Systematic Sociology V 8 by Mannheim Karl;

Author:Mannheim, Karl;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

4. INDIVIDUALISATION AS A KIND OF INTROVERSION

By individualisation we understand a deepening of the personality; what could be called introjection. Its stages may be traced. The stage of estrangement, of becoming solitary, is characterised by the fact that the individual withdraws into himself his libidinous energy. We find this often in big cities where unfriendliness is felt and confusion is caused, and generally when the community loses its expressive force, when for instance forms of worship and ceremonies lose their collective and individual significance. The loss of the range of activities, the limitations of the possibilities of shared emotional expression, all contribute to estrangement, introjection and inwardness and to an introversion of the sublimating energies. This process combined with the emergence of individualised love makes romantic love possible.

There develops then an acceptance of privacy, partial isolation, as a means of escaping external control, as another form of individualisation connected with introversion. The predominance of introspection is also one of these forms. In the circumstances of social and cultural mobility when sudden inner readjustments become necessary, such introspective moods usually appear especially in personalities who have leisure time combined with privacy. Harmonious cultivation of the whole personality is the form of individualisation favoured by such people, who deal with things not specifically but as showing the variety and unity of experience at once. For such people, the social distance from the sphere of labour and social struggle results in a reduction of subservience to the power or finality of external facts. The great artists of the Renaissance, the writers and scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and some English thinkers of the nineteenth century, show these attitudes.

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