ABSTRACT
In the volume Intercultural Therapy, contributors explored and theorised the importance of recognising that ‘social and political phenomena are powerful forces … determining the lives of individuals who live in a particular society’ (Kareem 1992: 19). This chapter offers a further reflection on the role of society and culture in the shaping and understanding of the individual self, within a framework developed on the work of G.H. Mead.
The suggested framework is presented through case studies collected not from a formal therapeutic context, but from ethnographic interactions with children and families experiencing and discussing a range of both everyday matters and difficult life situations, referred to as ‘social predicaments’. Theorising outside the therapeutic Western model, on a higher level of abstraction of the concept of therapy itself, will function as tool to conceptualise the formation of the individual outside the restraints of Oedipal and nuclear family patterns.
Informed by prior attempts to incorporate culture and family dynamics in the understanding of the individual, this chapter aims to theorise the formation of the self as an act driven and shaped by society and its forces, as discussed in the work of G.H. Mead in his outline of social psychology.
