Man and Postmodernist Pluralism: Implications for Personal Growth

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Man and Postmodernist PluralismImplications for
Personal Growth

• Günther Fleck
• Institute for Human and Social Sciences
• National Defense Academy
• Vienna, Austria

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Contents

• Part I Existential Conditions of Every Day
  Life and Human Development
• Part II Pluralism Challenge of
  Postmodernism
• Part III The Self in the Postmodern World
• Part IV Personal Relatedness Understanding
  Fundamental Forms of Self-Experience and
  Identity Formation
• Part V Implications for Personal Growth

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Part I Existential Conditions of Every Day
Life

• Fulfilling of Daily Demands
• Demands from Outside
• Self-Defined Demands
• Self-Regulation of Subjective Well-Being Wishes
• Needs
• Interests

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Differentiation and Integration

• The general mode of individual adaptation can be
  understood as a never ending consequence of two
  opposed processes The process of differentiation
  and the process of integration. According to
  Watkins (1978) differentiation is the perceptual
  recognition of differences and discrimination
  between two different things integration is the
  bringing together of two or more elements so that
  they are consonant or can interact constructively
  with each other.

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Individual-Environment-Interaction, Personal
Growth and Self-Complexity (I)

• The processes of differentiation and integration
  are embedded in individual-environment-interaction
  s promoting mental (cognitive) development (e.g.,
  various intellectual abilities, value
  orientation, world view, belief systems,
  self-reflection), affective development (e.g.,
  affect-regulation, affect maturity, empathy, need
  satisfaction), and motor development (e.g.,
  various motor skills, sports, dancing).

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Individual-Environment-Interaction, Personal
Growth and Self-Complexity (II)

• Under optimal conditions these processes will
  produce personal growth and self-knowledge.
  According to Linville (1987) self-knowledge is
  represented in terms of multiple self-aspects.
  Greater self-complexity involves representing the
  self in terms of a greater number of cognitive
  self-aspects and maintaining greater distinctions
  among self-aspects.

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Present Uncertainties

• Epistemological Uncertainties
• Social Uncertainties
• Economic Uncertainties
• Ecological Uncertainties
• Political Uncertainties

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Central Question

• Who am I?

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Part II

• Pluralism
• The Challenge of Postmodernism

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The Postmodern Worldview(after Brent Wilson,
1997)

• I. Postmodernism, as the term implies, is
  largely a response to modernity. Whereas
  modernity trusted science to lead us down the
  road of progress, postmodernism questioned
  whether science alone could really get us there.
  Whereas modernity happily created inventions and
  technologies to improve our lives, postmodernism
  took a second look and wondered whether our lives
  were really better for all the gadgets and toys.

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The Postmodern Worldview(after Brent Wilson,
1997)

• II. Postmodernism looked at the culmination of
  modernity in the 20th century the results of
  forces such as nationalism, totalitarianism,
  technocracy, consumerism, and modern warfare
  and said, we can see the efficiency and the
  improvements, but we can also see the
  dehumanising, mechanising effects in our lives.
  The Holocaust was efficient, technical, coldly
  rational. There must be a better way to think
  about things.

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Key Features of Postmodern Thinking(after Dennis
Hlynka Andrew Yeaman, 1992)

• I. A Commitment to Plurality of Perspectives,
  Meanings, Methods, Values - Everything!
• II. A Search for and Appreciation of Double
  Meanings and Alternative Interpretations, Many of
  Them Ironic and Unintended.

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Key Features of Postmodern Thinking(after Dennis
Hlynka Andrew Yeaman, 1992)

• III. A Critique or Distrust of Big Stories Meant
  to Explain Everything. This Includes Grand
  Theories of Science, and Myths in Our Religions,
  Nations, Cultures, and Professions That Serve to
  Explain Why Things Are the Way They Are.
• IV. An Acknowledge That - Because There Is a
  Plurality of Perspectives and Ways of Knowing -
  There Are Also Multiple Truths.

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Part III The Self in the Postmodern World

• The Self is Ones inclusive sense (or
  symbolization) of ones own being.
• Robert Jay Lifton (1993)

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The Protean SelfThree Manifestations

• 1. It is sequential a changing series of
  involvements with people, ideas, and activities,
  as was especially during the late 1960s and early
  1970s, but has continued to occur more quietly
  (and as a sustained pattern) in much of American
  culture.

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The Protean SelfThree Manifestations

• 2. Proteanism can also be simultaneous, in the
  multiplicity of varied, even antithetical images
  and ideas held at any time by the self, each of
  which it may be more or less ready to act upon
  a condition sometimes referred to as multimind.
  

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The Protean SelfThree Manifestations

• 3. And it is social , so that in any given
  environment office, school, or neighborhood
  one may encounter highly varied forms of
  self-presentation everything from a
  conventional, buttoned-down demeanor, to jeans
  and male beads and earrings, to the blissed-out
  states of members of religious cults, to any
  conceivable in-between.

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The Fragmented SelfThe Dark Side of the Protean
Self

• Fragmentation can be associated with different
  kinds of self-processes, all of them precarious
  with contradictory fundamentalism, with defensive
  self-constriction, and with various forms of
  negative or caricatured proteanism. The
  fragmented self is radically bereft of coherence
  and continuity, an extreme expression of
  dissociation.

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Part IV

• Personal Relatedness
• Understanding Fundamental Forms of
  Self-Experience and Identity Formation

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Areas of Personal Relatedness

• I. Relatedness to Oneself
• II. Relatedness to Other Single Persons
• III. Relatedness to Groups
• IV. Relatedness to Society, Nation, World
  and Universe

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Fundamental Forms of Self-Experience and Identity
Formation

• Numerous personality theorists have postulated
  and discussed two central processes in
  personality development differentiation and
  integration
• Angyal (1941, 1951) Autonomy vs. Surrender
• Bakan (1966) Agency vs. Communion
• Balint (1959) Philobatic vs. Ocnophilic
  Tendencies
• McAdams (1985) Power vs. Intimacy
• Spiegel Spiegel (1978) Fission vs. Fusion
• Koestler (1972) characterized man with respect
  to these basic tendencies as a Janus-Faced
  Holon.

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Part VImplications for Personal Growth

• Models of Personal Growth
• Ways to Personal Growth

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Models of Personal Growth I

• Traditional View of Self-Actualisation
• (e.g., Maslow, 1962 Rogers, 1963)
• Self-Actualisation is characterised as the
  increased realisation of inherent potentialities

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Models of Personal Growth II

• Alternative Views of Self-Actualisation
• ( after Butler Rice, 1963)
• Self-Actualisation generally reflects the
  persons ability to create new experience and
  change for himself via his own cognitive
  functioning.
• Expanding on Butler and Rices position, a more
  elaborated view proposed by Wexler (1974) sees
  self-actualisation as the degree to which the
  person characteristically engages in a mode of
  information processing in which he is his own
  source for creating new experience.

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Models of Personal Growth III

• Self-Complexity (after Patricia
  Linville, 1987)
• The model assumes that self-knowledge is
  represented in terms of multiple self-aspects.
  Greater self-complexity involves representing the
  self in terms of a greater number of cognitive
  self-aspects and maintaining greater distinctions
  among self-aspects.

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Ways of Personal Growth

• Systematic Self-reflection as a Means of
  Personal Growth

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Systematic Self-reflection as a Means of Personal
Growth

• Systematic self-reflection (SSR) A special way
  to tackle important events and areas of life
  intentionally and regularly
• Purpose Acquisition of self-knowledge
  self-complexity
• Empirical evidence shows people with greater
  self-complexity are less susceptible to stress
  than others

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Goals

• Self-Congruence
• Defining One's Position in Life
• Clarifying One's Own Roles
• Solving of Personal Problems
• Removing Self-Deception
• Self-Actualisation
• Developing a Life Plan
• Self-Knowledge
• Health

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Contents

• A. Areas of Life
• Profession, Partnership, Marriage, Family,
  Religion, Arts,...
• B. Life Events
• C. World View Value Orientation
• D. Thinking Habits
• E. Health Condition
• F. Sources of Stress

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Methods

• A. RATIONAL SELF-REFLECTION
• Contents are processed by means of
• logical-analytical methods including internal
• dialogue and mental imagery
• B. CONTEMPLATIVE SELF-REFLECTION
• Contents are processed by means of the
• consciousness disciplines such as
  meditation and
• self-hypnosis

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Contemplative Self-Reflection

• Developing the Observing Self
• The Identification- versus Dis-Identification
  Principle

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Self-Identification versusDis-Identification

• We are dominated by everything with which our
  self becomes identified.
• We can dominate and control everything from
  which we dis-identify ourselves.
• Roberto Assagioli (1965)

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DE-REFLECTION A NECESSARY COMPLEMENT OF
SELF-REFLECTION

• Clinical evidence shows that people practising
  self-reflection, a necessary condition to tackle
  important events and areas of life, may get upset
  when someone has lost subjective control of it.
  As a consequence, all spontaneity may disappear
  and aversive emotions emerge.

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Dynamics of Self-Reflection andDe-Reflection

• Basic assumption
• The following two states of awareness are
  essential in guiding human experience and action
• Reflective awareness
• Non-reflective awareness

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Dynamics of Self-Reflection andDe-Reflection

• Reflective Awareness
• Controlled information processing
• Experience is connected to meanings, plans,
  functions, decisions, and possible actions
• Action is guided via self-talk
• High self-awareness

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Dynamics of Self-Reflection andDe-Reflection

• Non-Reflective Awareness
• Automatic information processing
• Person is completely and vividly aware of his her
  experience, but there are no processes of
  thinking or interpreting going on
• Objects are experienced as sensory qualities,
  without the intrusion of interpretation
• A kind of self-forgetfulness occurs, in which the
  distinction between self and object dissolves
  ("flow experience", absorption)

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Dynamics of Self-Reflectionand De-Reflection

• Regulation of the reflective versus
  non-reflective states of awareness via shifts of
  attention
• Ideally, people are able to guide their stream
  of consciousness and to change between states of
  reflective or non-reflective awareness
  voluntarily. People may develop defects in
  regulating the balance between these states in
  two ways
• Deficits in inducing reflective awareness
• Deficits in inducing non-reflective awareness
• In the case of deficits in inducing
  non-reflective awareness the ability of
  de-reflection as a necessary complement of
  self-reflection should be acquired.

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Dynamics of Self-Reflectionand De-Reflection

• Although it is not easy to learn to look at
  objects without words, the so-called
  consciousness disciplines (e.g., hypnosis,
  meditation) offer ways to cultivate the observing
  self as a necessary condition to induce
  non-reflective awareness voluntarily.
• People can learn to forget themselves and to
  overcome categorising and self-talk thereby
  promoting their well-being, health and quality of
  life. It is stressed that clinical and health
  psychologists themselves should learn such
  techniques enriching their therapeutic tools and
  maybe helping their clients in a more
  comprehensive way.

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C. Conclusions

• Toward a New Self-Understanding
• in Regard to Cope with Postmodernist Pluralism

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Conclusion I

• Postmodernism offers the most complex context in
  history of life regarding the potentialities of
  individual development.
• Success or failure in individual development in
  the sense of personal growth or fragmentation of
  self cannot be understood as an either/or
  principle.
• Although early personal relationships may have a
  strong impact on the generation of developmental
  patterns (Verlaufsgestalt), this does not
  represent an invariable fate.

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Conclusion II

• The human being is asked to take responsibility
  for himself or herself with regard to his or her
  relatedness to himself or herself, to other
  humans and living systems, and to the universe.
• Looking into future, we should (better we must)
  accept this challenge.

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THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION!