Beyond Individualism

Toward a New Understanding of Self, Relationship, and Experience

Gordon Wheeler

• Publisher: Gestalt Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138150348
• eBook ISBN: 9781135061487
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Applied Psychology
• Index: Psychology

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.

Part I -- The Problem of Self: In Search of a New Paradigm

Chapter One: The Legacy of Individualism -- the Paradigm in Practice

What is the self? What do we mean exactly when we use this familiar yet elusive term, at once as near to us as our own skin and still somehow as vanishing as a mirage, always seeming to recede as fast as we try to approach it and pin it down? Is it a thing, a process, or just a feeling? Something we have, or something we do -- or should we be thinking of it rather as something we somehow just are? Is it the little person inside who runs the show -- and then who runs her or him (or should we say “it” -- does self have gender?). Noun, verb -- or more a kind of adjective, something we use for emphasis, as in “I did it my self’ -- in which case who or what is that adjective supposed to emphasize or describe? Or should we think of self more as a kind of place, a point of view in some literal or figurative sense, maybe that domain we refer to when we talk about where somebody is “coming from?” And then where do we find that place: inside us or outside, or somehow both at the same time? (But then here we have to be careful, because this common way of talking about it, “inside” and “outside,” seems to leave us with two unclear terms now to work with, where a moment ago we only had one. First there was “self,” and now there’s a “me” for that self to be “inside of” or otherwise -- plus possibly the person who is standing off looking at the relationship of those two terms, which may or may not be the same as the person who is talking to you now about standing off and looking in that way, and so on and so on with no obvious stopping point in sight!)

This is what philosophers call an “infinite regress,” the kind of backward-spiraling answer which gives us an uncomfortable feeling there was something wrong with the question in the first place. But what? I do feel somehow that I am “myself,” and you are “yourself:” why should it be hard for us to talk about that? How is it we seem to get so quickly into difficulties of this kind, the minute we try to stake out a space for dialogue on these slippery slopes, and talk meaningfully about questions like who we are exactly, and what it means to be that person, or to be a person at all, in relation to ourselves and to other selves in the world. We know ourselves, don’t we? -- or don’t we? Why is it so difficult to say who or what that self is, that we think we know?

All of these are the riddles that once were answered -- or begged -- in a single swift stroke by the evocation of a Creator: we are who we are, says the Creationist perspective, whatever kind of being or state that is, because Somebody out there made us that way, period, end of story. Of course, that didn’t really answer the question of self at all, but it did offer the soothing promise of closing off the discussion. Nowadays, in the absence of that easy answer, the discussion somehow seems to want to chase its own tail, as if language itself were not really very well equipped to deal with our own felt experience on these matters. Which is odd when you think about it, because where else would words and concepts have come from, if not from some underpinning of felt reality and lived experience?

If we keep thinking stubbornly on past this point we may begin to get to a kind of curious split in our own self-experience, that eerie self-mirroring sensation the romantic poets called the “double,” and the Existentialists discussed a century or so later on as “alienation,” the uncomfortable gnawing sense that I am somehow not at home in the world I was born into, perhaps not even in this body itself, which seems to be both me and not me at the same time. And yet our most firmly-held modem creation stories have us evolving straight out of that natural world, which we then surely must belong to and be a direct part of, in some deeply integral way. Thus it is that we arrive at a sudden impasse in our reflections about our selves and our own nature, which may seem to be the validation of what the Existentialists maintained: namely that we are in some sense shipwrecked here on the shores of existence -- “thrown here,” as Heidegger put it, an image which has the effect of making us strangers in a strange land indeed: born to live and die essentially homeless, with no naturally given connections or meanings. An impasse of this kind can be finally a kind of wordless place, since language itself seems to be leading us to more and more disconnection, in place of the natural belonging and meaning we were yearning for, leaving us in the end to stare at each other in silence across that Existentialist divide, each of us isolated and lonely, fastened to a dying animal (in Yeats’s vivid phrase), imprisoned with some self or being who gives us no comfort, and which we are apparently helpless even to name or define.

But why should this be? Why is it that our reflections on our own nature and being seem to lead us repeatedly up this kind of blind alley? Is this the irreducible absurdity of selfhood and being, an intrinsic part of just existing in the world at all, as some of the Existentialists maintained (“Dasein” or “being there” -- again a coinage of Heidegger’s, by which he seemed to mean “pure existence,” prior to or isolated from any particular desires and feelings, an imaginary state parodied in the blackly comic Jerzy Koszinski novel and Peter Sellers movie of the same title)?

Or is this impasse, as we will argue here, more the result of a category of language, a deep cultural structure which shapes how we understand and then actually experience the world and ourselves -- and thus how we take up relationship, and live and work with other people? Other cultures after all have thought and felt differently from us about who we are and how we get that way. Where do our own assumptions about self and experience come from, and then how do those assumptions operate dynamically to influence and predetermine that experience, perhaps even our “inner experience” -- because we know enough by this time about other cultures and other ages to be suspicious, at least, about the idea that there is any such thing as “pure experience” completely free of the developmental influences of culture, subculture, and family and personal history? We know that language prestructures feelings and thought, and even “nature” itself, as post-modern physics tells us, is a social construction of mind, a way of looking at things with deep roots in hidden cultural assumptions about what is given and real, which then provide the lens through which we see the world. Where do we get our deepest assumptions about human nature and the self, and then how do they function to predetermine what we assume to be “natural” and irreducible, just “the way things are?” To use the language we were developing in the Preface, what is our paradigm of selfhood? Where does it come from, and how does that legacy operate today, to color not just how we think and analyze theoretically, but how we actually feel, and experience, and relate to ourselves and other people?

The Legacy of Western Culture

In our Western tradition, once we begin to speak of origins and sources, usually it isn’t very long before we make a move which is so habituated in the cultural stream as to be virtually automatic. This is to turn to the Greeks, who are assumed in this tradition to represent a sort of bedrock or zero point for the beginning of almost any discussion, and particularly one about terms and language -- not just what things mean, but even more than that, how we should set about to find that out in some clear and reliable way. The ancients after all lived in far simpler times -- or at any rate so we like to imagine, because imagining this supports our faith that the classic age promises us something solid we can rely on, free of the noise and confusion of modem life, with its relentless overload of “information,” all too often a river of data without context, which only seem to cloud the issues we are trying to clarify.¹

“Man,” says Protagoras, a contemporary and sometime adversary of Socrates and Plato, “is the measure of all things” -- the kind of dictum which sums up the age, and gives our tradition of “Western humanism” its focus and its name. Leaving aside for the moment the gendering of that proposition (a topic we will return to, especially in Chapter Eight), who or what is this “man” the ancients have in mind, and how does their perspective inform ours today -- helpfully or otherwise -- in our own search for self? All subsequent philosophy in the West, remarks Bertrand Russell (1972), quoting Whitehead to express this same cultural faith, is footnote or commentary to Plato -- by which he meant not that every question had necessarily been answered, 2500 or so years ago, but rather that Plato and his own commentator Aristotle had laid down for us all the terms and parameters of discussion, as well as the methods by which questions and answers could rationally and reliably be explored and critiqued, including Plato’s own proposed answers to basic issues like who we are, what it means to be that person, and thus how we should live with ourselves and each other in our shared world. That these methods and terms themselves might limit or even blind us to other possible ways of seeing and experiencing does not seem to occur to Russell, or his mentor Whitehead -- though it will become a major preoccupation of the next, most recent wave of Western philosophy, the movement that today is called “postmodern,” from Russell’s own protegé Wittgenstein and on through Foucault and the deconstructionists of our own times (very much including a number of feminist philosophers and psychologists, who have taken leading roles in critiquing assumptions about self and relationship that derive from Freud in particular, -- but are inherited, as we will be tracing here, from Plato and his world, pretty much intact). Many of this group will eventually conclude that the whole Platonic/analytic tradition was a dead end in philosophy -- without always appreciating, we will be arguing, how much they continue to inhabit the Platonic self-paradigm themselves, and how much our view of self, in clinical models and philosophy alike, is still in thrall to Plato’s thinking and Greek assumptions about human nature in general.

To understand this, and then to do something about it together, we first have to take a look at those terms and assumptions and that Greek world itself -- again, not just in the abstract, as Plato’s own philosophical tradition would seem to suggest, but more phenomenologically, meaning in terms of our own felt concerns and experience of self and relationship, looking for the fit and misfit between and among that experience, our inherited tradition of language and thinking, and then the interplay of the form and the content of those two domains. What was Plato’s own view of the self and self-experience? What concerns in his world did that view grow naturally and creatively out of? And then how does the legacy of that view inform and influence our approach and our own experience in our lives and work with people today?

The Origins of the Paradigm -- the Self in Greek Perspective

The answer to this question is a curious one, and leads us into another one of those logical circles or experiential dead ends that we’re coming almost to expect, as soon as we try to explore self in the language of the individualist tradition. Briefly, that answer is simply that the classical philosophers, who were our first psychologists in the West, would very likely have been puzzled by the issues and questions we are raising here, if not totally nonplussed -- at least in the forms and language we are raising and posing them in now, which all have to do with our felt experience of selfhood in a world of other selves. The problem is not so much that the ancients had no positions on matters like these, of what it means to be a self, with self-experience, in a world of other experiencing selves with realities and points of view of their own. They certainly did have their own answers to all this, implicitly at least if not explicitly -- positions which took a certain view of human nature for granted, and along with it a certain natural social order deriving from that view. That view and that social order included the institution of slavery; the denial of full citizenship to women (though to give him credit, Plato’s repressive ideal state, the Republic [1993], does allow for the idea of political participation for women of the elite class, at least -- a notion from which Aristotle [1984] will recoil in horror); the normalization of war; and the relegation of almost all other cultures to the status of “barbarians” (from the onomatopoetic Greek root based on the mocking sound “ba-ba-ba,” meaning that foreigners speak tongues which are no more than primitive babble). All those are just a few of the social arrangements and positions that both underlie and derive from the Platonic view of self and the relationships of selves, to each other and to the world.

But that’s just it -- all this is taken for granted, based on a view of self that is presumed, not discussed, in the way paradigmatic principles and assumptions generally are, in our own culture or any other. To be a “self,” to Plato and his world, meaning a fully human being with a mind and a valid inner process of some kind, yielding a legitimate voice and point of view, is just assumed to mean being adult, male, emancipated, probably propertied, something they would call “rational” -- and also Greek. These things are not just specific attributes of particular persons or selves, but are the qualifications for belonging to the class of selves itself, membership in the group we take as fully human, treat as full human voices, and are talking about when we start to spin theories about human nature, the self, and the natural ordering of things. If the criteria themselves aren’t generally discussed, that’s just because they simply seem too obvious to the Greeks of the classical age and beyond to be in need of any articulation.

By contrast, when Plato and Aristotle do want to talk about human nature and experience, their interest is not at all in our modern preoccupations of identity and self-experience, our human condition as individual selves in relation somehow to other selves. Rather, what concerns Plato in particular is the issue of how those selves, once here, may achieve reliable knowledge. Not what it means to be a self, but what it means for that preexistent self to know the world. What is knowledge, and how do we come by it? What kinds of knowledge are certain and reliable, and which ones are just opinion or ephemera? How do we know the difference? Specifically, Plato is preoccupied with the question of how we arrive at knowledge that is solid enough to organize our lives and social systems around, including our moral and political judgments, in the midst of a physical and perceptual world that is characterized by accident, chance, error, misperception, and (worst of all) constant change.

To Plato as to his contempories this question is urgent, because of their project of deriving ethics and social policy from human reason alone -- without the traditional recourse to the guidance of priests and soothsayers or the dictates of tyrants to tell us what to do and how to live. Our lived experience seems such a jumble of fleeting impressions and misimpressions, contingency and hearsay; worst of all, our very selves seem subject to constant change, at least on the level of our physical beings, moods, and sensations. In the face of all this flux, what part of our own experiential process is reliable, and then what should be the rules of discourse and argument, so we can know when we’re proceeding on the basis of the reliable parts of what we seem to know, and not just on accident and opinion? The fact that the individual selves who are doing this knowing and deciding are already there, fully formed by some prior act of creation, separate and distinct from each other and from the world to be known -- in other words, the individualist paradigm itself -- is a constant in this exploration, just assumed as a given fact, and not itself a subject of inquiry or debate.

Not that Plato would have used the word “self,” which likely would have puzzled him mightily, as a substantive noun, as would the questions themselves that we are raising about it here. To Plato the natural word for referring to what is essential about a person would be “soul” -- as it was for that matter to Freud (1939), at the other end of the same tradition ² Self as a freestanding noun doesn’t actually emerge in common usage in the West until some two thousand years after Plato, around the time of Locke and the writers of the British Enlightenment, who were looking for a way of talking about personhood without recourse to the old religiously-derived vocabulary. From there the word eventually works its way back into German from English in the 18th Century (Drosdowski et al, 1963). Freud, who like most educated Germans of his day was steeped in Shakespeare and the Renaissance, was not particularly conversant with Locke and the British Enlightenment/empiricist philosophers, with whom he nonetheless shared many assumptions about self and the world (Gay, 1988).

But whether self or soul, the problem of what judgments, what kinds of perception or intuition we can rely on about ourselves and our world remains perplexing, in the absence of absolute kingly or priestly authority -- particularly when we consider that the thinking, perceiving person himself (sic) is also undergoing constant change, on a physical level and also in terms of mood, interest, information, and so on. How can our knowing of anything be anywhere near reliable enough to replace sheer authority as a standard, under these unstable conditions? Plato’s solution was ingenious, and enormously influential -- not so much for its explicit terms, which have provoked many critiques but little agreement down through the centuries, as for the implicit assumptions and social/psychological implications of his argument, which carried over into the culture and continue to mark discussion and analysis of self and relationship today.

The answer to the problem of reliable knowledge for the individual self, Plato argued, can only be that this apparent world, this world of accident, approximation, and change, is not the real world at all. If it were, there would be no way for us to know anything at all with any certainty, amid all this flux and error. Rather, there must be another world somewhere, more stable and real than this life of ephemeral appearances, which underlies this one, and from which this one takes its real shape and meaning. The proof of this is that we do know anything at all, which would be impossible if the world of sense impressions were all we had to go on -- in which case we wouldn’t even know how to recognize ourselves or each other, as we change from moment to moment and day to day. In that other, ideal realm, of which this world of sense impressions is only a pale copy, everything is clear, distinct, absolute, and eternally unchanging -- and thus reliable. These are the originals, or archetypes, which the particular things and classes and ideas of this world only roughly reflect -- as shadows on a wall only imperfectly resemble the real things that cast those shadows, in Plato’s famous image. Without that other world of reality to underlie the mere “phenomena” of this one, this world of shadows and echoes wouldn’t exist at all, and certainly wouldn’t be accessible to being known in any way.

Thus there is somewhere an ideal form of, say, “dog,” which all the various canines of this experiential world partake of or somehow draw their form and nature from, in their imperfect way. That’s what makes them “dogs” -- both as individual cases and as members of the class “dog” -- even though some of them are small, some large, some mean, some dead, some puppies, some imaginary, and so on. And then here comes the interesting part, for our exploration of self and human nature here: we know dogs -- both the individuals, as dogs, and the class as a category -- by making mental reference in some way to that archetype, that ideal form, which is already imprinted by creation into our brain. That is, when we see a particular, individual, and variable dog, who is different from all other dogs and also looks different in different lights, at different ages, in different doggy moods, and so on, we still know it’s a dog, because it always draws its nature from the Ideal Form of dog, and we have that Ideal Form stored, so to speak, in our inborn memory -- programmed in, as we might say today, to the hardwiring that is part of our created nature. Thus Plato solves the problem of “reality” -- how the world gets to be organized the way it is, in things and species and classes and categories and ev...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Other
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements and Note on Usage
• Preface: Paradigm and Practice
• Part I -- The Problem of Self: In Search of a New Paradigm
• Chapter One: The Legacy of Individualism -- the Paradigm in Practice
• Chapter Two: Looking for an Alternative Paradigm
• Part II -- The Self in the Social Field: Relationship and Contact
• Chapter Three: The Self in Relation -- Orienting and Contacting in the Social Field
• Chapter Four: The Self in Contact -- Integration and Process in the Living Field
• Part III -- Support, Shame, and Intimacy: The Self in Development
• Chapter Five: Support and Development -- The Self in the Field
• Chapter Six: Shame and Inhibition -- The Self in the Broken Field
• Chapter Seven: The Restoration of Self -- Intimacy, Intersubjectivity, and Dialogue--
• Part IV -- The Integrated Self: Narrative, Culture, and Health
• Chapter Eight -- Self as Story: Narrative, Culture and Gender
• Conclusion: Ethics, Ecology, and Spirit - The Healthy Self in the Healthy Field
• References
• Name Index