of peers, they fail to internalize a coherent sense of how others view them.
As a result, the “me” fails to properly form, and the individual becomes an
“I” without reference point. Without a fully formed “me” to balance the
“I,” social actors experience difficulty in terms of conceptualizing them-
selves and formulating lines of action. Participants in the Southeastern City
scene reported precisely such feelings prior to participating in the
subculture.
Members of the scene developed a way to neutralize “multiphrenia” by
attending shows, however. After concerts, subjects reported feelings of
extraordinary self-comfort. Going to concerts helped the punks in my study
to construct a coherent generalized other by facilitating a rare social-
psychological fusion of the “I” and “me” that triggered feelings of trans-
cendent self-actualization.
In his social-psychological work on the self,Mead (1934)theorized that
the “I” and “me” ordinarily remained locked in dialectical tension, unifying
the self by balancing personal distinctiveness with social connection. He
believed that the “I” and “me” would fuse into a temporary unity, however,
when individuals cathartically engaged in a difficult activity within a social
situation predicated upon mechanical solidarity. Preempting scholars of
flow, he asserted that these situations would yield sentiments of exultation,
as individuals experienced a spiritual connection to their reference groups.
Mead’s concept of fusion explains why the subjects in my study
experienced feelings of elated self-actualization during concerts. At shows,
participants experienced complete identification with those around them.^19
Because all were engaged in the same stimulating and collaborative
activityand because all were contemporaneously engaged with the same
powerful sensory objectsubjects believed that they were experiencing the
same feelings and emotions as those around them. Rather than struggling
to unify disparate values and reference groups, they fully and completely
took the attitude of those in their presence. Mead calls this the “attitude of
the engineer.” “The engineer,” he asserts, “has the attitudes of all the other
individuals in the group.” In the “high social processes and significant
experiences” wherein individuals take this attitude,
the self...is the action of the “I” in harmony with the taking of the role of others in the
“me.” The self is both the “I” and the “me”; the “me” setting the situation to which the
“I” responds. Both the “I” and “me” are involved in the self, and here each supports
the other.” (p. 277)The intensity of concerts, in other words, reduced the “me” to the immedi-
ate situation. Requiring the full participation of the “I,” “me,” and “I”
Ecstatic Ritual as a New Mode of Youth Identity Work 185