SOC 2112 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: George Herbert Mead, Symbolic Interactionism, Individual Psychology
2 Sep 2015
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He had no books published in his lifetime, but he had many journal articles: the philosophy of the present (1932, mind, self, and society (1934, movements of thought in the nineteenth century (1938) His ideas and theories are the foundation of the symbolic interactionist tradition of sociology. Individual psychology is intelligible only in terms of social processes. The development of the individual"s self, and of his self-consciousness within the field of his experience is pre-eminently social. The social process is prior to the structures and processes of individual experience. The self, like the mind, is a social emergent or process. Individual selves are the products of social interaction and not the preconditions of that interaction. Soren kirkegard said that self is a relation . If this is so, then it is a social structure. The only reason we can interact because there is a collective shared set of rules and we all understand and agree upon things.
