VARIETIES OF POSTMODERN INDIVIDUALITY: IMPLICATIONS FOR SOLDIERLY SELFDEFINITON

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VARIETIES OF POSTMODERN INDIVIDUALITYIMPLICATION
S FOR SOLDIERLY SELF-DEFINITON

• Günther Fleck
• Institute for Human and Social Sciences
• National Defense Academy
• Vienna, Austria

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Contents

• Modern Warfare Doctrines
• Postmodern Political Changes and Warfare
• Postmodern Thinking and Postmodern
• World-View
• Personal Relatedness and Identity Formation
  Fragmentation of Self or Personal Growth?
• Towards a New Self-Understandingand New Identity
  of Soldiers

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Modern Warfare Doctrines

• Defending Western Democracy and Values against
  Communism
• Defending Communism against Western Capitalism

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Postmodern Political Changesand Warfare

• Appearance of New Enemies
• International Terrorism
• Transnational Organized Crime
• Implication
• Asymmetric Warfare
• New Role and Self-Understanding
• of Soldiers and Armies

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The Postmodern Worldview Five Metatrends(after
Walter Truett Anderson, 1990)

• Changes in Thinking-About-Thinking
• (Shifts in the Public Psychology).
• Changes in Identity and Boundaries.
• Changes in Learning.
• Changes in Morals, Ethics, and Values.
• Changes in Relationship to Traditions, Customs,
  and Institutions.

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Key Features of Postmodern Thinking(after Dennis
Hlynka Andrew Yeaman, 1992)

• I. A Commitment to Plurality of Perspectives,
  Meanings, Methods, Values - Everything!
• II. A Search for and Appreciation of Double
  Meanings and Alternative Interpretations, Many of
  Them Ironic and Unintended.

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Key Features of Postmodern Thinking(after Dennis
Hlynka Andrew Yeaman, 1992)

• III. A Critique or Distrust of Big Stories Meant
  to Explain Everything. This Includes Grand
  Theories of Science, and Myths in Our Religions,
  Nations, Cultures, and Professions That Serve to
  Explain Why Things Are the Way They Are.
• IV. An Acknowledgement That - Because There Is a
  Plurality of Perspectives and Ways of Knowing
  There Are Also Multiple Truths.

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The Postmodern Worldview(after Brent Wilson,
1997)

• I. Postmodernism, as the term implies, is
  largely a response to modernity. Whereas
  modernity trusted science to lead us down the
  road of progress, postmodernism questioned
  whether science alone could really get us there.
  Whereas modernity happily created inventions and
  technologies to improve our lives, postmodernism
  took a second look and wondered whether our lives
  were really better for all the gadgets and toys.

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The Postmodern Worldview(after Brent Wilson,
1997)

• II. Postmodernism looked at the culmination of
  modernity in the 20th century the results of
  forces such as nationalism, totalitarianism,
  technocracy, consumerism, and modern warfare
  and said, we can see the efficiency and the
  improvements, but we can also see the
  dehumanising, mechanising effects in our lives.
  The Holocaust was efficient, technical, coldly
  rational. There must be a better way to think
  about things.

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Personal Relatedness and Identity Formation
Fragmentation of Self or Personal Growth?

• Existential Conditions of Every Day Life
• Areas of Personal Relatedness
• Fundamental Forms of Self-Experience and Identity
  Formation
• Personal Boundary Management and Self-Experience

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Existential Conditions of Every Day Life

• Fulfilling of Daily Demands
• Demands from Outside
• Self-Defined Demands
• Self-Regulation of Subjective Well-Being Wishes
• Needs
• Interests

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Areas of Personal Relatedness

• I. Relatedness to Oneself
• II. Relatedness to Other Single Persons
• III. Relatedness to Groups
• IV. Relatedness to Society, Nation, World
  and Universe

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Fundamental Forms of Self-Experience and Identity
Formation

• Numerous personality theorists have postulated
  and discussed two central processes in
  personality development
• Angyal (1941, 1951) Autonomy vs. Surrender
• Bakan (1966) Agency vs. Communion
• Balint (1959) Philobatic vs. Ocnophilic
  Tendencies
• McAdams (1985) Power vs. Intimacy
• Spiegel Spiegel (1978) Fission vs. Fusion
• Koestler (1972) characterized man with respect
  to these basic tendencies as a Janus-Faced
  Holon.

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Personal Boundary Management and Self-Experience

• There exists great agreement among reseachers and
  clinicians that interpersonal flexibility, the
  ability to adjust ones behaviour to suit
  changing interpersonal situations, is central to
  mental health and subjective well-being.
• Thus, personal boundary management based on the
  ability to handle the dialectics between
  interpersonal separateness and connectedness in
  an adaptive way has an important function. Many
  people have developed more or less strong
  deficits in regulating their personal boundaries
  ranging from severe disturbances to more mild
  ones.
• As a consequence, problems and suffering in
  interpersonal relationships appear. In clinical
  practice different approaches have been created
  how to treat people with boundary disturbances
  (e.g., psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioral, and
  systems approaches).

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A Capabilities Conception of Personal Boundary
Management

• Loosening Vanishing
• of Boundary
• Capability of Boundary Formation
• "Separateness"
• Capability of Boundary Removal
• "Connectedness"
• Crystallising Strengthening
• of Boundary

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Two Basic Approaches to UnderstandPersonal
Boundary Management

• Traditional Trait Approach
• Basic Assumption
• Individuals have stable thin or thick boundaries
  in different areas.
• Abilities Conception
• Basic Assumption
• Individuals create or remove boundaries with
  respect to situation-specific demands and
• subjective needs.

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Implications

• Personal boundary management, the subjective
  regulation of interpersonal separateness and
  connectedness, cannot be understood and diagnosed
  sufficiently within the frame of the traditional
  trait approach.
• Moreover, an abilities conception of personal
  boundary management which is sensitive to
  individual differences and situation-specific
  demands provides a better basis for the diagnosis
  and psychological treatment of boundary problems
  or disturbances.

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Varieties of Postmodern Individuality

• Fragmentation of Self
• Personal Growth and Self-Actualization

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Models of Personal Growth I

• Traditional View of Self-Actualisation
• (e.g., Maslow, 1962 Rogers, 1963)
• Self-Actualisation is characterised as the
  increased realisation of inherent potentialities

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Models of Personal Growth II

• Alternative View of Self-Actualisation
• ( after Butler Rice, 1963)
• Self-Actualisation generally reflects the
  persons ability to create new experience and
  change for himself via his own cognitive
  functioning.
• Expanding on Butler and Rices position, a more
  elaborated view proposed by Wexler (1974) sees
  self-actualisation as the degree to which the
  person characteristically engages in a mode of
  information processing in which he is his own
  source for creating new experience.

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Models of Personal Growth III

• Self-Complexity (after Patricia Linville,
  1987)
• The model assumes that self-knowledge is
  represented in terms of multiple self-aspects.
  Greater self-complexity involves representing the
  self in terms of a greater number of cognitive
  self-aspects and maintaining greater distinctions
  among self-aspects.

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HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

• Childhood Process
• of
• Youth Differentiation
• Adulthood and
• Old Age Integration

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Differentiation and Integration( after John
Watkins, 1978)

• Differentiation is the perceptual recognition of
  differences and discrimination between two
  different things.
• Integration is the bringing together of two or
  more elements so that they are consonant or can
  interact constructively with each other.

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Man-Environment-Interaction and Personal Growth

• Mental (cognitive) development
• (e.g., various intellectual abilities, value
  orientation, world view, belief systems,
• self-reflection)
• Affective development
• (e.g., affect-regulation, affect maturity,
  empathy, need satisfaction)
• Motor development
• (e.g., various motor skills, sports, dancing)

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A Model of Auto-Organisation(after Gottlieb
Guntern, 1982)

• 6 Subprocesses
• Evaluating the status quo of a system.
• Defining future purposes and goals.
• Defining problems.
• Choosing strategies and tactics to reach those
  purposes and goals.
• Implementing the strategies and tactics.
• Controlling the implementing

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Conclusions

• Towards a New Self-Understanding
• and New Identity Formation of Soldiers

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Conclusion I

• Postmodernity offers the most complex context in
  history of life regarding the potentialities of
  individual development. Success or failure in
  individual development in the sense of personal
  growth or fragmentation of self cannot be
  understood as an either/or principle. Although
  early personal relationships may have a strong
  impact on the generation of developmental
  patterns (Verlaufsgestalt), this does not
  represent an invariable fate.

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Conclusion II

• The human being is asked to take responsibility
  for himself or herself with regard to his or her
  relatedness to himself or herself, to other
  humans and living systems, and to the universe.
  Looking into the future, we should (rather, we
  have to) accept this challenge. This is also
  valid for the development of the new role and
  self-understanding of soldiers in particular and
  armies in general.

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Conclusion III

• Defense motivation and readiness to engage in
  international military operations has to be
  understood as a relational phenomenon embedded in
  complex dynamic systems with regard to political,
  social and individual dimensions.

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Conclusion IV

• Governments are responsible for offering
  sense-making goals to the soldiers and to bridge
  the gap between the outdated modern warfare
  doctrines and the new postmodern conditions of
  warfare. The present ideological vacuum (in
  Europe) has to be filled with a new philosophy of
  security including military operations.

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Conclusion V

• When soldiers ask representatives of their
  governments
• Who needs me, and why?,
• then, what will be the answer?
• This seems to be the most important affair for
  the future in regard to the challenge of the
  postmodern world.

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Conclusion VI

• To tackle this important affair in an efficient
  way governments have to provide clear political
  strategies of how to use the instrument
  military the majority of democratic societies
  has to share these strategies and the individual
  soldiers have to develop appropriate value
  systems as a means for a solid basis for their
  profession.