A Critical Introduction to Psychology

(Tuis.) #1

200 Christopher R. Bell


Martin and Sugarman (2003) note that the concept of the ‘self’ has
pervaded psychological research of all kinds during the 20th century, and
express concern about the underlying ontological status of the self that is
often assumed as a pre-theoretical concept enabling empirical research.
Martin and Sugarman bring our attention to the fact that the Western
concept of self, despite its apparent naturalness/obviousness, is indeed
culturally specific, and emerges out of the Western philosophical tradition
in its modern form via the thought of Thomas Hobbes and subsequently
John Locke. Martin and Sugarman (2003) state:


We take Hobbes as the progenitor of many of the ideas that
subsequently have proven so influential in the psychological study of
personhood. For not only did Hobbes (1962) promote the idea of an
ontologically prior person, but he also married this idea to doctrines of a
physiologically reductive determinism and a dissolutionist approach to
the question of human agency. (p. 75)

Only relatively recently have ontologically prior notions of the self
been challenged by social theories and philosophies that substituted
Hobbesian individual physiological determinism with various models of
social determinism that tend to downplay or outright eliminate the self as
having any agentic capacity, even in its physiologically self-deterministic
form. Given this stark antimony between a concept of self that is agentic
(albeit self-deterministic) versus a concept of self that is an effect of
discourse rather than a cause of itself, Martin and Sugarman emphasize the
need for a level of ‘middle ground’ theorizing that allows room for the
possibility of both individual agency and an appreciation of the ways in
which the self is influenced by social forces and cultural discourses.
As such, Martin and Sugarman (2003) begin from the ontological
premise that a person “is an identifiable, embodied individual human with
being, self, and agentic capability” (p. 78). This postulated embodied
person is always embedded within a life-world the horizons of which are
established by their cultural context. While the horizon of intelligibility
provided by one’s culture is both contingent and inherited, it enables “that
compelling comprehension of one’s unique existence that imbues

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