Images of self in psychological thought

Images of Self in Psychological Thought Michael F. Mascolo & Surabhika Maheshwari Psychological Studies ISSN 0033-2968 Volume 64 Number Psychol Stud (2019) 64:249-257 DOI 10.1007/s12646-019-00517-y 23 Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by National Academy of Psychology (NAOP) India This eoffprint is for personal use only and shall not be self-archived in electronic repositories If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com” 23 Author's personal copy Psychol Stud (July–September 2019) 64(3):249–257 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12646-019-00517-y REVIEW ARTICLE Images of Self in Psychological Thought Michael F Mascolo1 • Surabhika Maheshwari2 Received: 15 June 2018 / Accepted: 24 August 2019 / Published online: 19 September 2019 Ó National Academy of Psychology (NAOP) India 2019 Abstract The concept of self is a multi-faceted one that is used by different theorists in different ways In this paper, we present an overview of the dominant themes and images that structure conceptions of self as used by psychologists, sociologists, philosophers and other scholars In order for concepts like self and identity to be meaningful, it is necessary that we compare and clarify their various uses, identify the different aspects of experience that they are intended to illuminate, and seek to consolidate them in ways that are coherent and integrative In this paper, we identify four broad models of self in psychology: self as inner life, social conceptions of identity, relational conceptions of self and conceptions of self based on group identifications We offer this typology as an initial framework for coordinating different conceptions of self and identity Keywords Self Á Identity Á Theoretical integration Á Agency The concept of self is an imprecise one Laypersons and scholars use the term in very different ways to refer to different processes and states (Katzko, 2003) As a result, it is often difficult to know what people mean when they invoke this concept in theoretical and empirical analyses Part of the problem, of course, is that the concept of self is an everyday one It comes from everyday experiences and & Michael F Mascolo mascolom@merrimack.edu Merrimack College, North Andover, USA Department of Psychology, Indraprastha College for Women, University of Delhi, Delhi, India interactions It is thus defined against the backdrop of shared everyday meanings These meanings, of course, are polysemous and variegated Perhaps the most basic meaning of the term self is captured by our everyday use of the first person pronoun This meaning is aptly expressed by Shoemaker (1968), who writes: In all first-person statements, including ‘‘psychological’’ or ‘‘experience’’ statements, the word ‘I’ serves the function of identifying for the audience the subject to which the predicate of the statement must apply if the statement is to be true (what it indicates, of course, is that the subject is the speaker, the maker of the statement) And this is precisely the function of a referring expression (p 555) In this sense, Shoemaker’s definition might be seen to eliminate much of the mystery that surrounds the word ‘‘I.’’ ‘‘I’’ refers to this person—the person doing the speaking— rather than some other person who is listening, silent or not present In this way, the term ‘‘I’’ operates much like the subject of an active sentence; it refers to the entity or process doing the doing But this is where our problems begin The moment we speak of doing, we raise the question of agency When this happens, we must confront the sense, engrained in our experience, that ‘‘we’’ are the author of our actions—that ‘‘we’’ are somehow in control of our own destinies (Shepherd 2015) This experience of agency sets us off from inanimate entities and processes: Things are moved; persons act How are we to account for our sense of being self-caused agents (Stillman, Baumeister & Mele, 2011)? One way to account for everyday experience is to affirm that we indeed exist as a kind of self-causing entity—a mind or self—a willful and self-determining process 123 Author's personal copy 250 Psychol Stud (July–September 2019) 64(3):249–257 Fig Images of self in psychological theory defined in contradiction to the determined corporeal of the body As shown in (a) in Fig 1, this position expresses the duality between incorporeal mind and the material body espoused by Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes and others This way of thinking, of course, brings us immediately up against the intractable problem of the relation between mind and body If mind is in corporeal and operates according to its own principles, how is it possible for it to control a body that is material and can only be moved by other material forces and entities? Given these same conditions, how would it be possible for a material body to influence the operation or experience of a non-corporeal substance, when, by definition, the material body can only play a causal role in affecting other material bodies Another way to solve this problem is to reject Cartesian dualism in favor of monism There is no duality between mind and body; there is only body This theoretical move allows us to escape the logical contradiction of dualism— but at a cost If we are mere bodies, what happens to our sense of agency? Are we mechanisms that are merely 123 moved? Is our capacity for agency an illusion? So much of our struggle with the concept of self has to with navigating the vastness between these alternative conceptions Psychological science, of course, is founded upon the belief in some form of determinism To admit an unmoved mover into psychological theorizing would question the very foundation of scientific thinking However, even as they embrace monism, psychological scientists often find it difficult to leave behind dualistic tendencies (Hacker, 2015) Something akin to the Cartesian cogito tends to enter into the back door of even the most deterministic of theorizing (Bennett & Hacker, 2003) Cognitive psychologists differentiate automatic processes from controlled processes (Hassin, Uleman & Bargh, 2005) Automatic processes operate automatically, without consciousness awareness, whereas controlled processes are engaged with there is a need for deliberate conscious control over thinking, feeling or behavior Of course, the duality between automatic and controlled processes is intuitive; it maps onto everyday experience Nonetheless, Author's personal copy Psychol Stud (July–September 2019) 64(3):249–257 explanations of how conscious control processes actually control typically remain unclear A similar tendency occurs in neuroscience—arguably the most deterministic of psychological sciences Neuroscience is based upon the proposition that human action and experience are products and properties of neurobiological activity From this view, what we call ‘‘mind’’ is ‘‘what the brain does’’1 (Haueis, 2014; Slife & Hopkins, 2005) However, theorizing in neuroscience is replete with agentic language Neuroscientists invoke agentic metaphors whenever they suggest—casually or otherwise—that the brain thinks, perceives, acts, experiences or ‘‘is aware of’’ something Bennett and Hacker (2003) have labeled this practice the mereological fallacy—the error of attributing properties of the whole it its parts While the brain must mediate the processes of thinking, perceiving, experiencing, acting and so forth, it is the organism that thinks, perceives, experiences and acts The brain is a part of the organism; brain areas are parts of the brain To say that the brain perceives is akin to saying that a submarine swims This is not to suggest that neuroscientists are somehow unsophisticated Most neuroscientists are aware that to they are invoking metaphor when they say that the brain thinks The problem is that we simply have not yet developed a vocabulary for taking about neurological activity—or at least to talk about the relation between neurological and psychological activity (Haueis, 2014) Even if psychological processes are neurobiological processes, one cannot import language developed to understand one level of functioning in the service of understanding a different level of functioning (Hacker, 2015) Without the capacity to experience what we call anguish, one cannot begin to infer its meaning from even an exhaustive understanding of the functioning of the brain If neuroscience will eventually explain psychological science, it will only be because it can build upon a coherent and sophisticated psychological science (Mascolo, 2017) Thus, when it comes to the question of selfhood, there is no simple exit We must venture forward to build psychological models of self, personhood, agency and so forth Conceptions of Self in Psychological Theory Theorists differ in their conceptions of what it means to speak of self In their cultural and historical overview of conceptions of self, Altman and Stile (this volume) Of course, to say that the mind is what the brain does is to think of the brain as the kind of thing that can From this view, from a neuroscientific perspective, it might be more appropriate (or fair) to say that what we call the ‘‘mind’’ is ‘‘how the brain functions.’’ 251 acknowledge the perennial tensions operation between cohesion and fragmentation in the experience of self Altman and Stile observe that what we call the experience of self has long been understood to have multiple forms, streams and dimensions A diverse sampling of different conceptions of self is provided in Fig 1.2 The four quadrants of Fig reflect different conceptions of self that arise as scholars point to and privilege different aspects of selfhood Self as Inner Experience The first quadrant in Fig identifies conceptions of self organized around the concept of inner experience Model (1) consists of dualistic Cartesian model of self The (2) Freudian conception explains the agency of persons by invoking three different categories of quasi-agencies (Freud, 1949a, b) While id processes refer to internal biological happenings (literally the ‘‘it’’), ego refers to the capacity for persons to exert control over action Superegoprocesses arise as the result of the internalization of socio-moral norms Note how, for Freud, the distinction between id and ego invoke the duality between mind and body, while the distinction between ego and superego incorporates the contrast between individual and society While it is likely that Freud’s translators must bear the burden of the intellectual damage that results from populating the mind with multiple internal agencies (Laplanche, 1991), many applications of psychoanalysis continue to invoke personified entities as explanations of human action Model (3) shows the Eriksonian (1950, 1956) solution to proliferation of internal dualities Instead of postulating a series of inner agents, Erikson upheld the primacy of but one—the ego However, in Erikson, the ego is not an individual structure; it is a relational and developmental one Ego identity develops over time by virtue of the shifting relations between person and society In this way, Erikson’s model moved psychoanalysis away from troubling dualisms and toward relational conceptions of human agency Nonetheless, the concept of ego-as-controller remains a somewhat mysterious one; we are left with the fact of agency, but without a model of how agency actually works Models (4), (5) and (6) reflect somewhat spiritual conceptions of self The real and the mythical are not disjunctive, but feed each other in a mutative flux (Basu, this volume) Some versions of these conceptions are invoked by Altman and Stile and Pitra in their contributions to this volume The Indian spiritual conception of self is depicted in Panel (4) The Indian conception reflects the spiritual, The structure of this section was inspired by Altman and Stile’s historical overview of conceptions of self 123 Author's personal copy 252 religious and philosophical traditional of Hindu and Buddhist (Benovsky, 2017; MacKenzie, 2015; McGarrity, 2015) conceptions of psychological and social life At base, self refers to a kind if deep inner agency, a source spiritual volition that extends beyond the individual person and becomes distributed between the spiritual interiority of the person (Atman) and the universal essence of God (Brahman) Here, the spiritual dimension of selfhood is alive and contrasts deeply with the empirical selves that are derived by Western academics in their studies Like the Hindu conception of self, the Buddhist conception (5) embraces a sense of spiritual interiority that transcends the experience of the individual person to encompass the broader cosmos Like the Hindu quest for moksha, the journey to nirvana arrives through the cultivation of sense of no-self—a sense of merging with the cosmos which brings deep bliss En route to the cultivation of non-self, the person is able to separate from earthly and experiential attachments One’s own experience becomes a fleeting, impermanent and detached object of observation The rich Indian tradition of inner exploration is reflected in Thapan (this volume), who invokes the work of J Krishnamurti in her analysis of how we engage with our selves through observation, listening and looking inwards However, for Thapan, our experience of self is not something that is encased within; it extends into and is structured by our relationships with others The Buddhist conception of self figures in Marginean, Lambert, LaTorre and Mascolo’s (this volume) analysis of the intercultural construction of novel forms of selfhood in a Bhutanese family In their discussion of the interplay between fragmentation and cohesion, Altman and Stile (this volume) note how Hindu and Buddhist conceptions identify self a process that is, one the one hand, impermanent and continuously changing, and, on the other hand, a stable observer of the flux of experience They invoke Bromberg’s (1998) conception that amidst the multiplicity of self experience, the ‘‘observing’’ self is an experience that ‘‘stands in the spaces between multiple versions of the self.’’ This conception of self, depicted in Model (6), provides a way of thinking about how the experience of self is simultaneously subject and object, fleeting and stable, cohesive and multiplicative This conception bears similarity to James’s (1890) conceptions of the stream of consciousness, and his distinction between the sense of ‘‘I’’ that navigates among multiple senses of ‘‘me.’’ It stands as a transitional model as we move to conceptions of self that privilege multiplicity, fragmentation and decentralization Fragmentation and Multiplicity of Self The second quadrant of Fig depicts models of self that privilege the idea of fragmentation, decentralization and 123 Psychol Stud (July–September 2019) 64(3):249–257 contextualization over cohesion and centralization Model (7) contains an extreme representation of the decentralized postmodern conception of self (Gergen, 2009; Mahoney, 1993; McKenna & Hanks, 1996; Wiley, 2012) From this view, to the extent that it makes sense to speak of a self at all, individuals experience themselves in different ways in different contexts (C1, C2, etc.), interactions and social relationships There is no singular, central or omnibus agency or structure that integrates the varieties of self experience Instead, experiences of self are socially constructed in discursive encounters that occur between individuals Within such models, because experiences of self are continuously emergent in sign-mediated relations between people, it makes no sense to speak of a true, unchanging or even core sense of self Multiplicity, differentiation and fragmentation take precedence over unity, coordination and integration Model (8) represents the self as a form of structured multiplicity Such a conception provides a model that allows for both diversity and integration of experience (Kiang & Harter, 2008; MacKenzie & Poltera, 2010; Qin & Lykes, 2006; Whelton & Greenberg, 2001) Emphasizing both differentiation and integration of experience, one might suggest that such a model provides the backdrop for most contemporary conceptions of self in Western social psychology (Katzko, 2003; Rosenberg, 1997) The sense of integration as a normative condition provides the backdrop for any analysis of fragmentation However, while we may seek integration in the experience of self, there are often forces that tear us asunder In such circumstances, integration of self is a hard-won achievement Tara-Chand (this volume) shows how the South Asian Muslim women resist the fragmentation of identity that occurs as they seek to position themselves within British society at a time when Muslims are viewed with suspicion Allowing the participants in her ethnography to speak with their own voices, Tara-Chand asks, ‘‘In the context of the ‘war on terror’…could the South Asian Muslim woman also be British?’’ Model (9) depicts the discursive-relational conception of self This view is most clearly represented in Harre´’s positioning theory (Harre´, 2012, 2015) Harre´ suggests that a self is a kind of position that a person adopts in relation to others within a broader socio-moral or discursive space The concept of position provides an alternative to the concept of social role The concept of role suggests a kind of fixedness—a set of more or less static rules that organize how one person relates to another in social contexts In contrast, a position is a kind of stance, a particular mode of relating in a particular type of context As such, positioning is a more dynamic concept For Harre´, persons use language and other forms of symbolic action to discursively position themselves in relation to ongoing story lines In Author's personal copy Psychol Stud (July–September 2019) 64(3):249–257 this way, although persons are agentic beings, they use socio-cultural tools to define themselves in relation to ongoing interactions that occur over time Individuals position themselves not only in relation to others, but also in relation to jointly created story lines—normative and socio-moral conceptions of the accepted flow of particular classes of events over time While persons are discursive creatures whose actions emerge in social relations, they are not mere products of fixed social structures The act of positioning suggests a kind of adaptive flexibility in the ways in which persons relate to their social environments In the act of positioning, people use the cultural resources of their social communities to both define themselves and to resist the flow of conformity that implicit in the storylines that structure everyday life The concept of storyline is an important one It reminds us of the centrality of narrative knowing in our conceptions of self Amidst the flux of human experience, as we engage with other people over time, who we are at this moment of time is not intelligible without a sense of who we were and who we are becoming over time In this way, the capacity organize experience in terms of a narrative structure becomes a primary mode of representing selfhood Menon (this volume) explores the importance and complexities of the role of narrative in selfhood and how it both builds upon and organizes our sense of agency and identity over time Maheshwari draws upon narrative as both a method and mode of knowing in her analysis of the complexities of fame in organizing experiences of self Model (10) shows Hubert Hermans’ (2011; Hermans & Salgado, 2010; Raggatt, 2006) dialogical conception of the intrapsychic experience of self Hermans begins by rejecting the classic Cartesian conception of self and other in favor of a dialogical view The dialogical view is similar to Harre´’s (2015) discursive and Gergen’s (2009) social constructionist approaches A person is not an individual entity defined in opposition to social context or the bodily world; persons are embodied relational beings whose actions and experiences arise in dialogical exchanges with others As a result, people experience themselves different in different contexts and in different relationships with other people Hermans (2011) takes this idea one step further While people create selves in dialogical exchanges with others, the internalization of those exchanges creates the capacity for the intrapsychic construction and experience of multiple dialogical selves Just as people have discursive interactions with others on the social plane of acting, they create internalized dialogues with imagined others on the personal plane of thinking, imagining and experiencing For Hermans (2011), the dialogical self is composed of multiple ‘‘I-positions’’—imagined representations of self who engage in imagined dialogues with multiple imagined 253 others The dialogical self that one experiences or imagines in dialogue with one’s boss is different from that which he experiences with his significant other, child, co-worker or even with any of these people in different ways of relating Not only people experience themselves in terms of dialogical encounters with diverse others, persons can engage in dialogical relations among different I-positions themselves This occurs, for example, when, adopting the I-position of caring mother engages an alternative self who assumes the I-position of assertive professional Dialogical conceptions of self are represented in a wide variety of discursive accounts of human action, including internal family systems theory (MacDonald, 2005) The importance of dialogue—and its role in the mutual transformation of each party in an interaction—extends beyond encounters between individual interlocutors Indeed, it extends to relations among groups and even cultures How are cultures transformed in their dialogical encounters—not always or even primarily peaceful—with each other? How does a culture reclaim what is its own after having been dominated by another? How has a cultures sense of what is its own changed by the encounter? Basu (this volume) explores questions of multiplicity of selfhood as they arise at the broader level of cultural and intercultural identity What novel concepts of personhood can arise from the constructive and destructive tensions among nations and cultures? Relations Between Self and Other The third quadrant of Fig identifies different ways in which theorists have represented the nature of the relationship between self and other in psychological theory (see Mascolo, Misra & Rapisardi, 2004) These representations are often used to understand cultural differences in how members of different cultural groups experience relations between self and other While the forms of self that are depicted in Quadrant III are likely to be represented in all cultures in idiosyncratic ways, some forms become more dominant in some cultural groups rather than others (Mascolo, 2004) The models described in this quadrant overlap with conceptions represented in other quadrants in Fig Model (11) represents what is often called the individual self From this view, persons are conceptualized as bounded, self-contained units each separate from the other Arguably, this view is the dominant conception of social life, at least in much of Western psychology Such a model is often used to depict the experience of self in individualist societies For example, in the USA, individuals are often idealized as distinct and independent units, each with their own personal goals and desires Individuals are understood as free to pursue their own personal agendas—so long as 123 Author's personal copy 254 their actions to not violate the freedoms and boundaries of others in society There are, however, multiple forms of individualism Some forms of individualism are organized around the primacy of individual freedom and self-reliance (Capps & Fenn, 1992); others are organized around the responsibilities of the individual in relation to others in society (Montague, 1963) Still others are based upon communitarian values in which individuals group together to advance public as well as private goods (Bellah et al., 1985) Model (12) identifies what Markus and Kitayama (1991) have called the interdependent self (Cross, Hardin & Swing, 2009) Markus and Kitayama (1991) offer the interdependent conception as a contrast to the independent conception of self For Marcus and Kitayama, the interdependent self is one that is characteristic of more collectivist societies where the concerns of the group dominate over the prerogatives of the individual Defined in contradistinction to the concept of independence, selfreliance or self-determination, the concept of interdependence suggests that members of society are mutually reliant—that their sense of autonomy or identity is dependent upon those of others in society However, while the concept of interdependence provides a useful contrast to independence, it is not clear that interdependence clarifies the distinction between the so-called individualist and collectivist cultures (Mamat et al., 2014; Misra & Giri 1995) Interdependence does not capture, for example, the social asymmetries, hierarchies and forms of duty and obligation that are characteristic of many cultures that have been seen as collectivistic (Roland, 1988) Similarly, even in the so-called individualist cultures, people who are seen as independent are nonetheless mutually dependent Nonetheless, like the other models in this quadrant, the interdependent conception accentuates an important form of human relating that is often eclipsed by the dominance of the individualist framework Nayak (this volume) provides a compelling examination of interdependence in the construction of self in her analysis of racial grief among a marginalized social group—Black, lesbian women In her paper, Nayak advances the thesis that it is through the mutuality of their relationships that members of marginalized groups can seek to acknowledge, know and transform the grief that comes from persistent racism and marginalization The relational conception of self is depicted in Model 13 The relational conception stands in contrast to the individualist view While the individualist model depicts persons as self-contained units defined by clear boundaries, the relational view maintains that persons are open-ended beings with permeable boundaries From this model, one is defined not as an entity unto oneself, but instead in terms of one’s relation to others The relational model is not simply 123 Psychol Stud (July–September 2019) 64(3):249–257 asserting that selves emerge in social interactions between independent units; instead, in the relational approach, self and other make each other up; persons come into being through their relations to other persons (Beni, 2018; Gergen, 2009; Wang, 2016) In this way, the actions, thoughts and feelings of the other are part of the process by which individuals construct, present and experiences themselves Thapan (this volume) elaborates a relational conception of selfhood and self-knowledge The capacity for selfknowledge is part of the process of relating to others Thapan elaborates this thesis to include the dimension of how our engagement with our own selves facilitates the possibility of meaningful relation and engagement with others Some version of Thapan’s thesis is represented in each contribution to the present volume The final model (14) in this quadrant consists of encompassing forms of relating in which the selfhood of one individual subsumed by asymmetrical obligations of a hierarchical relationship to the other Encompassing relations among people are those that exist in relationships that are defined by asymmetry, hierarchy, social obligation, or in relationships in which one person is responsible for the well-being of the other For example, in cultures that value filial piety, individuals experience themselves in terms of their roles within relatively fixed hierarchies (Roland, 1988; Wang, 2016) Their actions are organized with respect to obedience to their parents, elders, ancestors and other figures of authority (e.g., and emperor) At the same time, the authority figure, by virtue of superior status, knowledge or divinity, is viewed as responsible for the well-being of the subordinate The authority is obligated to protect and advice, provide for and put into place practices that ensure the harmonious working of society Thus, the sense of self is organized in terms of the asymmetry that defines the relationship between subordinate and superior (see Aruta et al., this volume) The phenomenon of encompassment is not limited, however, to hierarchical relations In her analysis of the role of fame in the experience of self, Maheshwari shows that people who are celebrated in the public eye often experience their sense of who they are ‘‘gobbled up’’ by the process As public images of famed individuals come to organize both public and private ways of relating, the boundary between the public and the personal becomes blurred; celebrated individuals often find their identities to be increasingly under siege Relations Among Identities and Identity Groups Persons are social beings who live and act with other people in societies This simple fact raises questions about the relation between individuals and groups Beyond the perennial problem of managing intergroup relations, this Author's personal copy Psychol Stud (July–September 2019) 64(3):249–257 issue is made more salient by the increasing prevalence of identity groups, political concerns about the relation between power and selfhood, and struggles for recognition by members of marginalized social groups In the last half of the twentieth century, Western European culture went through a dramatic transformation Social movements emerged—namely the civil rights and women’s movements—that were devoted to extending full rights to members of previously disenfranchised groups At around the same time, the psychological concept of identity (Erikson, 1950) was introduced into the public sphere (Moran, 2015) As these movements proved successful, the quest for social equality was extended to other marginalized groups, such as LGBTQ groups, people with disabilities and other groups Over time, as the concept of identity gained cultural currency, political concerns about group identity began to take hold What began as a series of movements designed to extend equal rights to individuals within disenfranchised groups became transformed into the politics of identity and recognition While people have always identified themselves within their in-groups, what was new was the idea of seeking social equality on the basis of group identity—that is, to justify political and socio-moral claims based one’s identification with a group rather than on the basis of the equality of individuals With this transformation, the politics of identity and recognition were born (Taylor, 1994) In the past decades, psychologists have increasingly framed questions of self in terms of the categories of political and social identity As this occurs, psychological theory and research becomes increasingly (and perhaps inescapably) organized in terms of the prevailing political concepts and categories.3 Quadrant IV of Fig identifies different models of the relation between identity groups in society Model (15) represents the nature of identity groups in terms of the structural dynamics of power and oppression distributed throughout a given society In this model, societies are organized in terms of structural systems of advantage and disadvantage (Tatum, 1992; Wellman, 1977) Such structural systems are not to be confused with individual persons; they are institutionalized structures and processes about which individual persons may or may not be aware This should not be surprising Categories of personhood have always had political origins For example, the dominant concepts of selfhood used in Western psychology have their origins in the philosophical, scientific and political thinking of the Enlightenment One might suggest that, regardless of whether the entry of political thinking into psychological science is seen as a cause for celebration or concern, it is important to be reflexive about the socio-political bases of psychological theorizing Without becoming aware of the political dimensions of psychological scholarship, it is not possible to make decisions about the role of such concerns in psychological theorizing 255 Structural advantage is indicated in Mode 15 in terms of the structures of power exerting downward control over disenfranchised identity groups, each of which seeks to equality through a process of dismantling existing systems of arbitrary advantage Models (16) and (17) provide alternatives a monolithic representation of the relation between power and oppression model Model 16 presents a variegated conception of intergroup relations, while Model 17 depicts relations among identity groups as mutually embedded What is common to these latter models is the idea that structures of power and advantage are not monolithic; they are distributed in diverse and non-obvious ways within any given social structure As shown in Model 17, structures of domination can occur between different constituents Power can be exerted in multiple ways Marginalized groups can marginalize each other; create hierarchies within groups; have conflicting and overlapping commitments; dominate and collaborate at the same time; and engage in different forms of relating with different identify groups Model 18 represents the diversity of group relations in terms of a series of overlapping and embedded groups Both Nayak (this volume) and Tara Chand (this volume) explore the process of resisting the fragmentation the self experiences in the face of political and social power These conceptions of self and their expression have been brought forth in breaks and dislocations in the relationships between South Asian Muslim women with dominant political and social systems (Tara Chand, this volume) and shared grief of black women (Nayak, this volume) In so doing, they entertain different conceptions of existing and possible relations between individual, community and the broader society In their work, they show that identity groups are not monolithic structures Their concerns not only overlap between and among groups, conflicting and mutually embedded allegiances occur within groups as well Diversity and Cohesion It is imperative to continuously reflect upon and renew our understanding of what it means to speak of self and identity—especially in increasingly diversified, technologically mediated and interconnected world New expressions, ideas and experiences guide us to formulate and uncover emergent insights into the notions that have been central to human existence and to the subject matter of psychology Novel formulations of self arise as products of our shifting relations with others—shifts that occur as occur as a product of changing social, technological, economic and political conditions With such shifts come new forms of 123 Author's personal copy 256 social mediation, which transform our sense of who we are and who we can become How we experience and identify ourselves within the shifting medium of a mixing and moving world? How we make claims of agency and identity against the resistance of traditional and established forms of social and cultural life? How I construct myself anew in the context of shifting social, cultural and technological circumstances? Are there ways to reconcile competing claims to identity as they are made within and between persons, groups and societies? 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