The Effect of Spiritual Exercises on the Integration of Self-System

Abstract

The application of a symbolic interactionist approach to the phenomenon of the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola suggests that individuals engage in this experience in an attempt to reconcile conflicting self-systems that arise in disparate social situations. A study of forty-six Jesuit novices was conducted over a four-month period, during which novices underwent intensive spiritual exercises. Results of the analysis confirm that the thirty-day initiatory experience did have a significant integrative effect on the self-systems of individuals in the sample. From the standpoint of symbolic interactionism as stated by G. H. Mead (1934), an individual's affinity for experiences such as the Jesuits' thirty-day spiritual exercises may arise from the failure of interpersonal relationships to generate for the individual a consistent definition of self. Mead (1934: 154) states that the ultimate outcome of the socialization process is the emergence of a unified definition of self embodied, so to speak, in the generalized other; however, Cottrell (1969: 553) has maintained that, within our complex urban society, role expectations in various social situations may be so mutually exclusive as to preclude the successful emergence of a unified self-system. Thus, a constellation of self-other systems arises-each significant to the individual and yet incompatible with its counterparts-rather than a single generalized other, as postulated by Mead. Assuming that such conflict is abhorrent to the individual, as the vast literature