"No very sharp line can be drawn between social psychology and individual psychology"
About this Quote
Mead’s line is a quiet demolition of the “self-made individual” fantasy. He isn’t offering a mushy compromise between personal agency and social forces; he’s arguing that the boundary itself is a misreading of how minds are built. The “sharp line” he refuses is the kind modern culture loves: a neat border where private thoughts stay pure and society is merely an external pressure. Mead’s point is more unsettling and more useful: the raw material of individual psychology is already social.
The subtext is methodological as much as moral. If you want to explain why a person desires, fears, or decides the way they do, you can’t treat the social world as background scenery. Language, norms, roles, and the anticipation of other people’s reactions don’t just influence the self; they furnish it. Even introspection borrows a public vocabulary. The inner monologue is, in a sense, a conversation learned from outside.
Context matters here: Mead is writing in an early 20th-century moment when industrialization, mass media, and urban life were rapidly reorganizing social relations, while psychology was trying to professionalize itself by isolating the individual as a lab-ready object. Mead pushes back with a more porous model: identity formed through interaction, the “I” constantly negotiating with a socially shaped “me.”
Why it works rhetorically is its restraint. “No very sharp line” sounds modest, almost technical, yet it smuggles in a radical claim: the self is not a sealed container. It’s a social process wearing a human face.
The subtext is methodological as much as moral. If you want to explain why a person desires, fears, or decides the way they do, you can’t treat the social world as background scenery. Language, norms, roles, and the anticipation of other people’s reactions don’t just influence the self; they furnish it. Even introspection borrows a public vocabulary. The inner monologue is, in a sense, a conversation learned from outside.
Context matters here: Mead is writing in an early 20th-century moment when industrialization, mass media, and urban life were rapidly reorganizing social relations, while psychology was trying to professionalize itself by isolating the individual as a lab-ready object. Mead pushes back with a more porous model: identity formed through interaction, the “I” constantly negotiating with a socially shaped “me.”
Why it works rhetorically is its restraint. “No very sharp line” sounds modest, almost technical, yet it smuggles in a radical claim: the self is not a sealed container. It’s a social process wearing a human face.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|
More Quotes by George
Add to List
