Self Awareness

Phenomenological Architecture 1

Phenomenological Architecture of Self-Awareness: Applications in Education and Transpersonal Psychotherapy
Olga Louchakova
[Louchakova, O. (2004, February 15). Phenomenological Architecture of Self-Awareness: Applications in Education and Transpersonal Psychotherapy. Paper presented at a Transpersonal Psychology 2004 Conference of the Institute ofTranspersonal Psychology and the Association of Transpersonal Psychology, Palo Alto, CA. Retreived [date] from the [URL of the current page ]]

olouchakova@itp.edu Once marginalized in the wake of a limited empiricism, the notion of self now enters the center of psychological discourse (Benson, 2001). Its dialogical nature and multivocality necessitates a new paradigm of psychological inquiry (Misra, 2001).Theoretical framework of the self is an important alternative to personality theory (Schweder, 1991). However, the typology of the self does not accommodate all the evidence (Matsumoto, 1999). The depth phenomenological analysis of the self can render data useful for building the more accurate understanding of this foundational component of human experience. This paper presents thephenomenological structure of the psychological system, which is commonly called “self”, and examines the applications of this knowledge in higher education and transpersonal psychotherapy. The new method of dialogical explication of the deep structures of self-awareness was developed and used in the 7-year study of the self in the focus groups of participants interested in personal development (n > 35, numberof participants over 300). The following questions were posited: how do you know that you are? How do you experience yourself now? What constitutes your experience of yourself? Accounts were analyzed by the modified method of Giorgi (1985, 1997), with the analytic focus on the generalizable organization of experience rather than the psychological content. Results show that spatiality is theprimary organizational principle of the self, which concurs with Benson’s (2001) view of self as a locator. Spatiality, however, not only locates and defines self externally, but is pervasive to the whole internal organization. The components of the self are organized in the “internal space” of introspection as layers around the central experience of the “I am” – consciousness. “I am” in associationwith sensations, emotions and feelings, images, verbal thoughts, deeper non-verbal understandings, mental states such as torpor or confusion, and “nothing” forms the easily identifiable phenomenological clusters. This level of internal self-organization corresponds with the Eastern psychologies of Vedanta and Kundalini yoga (Berliner, 1990; Sadananda, 1974; Misra, 2001). Deeper analysis uncovers theinner, essential structural groupings, such as self-concept/selfsense, interiority/exteriority, constancy/changeability (subjectivity/objectivity), selfhood/transcendentality, and body-schema relatedness/unrelatedness. Self-concept/self-sense axis includes the polarity of self-related concepts versus the body-based, spatial sense of one’s own self. Interiority/exteriority includes the polarity ofmeaning and verbal expression, constancy-changeability relates to the subject (constancy)-object (changeability) relationship within the introspective field. Transcendentality accommodates transpersonal psychological dimensions of experience such as “larger-than-self” or “no self”, and body schema relatedness refers to the psychological phenomena,

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which emergein connection with particular locations within the body schema. These groupings resonate with the phenomenological map of the “cosmic man”, developed by the Islamic philosopher Ibn-al’Arabi (1980). This research suggests that the “I am”- sense, a constant component of self-awareness, can be easily differentiated from the changing components by the subjects in guided open-eyed introspection....