/tag/individuation

21 quotes tagged 'individuation'

How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves

Publisher: Cornell University Press (1999)

161-163

Jeffery H. Reiman argues that privacy is 'a precondition of personhood,' 'a social ritual by means of which an individual's moral title to his existence is conferred' (310). Moreover, theorists of privacy seem to agree that space or social distance is a precondition of privacy. If we accept this hypotheses, ethical problems will arise in life writing when space is transgressed, when privacy is abridged, with the result that the integrity of the person is breached or violated. I investigate this link between privacy and personhood first in the philosophical and juridical literature and then in various kinds of life writing. \r\n\r\nThe American press seized upon the death of the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in 1994 to mourn the passing of an ideal of privacy that this beloved public figure had, paradoxically, come to represent. No one needs reminding that we live in an age of intrusiveness, where each innovation in communications technology seems to create some new threat to the possibility of being left alone: we read daily about eavesdropping on the eaveless virtual space of cellular phones, about call screening, caller identification, and scrambling devices. It is surely a sign on the times that access is newly empowered as a transitive verb. The hunger of the public for the private lives of the rich and famous has spawned a breed of professional privacy-busters - gossip columnists and paparazzi - and Onassis became the chosen prey of self-styled paparazzo Ronald E. Galella. Photographer Galella's single-minded pursuit of Onassis resulted in more than a decade of litigation, culminating in a Federal Superior Court judgement in 1982 that upheld Onassis's 'constitutional right of privacy' (Galella 1106)... \r\n\r\n The legal history of the right to privacy invoked in this case dates from the publication in 1890 of a celebrated article by Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis titled, precisely, 'The Right to Privacy.' The article was occasioned by Warren's exasperation with intrusive coverage of his family's social life by the popular press of the period; revolutions in printing technology and photography exposed anyone deemed to be a celebrity - the Warrens were socially prominent Bostonians - to the gaze of a mass-circulation audience. Brandeis and Warren argued for 'a general right to privacy for thoughts, emotions and sensations...whether expressed in writing, or in conduct, in conversation, in attitudes, or in facial expression' (82), a right so comprehensive and fundamental, in fact, that we might call it the right to personhood. Their own formulation, however, as we shall see, has proved peculiarly memorable, 'the right to an inviolate personality' (85). \r\n\r\nThe subsequent legal history of privacy is rich and complex, turning especially on challenges to Brandeis and Warren's positing of a single, all-embracing right. William Prosser, for example, reviewing seventy years of cases in 1960, found that 'the law of privacy comprises four distinct kinds of invasion of four different interests of the plaintiff.' I quote his description of these four torts to suggest something of the complex of issues with which the right to privacy has been associated in the law: \r\n\r\n1. Intrusion upon the plaintiff's seclusion or solitude, or into his private affairs. \r\n2. Public disclosure of embarrassing private facts about the plaintiff. \r\n3. Publicity which places the plaintiff in a false light in the public eye. \r\n4. Appropriation, for the defendant's advantage, of the plaintiff's name or likeness. (107) \r\n\r\nCountering the apparent reductiveness of Prosser's four-part analysis, however, is Edward J. Bloustein's 'Privacy as an Aspect of Human Dignity: An Answer to Dean Prosser' (1964), a defense of the distinctiveness of the right to privacy claimed by Brandeis and Warren. Bloustein discerns in all of the manifold transgressions against the right to privacy 'an interference with individuality, an interference with the right of the individual to do what he will.' His portrait of the person deprived of privacy, moreover, is chilling: 'Such a being, although sentient, is fungible; he is not an individual' (188). \r\n\r\n*Galella*: Galella v. Onassis. 533 F.Supp.1076 (1982)

...the key environment in the individual's formation is the family, which serves as the community's primary conduit for the transmission of its cultural values.

[Henry Louis Gates, Jr.]'s sensitive - and also startlingly funny - account of the permutations of racial identity, of 'being colored' (xiv), demonstrates how 'we'-experience shapes the trajectory of 'I'-narrative, not only his own but the one he projects for his children: 'In your lifetimes, I suspect, you will go from being African Americans, to 'people of color,' to being, once again, 'colored people.' ...But I have to confess that I like 'colored' best, maybe because when I hear the word, I hear it in my mother's voice and the sepia tones of my childhood.

...developmentally speaking, the rise of the self that is the subject of autobiographical discourse dates from the child's initiation into a lifelong practice of self-narration.

The psychologist John Shotter has worked out a much more searching answer to the enduring vitality of the myth of autonomy. In order to correct psychology's - and his own - one-sided preoccupation with inner states, Shotter proposes 'to repudiate the traditional 'Cartesian' starting-point for psychological research located in the 'I' of the individual, ...and to replace it by taking as basic not the inner subjectivity of the individual, but the practical social processes going on 'between' people' (137). \r\n \r\n'In my earlier views,' Shotter writes, 'I was clearly still in the thrall of classic 'text' of identity, possessive individualism' (147). Possessive individualism is C. B. Macpherson's term for the proto-capitalist model of identity proposed by Hobbes and Locke, which posits the individual as 'essentially the proprietor of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to society for them' (quoted in Shotter 136). Stepping back, Shotter asks why he - why we all - continue to account 'for our experience of ourselves...in such an individualistic way [as Macpherson describes]: as if we all existed from birth as separate, isolated individuals already containing 'minds' or 'mentalities' wholly within ourselves, set over against a material world itself devoid of any mental processes' (136). We talk in this way, he answers, because we are disciplined to do so by 'social accountability': 'what we talk of as our experience of our reality is constituted for us very largely by the already established ways in which we must talk in our attempts to account for ourselves - and for it - to the others around us...And only certain ways of talking are deemed legitimate.' So pervasive is this discursive discipline that not only our talking but 'our understanding, and apparently our experience of ourselves, will be constrained also' (141).

53-54

Like Benjamin, Steedman conceives of identity as relational, and the autobiography she writes is also relational, for she believes that her mother's self and story provide the key to her own. 'Children are always episodes in someone else's narrative,' she affirms, 'not their own people, but rather brought into being for particular purposes' (122).¹ In this way the familiar and perfunctory beginning of so many autobiographies - 'I was born...' - acquires a new and signal importance, for Steedman argues that her dawning recognition of the circumstances of her conception - her realization that she was neither a wanted nor a legitimate child - determined the very structure of her personality. \r\n\r\n¹ /publication/67

According to Benjamin, 'most theories of [infant] development have emphasized the goal of autonomy more than relatedness to others.' They accept Margaret Mahler's 'unilinear trajectory that leads from oneness [with the mother] to separateness,' 'leaving unexplored the territory in which subjects meet' (25). As a corrective to Mahler's model, Benjamin stresses accordingly the 'intersubjective dimension' (49) of individuation and its central paradox: 'at the very moment of realizing our own independence, we are dependent upon another to recognize it' (33). Thus, because the assertion of autonomy is dependent on this dynamic of recognition, identity is necessarily relational.

The contemporary debate about the nature of the self portrayed in autobiography was launched forty years ago in a remarkably influential essay written by the French critic Georges Gusdorf, 'Conditions and Limits of Autobiography' (1956). The model Gusdorf posited for the identity that autobiographies presuppose - let us call it the Gusdorf model - was emphatically individualistic, featuring a 'separate and unique selfhood' (Friedman 34). In a similar vein, writing in the 1970's, Phillippe Lejeune (L'Autobiographie) and Karl J. Weintraub traced the rise of modern autobiography to Rousseau and Enlightenment individualism. Then, in 1980, Mary Mason became the first of a long line of feminist critics to repudiate the universalizing claims of this model and question its place in the history of the genre. The model might suitably describe the experience of Augustine and Rousseau, she conceded, but it did not fit the contours of women's lives. Correcting this gender bias, she proposed an alternative model for women: 'identity through relation to the chosen other' (210). \r\n \r\n A few years later, Domna Stanton asked, 'Is the [female] subject different?' and by implication, 'Is women's autobiography different from men's?' Answering yes to these questions, subsequent scholars - and I am thinking especially of Susan Stanford Friedman, Bella Brodzki, and Celeste Schenck - have returned most often to Mason's notion of relational identity as the distinguishing mark of women's lives. Thus, in her essay 'Individuation and Autobiography,' and indictment of 'the conflation of autobiography with male life-writing' and 'the conflation of male experience with critical ideologies' (60), Joy Hooton observes, 'The presentation of the self as related rather than single and isolate is...the most distinctive and consistent difference between male and female life-writing' (70). Following Friedman, Hooton cites research in developmental psychology and sociology, by Carol Gilligan and especially Nancy Chodorow, to support this view that individuation is decisively inflected by gender. The female subject, then, is different, and so is her life story. \r\n \r\n... \r\n \r\nThe understandable pressure to settle on reliable criteria for identifying difference in autobiography, together with the rarity of comparative analysis, has promoted the myth of autonomy that governs our vision of male lives. I hasten to add that men are hardly the victims alone of critical misdescription; like women, men also are constructed by patriarchal ideology. Consolidating the gains of feminist scholarship, and emulating what Sidonie Smith and others have achieved for women's autobiography , we need to liberate men's autobiography from the inadequate model that has guided our reading to date. As Chris McCandless's story demonstrates, the Gusdorf model is potentially a killer. \r\n \r\nWhy, it is fair to ask, didn't critics pick up on the implications for male identity of Mary Mason's early critique of the Gusdorf model? Part of the answer, I believe, is that Mason, Friedman, and other feminist critics helped to keep the old Gusdorf model in place - paradoxically - by attacking it: it didn't apply to women, they argued, but it did to men, leaving men stuck with a model of identity that seems in retrospect rather like a two-dimensional caricature: so-called traditional autobiography became the province of the Marlboro Man.

The Society of Individuals

Author: Norbert Elias, Edmund Jephcott (Translator)

Publisher: Oxford (1991)

The Denial of Death

Author: Ernest Becker

Publisher: Free Press (1975)

203

You can look at the whole problem of a human life in this way. You can ask the question: What kind of beyond does this person try to expand in; and how much individuation does he achieve in it? Most people play it safe: they choose the beyond of standard transference objects like parents, the boss, or the leader; they accept the cultural definition of heroism and try to be a “good provider” or a “solid” citizen. In this way they earn their species immortality as an agent of procreation, or a collective or cultural immortality as part of a social group of some kind. Most people live this way, and I am hardly implying that there is anything false or unheroic about the standard cultural solution to the problems of men. It represents both the truth and the tragedy of man’s condition: the problem of the consecration of one’s life, the meaning of it, the natural surrender to something larger—these driving needs that inevitably are resolved by what is nearest at hand.

At about the same time that Rank wrote, Heidegger brought these fears to the center of existential philosophy. He argued that the basic anxiety of man is anxiety about being-in-the-world, as well as anxiety of being-in-the-world. That is, both fear of death and fear of life, of experience and individuation. Man is reluctant to move out into the overwhelmingness of his world, the real dangers of it; he shrinks back from losing himself in the all-consuming appetites of others, from spinning out of control in the clutchings and clawings of men, beasts and machines. As an animal organism man senses the kind of planet he has been put down on, the nightmarish, demonic frenzy in which nature has unleashed billions of individual organismic appetites of all kinds—not to mention earthquakes, meteors, and hurricanes, which seem to have their own hellish appetites. Each thing, in order to deliciously expand, is forever gobbling up others.

At about the same time that Rank wrote, Heidegger brought these fears to the center of existential philosophy. He argued that the basic anxiety of man is anxiety about being-in-the-world, as well as anxiety of being-in-the-world. That is, both fear of death and fear of life, of experience and individuation.11 Man is reluctant to move out into the overwhelmingness of his world, the real dangers of it; he shrinks back from losing himself in the all-consuming appetites of others, from spinning out of control in the clutchings and clawings of men, beasts and machines. As an animal organism man senses the kind of planet he has been put down on, the nightmarish, demonic frenzy in which nature has unleashed billions of individual organismic appetites of all kinds—not to mention earthquakes, meteors, and hurricanes, which seem to have their own hellish appetites. Each thing, in order to deliciously expand, is forever gobbling up others.

Myths to live by

Author: Joseph Campbell

Publisher: Joseph Campbell Foundation (2011)

The Origins and History of Consciousness

Author: Erich Neumann

Publisher: Princeton University Press (1954)

403

The development of the persona is the outcome of a process of adaptation that suppresses all individually significant features and potentialities, disguising and repressing them in favor of collective factors, or those deemed desirable by the collective. Here again, wholeness is exchanged for a workable and successful sham personality. The 'inner voice' is stifled by the growth of a superego, of conscience, the representative of collective values. The voice, the individual experience of the transpersonal, which is particularly strong in childhood, is renounced in favor of conscience. When paradise is abandoned, the voice of God that spoke in the Garden is abandoned too, and the values of the collective, of the father, of law and conscience, of the current morality, etc., must be accepted as the supreme values in order to make social adaptation possible.\n\n 'Whereas the natural disposition of every individual inclines him to be physically and psychically bisexual, the differential development of our culture forces him to thrust the contrasexual element into the unconscious. As a result, only those elements which accord with the outward characteristics of sex and which conform to the collective valuation are recognized by the conscious mind. Thus 'feminine' or 'soulful' characteristics are considered undesirable in a boy, at least in our culture. Such a one-sided accentuation of one's specific sexuality ends by constellating the contrasexual element in the unconscious, in the form of the anima in men and the animus in women, which, as part souls, remain unconscious and dominate the conscious-unconscious relationship. This process has the support of the collective, and sexual differentiation, precisely because the repression of the contrasexual element is often difficult, is at first accompanied by typical forms of animosity towards the opposite sex. This development, too, follows the general principle of differentiation which presupposes the sacrifice of wholeness, here represented by the figure of the hermaphrodite.

399

An important goal of childhood development and education is the utilization of the individual in the sense of making him a useful member of the community. This usefulness, achieved through differentiation of the separate components and functions of the personality, is necessarily bought at the cost of wholeness. The need to renounce the unconscious wholeness of the personality is one of the most formidable developmental difficulties for the child, and particularly for the introverted child.

400

Characteristic of the process of differentiation in childhood is the loss and renunciation of all the elements of perfection and wholeness, which are inherent in the psychology of the child so far as this is determined by the pleroma, the uroboros. The very things which the child has in common with the man of genius, the creative artist, and the primitive, and which constitute the magic and charm of his existence, must be sacrificed. The aim of all education, and not in our culture alone, is the expel the child from the paradise of his native genius and, through differentiation and the renunciation of wholeness, to constrain the Old Adam in the paths of collective usefulness.\n\n '...The drying up of imagination and of creative ability, which the child naturally possesses in high degree, is one of the typical symptoms of impoverishment that growing up entails. A steady loss of the vitality of feeling and of spontaneous reactions in the interests of 'sensibleness' and 'good behavior' is the operative factor in the conduct now demanded of the child in relation to the collective. Increase in efficiency at the cost of depth and intensity is the hallmark of this process.\n\n 'On to the ontogenetic plane there now ensue all the developments which we have described as indispensable for ego formation and the separation of the conscious and unconscious systems. The child's primarily transpersonal and mythological apperception of the world becomes limited owing to secondary personalization, and is finally abolished altogether. This personalization is necessary for the growth of personality now beginning and is effected with the help of ties to the personal environment upon which the archetypes are at first projected. As the personal ties grow stronger, the archetype is gradually replaced by the imago, in which personal and transpersonal characteristics are visibly blended and active.

378

The hero, as the vehicle of this effort at compensation, becomes alienated from the normal human situation and from the collective. This decollectivization entails suffering, and he suffers at the same time because, in his struggle for freedom, he is also the victim and representative of the obsolete, old order and is forced to bear the burden of it in his own soul.\n\n '...Jung puts it that the danger to which the hero is exposed 'isolation in himself.' The suffering entailed by the very fact of being an ego and an individual is implicit in the hero's situation of having to distinguish himself psychologically from his fellows. He sees things they do not see, does not fall for the things they fall for - but that means that he is a different type of human being and therefore necessarily alone. The loneliness of Prometheus on the rock or of Christ on the cross is the sacrifice they have to endure for having brought fire and redemption to mankind.

272

Common descent from the same tribe, the sharing of a common life, and, above all, common experiences create emotional bonds even today, as we well know. Social, religious, aesthetic, and other collective experiences of whatever coloring - from the tribal head-hunt to the modern mass meeting - activate the unconscious emotional foundations of the group psyche. The individual has not yet broken loose from the emotional undercurrent, and any excitation of one part of the group can affect the whole, as a fever seizes upon all parts of the organism. The emotional fusion then sweeps away the still feebly developed differences of conscious structure in the individuals concerned and continually restores the original group unity.

146

The spiritual collective as we find it in all initiations and all secret societies, sects, mysteries, and religions is essentially masculine and, despite its communal character, essentially individual in the sense that each man is initiated as an individual and undergoes a unique experience that stamps his individuality. This individual accent and the elect character of the group stand in marked contrast to the matriarchal group, where the archetype of the Great Mother and the corresponding stage of consciousness are dominant. The opposed group of male societies and secret organizations is dominated by the archetype of the hero and by the dragon-fight mythology, which represents the next stage of conscious development. The male collective is the source of all the taboos, laws, and institutions that are destined to break the dominance of the uroboros and Great Mother. Heaven, the father, and the spirit go hand in hand with masculinity and represent the victory of the patriarchate over the matriarchate. This is not to say that the matriarchate knows no law; but the law by which it is informed is the law of instinct, of unconscious, natural functioning, and this law subserves the propagation, preservation, and evolution of the species rather than the development of the single individual.

131

Although the separation of the World Parents is, strictly speaking, an integral part of the hero myth, the developments which, at that stage, could only be represented in cosmic symbols now enter the phase of humanization and personality formation. Thus the hero is the archetypal forerunner of mankind in general. His fate is the pattern in accordance with which the masses of humanity must live, and always have lived, however haltingly and distantly; and however short of the ideal man they have fallen, the stages of the hero myth have become constituent elements in the personal development of every individual.

122

Ego formation can only proceed by way of distinction from the non-ego and consciousness only emerge where it detaches itself from what is unconscious; and the individual only arrives at individuation when he marks himself off from the anonymous collective.