ABSTRACT
This chapter describes what Marcel means by dignity, an ambiguous term in philosophical circles and a hardly dealt with concept in mainstream psychological circles. It discusses the problem of maintaining dignity in terms of what Marcel and others have called the "mass society", that is, the role of dignity in helping a person to maintain a modicum of autonomy, integration, and humanity amid the depersonalising effects of technological mass society. The chapter elucidates how maintaining a degree of personal dignity helped the concentration camp inmate to preserve Bruno Bettelheim himself "as a person" amid the everyday, radical attacks on his self-identity. It concludes by suggesting that despite lip service, there is still an under-appreciation of the psychological importance for the individual to cultivate in his everyday life, both in relation to himself and towards others, a greater commitment to the ethico-religious value of a broadly defined personal dignity.
