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Psychology of communication: the self
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Psychology of communication: the self
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We are at the very core of every communication we engage in. Even if someone else starts the communication, the message reaches our sense organs, is decoded by our brain, is filtered through our beliefs, attitudes and values; the feedback we give springs from our attitudes, beliefs and values and is encoded by us. Even when we are not engaged in interpersonal communication, we are probably engaged in intrapersonal communication, i.e. communication within ourselves.
The mere fact that I have just mentioned that we so frequently communicate within ourselves probably drew your attention to what you were thinking at the time. You may have been reading the text with some concentration and wondering whether what I had written really did seem to apply to you. You may have been thinking of something else entirely - in which case, of course, you'll be wondering what I'm going on about now (unless you're still thinking about something else entirely).
There are some fairly obvious and visible forms of intrapersonal communication, such as when a mechanic uses a checklist during an MoT test or we check off our purchases on a shopping list. Post-it notes to remind us of appointments, the 'to do' lists in filofaxes are other obvious examples. We also quite literally talk to ourselves; at my age, 'What was I about to do next?' or even 'What the hell am I doing here?' are becoming increasingly common questions I ask myself. You'll hear some people speaking aloud to themselves. I recall an elderly Theology professor who never stopped talking to himself about major philosophical problems- which made it particularly interesting watching him trying to eat his soup, though it was advisable not to get too close. Others don't necessarily speak, but grunt and groan and slap their hands to their brow in anguish when trying to solve a problem - the sort you'd hate to have to sit by in an examination!
The fact that we say we communicate within 'ourselves' leads us to think that we 'have' something which we can call a 'Self'. Our language and other European languages also foster the view that what we call our Self has fairly stable characteristics and that there may also be a kind of 'core' Self, which is fairly stable regardless of how we may be behaving at any given time: 'He was beside himself with anger', 'I'm not really feeling myself today', 'I'm not like that when I'm by myself', 'She wasn't at all her usual self'. There is an implication in those usages that I can have experiences and have thoughts whilst at the same time a somehow more essential I can stand back from those experiences and thoughts and reflect on them. People who accept that animals can have consciousness and are not mere automata will often nevertheless claim that what distinguishes us humans from other animals is that we have self-consciousness. This view is pretty well summed up by the philosopher William James:
The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part... The objective part is the sum total of whatsoever at any given time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner 'state' in which the thinking comes to pass.
James (19??)
A similar view is reflected also in, say, Carl Rogers' belief that his clients' major problem was that they were somehow being prevented from being themselves; or in Maslow's placing 'self-actualization' at the top of his hierarchy of needs. The title of Erving Goffman's book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life also suggests that there is some kind of Self to be presented.
This view of the self is sometimes referred to as a humanist view since it accords great importance to the individual human being and to each human being's individuality. Indeed, Rogers and others referred to their school of psychology as 'humanistic psychology'. This emphasis on the uniqueness of the individual is opposed by many philosophers, often broadly described as anti-humanist, who reject the notion of a discernably unitary self and see the self rather as the product of social structures and patterns of signification; this is a view which is also closely related to notions of identity in post-modernity, where
society appears as a kind of fancy-dress party in which identities are designed, tried on, worn for the evening and then traded in for the next.
Slater (1997 : 30)
(see for example the section on the decentred self).
Many common views of 'the self' may be referred to as dualism, or Cartesian dualism after the French philosopher René Descartes, whose philosophical method of radical doubt began with the one thing which he could be sure of: his own existence - 'I think therefore I am' (cogito ergo sum). Cartesian dualism is the notion that we somehow consist of two quite different substances, a body and a mind (hence 'dualism') and that in the latter somehow resides our essential being, our self, which controls the other substance. I'm not quite sure why poor old Descartes always gets the blame for this, since there were plenty of philosophers who thought it before him; indeed, I would have thought it's pretty much the standard 'common-sense' view of the mind (consider for example the public school ideal of cultivating a 'healthy mind in a healthy body'). Since the philosopher Gilbert Ryle launched his attack on this doctrine, it has often been referred to as 'the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine', a description which Ryle used, as he said, 'with deliberate abusiveness'. He summarized the 'official' Cartesian dogma as follows:
With the doubtful exception of idiots and infants in arms every human being has both a body and a mind. Some would prefer to say that every human being is both a body and a mind. His body and mind are ordinarily harnessed together, but after the death of the body his mind may continue to exist and function .... A person therefore lives two collateral histories, one consisting of what happens in and to his body, the other consisting of what happens in and to his mind. The first is public, the second private. The events in the first history are events in the physical world, those in the second are events in the mental world.
Ryle (1949:13)
Despite Ryle's demolition job on Cartesian dualism (from a broadly behaviourist perspective - see behaviourism) and the assault on the self from post-structuralism, the notion still persists:
What is a self? Since Descartes in the 17th Century we have had a vision of the self as a sort of immaterial ghost that owns and controls a body the way you own and control your car.
Dennett (1989)
Clearly also, most of us tend to think of our 'self', our 'mind', as located in our brain. As Dennett points out, in a heart transplant operation we want to be the recipient, not the donor, but in a brain transplant, most of us would prefer to be the donor, taking the view that our self or mind goes where the brain goes. We would normally see ourselves as something like the 'owners' of our bodies. We might accept having a new brain if the old one was getting worn out, providing that the contents of the old one could be transferred, rather as we would transfer our old, familiar belongings from an old house to a new one. Dennett suggests that we need to view the brain as just another part of the body, another organ contributing to a complex whole. (1996: 77-8)
The Cartesian view also came under attack from behaviourist psychology. For behaviourists, there was no need to presuppose the existence of something called consciousness to explain animal and human behaviour. As Bertrand Russell wryly observed, 'there is nothing particularly repugnant to our prejudices in the conclusions of the behaviourists' as long as those conclusions refer to animals and other people, who are said by the behaviourists not to have minds, thoughts, mental states or consciousness. 'But when it comes to ourselves, we feel convinced that we can actually perceive our own thinking. Cogito ergo sum would be regarded by most people as having a true premise (1921: 29). Behaviourists disputed that we had a mind and that such concepts as consciousness or metal states were required to explain human behaviour any more than they are required to explain the behaviour of dogs or pigeons. If we feel we do need such a concept, then that is symptomatic of human arrogance. As Russell remarked, referring to Watson's writings: 'Where you might expect a chapter on "thought processes" you come instead upon a chapter on "The Language Habit". It is humiliating to find how terribly adequate this hypothesis turns out to be.' If you wish to investigate this further, please refer to the section on behaviourism.
I have referred to behaviourism as just one example in passing of an attack on our common-sense understanding of the 'Self'. There have been others. For example, Freudian personality theory attacks the notion of the 'unitary subject', though not 'dualism'; more recently, evolutionary and cognitive psychologists' development of a computational model of the brain as composed of specialized modules has come to undermine the notion of the 'autonomous subject', the idea that my 'higher' cognitive functions are under my sole control. Examination of twins separated at birth, for example, must surely raise some doubts. As Pinker says in How The Mind Works:
The discoveries [from the investigations of identical twins] cast doubt on the autonomous 'I' that we all feel hovering above our bodies, making choices as we proceed through life and affected only by our past and present environments. Surely the mind does not come equipped with so many small parts that it could predestine us to flush the toilet before and after using it or to sneeze playfully in crowded elevators, to take two ... traits shared by identical twins reared apart. But apparently it does.
Pinker 1998 : 20
and, in The Language Instinct
Not only are very general traits like IQ, extroversion and neuroticism partly heritable, but so are specific ones like degree of religious feeling, vocational interests, and opinions about the death penalty, disarmament, and computer music.
Pinker 1994 : 328
Broadly speaking, we can identify three conceptions of the self, as suggested by Stuart Hall (1992b):
As you can see, Ryle's view entails the rejection of the Enlightenment subject:
Abandonment of the two-worlds legend involves the abandonment of the idea that there is a locked door and a still to be discovered key. Those human actions and reactions, those spoken and unspoken utterances, those tones of voice, facial expressions and gestures, which have always been the data of all other students of men, have, after all, been the right and only manifestations to study. They and they alone have merited, but fortunately not received, the grandiose title 'mental phenomena'.
Ryle (1949:302)
As I understand that, if you want to figure out how people work, you'd be better off reading Proust and Dickens than Freud and Jung. Fine with me.
In the sections that follow, I shall, on the whole, confine myself to a broadly humanistic perspective, covering the 'Enlightenment subject' and the 'sociological subject', not because I particularly favour that perspective, nor because I discount the objections we have briefly examined, but simply because, at this level, Communication Studies seems to confine itself to this viewpoint. However, in the area of cultural studies, the notion of the decentred self has been debated for some time and identity is now a central issue, so I would advise you to follow that up at some point.
I think, though, that it would be worth mentioning that none of the three perspectives mentioned above (except perhaps, in a sense, the 'Enlightenment subject') deals with the possible existence of a 'neural self', proposed by the neurologist Antonio R. Damasio (1996) on the basis of the reports from his patients who have suffered brain damage though strokes. Most of these patients will report the moment of brain lesion as something like 'What is happening to me?' However, there is a relatively small number of patients who suffer complete anosognosia as a result of a stroke. Such patients may, for example, suffer total paralysis in one side of their body, but be wholly unaware of impairment and respond to 'How do you feel?' with an entirely sincere 'Fine'. These patients cannot relate their problems to the self, because, Damasio suggests, they have sustained damage to the neural substrate of the self. They cannot process current body states and therefore rely on old information, which is growing ever older. A person who retains a sense of self, according to Damasio, depends for that sense of self, first, on the ability to access information about the slowly evolving details of her autobiography, including her likes and dislikes and plans for the future and, secondly, on the ability to access representations of her body and its states, the collective representation of which constitutes the 'concept' of self:
At each moment the state of self is reconstructed, from the ground up. It is an evanescent reference state, so continuously and consistently reconstructed that the owner never knows it is being remade unless something goes wrong with the remaking.
(240)
Where neoroscience is concerned, it may be worth remarking that it also may turn out to pose a challenge to the conventionally dominant conception of ourselves as being endowed with free will and a sense of responsibility. Our democracy, our justice system, our everyday understanding of morality are grounded in the understanding of ourselves as autonomous individuals. That notion is reflected in our conception of 'extenuating circumstances', such as physical or financial duress, where a person's freedom of action is limited and the sentence they receive or the moral censure they are subject to is less severe than if they had been able to make a totally free choice between possible courses of action.
Some commentators on neuroscience, however, seem to be coming to the conclusion that the insights of this science point to a wholly deterministic view of human action. One of the earliest well-documented cases of the influence on behaviour of damage to the frontal lobes was that of Phineas Gage, a nineteenth-century railway engineer who, in a freak accident, had a large metal spike blown through the front of his head. Though able to function 'normally' after the accident, Gage was no longer the industrious worker he had been before, but a drunken, foul-mouthed drifter, full of plans, but too capricious ever to put any of them into effect. You might think that you wouldn't be any too happy either if a large chunk of your brain was blown away, but the point is that numerous observations since that time have pointed to the major rôle played by the frontal lobes in what we normally understand as the 'will', 'moral sense', 'sense of responsibility' and so on. No doubt, if Gage were to be brought before the courts today for some crime he had committed, he would receive a light sentence or would be sent for treatment because of the obvious extenuating circumstances.
But what of those people whose frontal lobes function outside normal patterns anyway and who do not display Gage's obvious injuries? French neurologist L'Hermite has coined the term 'environment dependency syndrome' to describe the compulsive behaviour of those who, having suffered frontal lobe damage, feel compelled to go ahead and act on a cue from their environment. Typically the syndrome is displayed in a compulsion to steal anything that is left unattended or unlocked. Only a few years ago, we would have been unable to determine whether or not such people had suffered frontal lobe damage and they would therefore have been deemed fully responsible for their actions. Until quite recently, before dyslexia was recognized as a genuine disability, dyslexic children were labelled lazy. The term clearly implies moral censure based on an assumption of free will - they could be industrious if they chose. Children who suffered from attention deficit syndrome were labelled inattentive, lazy and disruptive - if they so chose they could be attentive, industrious and calm. Neuroscience appears to be revealing that a great deal of our behaviour, especially that which falls outside social norms, may well have a neurological basis. If that is so, how do we, in John Major's terms 'condemn more and understand less'? Moral condemnation becomes an impossibility when we recognize that a person is driven by a compulsion which arises from a purely fortuitous miswiring of their brain circuitry. Rita Carter suggests that the more we can explain about this circuitry, the more the notion of free will appears to be an illusion. In her view 'future generations will take for granted that we are programmable machines just as we take for granted the fact that the earth is round' (1998 : 207). If so, where does that leave the 'Enlightenment self'?
OK, then: Just what is this Self that we present?
A useful starting point for looking at the Self is provided by Dimbleby and Burton in their book More Than Words (1985). It is shown in the graphic on the left. For further discussion of the elements of that model, please proceed to the sections which follow:
Consciousness
Personality
Identity
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