青年期における自我の形成

Abstract

In this study, an attempt was made to observe self-consciousness of students of junior and senior high schools in relation to the problems of selfacceptance.1) In what manner are the youth self-conscious?High school students wrote compositions under the subject “I”, and gave answers to the questionnaires made on the basis of two different categories-“agreeable self” and “disagreeable self”. The result shows that the adolescent self-consciousness has as substance much that relates to the feelings and the attitudes toward other people, and that the number of students describing their own defects and self dissatisfactions are much greater than those who write about their own good points and their selfsatisfactions.2) How does their self-consciousness relate to the evaluations and the attitudes others have towards them?In order to see how the criticism of other people influences the self-evaluation of the adolescent and how it is accepted, the writings of the young people on “Other people's criticism about me” were analyzed. It was revealed that those young people were two or three times more conscious of negative criticism than of positive criticism about them. It was also found that they accepted much more than half the criticisms of both kinds as holding true. The manner in which the criticism was accepted differed according to sex and school-grades and also according to the categories of people who criticized.In order to see what relation there is between their consciousness of what other people think of them and their attitudes towards themselves, a study was made of how they interpret other people's anger towards them, then investigated the relation between their interpretation and their attitude towards their own good points and bad points. It was found that those who were positive in understanding others were inclined also to be positive towards themselves, and that those who were negative in their understanding of others tended to be negative towards themselves. From the point of view of age, it was observed that the younger the person the more inclined he was to inter pret other people's anger as hostile towards himself.In the research made on how they consider thireown anger, differences were found according to their ages. There, again, the same relationship as before was seen that those who were lenient towards others were lenient also towards themselves.3) With regard to the assistance to be given to young people in their problems of self-acceptance: It was clear from the answers to the questionnaires that the greatest joy and sorrow, suffering or anger were frequently caused by approval or disapproval of other people. From this fact, it can be said that other people's criticisms and attitudes play a big role in the formation of self-evaluation of the youth. As a consequence, it is the author's opinion that to make them hold sound judgements upon other people's criticisms by means of the technique of compairing their own way of judgements and that of other people, role-playing and discussions, or changing values in “possible-self”, can be considered as means of helping the youth acquire healthy self-acceptance.