Living Politically: An Irigarayan Notion of Agency as a Way of Life

This paper formulates Luce Irigaray's notion of agency as a political way of life. I argue that agency, within an Irigarayan framework, is both the outcome and the condition of a political life, aimed at creating political transformations. As Irigaray hardly addresses the topic of agency per se, I suggest understanding Irigaray's textual style as implying specific “technologies of self” in the Foucauldian sense, that is, as self‐applied social practices that reshape social reality, one's relations to oneself, and enhance one's freedom and pleasures in these relations. This interpretation aims to extract concrete transformative practices, which, by shaping one's sense of self in relation to others, create oneself as a free and active subject.     

Balancing “We” and “I”: Self‐construal and an alternative approach to seeking uniqueness

Influenced by the need for uniqueness theory, the current study proposes that expressing uniqueness via consumption offers a means for achieving a different sense of being without damaging the individual's sense of social assimilation. With respect to self‐construal, it is suggested that highly interdependent people satisfy their need for distinctiveness by selecting unique products; meanwhile, individuals with highly independent self‐construal seek out unique products to satisfy their need for uniqueness. Thus, this study demonstrates that, despite the fact that individuals with both types of self‐construal seek out unique products, the reason for seeking uniqueness differs according to the types of self‐construal. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

From “It's Not Me” to “It Was Me,After All”: A Case Presentation of a Patient Diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder

In cases of extreme childhood trauma associated with abuse and neglect, one's sense of self is seriously compromised. Attachment patterns, symptoms, defensive operations, and character formation will differ depending upon the level of interference and impingement. When repeated trauma occurs in early childhood, the dissociative response may become the first line of defense for the person to rely upon. In its most severe form, patients are diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). This paper addresses the case of a woman diagnosed with DID. It describes the restoration of a cohesive sense of self from the eight parts of a dissociated and fragmented self in the course of therapy. The clinical case material presented is that of the child part of her, known as Lucy. Her treatment resulted in the integration of the “it's not me!” self to the patient's knowledge that “it was me, after all.”     

Can We Be Self‐Deceived about What We Believe? Self‐Knowledge,Self‐Deception,and Rational Agency

Abstract: This paper considers the question of whether it is possible to be mistaken about the content of our first‐order intentional states. For proponents of the rational agency model of self‐knowledge, such failures might seem very difficult to explain. On this model, the authority of self‐knowledge is not based on inference from evidence, but rather originates in our capacity, as rational agents, to shape our beliefs and other intentional states. To believe that one believes that p, on this view, constitutes one's belief that p and so self‐knowledge involves a constitutive relation between first‐ and second‐order beliefs. If this is true, it is hard to see how those second‐order beliefs could ever be false. I develop two counter‐examples which show that despite the constitutive relation between first‐ and second‐order beliefs in standard cases of self‐knowledge, it is possible to be mistaken, and even self‐deceived, about the content of one's own beliefs. These counter‐examples do not show that the rational agency model is mistaken—rather, they show that the possibility of estrangement from one's own mental life means that, even within the rational agency model, it is possible to have false second‐order beliefs about the content of one's first‐order beliefs. The authority of self‐knowledge does not entail that to believe that one believes that p suffices to make it the case that one believes that p.     

Absolve You to Yourself: Emerson's Conception of Rational Agency

Ralph Waldo Emerson famously warned his readers against the dangers of conformity and consistency. In this paper, I argue that this warning informs his engagement with and opposition to a Kantian view of rational agency. The interpretation I provide of some of Emerson's central essays outlines a unique conception of agency, a conception which gives substance to Emerson's exhortations of self‐trust. While Kantian in spirit, Emerson's view challenges the requirement that autonomy requires acting from a conception of the law. The key to understanding Emerson's opposition to Kant rests in showing how obeying the law requires spontaneity on the part of the agent herself. Emerson's concerns about conformity and consistency further enrich the view of agency, argued for by Richard Moran, according to which we take responsibility for our minds by taking up a first‐person deliberative perspective on our minds. Conformity and consistency in one's thinking and acting permits society and one's own past to dictate when deliberation may come to an end, thereby undermining a crucial sense in which an agent, in taking up the deliberative perspective, has taken responsibility for her mind.     

Internalized Oppression and Its Varied Moral Harms: Self‐Perceptions of Reduced Agency and Criminality

The dominant view in the philosophical literature contends that internalized oppression, especially that experienced in virtue of one's womanhood, reduces one's sense of agency. Here, I extend these arguments and suggest a more nuanced account. In particular, I argue that internalized oppression can cause a person to conceive of herself as a deviant agent as well as a reduced one. This self‐conception is also damaging to one's moral identity and creates challenges that are not captured by merely analyzing a reduced sense of agency. To help illustrate this claim, I consider experiences of people of color who internalize stereotypes regarding criminality and moral deviance. With these examples in mind, I show that internalized prejudices regarding criminality can cause people of color (men and women) to view themselves as outlaws in the moral community, that is, as wrongdoers. This conclusion helps give voice to some of the challenges that women of color who experience multiple sorts of internalized prejudices often face. To conclude, I discuss one strategy for empowerment that women of color have used when confronted with multiple forms of internalized oppression.     

A problem for Wegner and colleagues’ model of the sense of agency

The sense of agency, that is the sense that one is the agent of one’s bodily actions, is one component of our self-consciousness. Recently, Wegner and colleagues have developed a model of the causal history of this sense. Their model takes it that the sense of agency is elicited for an action when one infers that one or other of one’s mental states caused that action. In their terms, the sense of agency is elicited by the inference to apparent mental state causation. Here, I argue that this model is inconsistent with data from developmental psychology that suggests children can identify the agent behind an action without being capable of understanding the relationship between their intentions and actions. Furthermore, I argue that this model is inconsistent with the preserved sense of agency in autism. In general, the problem is that there are cases where subjects can experience themselves as the agent behind their actions despite lacking the resources to make the inference to apparent mental state causation.     

The integration of Iraqis in two European cities: Emotions and identity work

In this study of Iraqi refugees in Helsinki and Rome, we explore the verbal construction of identity as evidence of the process of integration into a new society. We make use of Snow and Anderson's idea of “identity work” and link it to McCall's idea of “not-me.” The data for this paper derive from a larger comparative study conducted by the second author. They are based on the findings from forty-eight open-ended, semi-structured interviews, half conducted in each city. We argue that despite differences between the two locales regarding such things as the respective welfare regimes and relations with natives, the identity work required for refugees to reinscribe and reconstruct their sense of self was remarkably similar.     

Musical expertise affects the sense of agency: Intentional binding in expert pianists

Intentional Binding (IB), a subjective compression of the time interval between a voluntary action and its consequence, is an implicit measure of the sense of agency (the feeling of controlling one's own actions and their outcomes). The sense of agency is influenced by experience, e.g. learning, development, or learned contingency. The present study aimed at analyzing expertise – an expert competence acquired through experience alone – as a possible means to affect the sense of agency. We compared performance of expert pianists and non-musicians within the IB paradigm with two types of sensory outcome – a piano note and an electronic sound. Pianists showed significantly greater outcome binding and composite binding for both types of stimuli. Therefore, musical expertise might influence the sense of agency, possibly due to continuous exposure to action-outcome associations during the musical training. Additionally, such effect might extend beyond the specific expertise to the other types of auditory outcomes.     

Agency without autonomy: valuational agency

National minority women's defense of non-liberal minority cultures that encompass sexist customs and rules has greatly perplexed liberal theorists. Many attempted to resolve this puzzle by attributing constrained agency to such women and dismissing their defense as unreasonable. This article argues that this liberal assessment of minority women's position is philosophically indefensible and that the failure of mainstream liberalism to make sense of these women's response indicates not that these women's agency is compromised but rather that the liberal conception of agency as autonomy has limits in its cross-cultural applicability. An alternative conception of agency, valuational agency, that illuminates minority women's agency is proposed as a more plausible alternative for radically pluralistic societies.     

Self-defining future projections: Exploring the identity function of thinking about the future

The act of projecting oneself into meaningful future events may significantly contribute to a person's sense of self and identity. Yet if the role of memories, in particular self-defining memories (SDMs), in grounding the self is now well established, the identity function of anticipated future events has received comparatively little attention. This article introduces the construct of self-defining future projection (SDFP) to address this issue. Two studies show that people can readily identify significant future events that they frequently think about and that convey core information about who they are as individuals. Furthermore, a person's particular style of constructing SDMs is similarly manifested in SDFPs, suggesting that both types of events can be used to ground the self. Notably, people who display a stronger tendency to extract meaning from their past experiences also reflect more about the potential implications of imagined future events. The results further demonstrate that SDMs and SDFPs both give rise to a strong sense of personal continuity over time and are meaningfully related to self-esteem. Together these findings lend support to the idea that a person's sense of self and identity is in part nourished by the anticipation of significant future events.     

Kierkegaard's Mirrors: The Immediacy of Moral Vision

This paper explores Kierkegaard's recurrent use of mirrors as a metaphor for various aspects of moral imagination and vision. While a writer centrally concerned with issues of self‐examination, selfhood and passionate subjectivity might well be expected to be attracted to such metaphors, there are deeper reasons why Kierkegaard is drawn to this analogy. The specifically visual aspects of the mirror metaphor reveal certain crucial features of Kierkegaard's model of moral cognition. In particular, the felicity of the metaphors of the “mirror of possibility” in Sickness Unto Death and the “mirror of the Word” in For Self‐Examination depend upon a normative phenomenology of moral vision, one in which the success of moral agency depends upon an immediate, non‐reflective self‐referentiality built into vision itself. To “see oneself in the mirror” rather than simply seeing the mirror itself is to see the moral content of the world as immediately “about” oneself in a sense that goes beyond the conceptual content of what is perceived. These metaphors gesture towards a model of perfected moral agency where vision becomes co‐extensive with volition. I conclude by suggesting directions in which explication of this model may contribute to discussions in contemporary moral psychology.     

The Case Study of Jacob: Childhood Sexual Abuse and the Limitations of the Holding Environment

Childhood sexual abuse and trauma influence relational development in significant ways. Notable among them are the development of a patient's internal object world, fantasies, and sense of self. Dynamic formulations and holding techniques are used to identify, process, and alter fractured relational dynamics. However, the use of such techniques may also influence a patient's narrative process, pulling them away from the realities of their life as lived. Using the case study method, focusing specifically on the patient's narrative development, this article examines the impact of analytic framing on a patient's experience of child sexual abuse and trauma.     

Cultural group perception enhances sense of agency in a multicultural society

Group, which involves collective actions for achieving shared goals, can be conceptually understood as an important source of agency and control. The current research investigated whether group identity salience can enhance sense of agency within the individual. Specifically, we examined whether an activated cultural group identity, through presenting different types of cultural photographs in a predictable way, would facilitate people's sense of agency by using an implicit method, namely, intentional binding effect paradigm. Experiment 1a found that an activated cultural group identity enhanced the sense of agency. Next, Experiment 1b replicated the findings by recruiting a different ethnic group in the same society. Experiment 2 explored what may affect the intensity of induced sense of agency and found that perceived representativeness of the presented cultural stimuli was positively correlated with the intensity of induced sense of agency. Finally, Experiment 3 explored whether ethnic minority and majority groups would demonstrate different intensity of agency when their cultural identity was activated. The results showed that the sense of agency induced by the mainstream cultural stimuli was greater than that induced by the foreign cultural photographs. These patterns were not different between the two ethnic groups. Taken together, these findings reflected the dynamic nature of cultural identity construction in a multicultural society.     

Pride and Moral Responsibility

Having the emotion of pride requires taking oneself to stand in some special relation to the object of pride. According to agency accounts of this pride relation, the self and the object of pride are suitably related just in case one is morally responsible for the existence or excellence of the object of one's pride. I argue that agency accounts fail. This argument provides a strong prima facie defence of an alternate account of pride, according to which the self and the object of pride are suitably related just in case one's relation to the object of pride indicates that one's life accords with some of one's personal ideals. I conclude that the pride relation, though distinct from the relation of moral responsibility, is nonetheless a relation of philosophical interest that merits further attention. 1 … the objects which excite these passions [pride and humility], are very numerous, and seemingly very different from each other. Pride or self‐esteem may arise from the qualities of the mind; wit, good‐sense, learning, courage, integrity: from those of the body; beauty, strength, agility, good mien, address in dancing, riding, fencing: from external advantages; country, family, children, relations, riches, houses, gardens, horses, dogs, cloaths. [I] afterwards proceed to find out that common circumstance, in which all these objects agree, and which causes them to operate on the passions. —David Hume 2     

The dangers and deprivations of too-good mothering

The paper explores Winnicott's ideas on the detrimental effects of mothering which is too well adapted to infant needs. Winnicott claimed that such too-good mothering, when pursued beyond the baby's earliest months, led to two possible outcomes: the child would either reject the mother or would remain in a state of arrested development, merged with her. The paper follows the development of a baby girl, observed by the Bick method, and illustrates how her mother's devoted and sensitive care effectively deprived her of the development of some aspects of the sense of self and of possibilities for negotiation, concern and reparation. The baby developed a paranoid orientation and later rejected her mother after the birth of her sister. The paper also mentions the alternative outcome of a persisting state of passive merger with the mother and ends by hoping for further exploration of the means by which some sensitive, responsive parents may inadvertently ‘worse than castrate’ their children by depriving them of an autonomous sense of agency.     

I,me, mine: Automatic attentional capture by self‐related stimuli

Drawing on decades of research suggesting an attentional advantage for self‐related information, researchers generally assume that self‐related stimuli automatically capture attention. However, a literature review reveals that this claim has not been systematically examined. We aimed to fill in this dearth of evidence. Following a feature‐based account of automaticity, we set up four experiments in which participants were asked to respond to a target preceded by a cue, which was self‐related or not. In Experiment 1, larger cuing effects (faster reaction times to valid versus invalid trials) were found with a participant's own name compared with someone else's name. In Experiment 2, we replicated these results with unconscious cues. Experiment 3 suggested that these effects are not likely driven by familiarity. In Experiment 4, participants experienced greater difficulties from having their attention being captured by their own compared with someone else's name. We conclude that attentional capture by self‐related stimuli is automatic in the sense that it is unintentional, unconscious, and uncontrolled. Implications for self‐regulation and intergroup relations are discussed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

No-Self and the phenomenology of agency

The Buddhists philosophers put forward a revisionary metaphysics which lacks a “self” in order to provide an intellectually and morally preferred picture of the world. The first task in the paper is to answer the question: what is the “self” that the Buddhists are denying? To answer this question, I look at the Abhidharma arguments (as presented in Chapter 9 of Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmako?a-bhāsya) for the No-Self doctrine and then work back to an interpretation of the self that is the target of such a doctrine. I argue that Buddhists are not just denying the diachronically unified, extended, narrative self but also minimal selfhood insofar as it associated with sense of ownership and sense of agency. The view is deeply counterintuitive and the Buddhists are acutely aware of this fact. Accordingly, the Abhidharma-Buddhist writings are replete with attempts to explain the phenomenology of experience in a no-self world. The second part of the paper reconstructs the Buddhist explanation using resources from contemporary discussions about the sense (or lack thereof) of agency.     

Sense of agency in narrative processes of repeatedly convicted drunk drivers

The study examines sense of agency as this appears in the narratives of two repeatedly convicted drunk drivers during the five-hour counselling sessions. The cases were chosen from a total of 30 cases, as representing the opposite polar types of action stories. Analysis of narrative processes showed the narrators' drunk driving (DD) as opposite solutions relating to conflicts concerning their sense of agency; for the NON-AGENTIVE CLIENT (NAC) DD as a compulsive action solution represented an abandonment of her agentive position, while for the STRONGLY-AGENTIVE CLIENT (SAC) consciously chosen DD represented an attempt to assert his personal autonomy. DD provided only a momentary sense of relief from the position of agency for the NAC, and only a momentary sense of autonomy for the SAC. The clients processed differently these agentive positions. The narration of the NAC was a stable process of alternativeness throughout the counselling sessions and repeated sense of absent agency. The narration of the SAC began as controlled process that strove to avoid the issue of DD, but during the sessions it changed, as the narrator switched from regarding himself as the counsellor's opponent, to regarding himself as a participant and responsible agent.     

Discussion of Robert Grossmark's Case of Pamela

The author discusses Robert Grossmark's “Case of Pamela” from the perspective of developmental (relational) trauma and offers the view that Pamela's remarkable growth as well as the stunning power of the clinical process that made it possible is best illuminated from the vantage point of self-states, dissociation, affect dysregulation, and the dread of annihilation. The phenomenon of pathological narcissism, which in a classical idiom would be a central concept in describing Pamela's personality organization, is here formulated relationally in a self-state context. That is, each self-state, to the extent that it is protectively dissociated from others becomes, inherently, an island of narcissism and is what narcissism truly means. In the face of trauma, each island of selfhood operates to obliterate, automatically, the felt invasion of otherness from parts of the self that hold alternative views of “self-truth,” as well as from an other in real life—a separate person with a mind of his or her own. As each narcissistic island of Pamela's selfhood was recognized and accepted as valid in its own terms by Robert, the experiential wholeness of Pamela's sense of self began to be restored. The clinical process through which this was accomplished is seen by the author as the expansion and enrichment of Pamela's overarching self-coherence through her gradual representation of Robert's “otherness” as part of each self-representation. This in turn allowed the restoration of safe, communicative interchange between the formerly dissociated self-state islands of narcissistic insularity.