The Genesis of the Self

Among Mead's most notable achievements is his account of the genesis of consciousness and of the self through the gradually developing ability in child- hood to take the role of the other and to visualize his own performance from the point of view of others. In this view, human communication becomes pos- sible only when "the symbol [arouses] in one's self what it arouses in the other individual." Very young children do not yet have the ability to use significant symbols; therefore, when they are at play, their behavior in many ways is similar to that of puppies playing with each other. As children grow older, however, they gradually learn to take the role of others through play. "A child plays at being a mother, at being a teacher, at being a policeman; that is, it is taking different roles." The growing child who playfully assumes these roles thereby cultivates in himself the ability to put himself in the place of others who are significant to him. As he matures, he will not only be able to take these roles by acting them out; but he will conceive of them by assum- ing them in his imagination. A crucial landmark in the child's social develop- ment is made when, in showing a picture to someone facing him, he will turn the picture away from himself rather than, as he did up to then, hold it to- ward himself in the belief that his partner can see only what he himself sees.

Child play at the level of simple role-taking is the first stage in the gradual transformation from simple conversations of gestures--a child's running away when chased--to the mature ability to use significant symbols in interaction with many others. Although he has learned to put himself, in imagination, in the position of his partner, the child still does not relate in his mind the roles that several others play with one another outside himself. Thus, he can under- stand the relation of mother or father with himself, but he cannot understand that his own mother is not his father's mother also. This breakthrough in his conceptualization comes with his ability to play complex organized games, when he will have in his mind all the roles of other players and make assess- ments about their potential responses to one another. Such games must be distinguished from simple games such as hide-and-seek, which involve only two types of role partners, or playing jacks, in which the actors do not modify each other's play and hence do not have to anticipate the response of the other partner. In hide-and-seek, "everyone, with the exception of the one who is hiding, is a person who is hunting. A child does not require more than the person who is hunted and the one who is hunting." But in a game in which a number of individuals playing different roles are involved, in baseball for example, "the child taking one role must be ready to take the role of everyone else." This differs not only from the two-role game, but also from what Mead calls "play," from those so-called games that do not involve mutual role-taking, such as jacks.

The fundamental difference between the [complex] game and the play is that in the former the child must have the attitude of all the others involved in that game. The attitudes of the other players which the participant assumes organize into a sort of unit, and it is that organization which controls the response of the individual. . . . Each one of his own acts is determined by his assumption of the acts of the others who are playing the game. What he does is controlled by his being everyone else on that team, at least in so far as those attitudes affect his own particular response. We get then an "other" which is an organization of the attitudes of those involved in the same process.

The difference between play and games resides in the number of partici- pants and in the existence or absence of rules. Play undertaken by one child has no rules. Games have rules but differ as to the number of players. Two person games require only simple role-taking; multiple person games require taking the role of the "generalized other," that is, each player's having an idea of the behavior of every other player toward each other and toward him- self. With the help of the rules that govern the game, the child develops the ability to take the place of all the other players and to determine their re- sponses. These "rules are the set of responses which a particular attitude calls out.'' The final stage in the maturation process of the child, Mead argues, occurs when the individual takes the role of the "generalized other"--the atti- tude of the whole community.

The fully mature individual, according to Mead, does not merely take into account the attitudes of other individuals, of "significant others," toward him- self and toward one another; he must also "take their attitudes toward the various phases or aspects of the common social activity . . . in which, as mem- bers of an organized society or social group, they are all engaged. As Natanson puts it, "[rules of the game] . . . mark the transition from simple role-taking to participation in roles of a special, standardized order. Through rules the child is introduced to societal compulsion and the abrasive texture of a more nearly adult reality." "Only insofar as he takes the attitudes of the organized social group to which he belongs towards the organized, cooperative social activity or set of such activities in which that group as such is engaged, does he develop a complete self." Hence, the mature self arises when a "gen- eralized other" is internalized so that "the community exercises control over the conduct of its individual members."

Thus, in the Meadian view of the emergence of role-taking capacities, the self that arises gradually through a progressive widening of the scope of human involvement must never be conceived as a mere body. It is rather a social entity emerging in a social process of development from simple con- versations of gestures to the process of identification with the "generalized other." "The conscious self," Dewey comments on Mead's conception, "was to him the world of nature first taken up into social relations and then dissolved to form a new self which then went forth to recreate the world of nature and social institutions."

The essence of the self, according to Mead, is its reflexivity. The individual self is individual only because of its relation to others. Through the individual's ability to take in his imagination the attitudes of others, his self becomes an object of his own reflection. The self as both subject and object is the essence of being social. The peculiar individuality of each self is a result of the peculiar combination, never the same for two people, of the attitude of others that form the generalized other. Hence, although individuality is rooted in sociality, each person makes an individual contribution to the social process.

From Coser, 1977:335-338.