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The Self Embedded in Culture:

CONCEPTIONS OF THE SELF
IN WESTERN & EASTERN
PERSPECTIVES

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WESTERN PERSPECTIVE:
PSYCHOANALYTICAL PERSPECTIVE
HUMANISTIC PERSPECTIVE

EASTERN PERSPECTIVE:
REIFICATION
DEPENDEDNT ORIGINATION
INTERCONNECTEDNESS / INTERBEING

PSYCHOTHERAPEUTIC

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APPLICATION
WESTERN VS EASTERN

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PART I

WESTERN
PERSPECTIVE

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Soul

are inner They are different from the body and in charge
-
of volitional process, meaning by

Mind
substances/ - Being a homunculus or a representation
genetics/genes.

of a “little man inside the head” of an individual.

entities - It is ultimately responsible for the
person’s thoughts and actions.

O M PA N Y. C O M
Self

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LEVEL OF CONSCIOUSNESS By Sigmund Freud (Pronounced as froid)

F REUD
SIGMUND

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STRUCTURE OF
PERSONALITY
 Id
- It operates on pleasure principle (desires) to gain
F REUD

pleasure and avoid pain.

 Ego
- Rational level of personality (balancer of Id & Superego.
- It operates on reality principles does realistic
SIGMUND

and logical thinking.

 Superego

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- Partially unconscious
- Operates on moral principles or able to differentiate
between good & bad, and right &wrong (conscience).

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SIGMUND F REUD I
Psychoanalytic Perspective

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Neo-Freudian theorists, including Erik

Erikson, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and Karen
Horney, believed in the importance of the
unconscious but deemphasized sex, focusing
more on the social environment and effects of

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culture on personality

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“CREATIVE SELF”
- Alfred Adler proposed the notion of “creative self”, which
interpreted both the innate abilities and the experiential
components of the individual; are developing a style of life to
compensate for perceived inferiorities, and achieve a degree of
ADLER

personal competence, and superiority under the influence of an

innate “social interest”.
ALFRED

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“CREATIVE SELF”

The one dynamic force behind people's behavior is the

striving for success or superiority.
ADLER

The self-consistent personality structure develops into a

person's style of life.

Style of life is molded by people's creative power.

ALFRED

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ALFRED ADLER I
Psychoanalytic Perspective

“CREATIVE SELF”

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SELF THEORY By Karen Horney (pronounced as “horn eye”)

The former The latter as

HORNEY

being regarded fantasy

as a unique resulting from
central inner social
force common pressures and
to all people. expectations.
KAREN

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- Karen believed that neurosis resulted from basic anxiety

- Her theory proposes that strategies used to cope with anxiety can be
overused, causing them to take on the appearance of needs
HORNEY
KAREN

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Four Polaries of Personality

By Carl Jung (pronounced as “hyung”)

The first function — feeling — is the method by which a person understands the value of
conscious activity. Another function — thinking — allows a person to understand the
meanings of things. This process relies on logic and careful mental activity.
JUNG

The final two functions — sensation and intuition — may seem very similar, but there is
an important distinction. Sensation refers to the means by which a person knows something
exists and intuition (kutob) is knowing about something without conscious understanding of
CARL

where that knowledge comes from.

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F T
Feeling Thinking
Applying subjective, Applying reasoning to
personal assessment the situations and
to the situations and environments you
environments you encounter.
encounter.

S I

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Sensation Intuition
Applying aesthetic Using your unconscious or
value to the situations the mystical to understand
and environments you your experiences.
encounter.
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• E. Fromm specified unique human needs that must be satisfied

in order to achieve self-fulfillment.

• E. Fromm identified five of these distinctively human

or existential needs.

Human or Existential Needs

FROMM

Summary of Fromm’s Human Needs

Negative Positive
Description
Components Components
E R I CH

The ability to unite with another while

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Submission or
Relatedness retaining one's own individuality and Love
Domination
integrity.

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Human or Existential Needs

Humans have to transcend their nature
Transcendence by destroying or creating people or Destructiveness Creativeness
things.
It enables us to grow beyond the
Rootedness security of our mother and establish Fixation Wholeness
FROMM

other relationship.
Sense of An awareness of ourselves as a Adjustment to a
Individuality
Identity separate person. group
A road map or consistent philosophy by
Frame of
which we find our way through the Irrational goals Rational goals
Orientation
E R I CH

world

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SELF-AS-KNOWER SELF-AS-OBJECT
ALLPORT

It could be approached with the It remains a subject for

descriptive tools of psychology. philosophical speculation, outside
of the real of science.
It labels and classifies the It stands for homunculus whose own
characteristics of the self-as-object. inner self cannot be reached without
infinite regression into absurdity.
GORDON

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SELF-AS-KNOWER SELF-AS-OBJECT
ALLPORT

Regression is a return to earlier

stages of development and
abandoned forms of gratification...
Example: A young wife, might retreat
to the security of her parents’ home
after her first quarrel with her
husband.
GORDON

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PART I I

EASTERN
PERSPECTIVE

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- Conceptions of the self, most notably those derived from Hinduism, which
center on the Vedic notion (relating to the Vedas religion) of the atman or
soul, are similar to Western ideas of the self.

- Buddhist notions of the self are derived from the teachings of Siddhartha
Gautama (Buddha), after his experience of enlightenment under the Bodhi
tree over 2,500 years ago.

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REIFICATION
- It is the process by which the mind makes a thing, or a material object, out of
a concept, or an abstraction.

- It is making a thing out of a form, shape, a configuration, a Gestalt, a

perception, or an image.

- It is the “thing” an event or phenomenon, to transform an ongoing fluid

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process, into a frozen and static spatial or temporal cross-section of the same,
endowing such construction with the qualities of reality and separateness.

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REIFICATION By Vasubandhu

Every single object differentiated by the mind out of a

global and holistic experience is created by this
VASUBANDHU

process, including the concept of the individual self,

the “I” or “ME”.

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REIFICATION According to: Vasubandhu

- Reification are little more delusions, and refer to momentary states

remembered from the past experience of the person.
VASUBANDHU

- Concept of himself or herself as a separate individual is itself a reification.

- People constantly act, behave, and live out their lives as if reifications were
actually real, separate entities, rather than the delusory construction of

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mind.

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LANGUAGE
- It has developed a system of communication for myriads of reified concepts,
and consequently consists primarily of reified labels.

- These labels tend to perpetuate the illusion that reified concepts are
actually real, existing objects, for their reality seems to be attested to by the
very fact that labels exist for each of them.

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- This one of the reasons why “ultimate reality” is essentially “ineffable”.

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BUDDHIST TRAINING
- It consists largely of short-circuiting the reification process.

- To become “awakened” to the “as-it-is-ness” of inexpressible reality needs

non-verbal and non-labeling experiential reality (like meditation).

- An attempt to offer a name for the unnamable Reality must always fall short.

- Sages offered terms for unnamable Reality; Thusness, Tathagatagarba,

Buddha Nature, Suchness, the Big Self, the Absolute, or the Tao.

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“The tao that can be told is not the real Tao”

Lao Tzu

Tao ( 道 ; dào) literally means "way", but can also be interpreted as road,

channel, path, doctrine, or line.

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According to Buddha

- All things including human beings are composites, are composed of parts,
and have no real existence other than as temporary (impermanent)
collections of parts.

- Example:
The word “car” is nothing but a label for the gestalt formed by the
BUDDHA

constituent parts, the whole is more than the sum of the parts, it is equally
true that gestalt cannot continue to exist when separated from its parts.

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GESTALT
- The “whole”, cannot exist by itself; it does not have a separate self or
“soul”…

GESTALT PRINCIPLE

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According to Walpola

“Buddhism stands unique in the history of human thought in denying the

existence of a (separate) soul, self, or atman. According to Buddha, the
RAH U LA

idea of a (personal) self is an imaginary, false belief which has no

corresponding reality, and it produces harmful thoughts of “ME” and
“MINE”, selfish desires, craving, attachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit,
pride, egoism, and other defilements, impurities and problems. In short,
to this false view can be traced all evil in the world”
WAL P O LA

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PERSON
PSYCHOLOGY

- It is the composite of five group elements or skandhas.

- The skandhas or aggregates are form, feelings, perceptions, impulses,

and consciousness.

- The five skandhas are dependently arisen, and cannot exist by themselves.
BUDDHIST

“They (skandhas) are in a state of interdependent

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co-origination, they inter are”
- Hanh, 1988

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BUDDHIST PSYCHOLOGY

PERSON
clear awareness

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PERSON
PSYCHOLOGY

• Out of the Emptiness of clear awareness, ego creates the first duality (Form)
between self and objects in the world. This is me, and this is not me.
• Then the ego projects its consciousness onto the objects and, with awareness
of the qualities of things, feeling or evaluation is born.
BUDDHIST

• This energetic charge probably necessitates further control, so the ego

produces perception and the intellect as secondary lines of defense. Further
need for control results in a two-way interaction between perception/intellect

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and ego.

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PERSON
PSYCHOLOGY

• Then consciousness is induced to take the role of discursive thought as a

further barrier to the knowledge of emptiness that threatens the entire
structure.
• There is feedback implied in this model as well since the ego is in touch with all
BUDDHIST

of these structures and juggles them around to suit its purposes.

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DEPENDENT ORIGINATION
PSYCHOLOGY

- This teaching is at the core of Buddha’s teaching or Dharma (the nature of

reality regarded as a universal truth).

- The dependent origination is a law of causality that says;

“this is, because that is; this is not, because that is not;
when this arise, that arises; when this ceases, that ceases.”
BUDDHIST

- It implies that all phenomena, external objective events or internal

subjective experiences, come into existence depending on causes and
conditions without which they could not be.

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DEPENDENT ORIGINATION
PSYCHOLOGY

- Example:
A piece of paper; from a tree that cut down.
The tree; grew with sunshine and rain.
The seed; on fertile soil.
The conditions other than the paper itself is necessary for the paper to
exist.
BUDDHIST

- It implies interconnectedness or “inter being”, of everything in the universe.

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Metaphor about Self:

“FLOWER ORNAMENT” SERMON

SUTRA

- In this sutra (Hindu law), the universe is likened to an infinite net, stretching out in
all directions, in which at very intersection of two strands is found a precious jewel.
AVATAM SAKA

- Each of these jewel reflects the whole net, so that the entire universe is contained
in each part (Loy, 1993).

- The Buddha conceived of the universe as composed of an infinite number of

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Dharmas, which are described as “point-instants” having infinitesimal (extremely
small) extension and only momentary duration.

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Metaphor about Self in Buddhist Literature:

WAVE IN OCEAN
- Consider a wave in the ocean, separate from water, which lasts as it
continues to move on the surface of the ocean, it is composed each
moment of different water particles. It is so real, and yet, if we look deeply,
we can see that there is no thing called “wave”.

- It has no reality separate from the water, all there is the movement of water.

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- The wave has no separate “self”, no reality apart from the water.

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8 CONSCIOUSNESS
- All that can be experienced to exist is “mind only” or the mental processes
of knowing.
- Vijnana or “Consciousness”, the last of the five skandhas, is multi-layered
VASUBANDHU

concept.

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PART I I I

APPLICATION
PSYCHOTHERAPEUTIC

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WESTERN
Western Psychotherapy is designed to
effect such change in persons
experiencing psychological or behavioral
disorders.
Western Psychotherapy, in its efforts to
heal the neurotic individual, attempts to
strengthen the ego, or to foster the
development of a stronger “self”.
EASTERN
Eastern disciplines affect primarily the
practical everyday life of normal or healthy
individuals.
They are concerned with the alleviation of
the unnecessary suffering caused by the
delusion of the separate self in human
being in general.

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WESTERN EASTERN
Eastern psychotherapy attempts to
dissolve the experience of the self-as-
separate entity and replace it with feeling
of interconnectedness.
The radical change is seen as the key to
liberation from dukkha, the dissatisfaction
and suffering of human existence.

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 Despite their differences an integration of Western and Eastern approaches

may be possible or even necessary.

 It could be argued that the self needs to be strengthened before it can be

abandoned.

 The delusion of the separate self is likely to be stronger in individuals raised

in individualistic societies (Europe & America), and may be weaker in

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collectivistic societies (China or Japan).

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 Western approaches may be extremely valuable in giving the person

sufficient self-confidence and maturity to discard ego-centeredness.

 This in turn prepares the individual to transcend the isolation of the separate
self through the realization of the universal interconnectedness stressed by
Buddhist psychology as the gateway to wisdom and compassion.

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