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 self-identity 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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