Prof. Joseph Levine, M.D. is an emeritus associate professor in the Division of Psychiatry, Faculty of Health Sciences, Ben Gurion University in Israel. Prof. Levine is a certified psychiatrist with clinical experience in controlled trials of adult psychiatric disorders and in psychotherapy. He was awarded a NRSAD independent investigator grant for the study of Creatine Monohydrate in psychiatric disorders -- mainly Schizophrenia. He resides and treats patients in Tel Aviv and all of central Israel.
Conversation 34: More about internalization processes in general while focusing on the processes of internalizing characters into the "board of internalized characters" that builds the "social self"
Greetings
We will once again remind those who join the blog that in the model we propose for the "self", one must first differentiate between the primary self, which is actually the basic biological core consisting of a number of innate structures and which is subject to development during life. and the secondary social self, which is a structure that develops during a person's exposure to social influence, and consists of internalization of figures significant to the person [we will call them secondary selves], originating either from external groups or from imaginary groups related, for example, in the form of a character from a story, from a myth, from a movie, etc. that had a considerable influence on the person.
We will note here that at birth there are innate patterns for most parts of the self such as the "social self" and its parts that are nuclei for a possible future development of these structures.
The "secondary selves" include:
1] the variety of representations of the "I" that originate from attitudes and feelings towards the self and its representations in different periods of life.
2] The representations of the internalized characters that usually originate from significant characters that the person was exposed to during his life, but as mentioned, there may also be imaginary characters represented in books, movies, etc. that had a considerable influence on the person.
3] The person’s representations of the "subculture" [subculture refers to social influences within the milieu [environment] in which the person lives and are not necessarily related to a specific person or group.
These secondary selves that build the social self usually demonstrate a hierarchy and there may be one or more internalized characters that are more dominant in the hierarchy and these dictate the person's positions and perceptions as well as impose censorship on contents and their internalization as well as the internalization of certain characters that do not fit and even contradict the positions of the dominant character or characters. For convenience we call the collection of internalized characters in the social self the "board of internalized characters" and some have called it the "internalized jury." The person is usually not aware of the composition of the social self, which consists of internalized significant figures that activate him in quasi "automatic" behavior patterns, unless he has undergone treatment that brought this to his awareness.