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Essay on George Herbert Mead's Conception of the Self
George Herbert Mead, was first and foremost a (pragmatist) philosopher. His overriding aim was to find a means of resolving basic issues in philosophy from an evolutionary standpoint free of Cartesian dualisms. Significantly, it was by way of psychology that Mead found he could resolve the philosophical issues with which he wrestled (Miller, 1973). Early on, Mead had been profoundly influenced by Darwin and hence considered it essential to develop a conception of the self consistent with Darwin's theory of evolution, one in which the self emerges from the process of adjustment between organism and environment. Unwavering in his commitment to the evolutionary standpoint, Mead gradually worked out a biosocial conception of the individual - the social self - in which mind and self arise within conduct, that is, are generated "without remainder" in a social process.
Mead's ideas pertaining to the social self - a socially constituted yet simultaneously open, creative self (Miller, 1973) - meshed well with, provided a rationale for, and often were even implicit in his own views about mind and action. Mead's social psychology also had the potential to "become negotiational" and attempted an exploration of the congruity of Mead's concept of the social self with his own conception of the "will" - his term for the self-directing capacity of human beings.
Mead. For Mead, "Social psychology . . . presupposes an approach to experience from the standpoint of the individual, but undertakes to determine in particular that which belongs to this experience because the individual himself belongs to a social structure, a social order. . . . [Thus] social psychology studies the activity or behavior of the individual as it lies within the social process" (Mead, 1934). Mead was quite clear about embracing what has subsequently come to be called methodological holism. Thus, Mead treated the whole (the social group) as prior to and constitutive of the part (the individual).....................
