The Social Self: Identity-Formation through Love in Recognition Theory and in Psychology
In: Love on Trial: Adjusting and Assigning RelationshipsSearch for other papers by Julia Judith van Ooststroom in
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In my chapter I would like to make a connection between social philosophical theory and empirical results from social psychology and developmental psychopathology. Taking the perspective of Axel Honneth’s theory of recognition, I will show what a socially constructed identity means, in what way love is a necessary condition for a healthy identity formation and how this idea gets supported by empirical results. Honneth’s work, The Struggle for Recognition, differentiates between three forms of recognition, all three being necessary and essential to being a full fledged self-conscious person: love, respect and esteem. Honneth considers all three to be essential for being human in the full sense of the word, because these three forms of recognition are linked to three levels of personal identity: basic self-confidence, self-respect and self-esteem. Love and self-confidence concern the affective relation aimed at the well-being and the fulfillment of needs of the concrete other - between parent and child, between partners in a love-relationship or in a friendship. Love is the most fundamental form of recognition because the development of basic self-confidence through love is a psychological pre-condition, necessary for the other forms of mutual recognition and self-respect to be realized. Referring to developmental psychology, Honneth argues that a balance between symbiosis and ego-demarcation is important in these kinds of relationships if a healthy form of emotional attachment is to be attained. In relation to the significant other we are not independent, but interdependent. The self has been the object of psychological research like in social psychology. On the one hand, this research can illustrate what we mean by this social self, by showing how our identity gets shaped by others. On the other hand, we might be able to understand these psychological mechanisms better by framing them in the dialectical paradigm of recognition.