A Formulation of the Ego and its Context

Fig. 13.1

Six step formulation of low self-esteem and social anxiety

What Fig. 13.1 means is that there is major difference between the syndromes of low self-esteem and social anxiety ; and the mere occurrence of a momentary fear in a social setting which is of a completely different order. Specifically, what makes social anxiety, the conditions of its possibility, are rumination on self with anger plus the repetitious replaying of the visual, auditory, emotional and other aspects, plus the harsh internal dialogue that brings on even more anger and dismay at self that primes the self for more difficulties in further social contexts. However, the anxiety in the example above is unnecessary, because generally there is no external actual threat to self. The fear and anxiety generated might be triggered by social contact but accumulate across the lifespan to become integrated with how the ego and its consciousness understand any social setting. There are further consequences though for the anxious self. One such consequence is that communication and rationalising are impaired, over and above the baseline of the original mis-reading of the expressions seen and heard. The concomitant sense of self is powered by the anxiety felt, alongside attempts to manage the consequences of the full set of meanings in every part of the lifestyle: How to work, how to treat people and oneself, ‘how to redeem oneself for being useless’, how to deal with people and earn a living. While there are causative biopsychosocial conditions for the constitution of meanings that produce anxiety in the lived body , the anxiety and fear felt occur in complex connections between self, other and the meanings experienced in the moment. The immediate understanding made of a trigger for fear is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. But such an effect exists in connection to the background of the passive syntheses of consciousness that operate at a distance from the ego but are connected to it. So the felt-experience exists partly in connection to others and objects of fixing attention on self, but also to various contexts of sense that contribute to the mood of anxiety and may not appear adequately in awareness at the time of feeling fear. In different examples, intersubjective causes of meaning from the past, present and future coincide depending on the specifics of each occurrence. Such causes can be comprised of tiredness, the loss of the sense of humour is due to being tense in an important meeting, an increase of physical tension in leib, and other frustrations which promote the priming of meanings of more fear due to immediate experiences within the past few hours.

The Irreducible Connection Between the Senses of Self and Other

This section considers the irreducible connections between self and other as a whole, in the light of the example above. Firstly, no wonder what so frequently occurs in social anxiety is not just inaccurate empathising but the interpretation of self as ineffective in dealing with others. Logically, this is a correct observation drawn from the evidence of fear that inhibits the spontaneous and assertive contact of being in a relationship or group of any sort. Anxiety and fear change the self’s abilities so there is frequent impairment in the inter-action, such as the self pulling away from others and cutting short its ability to get to know them better, even if it realises that there are no real grounds for these feelings. In this way, social anxiety maintains. The connection between the initial anxiety prior to, and fear during meetings, alter the flow of them and gets expressed verbally and nonverbally to others. (This has consequences for others of how to communicate back). Similarly, the anxious self’s low self-esteem makes sense in that self knows that it is not doing as well as it could. Self knows it could be relaxed and grasp the others’ perspectives as well as possible. So, the overall formulation of anxiety when encountering others means that both self and others are out of balance, with the quality of contact and communication decreased; in comparison to a more relaxed way of being together.

The fear that occurs in social contexts can arise due to multifactorial causes as already noted. It might be partly due to a meaning influenced by the biological state of affairs within the person at the time because of what else is happening for them during the last few days. Whilst conversation is meaningful, there are a number of other intersubjective contexts that co-occur and mean that any specific remark or look from another can be mis-empathised. If an occurrence of fear is compared to recent events, or to far distant events in personal history, or in relation to the person’s current biochemical state, all these factors conspire to create a moment of fear or panic in a social context that can arise quickly and come to an end quickly. What is central to social anxiety is that it involves a negative attention on self and others, so that the occurrence of negative self-consciousness, low self-esteem. The inaccurate empathising of others in a negative mind-reading role of mis-attributing negative thoughts and experiences to others means that there is a self-fulfilling prophecy between what is expected, what happens and the negative evaluation that follows during rumination on the experience of fear in a social situation (scenes 4, 5 and 6 above). So, while a few episodes of fear in social situations is not the same as persistent social anxiety as formulated above, nor are they the same as social phobia where the possibility of social fear is attempted to be avoided altogether.

So what is said of people who are socially anxious and have low self-esteem is that they are overly-sensitive to small comments that were expressed in face to face communication as jokes or banter. The case is that because of their sensitivities to criticism, a person with low self-esteem is motivated to feel pain and embarrassment because they believe they have ‘got it wrong again’. Embarrassment and social anxiety happen more with specific other people and specific contexts. Often, the socially anxious person is working extremely hard to make a good impression. Another defensive strategy is to be socially inhibited or to say things that they believe will be acceptable to others. Similarly, some specific topics of conversation might be more embarrassing than others. On the one hand, people with good self-esteem are the products of social environments that supported them and worked to develop their talents. On the other hand, people who present to therapists are from social contexts that have been damaging through a large number of ‘causal’ factors that provided mis-information that has become believed. The quality of the social space across the lifespan is highly influential. For those who seek help with how they apperceive themselves and empathise those around them, their influences vary considerably from grasping the truth of the actual views of others and the ability to receive loving and supportive comments from others. However, as intersubjectivity is such a major part of human existence, it’s worth looking at some of the styles of this context for learning how people make sense socially.

Social anxiety is connected to inhibition and the difficulty of speaking out and feeling that one has something worthwhile to say. For instance, anxiety is the felt-sense of preparedness because there is imagined and anticipative belief about threat and difficulty when encountering social contexts . Social anxiety impairs social fluency in specific sorts of ways because it can impair functioning in a wide variety of areas. So when there is dys-fluency of speaking and acting, these become further evidence of the expression of anxiety as a cultural object for self to make the meaning that it is bad, inept and impaired in some way and even that is incapable of improvement. The consequences and the emotional reasoning go something like this: because self apperceives itself to be of low value to others globally, then there is no reason to be intimate because it is assumed that others will also not find value in self because there is apperceived to be none.

Apperception: The Self-Reflexive Relationship with Self

The pure psychology of self-understanding is a complex topic and it is necessary to start by explaining the higher and lower ways of understanding oneself. Apperception is coined for this comparative act that functions across many instances and contexts of the self in relation to others. When the object of attention is oneself, how one feels in one’s body , sees it, and hears one’s own thoughts and thinks of oneself, apperception is the higher self-reflexive act of understanding oneself when focusing on what was one’s pre-reflective sense of self (I, 143, III, 32, IV, 159–160, 289–290, XVI, 280). Like all forms of turning a pre-reflexive sense into an object, making bodily sensation or anxiety into an object of attention occurs in the context of empathising what others might think and feel about self. It is clear that in the psychological attitude , higher self-conscious sense is gained by a reflection on self that concerns “I and we in the customary and psychological senses, concretely conceived as mind and community of minds, with the psychological life of consciousness that pertains to them”, (IX, 294). Apperception is interpreting oneself as a person and is stated in relation to Gottfried Leibniz’s 1714 use of the term: “it is well to distinguish between perception, which is the inner state of the monad representing external things, and apperception, which is consciousness, or the reflective knowledge of this inner state, and which is not given to all souls, nor at all times to the same soul”, (1973, Sec. 4, cf Kant 1787, B130). The point is that listening to one’s own voice, feeling one’s body or looking at oneself in a mirror are all forms of perception. So a special term is required to cover the mental act of making insight about oneself. The point is that if empathising is inaccurate, then it is likely that apperception , the understanding of self by self, will be inaccurate also.

The ability to understand the self begins in childhood and has been the topic of experimental research by a number of developmental psychologists. Doris Bischof-Köhler found experimentally that children are able to recognise themselves in a mirror at 16 to 24 months of age, and under controlled conditions they were able to empathise an experimenter who pretended to be sad and cry when a teddy bear’s arm that she had been playing with, came off (1988, 149). The experimenter continued to role-play being distressed for 2.5 minutes unless the child in the experiment intervened. Experimentally, what Bischof-Köhler found was that the children, who comforted the experimenter with her distress in a helpful way, were the same children who were able to recognise themselves in the mirror. On the other hand, children who were unable to recognise themselves were also unconcerned with the experimenter’s distress. Empirically then, the experiment is interpreted to mean that the ability to constitute the object of oneself, and hold in mind another’s perspective and intentions, are related and co-occur as a developmental stage.

The higher sense of self is self-reflecting and apperceiving self as a unique individual. There are many other possibilities of meaning-constitution though. The person can see self as beautiful or ugly, stupid or brilliant. Whilst the reasoning in any example is often illogical and emotionally motivated, the consequences can be highly influential. There are the possibilities of ruminating on self, for instance, as shameful for having been raped. Those who have been attacked without provocation can see themselves to blame for having been walking by at that time, and do not attribute the attack to the rapist: The idea that the attacker was to blame for it because of their motives does not occur. It is easy to see the same pattern of events as above. The self jumps to the conclusion that it is at fault. This is one example of what is called emotional reasoning that is contrary to logic. Thus remembering ‘shameful events’ becomes the meaning that self provides for itself and there is also the role of temporality in looking forward to social events where self could see itself as being rejected by others in the future, because of the past influence of the attack. Through emotional evidence, through implicit pre-reflexive beliefs and values, the apperception is that self is contaminated, stigmatised by its sins of omission: self should not have walked through the park the day the rapist struck. Despite the fact of an unprovoked attack by a stranger, self creates the sense of its own identity with regret and self-critical hindsight. Thus, understanding intersubjectivity is the ability to understand meaning that promotes the ease of spotting the means whereby meanings about being in a world-whole are constituted through on-going inter-relationship.

On questioning into the personal histories of persons who feel shame and have low self-esteem, what appears is the damage caused by bullies at school or work, the negative ideas of religion, critical parents, or favoured siblings to whom self was negatively compared, or other condemnation that was unfair at the time and has powerfully made its mark. Furthermore, the meaning of such events may not have been questioned since its first occurrence. And, as revealed in the detailed account of the intentionalities involved in the example of low self-esteem and social anxiety , what can be found through interviewing is what constitutes these motivations and meanings about self in the context of empathised and interpreted senses. In personality theory, the neuroticism factor of personality is an attempt to record what types of emotional distress and vulnerability co-occur with self-consciousness (McCrae and Costa 2003, 47–48). Neurotic self-consciousness is when persons problem-solve in ways that exacerbate their distress through the use of ineffective coping strategies because of excessively negative views of self. Unfortunately, an excessive focus on how the body feels and what distress is felt, work to increase both rather than reduce them. What occurs is a vicious cycle of inaccurate understanding (of self, others and the motivating ‘causes’) leading to inaccurate defences , leading to more distress and poor functioning because of distress.

Only gold members can continue reading. Log In or Register to continue