Self-Representation

This innovative work offers a new approach to the study of self-representation drawing on both the older study of lives tradition in personality psychology and recent work in narrative psychology. Gary S. Gregg presents a generative theory of self-representation applying methods of symbolic analysis developed by cultural anthropologists to the texts of life-historical interviews. This model accounts for the continual shifting of identity among contradictory surface discourses about the self as it shows how each discourse is defined as a reconfiguration of a stable cluster of deep structurally-ambigious elements. Gregg not only examines the nature of narrative but also addresses more mainstream issues in cognitive science such as: How is knowledge of the self and its social world represented? What are the elementary units of self-cognition? How are cognition and affect linked?After a brief introduction the book raises critical questions about self-representation by presenting re-analyses of two famous case studies--Freud''s Rat Man and Mack and Larry from The Authoritarian Personality--and initial observations from Gregg''s fieldwork in Morocco. A theoretical chapter then introduces the notion of structured ambiguity which enables a person to shift between identities by figure or ground-like reversals of key symbols and metaphors. Three original life-narrative analyses follow which with increasing complexity develop the model via analogies to basic structures of tonal music. The work concludes with a theoretical chapter that reexamines the ideas of William James George Herbert Mead and Erik Erikson about the self''s unity and multiplicity and then summarizes a generative model. The book presents a compelling alternative to prevailing views of self-cognition and identity and will be a valuable resource for courses in psychology anthropology and sociology as well as an important tool for researchers and professionals in these fields.