Review of Studies of How the Mind Publicly Enfolds into Being.

Abstract

WILLIAM E. SMYTHE and ANGELINA BAYDALA (Eds.) Studies of How the Mind Publicly Enfolds into Being Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004, 450 pages (ISBN 0-7734-6351-8, US$129.95 Hardcover) Reviewed by MATTHEW H. STEPHENS This volume contains the fruits of symposium of the Western Canadian Theoretical Psychologists devoted to the topic contained in the title, though the original idea was expressed by considering psyche and polis (p. viii), the two Greek terms from which our conceptions of and public largely derive. Most of the reflection does not return all the way to ancient Greece, but the essays draw deeply on historical sources, retracing the influences of contemporary thought and reminding the audience of some roads not taken. Judging from the references, the sources of inspiration for many of these essays is predominantly philosophical, with liberal borrowings from sociology, cultural studies, and political theory. Despite the complexity and range of theoretical issues discussed, the contributions are uniformly clear and engaging, credit to authors and editors alike. Henderikus Stam, in the inaugural essay, provides concise and persuasive account of the need to engage with ideas in philosophy and cognitive science, as he shows that psychology's neglect of what self denotes has led to paradoxical results. While noting that self is used as modifier to delineate some 41 categories in the PsycInfo database, the question of what, if anything, the actually is has received scant attention. Save for occasional discussions in undergraduate personality textbooks, the problem of the is all but buried, yet discussions of self-like properties allow psychologists to smuggle in cultural appropriations of the (p. 10). Stam's concluding discussion of dialogic concept of selfhood shows potential as an attempt at repairing psychology's legacy of the (p. 24). Stam's is not the only piece that adds useful background knowledge to the question of the current state of psychological concepts of the self. Several of the essays (e.g., Chapters 1, 3, and 6) provide useful summaries of historical movements in psychology and the history of ideas more generally. This suggests the volume has some pedagogical potential. There is substantial engagement with the psychological literature as well, with Harre in particular looming large. Leendert Mos' essay, Of the Historical Self, draws on the hermeneutic tradition to argue for moral identity grounded in individual agency (p. 59) (rather than self-knowledge) as the centre of our feelings of personhood. Mos' wide-ranging essay integrates great number of diverse sources, and his work shows the degree to which political thought and history depend upon astute psychological reasoning and observation. A dominant idea throughout the essays is that selfhood is to be understood hermeneutically, that is, as an interpretive activity that occurs within socio-linguistic context. As Jack Martin and Jeff Sugarman argue, this position offers away of balancing individualist and collectivist perspectives. As they see it, the is a kind of reflective, interpretive understanding that emerges within, yet is underdetermined by, its sociocultural origins (p. 177). The appeal to hermeneutics further manifests itself in various contributors' attention to the nuances of dialogue, including those of social psychologists and psychoanalysts, whose inquiries into particular selves often gravitate in this direction. Randall Tonks provides several interesting case studies of persons struggling with their cultural identities as Aboriginal Canadians, and Baydala and Stam give an interesting gloss on the analyist/analysand relationship as they explicate the program of social reform initiated by the so-called Freudian Left. While the initial essays explore the Hermeneutics of Self, the latter sections of the book are devoted to Emancipatory Possibilities and Cultural Perspectives. …