Читать книгу Introducing Cognitive Analytic Therapy - Anthony Ryle - Страница 52

Individuals are not self‐generated or self‐maintained. Born with a unique genetic endowment, their individuality is shaped and maintained through their relationships with others. This rejection of the monadic view of personality is shared with Mead (1934) and many others (see Burkitt (1991) for a useful survey of the field, and see Ormay (2012) for a group analytic perspective). It emphasizes that the activities of learning and becoming a person take place essentially in relation to others. In this process our activity and the acquisition of facts and of their meanings are inseparable. We do not store representations to which we apply a mayonnaise of meaning. “Representations” become a fundamental part of emerging psychological structures. They are inextricably imbued with the meanings acquired in the course of our activity in an intersubjective universe, through our relation to others, notably parents, whose own meanings in turn will reflect those of the wider society. Child‐rearing practices are guided by deliberate educational intent to a small extent only and their impact on the growth of the self is registered without conscious reflection on the part of the child.

Just as the realization that the world was not the center of the cosmos was resisted for a long time, so to think of the individual self as being formed and maintained in this social, interpersonal way, rather than as being the central source of thought and action, does seem to present major conceptual difficulties to many members of our contemporary professional culture. This point is returned to at the end of this chapter.