THE SELF AS SOCIAL STRUCTURE

George Herbert Mead: The Self as Social Structure

George Herbert Mead: The Self as Social Structure

Introduction

The psychologist and philosopher George Herbert Mead founded a number of the fundamental principles of symbolic interaction. Mead's view stressed how the survival of human depends upon communication which involves signs that are held in general. These signs formulate through social interaction; mind, self, and society each emerge out of this social process. This paper will summarize Mead's view point presented in his article “The Self as Social Structure.”

Discussion

For Mead, of course, what is primary is not conscious self-perception of the pressure I exert upon myself, but a self-perception analogous to the perception of sound produced by myself. In order that this can be transferred to objects, and a counter-pressure be anticipated, the basic role-taking capability, so Mead argues, must have already been acquired. If this is correct, social experience is the premise upon which the diversity of sense perception can be synthesized into 'things'. Mead thereby also explains why at first—that is, in the consciousness of the infant or of primitive cultures—all things are perceived as living partners in a schema of interaction, and why it is only later that social objects are differentiated from physical objects. The constitution of immutable objects is, in turn, the precondition for the separation of the organism from other objects and its self-reflective development as a unitary body. Self-identity is thus formed in the same process whereby 'things' take shape for actors (Mead, 1967).

Mead is trying to grasp the social constitution of things without falling prey to a linguistically restricted concept of meaning. His attempt to join the development of communicative and instrumental capabilities outlines a solution to the problem that remains unsolved in other substantial conceptions of instrumental action (Forgas and Kipling, 2002).

To some extent, Mead develops a slightly different formulation of the same ideas in those of his works that connect up with philosophical discussions of relativity theory and which make central, use of the concept of 'perspective' (Bennett and Fabio, 2004). For him, the theory of relativity finally lays to rest the idea that perspectives are merely subjective, for it is precisely as subjective that they are objectively present. 'The conception of the perspective as there in nature is in a sense an unexpected donation by the most abstruse physical science to philosophy. They do not have distorted perspectives of some excellent patterns, nor do they lie in consciousness as selections among things whose reality is to be found in a noumenal world (Reid, 2008). Mead then asks how it is possible that, man does not remain a prisoner to the perspective centered on his own body, but have two or more perspectives simultaneously (Mead, 1967). The main problem—and here Mead avoids drawing relativist consequences from pragmatism—is how man is capable of universality in grasping the object. Mead bases the capacity for perspective change upon role-taking, upon the capacity to place oneself in the perspective of ...