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of Psychological Life
 CHANGING CONCEPTIONS
OF PSYCHOLOGICAL LIFE

Edited By

Cynthia Lightfoot
Penn State University

Chris Lalonde
University of Victoria

Michael Chandler
University of British Columbia

LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES, PUBLISHERS

2004 Mahwah, New Jersey London
Copyright © 2004 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form, by photostat, microform, retrieval system, or
any other means, without prior written permission of the
publisher.

Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., Publishers

10 Industrial Avenue
Mahwah, New Jersey 07430

Cover design by Kathryn Houghtaling Lacey

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jean Piaget Society. Meeting (30th : 2000 : Montréal, Québec)

Changing conceptions of psychological life / edited by
Cynthia Lightfoot, Chris Lalonde, Michael Chandler.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8058-4336-1 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Self—Congresses. I. Lightfoot, Cynthia. II. Lalonde,
Christopher A. III. Chandler, Michael J. IV. Title.
BF697.J36 2004
155.2—dc22 2003063128
CIP

Books published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates are printed

on acid-free paper, and their bindings are chosen for strength
and durability.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents

Preface vii

PART I: SELF AS KNOWN AND AS EXPERIENCED

1 Neither Personality nor Cognition: An Alternative 3

Approach to the Nature of the Self
Agusto Blasi

2 Ricoeur, Narrative and Personal Identity 27

Donald Polkinghorne

3 The Promise and Limitations of the Moral Self Construct 49

Larry Nucci

PART II: SELF AND MIND

4 Unity and Modularity in the Mind and the Self: 73

Towards a General Theory
Andreas Demetriou

5 Identity: Does Thinking Make it So? 113

David M. Peterson, James E. Marcia
and Jeremy I. M. Carpendale

6 Self-Regulation and Children’s Theories of Mind 127

Louis J. Moses and Stephanie M. Carlson

v
vi CONTENTS

PART III: SELF, MIND, AND CULTURE

7 Self and Power in the World of Romance: 149

Extending Sociogenic Theories
Dorothy Holland

8 Theories of Self and Theories as Selves: 183

Identity in Rwanda
David Moshman

9 Culture, Selves and Time: Theories of Personal 207

Persistence in Native and non-Native Youth
Chris Lalonde and Michael Chandler

PART IV: THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF SELF

10 A Preface to the Epistemology of Identity 233

Theodore R. Sarbin

11 The Social Construction of Persons 241

Rom Harré

12 Improvisatory Accident-Prone Dramas 251

of (What Passes for) a Person’s Life
Amélie Oksenberg Rorty

Author Index 263

Subject Index 269

Preface

It’s in all the papers. Ninety-six years, fifty-some films, and one true love to
her credit, Katharine Hepburn died yesterday. She was, in the words of one
admirer, “an inestimable self;” someone who “reminded us again and again
that self is a gift not to be doubted or squandered or pawned for less that it’s
worth.”1
If the eulogy reveals anything about Hepburn, it speaks volumes about
our folk beliefs of having and valuing and being true to our selves, and the
consequence of it all for directing our lives. Selves, it would seem, should be
taken seriously, particularly by anyone who holds to the prospect that they
are beacons of knowledge and action.
This book stands as commentary on that sentiment. It is a product of the
30th Annual Meeting of the Jean Piaget Society, which convened in
Montréal, Canada, in June of 2000. The contributing authors constitute the
original cast invited to Montréal to speak on the theme of how individuals
come to construe psychological lives—their own and others. Their con-
cerns, more specifically are how our sense of ourselves—who we are and
how we think—emerges developmentally, culturally, and historically, and
the implications such constructions have for personal, social, and political
change. Together, the authors compose an international and interdisci-
plinary group of scholars already well regarded for their work on topics as
diverse as adolescence, language, aging, romance, and morality. Their par-
ticular accomplishment for this special project was to pin their expertise to
the cotter assumption that each of us understands ourselves as moral and
epistemic agents, as authors and narrators of our own lives, and as choosers
and construers of our own experience.
We have organized the book around four major themes that we will out-
line in a moment. There are, however, recurrent issues and sentiments
spanning the sections that create their own level of discourse about selves
vii
viii PREFACE

and minds, and how they have been and ought to be studied. Throughout
the book, for example, the reader is invited to reflect on the inadequacies of
traditionally narrow cognitive approaches to conceptions of psychological
life. By turns the authors take issue with views that settle myopically on that
particular version of self and mind first fashioned and celebrated during
the Enlightenment. Our authors argue that the shopworn account of men-
tal life as objective, reflective, stable, detached, and coherent turns up an in-
dividual so devoid of desire, motive, commitment, and feeling—so anemic
of personality—that it can hardly rise from the sofa, much less engage in
those forms of action that we commonly take as instrumental to the pursuit
of knowledge and collective life.
As their criticisms converge to undermine classical cognitive ap-
proaches, so too do their endorsed alternatives together present something
of a map for how to continue. The reader will find in these pages a call to
feed conceptions of mental life on the lush and shifting fields of attach-
ments and felt experience, epiphany and power, drama and genre, and the
possibility engendered by sheer coincidence. Explorations of a more con-
nected mind and a more convivial self are promised to bring to light possi-
ble solutions to the long-whiskered and doggedly difficult problems of
relating thought and action, unity and diversity, agency and duty.
The first section, Self as Known and as Experienced, includes work that is
principally concerned with elevating the position of our experience of
ourselves in constructing who we are. Agusto Blasi, for example, derides
more traditional approaches for casting mental life in strictly representa-
tional terms. Such approaches, he argues, result in a reductive, “hyphen-
ated self” that is no more than the sum of its constituent parts of
self-perceptions, self-images, self-concepts, and self-evaluations. There is
no place here for an active agent to manage and care for and lay claim to
the various perceptions, images, concepts, and evaluations to which it is
tagged; no place for the felt unity of agents and their own actions. He pro-
poses that the basic self, that is, the self that is foundational to construc-
tions of who we are, is experienced in the course of intentional action.
Intentional action, he suggests, defines a context of “being present to one-
self.” Such presence requires consciousness of our selves as agents; it con-
veys to us our own subject-hood.
Donald Polkinghorne pursues a similar course in his revisionist narrative
approach to personal identity. Although generally sympathetic to narrative
theory’s emphasis on how conceptions of self are affected by the language
and stories in which they are articulated, he argues, like Blasi, that any ac-
count that fails to address the role of identity as experienced is itself a story
only half-told. Polkinghorne and Blasi part ways, however, on the nature of
that experience and the details of its generative power. Drawing from the
theories of Ricoeur, Gadamer, and Merleau-Ponty, Polkinghorne maps out
PREFACE ix

a three-part solution of prefiguring, configuring, and refiguring that forms

the hermeneutic circle of identity development. The solution begins with
the prefigured life as lived, an unreflective, nonlanguaged, unfinished
“presence of oneself to oneself,” which becomes transformed through
story, plot, and genre. Once configured through narrative, self-stories be-
come subject to interpretation and evaluation, that is to say, they become
“refigured” and appropriated as our own in ways that fundamentally alter
life as lived.
Larry Nucci is also concerned with matters of experience and agency,
particularly in their relevance to moral life. He calls for a contextualized-
structuralism to lay to rest the classical Kohlbergian perspective and all its
unsettling accoutrements, principal among them the lack of consanguinity
of stage, thought and action. In a more spectral, contextualized light, moral
action draws explanatory power from social categories, cultural traditions,
and hierarchical relations, as well as from who we are as individuals apart
from, and as active interpreters of all such categories, traditions and rela-
tions. A contextualized-structuralism, on Nucci’s account, holds value for
defining and exploring “moral openness”—that is, our orientation towards
and proclivity to hear and respond to the moral voices in our life-worlds.
This openness maps the high road to moral and personal change.
Chapters comprising the second section, Self and Mind, share as a focal
concern the joinery presumed to exist between conceptions of self and con-
ceptions of mental life. However, each offers more expansive views that per-
mit the inclusion of the dynamics of temperament, attachment, personality,
and regulation. Beginning with the premise that mind constitutes a form of
self-awareness about thinking, Andreas Demetriou addresses the problem of
self-integration: what accounts for the felt unity of a self that is naturally di-
verse in abilities, characteristics and tendencies? Drawing theoretic inspira-
tion from dynamic systems and modularity approaches, and informed by his
own empirical data, he sets forth for consideration a three-tiered model in-
tended to capture both the dynamic (motivational and emotional) and cogni-
tive representational components of a “hypercognitive system” that under-
lies our sense of ourselves as unified and integral.
Although operating within the radically different perspective of
Eriksonian identity theory, David Peterson, James Marcia and Jeremy
Carpendale share Demetriou’s vision of an integrated study of identity,
cognitive, and epistemic development. Their study provides strong evi-
dence for the claim that identity and epistemic development are both
moved forward through a process of exploration which is itself mediated by
the developing child’s attachment history.
In the third contribution to this section, Louis Moses and Stephanie
Carlson propose and provide supporting empirical evidence that self im-
pacts mental life through the “non-obvious route” of self-regulation. They
x PREFACE

argue, in particular, that self-regulation—the ability to hold one’s own salient

perspective in abeyance in the face of competing possibilities—is the growth
medium for the emergence of preschool children’s theories of mind.
Contributions to the third section, Self, Mind, and Culture, are all con-
cerned with the cultural contexts that frame developing conceptions of
self and mental life. Dorothy Holland presents an historical analysis of
how anthropology has, in the past 20 years, backed away from essentialist
accounts of selves and cultures in order to articulate “social practice” theo-
ries of identity development. In the light of contemporary theorizing,
identity is understood to be historically produced and mediated through
the artifacts of culture—census forms, curricula vita, diagnostic manuals,
and other genre. Her own “sociogenic” revision to social practice theory,
illuminated in an analysis of women’s constructions of romantic identity,
interprets culture genres as tools of self-construction that are constrained
by relations of power.
David Moshman’s contribution resonates with several recurrent themes
in this book. His general aim is to account for the consistency between the
theories that we have about ourselves, and our actions within specific cul-
tural and historical contexts. Theories, he argues, initially implicit in be-
havior, increasingly become explicit objects of consciousness that alter who
we are. Theories are us. Interpreting the genocide in Rwanda as an issue of
ideology and identity, rather than as an issue of tribal and racial differences,
Moshman builds a case for viewing identity as theory and a commitment to
being a particular kind of person.
Chris Lalonde and Michael Chandler set themselves the task of explicat-
ing exactly how individuals resolve the paradox of personal persistence,
that is, how they face the challenge of understanding selves as continuous
through time despite life’s inevitable flux and change. Arguing that a sense
of personal persistence is a “generic design feature or systems imperative”
of self-hood, they trace two distinctive solutions to the problem of self-conti-
nuity, one reaching inward to some constant core protected from the turbu-
lent surround, a second solution reaching outward through an expanding
net of “relational” or “narratively-based” connections that bind the present
self to its history and its imagined future. When pressed to confront the par-
adox of personal persistence, Western-European adolescents lean heavily
on the first solution, whereas Native American adolescents favor the latter,
suggesting that culture figures importantly into developing of conceptions
of self.
Our fourth and final section, The Social Construction of Self, situates con-
ceptions of mental life directly and dramatically in the social contexts of
their making. The contributions are replete with references to persons as
protean, contingent participants within dynamic fields of joint action. The-
odore Sarbin argues that social identity is an answer to the question “who
PREFACE xi

am I?” But because we live in a storied world, the question is more appropri-
ately phrased in poetically nuanced terms: “in what story or stories am I tak-
ing part?” Although the personal pronoun figures into any answer—I am a
performing arts enthusiast; I am a servant of the Lord—Sarbin argues that
our conceptions of self, the meanings of who we are, ride ultimately on the
predicates our pronouns carry in their own wake.
Rom Harré’s chapter focuses likewise on the identity shaping power of
language, discourse and, particularly, personal pronouns. Following
Wittgenstein, he argues that selves are jointly constructed in virtue of don-
ning public masks appropriate to the local milieu. It is on this account that
pronoun systems are of special importance to personal identity: they serve
to locate self-singularities in space and time.
And, finally, a provocative chapter by Amélie Rorty who disavows as mis-
guided any notion of working out versions of persons as integrated, unified,
singular, or coherent. Attenuated across fields of dramatic action, contra-
diction, and revolution, selves, like calla lilies, are suitable to any occasion.
We are each a pocketful of “identity markers,” character-forming patterns
of cognitive and motivational proclivities produced as our situations de-
mand. That these identity markers are often dug out along with odd bits of
laundry lint, matchbooks, or last week’s grocery list just goes to the point of
our immapable futures, and our readiness to make fire.
All told, the reader will find in these pages programmatic efforts vari-
ously attuned to selves and minds as dynamic and structured, present and
represented, felt and known, nonlanguaged and storied, embodied and
theorized. There is paradox aplenty here. And for that we must be grateful.

—Cynthia Lightfoot
—Chris Lalonde
—Michael Chandler

ENDNOTE
1
Verlyn Klinkenborg, NYT; July 1, 2003.
 Part I
SELF AS KNOWN
AND AS EXPERIENCED
 Chapter 1

Neither Personality nor Cognition:

An Alternative Approach
to the Nature of the Self 1

Augusto Blasi
University of Massachusetts Boston

The use of the term self, in its nonhyphenated form, has increased exponen-
tially in recent psychological writings. However, referent and meaning are
still imprecise and ambiguous. There seem to be two main referents. Some-
times “self” is used either as synonymous with oneself, the concrete person,
or as equivalent with personality, as defined by temperamental and behav-
ioral traits, or perhaps by salient psychological characteristics. The most
frequent referent of the term, by far, is the subject-as-known, or the product
of self-cognition. I argue here that both these uses of the term are somewhat
inappropriate; I then attempt to define a domain of psychological function-
ing, to which the nonhyphenated “self” should be properly and unambigu-
ously applied. It is not my intention to write about language and to
construct an argument about semantics. In a discipline where agreement is
rarely found, and only on the basis of empirical evidence, a discussion about
the proper use of words is not likely to convince many people. My main in-
tention is positive and substantive, namely, to point to, and clarify a set of
psychological processes, to which the label, self, clearly belongs, and from
which the self as object of cognition should be carefully distinguished. This
domain of functioning, although essential to the understanding of specifi-
cally human characteristics, has been, at least from a theoretical perspec-
3