Chapter 7 explores some ways in which metaphors trauma shape the experience of the self and temporality through examples from refugees and Holocaust survivors. A key function of narrative is organizing the experience of time. Narratives of the self have consequences for the experience time. The discussion distinguishes two meta-narratives of the self in terms of their implicit root metaphors and associated temporalities: the adamantine self, characterized by endurance, integrity, coherence, autonomy, self-definition, self-determination, and self-control; and the relational self, characterized by flexibility, fluidity, sensitivity to context, multivocality, interdependence, and responsiveness. These models of the self are associated with different ideologies and forms of social life that shape trauma memory and experience. They also influence the ways that trauma experience is narrated through personal and collective stories. This occurs in settings that require an attentive listener. The ethics of storytelling has an essential counterpart in the ethics of listening, which involves particular forms of temporality and ways of participating in a cultural community.

Chapter 5 focuses on the narrative shaping of the sense of self and of the process of transforming it in psychotherapy. We can advance our understanding of the sources of rhetorical power of metaphor through some version of the constructs of myth and archetype. Myth stands for the overarching narrative structures of the self and other produced and lent authority by cultural tradition. Archetype stands not for preformed ideas or images, but for the bodily or existentially given in meaning. Metaphor links the narratives of myth and bodily experience through imaginative constructions and enactments that allow movement in sensory-affective quality space. Examples from contemporary psychotherapy illustrate how healing metaphors can transform sense of self and personhood. While this approach is most obviously applicable to psychotherapy and other talking cures, which use language to reconfigure experience, it captures a discursive level of sense-making that is an important part of all forms of symbolic healing, whether during ritual actions, as part of the prior construction of expectations, or in subsequent interpretation of outcomes.

This chapter explores Marcus’ concept of the soul and its main cognitive parts (hēgemonikon, nous, dianoia, daimon) and their relevance for the construction of a concept of the self that is closely interwoven with Stoic self-care. It also investigates Platonic influence on Marcus’ concept of the mind and its relation with the body. Selfhood, understood as an entity referring to itself, unfolds around the hēgemonikon and, to a lesser extent, the dianoia. Self-reference by cognitive acts is limited to the logical soul. These three rational elements are subordinated to the ‘I’ (or psychagogic subject) and serve as objects of its psychagogic self-(trans)formation, thereby construing its selfhood. The perfect starting point for mental self-transformation in Marcus is hypolēpsis ‘assumption’, a single mental act, similar to Epictetus’ prohairesis ‘choice’, to which Marcus’ concept of mental selfhood is heavily indebted. Platonising rhetoric supports the delineation and detachment of the soul’s rational part (esp. nous) from external entities and subordinate mental phenomena but offers no evidence for a dualist psychology or metaphysical concept of the mind. Instead, Marcus’ concepts of mind and body abide by Stoic orthodoxy and its materialist monism.

This chapter sheds light on phenomenological aspects of personality disorders. Although research on personality disorders has increased in the last decades, it remains relatively underexamined compared to other mental health conditions. This discrepancy is even more evident in phenomenological psychopathology. To fill this lacuna, this chapter offers an analysis of the implicit, temporal foundation of self-experience in personality disorders. It is argued that personality disorders can be understood in terms of a temporal inflexibility of the self. Important aspects of lived inflexibility are described across five topoi: repetitiveness of interpersonal patterns, affective rigidity, reification of self-experience, lack of future openness, and the feeling of being stuck.

The emerging awareness of self and other, especially with regard to compatible and conflicting aims, opens up dramatic new meanings for the toddler. Being able to be deliberately contrary gives the child experience with disruption and repair of the relationship and lets them explore the boundaries of appropriate behavior. The toddler also has a beginning capacity to control impulses and manage behavior, but doing this adequately requires continued scaffolding and guidance from parents. Meanings surrounding parental reliability brought forward from infancy impact how readily children now accept parental guidance. At the same time, clear, firm, and warm guidance can increase the child’s confidence regarding parents. This is how the transactional model works.

Trauma refers to an event or series of events that overwhelms the capacities of the person. Trauma disrupts all developing systems from brain to self. Trauma is especially devastating in the early years because of the nature of development. Development is cumulative and follows the principle of differentiation. Basic forms are laid down and then refined; therefore, there is a lasting impact of early disruption. Trauma can be especially devasting with regard to meaning making, because the major impact of trauma is to compromise integration. Integration is precisely what meaning making is. When early integration is compromised, gaps in the mind in the form of dissociation will result.

I analyse Shelley’s fraught relationship with Byron’s self-monumentalising, flippantly self-mocking poetics and personal pride, arguing that Shelley’s notion of a ‘Promethean’ poet who catches the strains of general human ‘sympathy’ tenses productively against what he saw as Byron’s narrow drive to create an elevated poetic ‘self’. Shelley, though he admired Byron’s poetics in many ways, also saw his friend as being at risk, poetically and personally, of the sort of inflexible remove that the Promethean poet might fall into if their overreaching ambition comes to render them ‘cold’ and removed from their historical moment. Though acts of intertextual intimacy with Byron’s work, Shelley explores various forms of ‘coldness’: some Byronic laments for the trials of human mutability, some distinctively Shelleyan forms of ‘coldness’ that strive to regenerate, through defamiliarisation, the very ‘ashes and sparks’ of creativity that the poet, with their largely unavoidable removal from the world, risks disdaining.

Doppelgänger is a term drawn from the writing of Jean Paul Richter in his novel Siebenkäs. This term is examined and discussed in this chapter. It stands for the possibility of the existence of a double of a living person and therefore raises questions about the nature of the self and of mind too. The concepts of self and mind are explored and the implications for philosophy of mind are examined. The importance of attending to the empirical literature rather than using thought experiments is emphasized.

This chapter of the handbook introduces readers to the field of moral psychology as a whole and provides them with a guide to the volume. The authors delineate the landscape of morality in terms of five phenomena extensively studied by moral psychologists: moral behavior, moral judgments, moral sanctions, moral emotions, and moral communication, all against a background of moral standards. They then provide brief overviews of research on a few topics not assigned a dedicated chapter in the book (e.g., the moral psychology of artificial intelligence, free will, and moral responsibility), noting several other topics not treated in depth (e.g., the neuroscience of morality, links between moral and economic behavior, moral learning). In the last section of the chapter, the authors summarize each of the contributed chapters in the book.

This chapter reviews research on social cognition and age. This covers self-focused processes, including self-referencing and memory as well as own-age bias and stereotype threat and stigma. Processes focused on other people are also reviewed, including moral judgment, empathy, theory of mind, social interactions and impression formation, memory for impressions, and trust.

Does the conception of worship – in expressing, as it does, a direct relationship with God – prevent an understanding of love for God as mediated by love for humans? Taking the latter to be an existential model of one’s relationship with God, in this chapter I answer in the negative to the above question by demonstrating the role that worship plays in such a model. To do so, I turn to Kierkegaard’s image of “resting transparently” in God. For Kierkegaard, this image represents what he perceives as the highest possible state of the believer’s relationship with God; a state that is achieved, according to Kierkegaard, when one becomes the self – the individual – that God intends one to be. And how does one become this self? By loving properly the neighbour (that is, another individual). The suggestion I develop in this chapter is that it is the worshipping of God – that is, by being in a state of respect and attendance to God’s will – that directs one in loving properly the neighbour. Hence, it is worship of God that paves the way to fully loving the neighbour and thus to fully loving God.

This chapter will show you how traversing the overlapping identities of self (micro), organisation (meso) and system (macro) is an essential skill for educators to be culturally responsive. This includes making decisions informed by broader contexts, organisation/learning environment interpretations of those cultures and, crucially for educators at all stages, what this then looks like in their own educational setting. For pre-service teachers, this calls for a consideration of multiple layers in the development of teacher identity. For all educators, it demands reflection and scrutiny throughout one’s career recognising that some aspects of identity may remain a continuity, while others may change. By examining practitioner examples, research literature, national and global contexts, this chapter will equip you with practical and theoretical examples. We hope this will help you identify and negotiate micro, meso and macro levels of teacher identity as a way to better identify, empathise and implement effective culturally responsive pedagogies for the contexts you work in.

This chapter examines how essayistic personae enabled writers and readers to understand personhood as a means of making a unity out of multiplicity. It draws on Thomas Hobbes’s theory of the person to track how essayistic personae both depicted corporate personhood and themselves served as corporate persons, allowing many writers, real or imagined, to write as one. It also uses Locke’s theory of personhood to show how essayistic personae present conscious persons as contingent unities imposed upon multitudinous thoughts and experiences. Essayistic personae not only extended personhood to non-human beings, such as corporations and animals, they also drew attention to the limited nature of personhood for many human beings, including married women and enslaved people.