L2 - History of The Self

Question 1

What are the foundational theories on emergence of self hood intertwined with? (GRAM)

Answer 1

• Anxiety
• Growth and possibility
• Responsibility and attribution
• Motivation and attention

Question 2

What is anxiety and growth?

Answer 2

• Knowledge that some notions are more important, basic expectations of how people will meet our needs
• Values effect attachment expectations and aesthetic expectations

Question 3

What are just world expectations?

Answer 3

• Mental models become more elaborate
• Understanding others have different mental models
• We have differentiated preferences: growing sense of morality and we get smarter

Question 4

What is consistency motivation?

Answer 4

• Does exp match expectation?
• Experience of arousal to kick start different thought processes
• Leads to an uncomfortable queasy feeling

Question 5

Who was Soren Kierkegaard?

Answer 5

• Philosopher and theologian
• Talked about perceptions of self and wrote about religion, ethics and philosophy
• Father of Existentialism
• Meaningful life in absurd reality
• Focused on the concept of anxiety
• Wrote under pseudonyms so they were free to write without sanctions

Question 6

Anxiety: the soul of social psychology: (where does it stem from?)

Answer 6

• Starts with biblical accounts e.g humans expelled from paradise for disobeying God
• Tension of meeting needs and knowing what needs are: in original sin where we live in a world of anxiety
• The notion of contamination was not a consequence of the decision but the posing of the possibility that they had to choose between paradise or knowledge

Question 7

What does prohibition imply for us?

Answer 7

• We are individual selves who are free
• Who must make choices
• We gradually become aware of our own freedom
• Nostalgia from where we were in childhood where someone met all of our needs

Question 8

What is the dizziness of freedom?

Answer 8

• A lot to take in when we have more choices
• Responsibility of the consequences of choice
• Choices to be moral or immoral and will choices define/violate identity

Question 9

What is anxiety

Answer 9

• Awareness of ourselves and our own potential
• Tells us we can grow and change
• Can see it as more adaptive or maladaptive

Question 10

How is anxiety adaptive?

Answer 10

• Relief of closing other doors of possibilities
• Create our own identity
• Take responsibility
• Determines subsequent possibilities
• New anxiety = new growth = new confidence = new anxieties
• Allows growth and change

Question 11

How is anxiety maladaptive?

Answer 11

• Behave like we have no freedom
• Re-construe reality in a way where you cannot act another way
• Story of Abraham and his son (to kill) where he doesn’t know why and to trust god

Question 12

What are the ethical spheres in anxiety?

Answer 12

• Sum total of customs and laws
• Finite, changing and uncertain (how customs change over time)
• Leads to choices and anxiety

Question 13

What are the absolutes in anxiety?

Answer 13

• God/fate/nature
• Infinite, unchanging and certain
• No choices = no anxiety
• Serves a higher purpose = puts you above everything and is maximally selfish

Question 14

Who is Friedrich Nietzsche?

Answer 14

Combined with the big three psychologists and combines philosophy, psychology and philogy

Question 15

What are the two kinds of morality/universal archetypes?

Answer 15

• Knights and Priests and the rest of us are sheep because we are controlled by the prior forces
• Both groups avoid anxiety because they have an absolute commitment to a worldview
• They are most powerful and have most freedom (aristocrats)

Question 16

What are priestly Aristocrats:

Answer 16

• Free to impose their motivational biases on society
• Repress impulses
• Avoid failures and retreat from the world = do not grow
• Devotion to external standards

Question 17

What were the sheep?

Answer 17

• Less free BECAUSE we are constrained by reality
• Controlled by knights and priests

Question 18

What is being human with anxiety?

Answer 18

• Balance the competing motivational system
• Called behavioural approach and behavioural inhibition system

Question 19

What was the story of job? (Paradoxical)

Answer 19

• A paradox of civilisation
• More safe = more anxious = feel like you don’t deserve it = as hardship becomes more rare
• Experience more anxiety when we experience hardships
• When hardship is common = we do not ask why

Question 20

What did Freud say?

Answer 20

• Civilisation has increasingly met needs and personal safety
• But we get more anxious
• What if the social forces that increase our physical wellbeing also increase our anxiety?
• Being better at self-control = aggression turned inward

Question 21

What is the psychodynamic self?

Answer 21

• Id: source of all motivation = sex and aggression, basic needs we are born with
• Pleasure principle and inconsistent with our behaviours
• Ego: referee, reality principle = enact motivations and serve society and takes demands and consequences into action, sublimation: channeling basic info into other goals
• Superego: Values imparted by society that guide and evaluate our behaviour

Question 22

What is the super ego made of?

Answer 22

• Ego ideal: goals and aspirations which are consistent with behaviour = pleasure
• Conscience - restroctions and prohibitions = Inconsistent with behaviour = anxiety

Question 23

Self-Control in anxiety:

Answer 23

• Balance the competing influencing systems = neuroticism
• You punish yourself through guilt

Question 24

Who was Albert Camus?

Answer 24

• Father of absurdism
• World is irrational and has no inherent meaning
• Stop looking for meaning and start creating it

Question 25

Nostalgia for unity:

Answer 25

• Undeniable and indestructible need to feel like reality makes sense
• Predictable and purpose
• Everything is unified with everything else
• Feel like it used to be that way and we were pulled away
• Oceanic feeling = memory where self and (m)other was indistinguishable

Question 26

Feeling of the absurd?

Answer 26

You feel the irrationality of the world, our need to make sense of the world through our mental models

Question 27

What is nihilism?

Answer 27

• Absolute denial of any meaning
• Unity is restored = everything is worthless = despair and stagnation
• Quiets anxiety

Question 28

What Is dogmatism?

Answer 28

• Absolute assertion of found meaning - this is the way
• Unity is restores and everything makes sense
• Oppression and stagnation
• Quiets anxiety

Question 29

What is the myth of sisyphys:

Answer 29

• Punished for escaping the underworld
• Condemned to eternal pointless existence (rock)
• Still free to choose how he interprets the situation = no absolute progress = ends up enjoying it = ability to choose how we perceive reality