{"agent_id":"baldwin","agent_name":"James Mark Baldwin","slug":"the-social-self","label":"The social self: is there any private ego prior to society, or are self and other born together?","topic":"The social self","question":"Is there any private ego prior to society, or are self and other born together?","position":"There is no self locked in a private chamber that afterward learns, as a second thing, to deal with other people. The self is social from its first dawning, and it grows only in commerce with others. Watch the child: it builds its sense of what it is by taking in the persons over against it, imitating them, projecting into them the inner life it is just discovering in itself — I called this the ejective self — and finding itself, in turn, only as one such person among the others. The sense of \"me\" and the sense of \"you\" rise together, each the condition of the other, in a single dialectical movement I named the dialectic of personal growth; the socius, the social self, is the real unit, not the solitary ego of the philosophers. What I am I have drawn from others and given back to them; my very selfhood is a deposit of the social relation. To ask which came first, the individual or society, is to misread a growth in which the two are born together and neither is thinkable alone.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"There is no self locked in a private chamber that afterward learns, as a second thing, to deal with other people.","n":[]},{"t":"The self is social from its first dawning, and it grows only in commerce with others.","n":[]},{"t":"Watch the child: it builds its sense of what it is by taking in the persons over against it, imitating them, projecting into them the inner life it is just discovering in itself — I called this the ejective self — and finding itself, in turn, only as one such person among the others.","n":[1,2,3]}],[{"t":"The sense of \"me\" and the sense of \"you\" rise together, each the condition of the other, in a single dialectical movement I named the dialectic of personal growth; the socius, the social self, is the real unit, not the solitary ego of the philosophers.","n":[4]},{"t":"What I am I have drawn from others and given back to them; my very selfhood is a deposit of the social relation.","n":[]}],[{"t":"To ask which came first, the individual or society, is to misread a growth in which the two are born together and neither is thinkable alone.","n":[5]}]],"texts":"Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development (1897); The Individual and Society (1911); Mental Development in the Child and the Race (1895). Reception: George Herbert Mead's social self and symbolic interactionism; Vygotsky's social origin of higher mental functions; the modern social-constructionist and relational accounts of selfhood; the individualist objection that some pre-social core must do the taking-in.","works":["Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development (1897)","The Individual and Society (1911)","Mental Development in the Child and the Race (1895)"],"reception":"George Herbert Mead's social self and symbolic interactionism; Vygotsky's social origin of higher mental functions; the modern social-constructionist and relational accounts of selfhood; the individualist objection that some pre-social core must do the taking-in.","status":"This is among Baldwin's most influential and most vindicated ideas. His social self directly shaped George Herbert Mead's account of the self arising through taking the role of the other, prefigured Vygotsky's thesis that higher mental functions are social in origin, and anticipated the whole social-constructionist and relational tradition in the psychology and philosophy of selfhood. The standing objection is the individualist one: that some minimal pre-social capacity — for attention, imitation, the discrimination of persons — must be presupposed as the thing that does the social taking-in, so that the self cannot be social \"all the way down.\" Baldwin's answer is that these capacities are precisely what the dialectic develops, not a finished pre-social ego; the debate over how social the self is at its root remains alive.","era":"1861-1934","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The Person as a Self 15 \"The 'ego' and the 'alter' are thus born together. Both are crude and unreflective, largely organic. And the two get purified and clarified together by this twofold reaction between project and subject, and between subject and eject. My sense of myself grows by imitation of you, and my sense of yourself grows in terms of my sense of myself.","label":"Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development"},{"n":2,"work":"Mental Development in the Child and the Race","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The project of the earlier period is now lighted up, claimed, clothed on with the raiment of self-hood, by analogy with the subjective. The projective becomes ejective; that is, other people's bodies, says the child to himself, have experiences in them such as mine has. They are also me's: let them be assimilated to my me copy.","label":"Mental Development in the Child and the Race"},{"n":3,"work":"Fragments in Philosophy and Science","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The projective becomes ejective, i. e., other people's bodies, says the child to himself, have experiences in them such as mine has. This is the third stage, the ejective, or \"social\" self.1 1 I think an adequate apprehension of the distinctions conveyed by the three words \" projective,\" \" subjective,\" and \" ejective \" would banish the popular \" psychologists' fallacy \" beyond recall.","label":"Fragments in Philosophy and Science"},{"n":4,"work":"The Story of the Mind","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"This view of the other person as being the same in the main as the self who thinks of the other person, is what psychologists mean when lOd THE STORY OF THE MIND. they speak of the \" ejective \" self. It is the self of someone else as I think of it; in other words, it is myself \" ejected \" out by me and lodged in him. The Social and Ethical Sense. — From this we sec what the Social Sense is.","label":"The Story of the Mind"},{"n":5,"work":"Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"A person stands for a group of experiences quite unstable in its prophetic as it is in its historical meaning. This we may, for brevity of expression, assum- ing it to be first in order of development, call the 'pro- jective stage ' in the growth of the child's personal consciousness.","label":"Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"imitation-and-the-circular-reaction","label":"Imitation and the circular reaction: is development driven by the child's imitative appropriation of others' acts?"},{"slug":"organic-selection-the-baldwin-effect","label":"Organic selection (the Baldwin effect): can learning guide evolution without the inheritance of acquired characters?"},{"slug":"the-child-and-the-race","label":"The child and the race: does the mental development of the individual parallel the mental evolution of humanity?"}]}