12 - On self characterization

Summary

The finished man among his enemies? –

How in the name of Heaven can he escape

That defiling and disfigured shape

The mirror of malicious eyes

Casts upon his eyes until at last

He thinks that shape must be his shape?

And what's the good of an escape

If honour find him in the wintry blast?

Yeats, “A Dialogue of Self and Soul”

In this chapter I develop several ideas about the self, the other, and their characterizations that have received preliminary formulation in some of my previous publications, particularly those on life history (1977, 1980), transference and countertransference (1981), dialogue (n.d.), and the relationship between self and desire (1982). In these papers I adopted a radically dialectical approach to the self. I argued that self-awareness arises when the ego – my most primitive prereflexive term – views himself, herself, or more accurately (since gender attributions require minimal self-reflection) itself (understood in a pregender way) from the vantage point of the other. Unlike Hegel ([1807) 1977), George Herbert Mead (1964), and Jean-Paul Sartre ([1943] 1956, [1952] 1964), however, I maintained that the dialectical movement is continuous; that the characterizations, or the typifications, of the other are subject to (a) conventional constraints embedded in language (understood broadly, as in the German Sprache), (b) desire (itself articulated through and constrained by language), and (c) the resistance of the other, resistance being understood in phenomenological terms as the most elementary criterion of the real.