This chapter moves from examining institutional changes to the cultural history of morals and emotions, by examining how the evolution of the idea of the self came to supplant the institutional mediation of local law courts. It traces how three concepts – self-love, happiness, and interest – were developed and disseminated as religious and interpersonal ethics, all related to the development of the self within the singular mind. This was a crucial move that allowed the idea and practice of savings to move from taking the form of a debt owed, to the interest-bearing capital described above. It also validated the crucial concept of interest within religion, and this was related to the increasing moral acceptance of the interest rate. Although a legal interest rate had existed from the Elizabethan Act of 1571, interest rates are difficult to find mentioned explicitly in the seventeenth century. By the eighteenth, however, they had become commonplace.

This chapter analyzes Stages on Life’s Way as an extended thought experiment. Though it has some similarities with a literary work of art and is sometimes called a novel, I distinguish extended thought experiment narratives like Stages from literary novels. I will show how Stages, like Repetition, embodies and develops Ørsted’s core elements of variation, active constitution, and the pursuit of genuine thought. I will also contrast Stages as a “psychological experiment” with the field of empirical psychology emerging in the 1800s. Against increasing interest in empirical observation, Kierkegaard’s thought experiments direct attention to what is not outwardly observable.

Decades of research demonstrate cultural variation in different aspects of emotion, including the focus of emotion, expressive values and norms, and experiential ideals and values. These studies have focused primarily on Western and East Asian cultural comparisons, although recent work has included Latinx samples. In this chapter, we discuss why studying culture is important for studies of emotion and what neuroscientific methods can contribute to our understanding of culture and emotion. We then describe research that uses neuroscientific methods to explore both cultural differences and similarities in emotion. Finally, we discuss current challenges and outstanding questions for future research.

Chapter 10 approaches recent research on birth and infancy through a crisis-oriented framework. Birth and infancy are processes of transformations involving caregivers, kin, community, and the state. These take place in sociocultural and ecological contexts, which are many times also changing and adapting to known and unpredictable situations and possibilities. After introducing crisis as a pertinent concept for the study of birth and infancy beyond normative developmental frameworks, the authors describe works on notions of personhood, self, and attachments as processes involving lifecycle and non-lifecycle crises. The chapter approaches crises as disruptions that take place at different levels and temporalities, which are intrinsic to the understanding of birth and infancy contextually, highlighting long-term critical events that permeate societies and are intertwined with policy trends. The final section examines the crises of infancy, including attachment processes entangled in higher-order social crises, such as among socially and economically oppressed populations living with conditions of extreme precarity.

Unlike the individualist strains of much social science, psychological anthropologists take for granted the proposition that individuality is socially constructed. But at the same time, the discipline has rejected a determinism that understands the individual as a mere reflection of culture, a notion that is the simple inversion of individualist ideology.Experience is usefully conceptualized as the realm within which human subjects can take shape, becoming selves in a socially construable way. Ideally this relationship between culture and self takes shape as a familiar landscape through which the human subject can pass with some sense of purpose and meaning.However, both at the level of society or the individual, this harmony is not guaranteed. The concepts of self and experience – especially when considered together – provide a stronger theoretical foundation for an anthropology that avoids the reification of persons and culture and attends more closely to the processes whereby subjects pursue and follow filaments of meaning in their lives.

This chapter focuses on presocratic thinkers living in Magna Graecia (Sicily and southern Italy) in the sixth and fifth centuries bce. The main theme is the unity of opposites (a form of antithesis), treated in various ways by these thinkers, and the economic, political and mystic influences on their treatments. Parmenides’ radical separation between the one and plurality (or the paths of truth and opinion) reflects the contrast between possession of money and its circulation. This is informed by Parmenides’ aristocratic outlook; his account of the two paths is also modelled on mystic initiation. The Pythagoreans and Empedokles both adopt a more inclusive framework that embraces opposites within an overall unity, symbolising both the possession and circulation of money and a broad political structure. The Pythagorean cosmos, conceived in terms of fire, harmony and order or calculation, accommodates both poles in their table of opposites. Empedokles’ cosmic cycle includes the opposed subjectivities (with political connotations) of love and strife, while reincarnation accommodates divergent and opposed states of selfhood within an overall wholeness. Unity of opposites is framed by these thinkers in terms of the (introjected) inner self and (projected) cosmos, matching the wholeness offered by mystic initiation.

James’s modernism is based directly on the psychology he founded, and specifically on his recognition that the self is malleable (or “plastic”), aggregate, distributed, and capable of mental reform. Yet James’s outspoken critique of US imperialism and the lynching of African Americans reflected his understanding of the dangerous potential of conversion – namely, that revolutions in belief carry a measure of uncertainty and risk, not just to individual believers but to the very fabric of democratic thought. Jamesean conversion therefore dramatizes the processes by which consent is staged from within and from without. The self enacts the drama in the form of an internal dialogue in which one imagines one’s “self” inhabiting a particular temporo-spatial location, as if fulfilling the role of a protagonist in a work of fiction. Against that background, Henry James’s What Maisie Knew and Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware dramatize the processes through which individuals become plastically transformed under the manipulations of powerful “pattern-setters” of public opinion. By fracturing and fragmenting imperial forms of selfhood, these psychological Bildungsromane inaugurate a reform modernism that registers dissent from the imperial sway of groups, demonstrating the strenuous effort required by individuals to transform oppressive systems from within.

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.