Charles Horton Cooley Charles Horton Cooley
"Self and society," wrote Cooley, "are twin-born." This emphasis onthe organic link and the indissoluble connection between self and society isthe theme of most of Cooley's writings and remains the crucial contributionhe made to modern social psychology and sociology.
Building upon the work of William James, Cooley opposed the Cartesiantradition that posited a sharp disjunction between the knowing, thinking sub-ject and the external world. The objects of the social world, Cooley taught, areconstitutive parts of the subject's mind and the self. Cooley wished to removethe conceptual barrier that Cartesian thought had erected between the indi-vidual and his society and to stress, instead, their interpenetration. "A separateindividual," he wrote,
is an abstraction unknown to experience, and so likewise is society when re-garded as something apart from individuals. . . ." Society" and "individuals"do not denote separable phenomena but are simply collective and distributiveaspects of the same thing. . . When we speak of society, or use any othercollective term, we fix our minds upon some general view of the people con-cerned, while when we speak of individuals we disregard the general aspectand think of them as if they were separate
Cooley argued that a person's self grows out of a person's commerce withothers. "The social origin of his life comes by the pathway of intercourse withother persons." The self, to Cooley, is not first individual and then social; itarises dialectically through communication. One's consciousness of himself isa reflection of the ideas about himself that he attributes to other minds; thus,there can be no isolated selves. "There is no sense of 'I' without its cor-relative sense of you, or he, or they. "
In his attempt to illustrate the reflected character of the self, Cooleycompared it to a looking glass:
Each to each a looking-glass
Reflects the other that doth pass.
"As
we see our face, figure, and dress in the glass, and are interested in
thembecause they are ours, and pleased or otherwise with them according
as theydo or do not answer to what we should like them to be, so in
imagination weperceive in another's mind some thought of our
appearance, manners, aims,deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are
variously affected by it."
The notion of the looking-glass self is composed of three principal ele-ments: "The imagination of our appearance to the other person, the imagina-tion of his judgment of that appearance, and some sort of self-feeling, such aspride or mortification." The self arises in a social process of communicativeinterchange as it is reflected in a person's consciousness. As George H. Meadput it when discussing Cooley's contribution, "By placing both phases of thissocial process in the same consciousness, by regarding the self as the ideasentertained by others of the self, and the other as the ideas entertained of himby the self, the action of the others upon the self and of the self upon theothers becomes simply the interaction of ideas upon each other within mind."
This somewhat abstract notion can be illustrated by a delightful examplewhich Cooley gave himself when he imagined an encounter between Alice,who has a new hat, and Angela, who just bought a new dress. He argues thatwe then have,
I) The real Alice, known only to her maker. 2) Her idea of herself; e.g. "I[Alice] look well in this hat." 3) Her idea of Angela's idea of her; e.g."Angela thinks I look well in this hat." 4) Her idea of what Angela thinksshe thinks of herself: e.g. "Angela thinks I am proud of my looks in thishat." 5) Angela's idea of what Alice thinks of herself; e.g. "Alice thinks sheis stunning in that hat." And of course six analogous phases of Angela andher dress.
"Society," Cooley adds, "is an interweaving and interworking of mental selves.I imagine your mind, and especially what your mind thinks about my mind,and what your mind thinks about what my mind thinks about your mind. Idress my mind before yours and expect that you will dress yours before mine.Whoever cannot or will not perform these feats is not properly in the game."Multiple perspectives are brought into congruence through continued multi-lateral exchanges of impressions and evaluations between our minds and thoseof others. Society is internalized in the individual psyche; it becomes part ofthe individual self through the interaction of many; individuals, which linksand fuses them into an organic whole.
From Coser, 1977:305-307.
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