UNDERSTANDING THE SELF
Document: Module 2/ Week 2
Level: College IT/ HRS 1 -1
Teacher: Mr. Michael AS. Enaje
Module 2 Contents/ Lessons
1 The Self from Various Perspectives
∙ Sociology
LESSON 1 THE SELF FROM VARIOUS PERSPECTIVES (SOCIOLOGY)
REFLECTION ON THE SELF AS A PRODUCT OF SOCIETY
Nowadays, self-identity is important for an individual to understand the self
within him. The basic idea about self development is that, “The self is not present
at birth, rather, it develops while growing through social experiences”. There are
theories and concepts describing how self develops for us to understand the self
and others.
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According to the theory of Mead and Cooley, the self is not dependent on
biological predisposition; rather, it is a product of social interaction. It means that;
relating to the basic idea, self is not present at birth or it doesn’t comes from our
parents or ancestor’s trait. But it is a product of social interaction. Base on my
experience, my father has short tempered as well as my brother, but I, I can
manage my temper and stay calm. I think I developed this trait through
interaction with people with good temper like my friends around me. Another
idea from Cooley, about the looking glass. For example, base on my experience,
I’m always with my parents before and I have viewed myself as a mirror of them.
Like being good, being wise, and determined to live a life are some traits I like the
most that they have.
Next is the theory of the social self. The I and the me. “I” is the response to
“me”, which is the active side of the self that represent the spontaneous and
unique traits of an individual. While the “me” is the social self. Me is the
internalization of roles which derive from such symbolic processes as linguistic
interaction. The I and the me have dynamic relationship with one another and
once it has reunited, the self can attain its full development. So, I can say that the
“I” is my response to the the social side of myself which is the “me”. For example,
from socialization, i learned that the attitude that I must apply to one environment
should be strong, therefore the “I” of myself will respond to allow myself to show
the attitude that I must show. It is clear that the relationship of these two will result
in the development of the self.
Another concept according to Gerry Lanuza about our modern society
that we have freedom in choosing our self-identity. While in the postmodern
societies, our self-identity continuously change due to the demands of multitude
of social context, new information technologies, and globalization. It means that
we can freely choose what identity we want to have for self-cultivation but there
are some problems that may arise. For instance, the limitation of close interaction
if we choose not to socialize because that’s the identity we developed. Another
concept from a sociologist Jean Baudrillard, individual achieve self-identity
through prestige symbols and we consume goods that will give us a feeling of
goodness instead of choosing our needs. It’s one of the major problem about selfidentity in our postmodern society because we tend to compare the social class
we have from other people just to feel good. We keep on finding more because
we can never be satisfied in life. In my opinion, this is the reason why many people
are doing crime just to afford something they want. Also, I’ve noticed that in
today’s world, most of the dreams of many people are; to have prestige car,
house, million dollar or in short to become rich. But we definitely forgot what’s the
real reason of our life. Unfortunately, most of us forgot who really we are as a
human being because they were blinded by golds. Searching for self-identity is
indeed challenging, we maybe have a choice but can we really choose the right
one?
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Activities:
PART 1: Discuss the theory of Mead and Cooley about the
self. PART 2: Explain the concept of the theory of the social
self.
PART 3: Discuss the point of view of the theory from Gerry Lanuza.
PART 4: Learning Bank: (Summary of learning) Please write down about what you
have learned in this topic/ lesson.
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