Socialization: Theories Of Self Development

Socialisation is defined as the “process by which individuals acquire the knowledge, language, social skills, and value to conform to the norms and roles required for integration into a group or community.” (Business Dictionary, 2016).

Socialisation as means of self-development

(Theories of Socialisation)

The process of self-development is viewed as an ancestor to the self-socialisation by many scholars. During the first months of life, an infant has no understanding of the surrounding environment. Relations with the social environment surges the consciousness of the self and develops our personal identity. The more social experiences an infant accrues, the easier it becomes for the child to shapes up his/her identity and projects an image

Freud compared the human personality to an iceberg, and argued that larger part of our behaviour is determined by unconscious instincts. His interpretation of those instincts was that human behaviour is driven by negative and anti-social characteristics which viewed society as means of controlling and restraining an individual and divided the human mind into three parts: the “Id”, which seeks pleasure, the “Ego” that controls behaviour and the “Superego”, defined by our conscience.

Freud also linked the initial phases of personal growth with the way the individual is formed, phases such as “breastfeeding, toilet training and sexual awareness”. He also believed that failure to accurately involve an infant to a specific period of adolescent development will result in foreseeable consequences during adulthood (Freud 1905).

Freud’s “development of self” theory contradicts Mead and Cooley’s concept of socialised self. Mead and Cooley established that the individual develops through a social process and not a psychological one as opposed to Freud’s theory. Freud also considered the individual to be anti-social and viewed the self and society as a contradicting parts, whilst Mead and Cooley did not distinguish between the self and

The outcome of a recent study published in the Nature Genetics, a summary carried out on 14,558,903 twins for period over fifty years, concludes that the debate remains “controversial”. The same study discloses that on average the difference in human characteristics is “49 per cent genetic and 51 per cent due to the environmental factors”. (Tinca J C Polderman, Beben Benyamin, Christiaan A de Leeuw, Patrick F Sullivan, Arjen van Bochoven, Peter M Visscher & Danielle Posthuma, 2015). Benyamin also clarified “that there are good reasons to study the biology of human traits, and that the combined effect of many genes on a trait is simply the sum of the effect of each individual gene”

Socialisation as means of preserving culture

Not only socialisation plays a crucial role in the development of the self, but it also serves the purpose of preserving one’s culture. Individuals are closely connected to their social worlds and society survives by incorporating its values to the new generations. Everything that is unique for a culture should be conveyed within those who are born in it, in order for the culture of the nation to be conserved.