uses to treat such families.
After many "out-of-print" years, this volume has been reissued in response to an increasing demand for copies. This reflects that the fundamental questions that motivated this book thirty years ago are still being asked. But more important, the answers -- or at least their outlines -- now seem to be in sight. In 1968, this book stood as an expression of a paradigm crisis in its critique of the state of personality psychology. The last three decades have been filled with controversy and debate about the dilemmas raised here, and then with renewal and fresh discoveries. It therefore seems especially timely to revisit the pages which posed the challenges. Mischel outlined the need to encompass the situation in the study of personality, but with a focus on the acquired meaning of stimuli and on the situation as perceived, viewing the individual as a cognitive-affective being who construes, interprets, and transforms the stimulus in a dynamic reciprocal interaction with the social world. He focused on the idiographic analysis of personality that had originally motivated the field, and the complexity, discriminative facility, and uniqueness of the individual, and sought to connect the expressions of personality to the individual's behavior -- that is, to what people do and not just what they say. Even the intrinsically contextualized "if...then..." expressions of the personality system -- its essential behavioral signatures -- were foreshadowed in this book that fired the opening salvo in a search for "a truly dynamic personality psychology."
Any research that involves the use of the Rorschach or focuses on
the nature of the Rorschach must be framed in the context of the
basic principles that mark any scientific investigation. However,
most texts concerning research design or data analysis do not deal
directly with many of the unusual issues that confront
investigators who use the Rorschach in their research. The nature
of the test and test procedures are somewhat different than for
most psychological tests, and, often, these special characteristics
become critical when research designs are formulated. Similarly,
some of the data of the tests are quite different from the
customary distributions yielded by other psychological tests. Thus
special care must be exercised when considering the variety of
tactics that might might be used in analyzing the test data.
Social psychologists have long recognized the possibility that
attitudes might differ from one another in terms of their strength,
but only recently had the profound implications of this view been
explored. Yet because investigators in the area were pursuing
interesting but independent programs of research exploring
different aspects of strength, there was little articulation of
assumptions underlying the work, and little effort to establish a
common research agenda. The goals of this book are to highlight
these assumptions, to review the discoveries this work has
produced, and to suggest directions for future work in the area.
Social psychologists have long recognized the possibility that
attitudes might differ from one another in terms of their strength,
but only recently had the profound implications of this view been
explored. Yet because investigators in the area were pursuing
interesting but independent programs of research exploring
different aspects of strength, there was little articulation of
assumptions underlying the work, and little effort to establish a
common research agenda. The goals of this book are to highlight
these assumptions, to review the discoveries this work has
produced, and to suggest directions for future work in the area.
Christopher Bollas argues that Freud's vision of the dream process is a model for all unconscious mental experience. In this work he extends his exploration of the inner world of human experience and suggests that the rhythm of that experience is vital to individual creativity. It allows us to develop what the author calls a separate sense, which we use to assess the meanings of our own experiences and also to attune ourselves sympathetically to the lives of other people. In this book, Bollas examines how people educate one another in the idioms of their unconscious lives, and considers the nature and consequences of the traumas that inhibit the freedom to do this. He studies what we mean by the past - is it unchangeable or can history be a creative, open understanding of experience? We come to know who we are by giving form and meaning to our past - yet what do we mean by the self? Bollas' answer suggests yet more ways in which the separate sense expresses each person's unique qualities.
Changes currently occuring in the world of work are large-scale, affecting what people do everyday and altering relations among ourselves and with the physical world. There is a shift in the nature of industrial work, from a materiality of labour and product, and specialization of function, to forms of production that are discursive, or symbolic, and highly integrated. Among the far reaching implications of a postindustrial condition is a dissolution of traditional and modern bonds of social solidarity and a metamorphosis of the character of the modern self. This text examines the relationships between the institutional practices of work under post-industrial conditions and the formation of the self. Drawing on data from field work in a multi-national corporation, the book critically analyzes organizations and cultural practices in contemporary corporate work. The author interprets the deliberate construction of "designer cultures" as a response to the broad crisis in industrial production, work and culture. The book also develops a critical social psychology of corporate work.
Half a century after the collapse of the Nazi regime and the Third
Reich, scholars from a range of fields continue to examine the
causes of Nazi Germany. An increasing number of young Americans are
attempting to understand the circumstances that led to the rise of
the Nazi party and the subsequent Holocaust, as well as the
implication such events may have for today as the world faces a
resurgence of neo-Nazism, ethnic warfare, and genocide.
Traditionally, developmental psychology has its focus on
individuals. Developmentalists aim to describe regularities in
individuals' change and development across time, to explain the
processes and mechanisms that are involved in producing change and
regularity, and eventually, to design strategies for optimization
and modification of developmental pathways. Although the role of
contexts has always been of central concern for these purposes, it
is nevertheless quite surprising to note that compared to the
effort devoted to individuals, relatively little attention has been
paid to the study of the nature and organization of their contexts.
This is the first work to condense the large literature on
explanatory style -- one's tendency to offer similar sorts of
explanations for different events. This cognitive variable has been
related to psychopathology, physical health, achievement and
success. Compiled by experts in the fields of depression, anxiety,
psychoneuroimmunology and motivation, this volume details our
current level of understanding, outlines gaps in our knowledge, and
discusses the future directions of the field.
This volume presents a scholarly analysis of psychopathic and
sociopathic personalities and the conditions that give rise to
them. In so doing, it offers a coherent theoretical and
developmental analysis of socialization and its vicissitudes, and
of the role played in socialization by the crime-relevant genetic
traits of the child and the skills and limitations of the primary
socializing agents, the parents.
This volume presents a scholarly analysis of psychopathic and
sociopathic personalities and the conditions that give rise to
them. In so doing, it offers a coherent theoretical and
developmental analysis of socialization and its vicissitudes, and
of the role played in socialization by the crime-relevant genetic
traits of the child and the skills and limitations of the primary
socializing agents, the parents.
This monograph from a leading neuroscientist and neural networks
researcher investigates and offers a fresh approach to the
perplexing scientific and philosophical problems of minds and
brains. It explains how brains have evolved from our earliest
vertebrate ancestors. It details how brains provide the basis for
successful comprehension of the environment, for the formulation of
actions and prediction of their consequences, and for cooperating
or competing with other beings that have brains. The book also
offers observations regarding such issues as:
This monograph from a leading neuroscientist and neural networks
researcher investigates and offers a fresh approach to the
perplexing scientific and philosophical problems of minds and
brains. It explains how brains have evolved from our earliest
vertebrate ancestors. It details how brains provide the basis for
successful comprehension of the environment, for the formulation of
actions and prediction of their consequences, and for cooperating
or competing with other beings that have brains. The book also
offers observations regarding such issues as:
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