self reflexive biography

Three Models of Individualized Biography

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• Cosmo Howard  

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The individualization theorists assert that identity has become a central preoccupation of human experience and one of the most important “variables” that humans may affect in order to live as individuals. For Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, and Anthony Giddens, the breakdown of stable and coherent roles and status positions in late modernity has forced individuals to become actively involved in defining who they are and shaping their relationships with others. Contemporary individuals reflexively build and modify their biographies and identities in order to adapt to shifting institutional demands and cope with ever-present tensions in their lives. This shared emphasis on personal choice, self-identity, and reflexive biography has led several commentators to group the works of the different individualization theorists together, using umbrella terms such as the “individualization thesis” and the “reflexive modernization paradigm” (Budgeon 2003; Lash 1993).

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Howard, C. (2007). Three Models of Individualized Biography. In: Howard, C. (eds) Contested Individualization. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230609259_2

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Self-Reflective Awareness: A Crucial Life Skill

This post defines self-reflective awareness and identifies its key domains..

Posted September 10, 2016 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan

• Self-Reflective Awareness (SRA) involves thinking about and reflecting on one’s own mental processes.
• Self-reflection and engaging in "process" conversations with others help to cultivate SRA.
• There are eight key domains to SRA, including knowing your history as well as your needs, motivations, and emotions.

Self-Reflective Awareness (SRA) is probably the single most important competency that we teach in the doctoral program in professional psychology that I direct . It is listed first in the program’s core competencies and is central to the identity and culture of the program. Because we believe it is a very important skill in general, and it is something our program gets extremely high marks on (students rate their training a 4.8 out of 5.0 in this area), I share here how we define it and some of the ways we cultivate it in the program in order to offer ideas about how one might achieve greater SRA.

What Is Self-Reflective Awareness?

SRA is a “meta-cognitive” ability, meaning that it involves thinking about and reflecting on one’s own mental processes. Someone with good SRA is able to generate a narrative of self that is complex, clear, and multifaceted and is able to communicate that narrative in a way that allows others a much better understanding of where one is coming from. Let me give an example of a low versus high SRA response. Imagine a situation in which a doctoral student is working with a patient and I am the supervisor. We are watching some tape of the session, and it is a bit awkward and halting.

I say, “I noticed that the two of you lost some flow in the therapy here. You seem kind of awkward and hesitant. Can you tell me what was going on inside for you?”

A low SRA response might be something like:

“The patient is really resistant about deepening the conversation on this topic. I tried to do what you said, but they blocked me at every turn. So, I just was not sure about next steps.”

In contrast, a high SRA response would be something like:

“I know that this was not the best exchange and you are right I was feeling both stuck and frustrated. I tried to bring up the topic in the way you suggested, but I did not have the concept exactly right and I bundled it. I then felt a bit self-conscious, thinking about you watching it. As I thought about that, it was hard for me to know where to go next, so I just sort of sat there awkwardly. I think sometimes I feel stuck between you guiding me toward how the patient might change and my patient telling me they are not ready or that won’t work and that can leave me feeling a bit powerless and frustrated.”

Notice the difference in the two responses. Even though the question asked for the individual to explore what was “going on inside," the low SRA example basically offers none of that, reports simply on the behaviors, and explains why the individual did what they did focused on external obstacles with no real narrative of their private or emotional experience. In contrast, the high SRA response shows the person’s deep capacity to take an observer stance and to share the internal struggles and reactions they were having, and how that made them feel.

How Does One Cultivate SRA?

The first step to cultivating SRA is knowing what it is and explicitly valuing it. Once it is explicitly valued, there are several ways one can foster it. Introspection, that is, turning the focus of your attention inward and engaging in an attitude of curiosity about what makes you tick, is one key way to foster SRA. We explicitly encourage a mindful approach to meta-cognition that is captured by the acronym C.A.L.M. which attempts to capture the attitude of the meta-cognitive observer as being Curious, Accepting, Loving/Compassionate, and Motivated to Learn and Grow .

Education about psychological theories and processes, such as understanding human consciousness and human social motivation , provides conceptual maps that can help foster SRA in folks. Engaging in psychotherapy is another way to enhance SRA, and we encourage our doctoral students to have at least one meaningful therapy experience (in which they are the client) prior to becoming a fully functioning psychologist.

Another way is to engage in “process” conversations with intimate others. Most human conversations focus on content (the "what" that is being discussed). A process conversation is when you explore with another the “how," especially how you experience the process of relating to them and how they experience relating to you. For example, a process conversation might recall a time two people worked together and shared the way they felt (competitive, jealous , stressed ) in the context of getting the job done.

In our doctoral program, students engage in at least one formal process group, and we also regularly participate in process groups involving diverse individuals on conversations such as gender , race, ethnicity , and power.

What Are the Domains of SRA?

There are a number of different facets to SRA. Here are eight key domains we focus on and areas of SRA capacities we expect to see and some of the additional ways we train them.

• Know your family story and developmental history. To know thyself one must understand one’s history, including the context in which one was raised and key life events or turning points. In a required family class, taught by core faculty member Dr. Anne Stewart, our students complete a large family project in which they develop an autobiographical narrative of their place in their family. This involves the students creating a genogram and interviewing key players in the family drama (parents, siblings, grandparents) and writing it up in a detailed narrative, all to get a deeper understanding of the culture of the home in which they grew up and the way that impacted who they have become.
• Understand your needs, motivations, and emotions. Humans have intense social drives for things like intimacy and belonging and achievement and power. We also have deep-seated feelings about ourselves and others and key events. But often we do not spend time deeply experiencing or observing these aspects of our mental process. Attention to core motives and feeling states is crucial. Dr. Ken Critchfield is the co-director of our program and he helps folks understand their core attachment needs and how early patterns of attachment set the stage for current relating patterns.
• Understand your defenses and how you handle criticism. The defensive system gets activated when our identity is threatened or we are exposed to painful pieces of information about ourselves. Being aware of what makes you defensive and the kinds of defensive coping strategies you use is a key component. I often talk about the “Freudian Filter” and the Malan Triangle , which helps students see how impulses or images or feelings can trigger an anxiety signal and then activate a defense, often by shifting attention away from the image.
• Understand your strengths and weaknesses. As part of their regular evaluation process, the student must narrate their experiences over the year and articulate both areas in which they have excelled and various “growth edges” where they want to improve. We have also explored having students participate in a strength finder assessment, but have not done that.
• Understand your beliefs/values and worldview. Core faculty Dr. Craig Shealy is an expert in beliefs and values and he guides students regularly on deep conversations about what beliefs and values are, where they come from, how they are shaped, and how we respond when confronted with others who have very different beliefs and values (i.e., are we open or closed and defensive?). Students need to reflect on their religious beliefs, their views regarding the nature of being human, and their political beliefs in terms of the role of the government and their social values. We help students understand their beliefs and values in terms of their Versions of Reality (VOR).
• Know your purpose in life and how you make meaning. Related to both one’s beliefs and values and core motives is the recognition of what gives one’s life meaning and purpose. Students must reflect on why they are pursuing a doctoral degree, what are their “valued states of being,” and what kind of difference they want to make in the world.
• Know how others see you. In his Processes of Psychotherapy course, Dr. Neal Rittenhouse spends much time helping students reflect on how others see them. He asks them to reflect on their “stimulus value” and has them imagine how and why someone might feel about them in good or bad ways, and in or outside the therapy room.
• Know the “cultural bubble” that you live in. Students in our program must demonstrate cultural awareness and understand diverse perspectives. To foster this, our program frequently has conversation sessions focused on sensitive cultural issues. For example, over the past few years, the United States has witnessed increased tensions with Russia. We are fortunate to have Dr. Elena Savina on our core faculty, who is from Russia. She is concerned about the portrayal of Russia in the West and has much to say about this. We had a two-hour conversation in which the whole program listened to Elena’s Version of Reality, and why it was so strikingly different than what is portrayed in mainstream Western media.

More than two thousand years ago, the ancient Greeks carved “Know Thyself” above the entrance to the Apollo Temple at Delphi. We concur with this central maxim and believe SRA is a crucial capacity that is necessary for living a fulfilling, complex, and wise life. It is a basic capacity that should be fostered in relationships, in education in general, and in professional psychology in particular.

Gregg Henriques, Ph.D. , is a professor of psychology at James Madison University.

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Part I investigates a wide range of autobiographies, alongside work on the history and literary criticism of autobiography, on narrative, and on the philosophies of the self and of the good life. It works from the point of view of the autobiographer, and considers what she does, what she aims at, and how she achieves her effects, to answer three questions: what is an autobiography? How can we learn about ourselves from reading one? About what subjects does autobiography teach? This part of the book develops, first, an account of autobiography as paradigmatically a narrative artefact in a genre defined by its form: particular diachronic compositional self-reflection . Second, an account of narrative as paradigmatically a generic telling of a connected temporal sequence of particular actions taken by, and particular events which happen to, agents . It defends rationalism about autobiography : autobiography is in itself a distinctive and valuable form of ethical reasoning, and not merely involved in reasoning of other, more familiar kinds. It distinguishes two purposes of autobiography, self-investigation and self-presentation . It identifies five kinds of self-knowledge at which autobiographical self-investigation typically aims— explanation, justification, self-enjoyment, selfhood , and good life —and argues that meaning is not a distinct sixth kind. It then focusses on the book’s two main concerns, selfhood and good life: it sets out the wide range of existing accounts, taxonomies , and tasks for each, and gives an initial characterisation of the self-realization account of the self and its good which is defended in Part II.

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The Importance of Self-Reflection: How Looking Inward Can Improve Your Mental Health

Sanjana is a health writer and editor. Her work spans various health-related topics, including mental health, fitness, nutrition, and wellness.

Dr. Sabrina Romanoff, PsyD, is a licensed clinical psychologist and a professor at Yeshiva University’s clinical psychology doctoral program.

Sunwoo Jung / Getty Images

Why Is Self-Reflection So Important?

When self-reflection becomes unhealthy, how to practice self-reflection, what to do if self-reflection makes you uncomfortable, incorporating self-reflection into your routine.

How well do you know yourself? Do you think about why you do the things you do? Self-reflection is a skill that can help you understand yourself better.

Self-reflection involves being present with yourself and intentionally focusing your attention inward to examine your thoughts, feelings, actions, and motivations, says Angeleena Francis , LMHC, executive director for AMFM Healthcare.

Active self-reflection can help grow your understanding of who you are , what values you believe in, and why you think and act the way you do, says Kristin Wilson , MA, LPC, CCTP, RYT, chief experience officer for Newport Healthcare.

This article explores the benefits and importance of self-reflection, as well as some strategies to help you practice it and incorporate it into your daily life. We also discuss when self-reflection can become unhealthy and suggest some coping strategies.

Self-reflection is important because it helps you form a self-concept and contributes toward self-development.

Builds Your Self-Concept

Self-reflection is critical because it contributes to your self-concept, which is an important part of your identity.

Your self-concept includes your thoughts about your traits, abilities, beliefs, values, roles, and relationships. It plays an influential role in your mood, judgment, and behavioral patterns.

Reflecting inward allows you to know yourself and continue to get to know yourself as you change and develop as a person, says Francis. It helps you understand and strengthen your self-concept as you evolve with time.

Enables Self-Development

Self-reflection also plays a key role in self-development. “It is a required skill for personal growth ,” says Wilson.

Being able to evaluate your strengths and weaknesses, or what you did right or wrong, can help you identify areas for growth and improvement, so you can work on them.

For instance, say you gave a presentation at school or work that didn’t go well, despite putting in a lot of work on the project. Spending a little time on self-reflection can help you understand that even though you spent a lot of time working on the project and creating the presentation materials, you didn’t practice giving the presentation. Realizing the problem can help you correct it. So, the next time you have to give a presentation, you can practice it on your colleagues or loved ones first.

Or, say you’ve just broken up with your partner. While it’s easy to blame them for everything that went wrong, self-reflection can help you understand what behaviors of yours contributed to the split. Being mindful of these behaviors can be helpful in other relationships.

Without self-reflection, you would continue to do what you’ve always done and as a result, you may continue to face the same problems you’ve always faced.

Benefits of Self-Reflection

These are some of the benefits of self-reflection, according to the experts:

• Increased self-awareness: Spending time in self-reflection can help build greater self-awareness , says Wilson. Self-awareness is a key component of emotional intelligence. It helps you recognize and understand your own emotions, as well as the impact of your emotions on your thoughts and behaviors.
• Greater sense of control: Self-reflection involves practicing mindfulness and being present with yourself at the moment. This can help you feel more grounded and in control of yourself, says Francis.
• Improved communication skills: Self-reflection can help you improve your communication skills, which can benefit your relationships. Understanding what you’re feeling can help you express yourself clearly, honestly, and empathetically.
• Deeper alignment with core values: Self-reflection can help you understand what you believe in and why. This can help ensure that your words and actions are more aligned with your core values, Wilson explains. It can also help reduce cognitive dissonance , which is the discomfort you may experience when your behavior doesn’t align with your values, says Francis.
• Better decision-making skills: Self-reflection can help you make better decisions for yourself, says Wilson. Understanding yourself better can help you evaluate all your options and how they will impact you with more clarity. This can help you make sound decisions that you’re more comfortable with, says Francis.
• Greater accountability: Self-reflection can help you hold yourself accountable to yourself, says Francis. It can help you evaluate your actions and recognize personal responsibility. It can also help you hold yourself accountable for the goals you’re working toward.

Self-reflection is a healthy practice that is important for mental well-being. However, it can become harmful if it turns into rumination, self-criticism, self-judgment, negative self-talk , and comparison to others, says Wilson.

Here’s what that could look like:

• Rumination: Experiencing excessive and repetitive stressful or negative thoughts. Rumination is often obsessive and interferes with other types of mental activity.
• Self-judgment: Constantly judging yourself and often finding yourself lacking. 
• Negative self-talk: Allowing the voice inside your head to discourage you from doing things you want to do. Negative self-talk is often self-defeating.
• Self-criticism: Constantly criticizing your actions and decisions.
• Comparison: Endlessly comparing yourself to others and feeling inferior.

Kristin Wilson, LPC, CCTP

Looking inward may activate your inner critic, but true self-reflection comes from a place of neutrality and non-judgment.

When anxious thoughts and feelings come up in self-reflection, Wilson says it’s important to practice self-compassion and redirect your focus to actionable insights that can propel your life forward. “We all have faults and room for improvement. Reflect on the behaviors or actions you want to change and take steps to do so.”

It can help to think of what you would say to a friend in a similar situation. For instance, if your friend said they were worried about the status of their job after they gave a presentation that didn’t go well, you would probably be kind to them, tell them not to worry, and to focus on improving their presentation skills in the future. Apply the same compassion to yourself and focus on what you can control.

If you are unable to calm your mind of racing or negative thoughts, Francis recommends seeking support from a trusted person in your life or a mental health professional. “Patterns of negative self-talk, self-doubt , or criticism should be addressed through professional support, as negative cognitions of oneself can lead to symptoms of depression if not resolved.”

Wilson suggests some strategies that can help you practice self-reflection:

• Ask yourself open-ended questions: Start off by asking yourself open-ended questions that will prompt self-reflection, such as: “Am I doing what makes me happy?” “Are there things I’d like to improve about myself?” or “What could I have done differently today?” “Am I taking anything or anyone for granted?” Notice what thoughts and feelings arise within you for each question and then begin to think about why. Be curious about yourself and be open to whatever comes up.
• Keep a journal: Journaling your thoughts and responses to these questions is an excellent vehicle for self-expression. It can be helpful to look back at your responses, read how you handled things in the past, assess the outcome, and look for where you might make changes in the future.
• Try meditation: Meditation can also be a powerful tool for self-reflection and personal growth. Even if it’s only for five minutes, practice sitting in silence and paying attention to what comes up for you. Notice which thoughts are fleeting and which come up more often.
• Process major events and emotions: When something happens in your life that makes you feel especially good or bad, take the time to reflect on what occurred, how it made you feel, and either how you can get to that feeling again or what you might do differently the next time. Writing down your thoughts in a journal can help.
• Make a self-reflection board: Create a self-reflection board of positive attributes that you add to regularly. Celebrate your authentic self and the ways you stay true to who you are. Having a visual representation of self-reflection can be motivating.

You may avoid self-reflection if it brings up difficult emotions and makes you feel uncomfortable, says Francis. She recommends preparing yourself to get comfortable with the uncomfortable before you start.

Think of your time in self-reflection as a safe space within yourself. “Avoid judging yourself while you explore your inner thoughts, feelings, and motives of behavior,” says Francis. Simply notice what comes up and accept it. Instead of focusing on fears, worries, or regrets, try to look for areas of growth and improvement.

“Practice neutrality and self-compassion so that self-reflection is a positive experience that you will want to do regularly,” says Wilson.

Francis suggests some strategies that can help you incorporate self-reflection into your daily routine:

• Dedicate time to it: it’s important to dedicate time to self-reflection and build it into your routine. Find a slot that works for your schedule—it could be five minutes each morning while drinking coffee or 30 minutes sitting outside in nature once per week.
• Pick a quiet spot: It can be hard to focus inward if your environment is busy or chaotic. Choose a calm and quiet space that is free of distractions so you can hear your own thoughts.
• Pay attention to your senses: Pay attention to your senses. Sensory input is an important component of self-awareness.

Nowak A, Vallacher RR, Bartkowski W, Olson L. Integration and expression: The complementary functions of self-reflection . J Pers . 2022;10.1111/jopy.12730. doi:10.1111/jopy.12730

American Psychological Association. Self-concept .

Dishon N, Oldmeadow JA, Critchley C, Kaufman J. The effect of trait self-awareness, self-reflection, and perceptions of choice meaningfulness on indicators of social identity within a decision-making context . Front Psychol . 2017;8:2034. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02034

Drigas AS, Papoutsi C. A new layered model on emotional intelligence . Behav Sci (Basel) . 2018;8(5):45. doi:10.3390/bs8050045

American Psychological Association. Rumination .

By Sanjana Gupta Sanjana is a health writer and editor. Her work spans various health-related topics, including mental health, fitness, nutrition, and wellness.

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Get to know yourself through the act of self-reflection

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What is self-reflection?

Why is self-reflection important, 7 ways to practice self-reflection, self-reflection questions, keep self-reflection manageable.

You spend more time with yourself than anyone else. But how well do you know yourself?

Being confronted with who we are is often uncomfortable. It means holding ourselves accountable, admitting to weaknesses, and trying to further our personal development. Sometimes, it seems easier to ignore anything potentially negative about ourselves.

And we’re actually less self-aware than we think. Many people believe they’re self-aware, but only 10-15% of Americans actually are . 

When we understand our influences , drives, and impulses, we’ll have an easier time living a happy, fulfilling life. And the key to understanding yourself is self-reflection: the process of looking inward and examining our emotional responses and behaviors.

At its heart, self-reflection is setting aside time to think deeply and evaluate your thoughts, attitudes, motivations, and desires. It’s examining your emotions and behaviors and then asking yourself, “Why do I feel and act this way?” 

Taking the time to reflect on life might sound like an overwhelming task. We might think of this act of introspection as something that naturally occurs as we grow older, but the truth is self-reflection can and should be practiced at any age. And it can be as simple as looking back at your behavior in any scenario to ask yourself why you behaved the way you did.

Self-reflection builds self-awareness , but only through intention and dedication. This means you must regularly press “pause” on your busy life to create time and space to sit peacefully to sift through your thoughts and interactions to scrutinize them without judgment or condemnation. 

The value of self-reflection lies in its power to help identify what’s working well in your life and develop insight into what isn’t — and why. 

Without the self-discovery that comes from introspection, you can become stuck in a routine that’s neither productive nor inspiring. You may not understand why you’re dissatisfied or what you can do to improve your circumstances if you don’t know what you truly want. 

Regularly taking part in the process of self-reflection can:

1. Give you a fresh perspective. When you’re in the moment, emotion can cloud your judgment, making a bad situation seem worse than it is. Self-reflection lets you re-evaluate your circumstances calmly and rationally to process what’s happening and find a solution with greater clarity. 

2. Let you respond with intent. Instead of saying or doing something you regret, self-reflection allows you to consider the best and most effective course of action to deal with a troubling situation. With the space to safeguard your feelings and the feelings of others, you can navigate difficult circumstances with intent rather than impulse.

3. Help understand yourself. Self-reflection grants insight into your authentic self , allowing you to really grasp why you make certain choices and what makes you truly happy. When you identify your priorities, you can pursue them without doubt and confusion. You can be confident that you know what you want and what’s best for you.

4. Improve your decision-making skills. When you know what makes you tick, you’re better prepared to make the right decisions for your future. You have the clarity you need to pursue your dreams while giving you the flexibility to respond to changing circumstances. 

5. Facilitate learning. If you don’t take time to analyze a situation, particularly an uncomfortable one, you may find yourself drifting from one thing to the next without understanding or appreciating how you got there. You also risk making the same mistakes over and over again.

Self-reflection lets you evaluate the path that led to your current circumstances, allowing you to think about the feelings, desires, and motivations that have guided you to this place. If something about your journey doesn’t sit right, you know you need to change to avoid turning a misstep into a pattern.

6. Foster a sense of well-being. Understanding your priorities and values helps you establish healthy boundaries that protect your mental health and build self-esteem . When you have an intimate understanding of what inspires, upsets, and drives you, you can better prepare yourself for negative reactions and find positive motivators to spur you forward.

When setting out to discover yourself , start slowly. To grow, you need to confront both the good and bad aspects of your nature, but self-examination shouldn’t lead to anxiety , stress, or depression .

Step back and re-center if you ever find yourself overthinking and beating yourself up over things that went wrong. The point of introspection isn’t judgment and condemnation, but understanding and connecting with your sense of self .

Incorporate self-discovery into your daily, weekly, and monthly routines with some simple tips. Choose a time of day that’s typically quiet and worry-free. For some people, it's when they wake up, and others go to bed. Whatever routine you set, stick to it — you won’t see the same results if your self-reflection is inconsistent or approached without authenticity.

These are seven effective ways to approach the process of self-reflection. Start with just one, testing the techniques until you find what works for you.

1. Think: What do you want to know?

Take time to decide what questions you want to ask yourself during self-assessments. To make the most of your sessions, you need to identify where you could improve your understanding of yourself.

Questions can be as simple as “What makes me happy”’ or more specific, like “What happened this week that made me feel good about myself?” Start by identifying whatever you’d like to discover, then use it to guide your self-reflection process.

2. Practice gratitude

Sit back and review what you’re thankful for . Itemizing things that make you feel grateful is an excellent way to boost your mood and improve your outlook. Start by listing three things that made you happy during the day, and then scale backward. What are you thankful for this week? Month? Year?

3. Meditate

Meditation takes a little discipline, but it's a great way to connect with your brain's inner workings. Focus on your breathing to clear and calm your mind, then take note of what thoughts and impressions bubble up. You may identify patterns or themes worth exploring, such as lingering anxiety you can’t seem to shake.

4. Set your goals

Get specific and identify your goals . Write them down and use them as guidelines for your introspection activities. Have you reached the milestones that will bring you closer to the desired outcome? Are there any thought patterns holding you back? Is there something you need to learn to progress? These questions and more are fuel for your self-reflection journey.

5. Put it down on paper

Regularly writing your innermost thoughts in a journal is a great way to make your ideas and impressions more concrete. Putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) allows you to process feelings and reflect on past experiences from a safe emotional distance. You can also compare how far you’ve come by re-reading past entries to see what’s changed over time. 

6. Have a conversation with yourself

Hearing your thoughts out loud can generate insight in ways that merely thinking about them can’t. Self-talk forces you to clearly articulate your emotions, leading to a clearer understanding of what you’re feeling at the time. It also helps you organize your thoughts logically to communicate them clearly to others.

7. Get out into nature

If you’re having trouble getting into the frame of mind required for personal reflection, try getting out into nature. Spending time in the outdoors has a grounding effect, putting you in the moment by removing distractions and clearing your head so you can think.

It’s also a wonderful way to remove yourself from an environment, like your home or office, that may contain triggers that distract you from the self-reflection process.

Self-reflection may seem overwhelming when you’re just starting out. An excellent way to kick off your introspection routine is to ask yourself some beginner self-assessment questions . These also come in handy if you find your practice becoming stale and want to freshen up the way you approach time alone. 

Daily self-reflection questions

• What can I do to take better care of myself mentally?
• What can I do to create a positive outlook on life?
• What areas of my life do I feel satisfied with? Which ones need attention?
• Am I taking anything in my life for granted?
• What fears or worries keep me up at night?

Questions to jumpstart self-reflection

• What are my concerns about the future?
• What do I want my loved ones to remember about me?
• What matters most to me?
• When was the last time I left my comfort zone ?
• Who is the person that’s had the most significant impact on my life?
• What is an act of kindness I have received that I will never forget?
• What can I live with: failure or never trying?
• What aspect of my personality would I change, if anything?
• Do I genuinely care what others think of me?
• Is there anyone I would entrust with my life?

Self-reflection journaling prompts

• List 30 things that make you smile. 
• What have you discovered about yourself during your self-talk?
• What are the words you live by?
• Describe what unconditional love looks like for you.
• What’s the one thing you can’t imagine living without?
• What does “enough” look like to you?
• What changes have you discovered in yourself since beginning self-reflection exercises?
• What piece of advice would you give your younger self?
• What 10 words would you use to describe yourself?
• What words do you need to hear the most right now?

Yes, self-reflection see,s like an intensely personal process, but embarking on a journey of introspection practice doesn’t have to be intimidating. Simply taking five minutes in the evening to review your day and evaluate what worked for you and what didn’t can set you on the path to self-improvement. 

Making this small change to your day-to-day can improve your well-being, strengthen your relationships, make you a better leader , and help you gain traction in your personal and professional development. You have nothing to lose from settling in and starting your self-reflection journey today. 

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Elizabeth Perry is a Coach Community Manager at BetterUp. She uses strategic engagement strategies to cultivate a learning community across a global network of Coaches through in-person and virtual experiences, technology-enabled platforms, and strategic coaching industry partnerships. With over 3 years of coaching experience and a certification in transformative leadership and life coaching from Sofia University, Elizabeth leverages transpersonal psychology expertise to help coaches and clients gain awareness of their behavioral and thought patterns, discover their purpose and passions, and elevate their potential. She is a lifelong student of psychology, personal growth, and human potential as well as an ICF-certified ACC transpersonal life and leadership Coach.

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What is Self-Reflexivity – Super Powered Reflection for Personal Growth

Self-reflexivity is a way for you to super power your reflective process, and deepen on your path of personal growth. If your asking yourself “what is self-reflexivity?” your are not alone. However, this little known term is central to the discovery of new ways to do things .

Reflexivity is more than reflection. It could be called applied reflection . That is because reflexivity takes you deeper into anything you become more aware of. That awareness will then feed itself back into new ideas and new ways of doing things.

In this article, I will explain what self-reflexivity is, ways for you to use it, and why it matters. I will also demystify some of the confusion over self-reflection versus self-reflexivity. Finally, I will talk about ways you can use self-reflexivity for either your personal growth, or your professional development.

However, to understand this topic I will need to explain the connection between awareness and change. I will also need to clear up some of the confusion, around the definitions around reflexive, reflexivity, and reflection.

In order to understand Self-Reflexivity we will discuss:

• How Change Begins With Awareness

Defining Reflexivity

Can things really change.

• What is Self Reflexity?
• Ways to Engage in Self Reflexivity

Change Begins With Awareness

The concepts around self-reflexivity begin with the idea that your awareness of the self and of the other creates change.

If you keep doing things the exact same way your going to keep recreating the same situations and replaying the same stories. We live in a society that uses swift and forceful actions to change things we see as a problem. (Or ignore the problem because we don’t want to admit that we don’t know how to change it!)

If you think about it, it’s not surprising that despite all the effort we push into creating change, we often find ourselves right back where we started. When the principals and models we are using to design our plans haven’t changed, why should the outcomes?

The most surprising results for personal or societal change come from innovative thinking. Someone will think of a new way to get children to learn at earlier ages. Another person will come up with new community programs that actually make an impact on crime.

These innovations can involve revolutionary ideas, or they can involve ideas that simplify or clarify the situation. The key is that someone looked at the problem in a new way. How do you see a problem in a new way unless you become aware of how you are seeing it now?

If you don’t value awareness as an agent for change, you may not spend much of your time using your awareness to make new discoveries. Even being aware of how you see “awareness” is a type of self-reflexivity.

Can you only see the utility of awareness: ‘What does it do for me?’

Do you value awareness for awareness itself… ‘More awareness is better?’

Do you think that using your awareness can create change?

Before we can really understand self-reflexivity we need to get clear on the definition of reflexivity. Reflexivity can get very meta, which means we start becoming reflexive about reflexivity and quickly become confused. Lets clear up some of this confusion first by discussing the definitions around reflection, reflexive, and reflexivity.

The way I will be using the word reflexivity is “the capacity for and the influence of applied reflection.” Or more simply, using reflection to see things in a new way and for that new way to be the source for change. If your good with that, you can skip on down to the self-reflexivity section .

There are Many Definitions of Reflexivity

If you started looking up the definitions around Reflexivity that is one of the ways to get quickly confused. This is because the word’s definitions are different for different academic disciplines.

I initially learned about reflectivity as part of my masters program in Applied Professional Studies from DePaul University in Chicago.

The program emphasizes a strong relationship between inner knowledge and professional expression. Self-Reflexivity is an ideal concept for a program that focuses on becoming an accomplished professional by ‘seeing the bigger picture’ and ‘transforming personal definitions’ so that you can go to new places with the work you do. At the time, I assumed that self-reflexivity was one of those things I had missed learning about before starting my MA. I didn’t discover how little known reflectivity is, until I started preparing for this article.

Partly, this powerful tool may not have caught on because it appears in different ways for different academic disciplines.

• In some cases, reflexivity is seen as a way of keeping your biases in check. Be aware of what you think, so that you can be more objective.
• My MA used the approach of Reflexive Practice, where you grow in the work you do by observing yourself in action – in other words an engaging in an applied observation while doing the work.
• Reflexivity in economics – simply means that people’s perception of the market effects the market. In this case, that your perception of reality creates that reality.
• In Epistemology (studying the theories of what is knowledge) reflexivity is how cause and effect change each other in circular ways.
• In research, reflectivity includes the concept that the very act of researching changes what your researching and in turn changes your approach to that same research.

You can probably see this last one “change through research” most profoundly in social research. If you are studying subjects who went through abuse for instance, the opportunity to tell their story and be heard can be profoundly healing. Trauma is often helped through connection and care. The insights of those being healed by telling their story, will give insights to a responsive researcher, and new directions for that research can be uncovered.

Reflexive or Reflexivity?

You may find that Reflexive and Reflexivity are used interchangeably in certain discussions and in search results. Reflexive is a word about about relating to something, specifically something which relates back to its self. One of reflexive meanings includes the process of reflection.

In my master’s project we engaged in reflexive practice. That meant that I used a process of reflection while “in action.” While practicing my profession, I also observed and gathered insights about what I was doing. You are reflexive, because you are “taking account” of how you effect and affect the work that you do.

Reflexiv ity is an adjective that discusses a capacity for reflection, as well as fact of applying a process of reflections.

The Cambridge Dictionary Defines Reflexivity is:

the fact of someone being able to examine his or her own feelings, reactions, and motives (= reasons for acting) and how these influence what he or she does or thinks in a situation

So I engage in Reflexive Practice. I observe my practice and use my observations to better inform my practice. But my capacity to do this is my reflexivity. The influence this observation has on that which is observed – is reflexivity.

Perhaps my favorite definition for reflexivity is found in sociology:

[Reflexivity] means an act of self-reference where examination or action “bends back on”, refers to, and affects the entity instigating the action or examination. Wikipedia, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflexivity_(social_theory)

In this definition, we get a strong sense that your observation CREATES CHANGE. You are reflexive because you engage in reflection and observation to inform what your doing. Reflexivity feeds back into what your doing, and has the capacity to make something new.

Reflection versus Reflexivity

We are on the home stretch, so stay with me.

The main problem with trying to understand reflexivity is the circular nature of something which bends back on itself. If we follow the concepts through from the starting point of reflection, we can become really clear about what reflexivity is.

Reflection is defined by the Merriam-Webster as:

6: a thought, idea, or opinion formed or a remark made as a result of meditation 7: consideration of some subject matter, idea, or purpose

So with Reflection, we really just have the act of thinking. We have the act of observation. We place our awareness on something, and think about what we see.

If we engage in reflection in a reflexive way, we be make the first bend. We observe or reflect in a way that refers back to itself.

The google definition:

(of a method or theory in the social sciences) taking account of itself or of the effect of the personality or presence of the researcher on what is being investigated.

Merriam-Webster:

1 a: directed or turned back on itself b: marked by or capable of reflection 2 of, relating to, characterized by, or being a relation that exists between an entity and itself

So when we are reflexive, we establish a second order relationship through our observations. We aren’t just thinking about the observations; instead we look at the observations with regards to relationships of cause and effect. The observation takes account of the causes and effects.

Then we step it up one more level. We bend back for the second time. Reflexivity doesn’t just refer to cause and effect. The products of our observations become a new cause. The products of our observation EFFECT what we are studying.

Still Reflexivity is an adjective, not a verb. So the word really is about capacity. The capacity to be reflexive, and the capacity of a reflexive process to create change.

Sociology emphasizes reflexivity as a capacity to initiate social change through developing your own awareness of social structures. If you can see the structures you are a part of, that can result in a change to how you relate to that structure, and it can thereby alter your social position. In personal growth, the changes are both internal and external. However, they still involve change through deepening your capacity for awareness.

Often, we can only see one part of a picture. We think… my problems are due to a lack of discipline. Or… I don’t ever achieve things because I’m not trying hard enough. Or because I feel too much or I am too sensitive. Or because I don’t have access to resources I need.

However, the true causes for our struggles may have started generations before we arrived on the scene. The reasons we are struggling to move forward can be about larger social structures that we are participating and effected by. The cause of problems can include outdated self-concepts.

The initial assumption that we know and can see the true source of the problem may be a bad premise. Your way of seeing the world may have been shaped as a child, or by messages you received unconsciously through television or social media.

Before any change can happen, you need to examine your situation in more detail. You need to begin to develop a new awareness about your self, and how your self-concept situates you in your life and forms relationships with the world around you.

What is Self-Reflexivity?

Even the question: What is self-reflexivity? is a reflexive question. (Very meta!) There is a “what is this”, and “what is that” quality to self-reflexivity.

For the purposes of personal growth, the best way to think of Self-Reflexivity as applied reflection. The application of reflection to your self concept. The application of reflection by feeding insights gained through reflection, back into your new observational process. With Self-Reflexivity we don’t just think about the self. We apply our reflections in ways that create new insights, and that eventually serve as the source for change.

Because reflexivity’s definition includes something which bends back on itself, self-reflexivity has an additional bend in the s-curve of self-reflection. You become the one who observes yourself .

However, any time we want to observe anything, including ourselves, we need perspective. If you want to look at a very tall building, you can’t look at it with your nose pressed up against the window. You will have to take a walk, until you can get far enough away from it to see it.

Gaining Self Perspective

How do you get the kind of distance you need from yourself in order to “put yourself in perspective?”

First, in any reflexive process, you need to spend some time gathering data about the thing you are studying. For reflexive practice (described above) you gather data about your self as a practitioner of your vocation. Similarly, the data about yourself is gathered by watching and noticing how you engage in your life.

• Where and to what do you react?
• What things make you uncomfortable?
• What things excite you?
• Is there something you are avoiding?
• Taking an inventory of your belief system
• Noting where you get stuck, and which things you find easy to handle

The first step to gaining perspective of yourself, is this inventory process. Then you take note of what you see, and write them down in a journal, or even in post it notes on a blank wall. This is true of any research process, you first take note of what it is you think you know about the topic, and where your information may be more limited.

Armed with some perspective, you can begin to engage in a reflexive process and begin to deepen your capacity for self-reflexivity.

Bending Back

As I explained earlier, reflexivity is reflection which feeds back into itself.

So with self-reflexivity you use the inventory I mentioned in the last section and feed that into your reflective process. When you have fruits from reflexive observation, you feed those back into reflection process again. In this way, you bend your insights back into the process again and again.

Making puff pastry dough is very good analogy for a reflexive process of self-awareness. Puff pastry is a dough that is created by rolling out very thin layers of dough, folding them back and rolling out again to form multiple thin layers. (Croissants, for example, are a type of puff pastry.)

Before you start any reflective process, you don’t know anything. You have little or no insight into the thing your wishing to observe. Its like a lump of dough, where you cannot see inside of this thing (your self, a topic that you are researching, unconscious community structures, whatever.)

The process of trying to see inside is like rolling out dough. You are spreading the topic open, widening it so you can see the details of what inside. The thinner you spread the dough, the more minute your study of the inner workings of the topic.

Then with reflexivity, you fold the insights back into the dough, just as you do with puff pastry, thus putting one layer in relationship with the others.

Once the dough is folded back together, you begin rolling it out once more. Now that you have new layers of relationship, you spread the dough out again, looking for in-sight by spreading the topic wide once more.

Your capacity for self-reflexivity is how many layers of relationship you become capable of seeing by repeating this process over and over again.

While, dough analogies are nice and all… How do you apply self-reflexivity in your own life?

Three Methods for Self-Reflexivity

In the podcast at the top of this article, I go through three basic ways of engaging in self-reflexivity. Here they are again:

• Pure Observation or Reflexive Observation
• Self-Reflexivity in Action
• Self-Reflexivity Using your Full Awareness

You can be as detailed or as general with the reflection process as you wish. When you take the time to feed any insight back into your self awareness, that is helpful. So it really just depends on what your growth goals are, and how deep you wish to go with it. Any of these three ways can be tailored for what makes sense for you at this time in your life.

Self-Reflexivity as Pure Observation

I used the term pure observation, because I am trying to emphasize that you aren’t trying to act in a particular way or to change anything. Its as if you have a separate person inside of you who can act as an un-involved observer.

Just as with the scientific method, you don’t have any wish to disturb the system. You just want to watch it and gain insights.

The part that makes “pure observation” reflexive rather than reflective, is that you change and play with your perspectives during while observing.

If you have done a reflection inventory, you look for examples which align with or go against something on that inventory.

Lets say one of your inventory items is that “I hate dishonesty of any kind.”

Now you begin to observe yourself to see when you have reactions around honesty and dishonesty. You observe yourself to see instances of honesty. You look to see if there are any instances of dishonesty. You are looking at yourself in RELATIONSHIP to honesty/dishonesty, that is what makes this observation reflexive.

Perhaps you will discover that you spend more of your time thinking about honesty than you realized. Perhaps you will realize there are times when you feel drawn away from speaking your truth. Perhaps you will realize you actually don’t think about it much at all.

You are not meant to judge your findings. Judgement involves forming a conclusion, and growth is about staying open. If you begin to judge what you observe, you will start changing your behavior to avoid feeling bad about your self. To the best of your ability, you want to be an accepting self-observer.

Another way to engage in self-reflexivity in this mode, is to compare and contrast. Take a person whom you love, but tends to think very differently than you. As you observer yourself in different situations, ask yourself what your friend would think or do. Spend some time thinking about your preferences about your way of doing and reacting versus theirs. Are any of your ways old habits? Do you have strong feelings around reacting in particular ways.

This mode of self-reflexivity is an INVESTIGATION. Its meant to help you see something new, you may not have seen if you didn’t take the time to observe things in this way.

Self-Reflexivity Thru Action

The pure observation mode of reflexivity involves watching yourself while your going about your daily life, while you are in action. To clarify, this second mode of self-reflexivity is about actively changing things to see what happens.

You normally do things one way, try to do them the opposite. Try to do something you don’t usually do. Change things up.

We live in a results driven society, therefore, we usually change the way we do things in order to achieve particular results. What makes this self-reflexivity, is that your changing your action in order to gain new insight . You focus on your reaction to the changes, not the results from those changes. If you begin to steer towards a particular outcome, you may steer yourself away from learning something new. Focusing your attention on outcomes, means that your focus is not one of an un-involved observer.

Doing something completely different should bring up feelings, and reactions that will open your perceptions. Feelings of enjoyment, fear, or reluctance are little sign posts that say… there is something here. If you have no reaction, than perhaps this item doesn’t matter to you, or perhaps you have shut down around the issue at hand.

Following up with questions about why your reacting, or how often do I feel this way are good reflexive questions. These new questions can inform your pure observation modes of reflexivity.

Just as with the first approach, you aren’t judging and you are not assessing. You are gathering data, and seeing where it leads you.

Self-Reflexivity Using Full Awareness

In this mode of self-reflexivity, you invite your subconscious brain to be part of the process. Depending on what study you look at, something like 90 to 99.999 percent of the thinking done by your brain is unconscious. The brain sorts a lot of information before it comes to your conscious attention. Therefore a significant amount of your “awareness” comes from this part of your brain.

Since most people think of awareness, as conscious awareness, the idea that you could be aware of something unconsciously may seem absurd. The truth is that we are aware of more than we realize consciously. Our brain is continuously taking in information, sorting it, and drawing our attention to what seems important.

We can actually give some direction to these processes through a combination of conscious intention and allowing the brain to then do its thing in the background.

As an example of how the brain focuses depending on what we’ve consciously decided is important: If you are walking through a neighborhood that seems dangerous, or an empty parking lot late at night, your sense of unsafety will cause your brain to look out for dangers and unknown people. Anything that it deems dangerous will be brought to your attention.

If, on the other hand, your going out dancing and to meet new people, your brain will focus on seeking out what is new and exciting. Bringing your attention to the attractive girl over there, or the fun crowd you danced with last week. If your aware that even fun places can be dangerous, your brain may bring you information about both safety and fun.

In this way, the unconscious brain processes information based on what is deemed important in a particular setting.

In order to engage your full awareness, you will do a combination of conscious reflection and unconscious reflexivity. Going with the earlier example of dishonesty. You might consciously reflect around your feelings of dishonesty. Then you would set the intention that your brain be on the look out for examples. As your understanding becomes more sophisticated, your brain can do a better job sorting and bringing things to your attention.

Your brain can also sort out some of the more complex relationships in the collected data, and you may find unexpected new ideas come up as if they were “made by someone else.”

The key to this type of reflexivity is that you keep your conscious reflections to a short period of time a day, and intentionally allow your brain to sort through information while you do other things. Some people don’t realize that their brain works this way, and believe that they are only working on a problem if they are working on it consciously.

If you can “get out of the way” by not thinking about it consciously all the time, you avoid slowing down the unconscious brain. You commit to this self-reflexivity process by committing to conscious thinking time in which you gather the new information gathered by your unconscious brain and think it through consciously. In this way you can superpower your reflections by employing the full power of your brain.

I give an example of how I do this in my engineering work, in the podcast.

If you’re already engaged in self-reflection, reflexivity should allow you to empower your insights using an more informed reflection process. Many of the common modes for reflection, such as journaling, meditating, or group therapy are very complementary to the self-reflexivity process. You can use the techniques of self-reflexivity for either personal or professional growth.

New ideas, and new ways of seeing things are key to the reflexive process. As I explain in the Podcast at the top of this page, I have started the Reflections on Healing podcast to cover a variety of topics around personal growth, community awareness, as well as topics around spiritual evolution. For some of the episodes I will also provide workbooks for further reflection .

If your interested in new ideas, you might check out Reflections on Healing – Episode 1 which covers common misconceptions about love , or Episode 2 about the relationships between prejudice and our understanding of the world. You can also subscribe to Reflections on Healing , by visiting the homepage of the podcast.

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Home   >>   Blog   >>   Reflections on systems theory: the role of self and reflexivity

Reflections on systems theory: the role of self and reflexivity

In my first year of doctoral training, I learned about new theories and frameworks. One of these was Systems Theory, which relates to practice that takes into account how systems relate to one another within a larger, more complex system.

Systems theory has roots in mechanics and has been adapted to social sciences and family therapy. General Systems theory was founded by Von Bertalanfy in 1950. In social sciences, a system can be a unit such as a family, school, classroom, community or organisation. The principle is that ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its part’, similar to a machine.

Systems are complex and consist of many sub systems that interlink and affect one another. Looking at sub systems in isolation, such as a child’s presentation on the playground, does not include the wider systems that the child is part of. An example of this could be the child’s peer group, classroom environment, rules and their home context among other subsystems and related factors. Systems cannot be understood entirely, if we only consider elements of a system singularly.

Systemic questioning

Questions can be a powerful tool to incorporate theory into practice and it is often through this medium that practitioners can engage with schools, families and the communities that they support. In systems theory, there are different types of questions that can elicit information, which might reveal how systems interconnect and what the impact might be on members of a system. The right question could shine a spotlight on the missing piece of a jigsaw, which might lead to a change in outcome, mindset or belief.

Linear and circular questioning

Linear questions can unveil cause and effect behaviour/situations, and circular questions could reveal the effect of connections that exist between systems.

An example of a linear question is, ‘when does X tend to happen?’, this unveils the pattern that in X situation, Y can be the outcome.

An example of a circular question is, ‘What do you think (person) appreciates most when they experience X?’.  Posing this question could create an opportunity for other members of the system to make connections between the effects of their own behaviour, belief, rules, culture or environment on each other and the person at the centre experiencing X.

As I learned more about applied systemic theory, I started to play around with questions that might have pushed my thinking in previous work-related situations. I thought about the questions I might have asked myself, agencies or children and parents I worked with. The more I reflected on times that I felt stuck, I thought about the role of the self in the context of working with others. I wondered how we as professionals and individuals who have varied, multifaceted life stories and experiences, ensure that we are aware of the role that we play in helping others to make connections between systems.

Could there be a level of bias in making connections? Could we be informed by our own life stories or things we have seen previously? As I reflected on these questions, I was reminded of Patsy Wagner’s words in relation to the role of EPs in consultation with schools and families. She stated that we must, “stop, work out what is happening and apply appropriate psychology to our own situation” so that we could have a meta-perspective of what is going on (Wagner, 2000).

Reflexivity and the role of self

Reflexivity is the examination of one’s own beliefs and perceptions. Burnham (1986) described self-reflexivity as the manner in which practitioners evaluate and observe the effects of their own practice. It can be likened to a state of awareness in terms of how the self relates to members of systems, how it positions them or alters their viewpoint (Pelligrini, 2009).

The role of the self, that is the individual doing the work, plays a part in affecting the systems that we work with and support. This means that our presence, participation and own life stories, can influence the process and the people in a system. Unless we are aware of this, it could affect our ability to have a meta-perspective of our work, particularly when we are asking others systemic questions to elicit crucial information that could determine outcomes for a child or young person.

It is this level of awareness that should serve as a reminder to pause, work out what is happening for us, so that we mitigate the potential for bias, being positioned or aligning with members of a system due to reasons relating to ourselves.

Self-reflexivity can help us reflect on our identity and the narratives we create of others in relation to ourselves. There are other frameworks that can help us develop reflexive skills such as the Social GGRRAAACCEEESSS, which map differences in relation to social categorisations such as gender, class, race among others (Totsuka, 2014). This could help us become more aware of self-reflexivity in the context of how we relate to others and especially when using systemic questions.

As I continue to gain new knowledge, new possibilities form and I am reminded of the Somali proverb, ‘aqoon la’aan was iftiin la’aan’, in my mother tongue, ‘without knowledge there is no light’.

Burnham, C. W., & Nekvasil, H. (1986). Equilibrium properties of granite pegmatite magmas. American Mineralogist, 71 (3-4), 239-263.

Pellegrini, D. W. (2009). Applied systemic theory and educational psychology: Can the twain ever meet? Educational Psychology in Practice, 25 (3), 271-286.

Totsuka, Y. (2014). ‘Which aspects of social GGRRAAACCEEESSS grab you most?’ The social GGRRAAACCEEESSS exercise for a supervision group to promote therapists’ self‐reflexivity. Journal of family Therapy, 36 , 86-106.

Wagner, P. (2000). Consultation: Developing a comprehensive approach to service delivery. Educational Psychology in Practice, 16 (1), 9-18.

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About Hibak Mohamud

Hibak is currently a year 2 trainee educational psychologist at Cardiff University. Prior to doctoral training Hibak was an advisory teacher for children in need and children looked after. She is interested in anything and everything related to the human condition and feminism. Within the EP landscape, interests include the impact of intergenerational trauma, intersectionality and social mobility on CYP and their families.

View all posts by Hibak Mohamud

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Self-Reflexive Novels and Novelists

Self-Reflexive Novels and Novelists

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 19, 2019 • ( 0 )

After a few minutes of reading stories that are not selfreflexive, readers sometimes forget what they are doing and feel transported into the world of the book. Considering this experience naïve, authors of self-reflexive fictions thwart it by such devices as commenting on their own composition and focusing on storytellers as characters. To some extent, literary self-awareness has existed at least since Gilgamesh (c. 3000 b.c.e.), which mentions its being recorded on stone, but that single reference is not enough to make it very self-reflexive.

Truly self-reflexive fictions fall roughly into four levels of introspection: misguided self-consciousness, in which narrators examine their own words, seeking an elusive self-understanding; the Künstlerroman (artist’s novel), a novel about the education of a writer or some other analogous artist; “self-begetting” fiction, about its own creation; and extended Midrash, which focuses on its position within literature by combining narrative with literary criticism.

Self-reflexive authors tend to use language that is surprisingly contrived or casual, or to deviate from convention in countless other ways; this deviation highlights the text itself, thus making its portrayal of the world seem less real. This effect, called metafiction, is common to all self-reflexive works, though it is usually more extreme in each successive level.

J. D. Salinger

Misguided Self-consciousness

The malice-devoured narrator of Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevski, set a pattern for misguided self-consciousness in twentieth century fiction: A narrator analyzes his or her own text, indeed is often a would-be artist, but lacks sufficient insight. Irony thus divides author and narrator. For example, Humbert Humbert, the protagonist of Lolita (1955), by Vladimir Nabokov , wishes to immortalize statutory rape as serious literature; however, his account is classified in the preface as a psychological case, and the novel is ultimately darkly comic, ridiculing Humbert Humbert.

Comparably, The Great American Novel (1938), by Clyde Brion Davis, purports to be the diaries of a journalist who spends his whole obtuse life planning a never-written novel. The first-person voice in Grendel (1971), by John Gardner , becomes fascinated with a narrative poet but ultimately rejects art, morality, and any other order. In fictions primarily about misguided selfconsciousness, the monstrous or moronic narrator is an artist manqué.

The Künstlerroman

Near the start of Metamorphoses (second century c.e.; The Golden Ass , 1566), the author, Lucius Apuleius, predicts that its protagonist will have adventures worthy of being in a book. Although Apuleius writes the book, he declares his belief that the adventures themselves take precedence over the authorship of the story. Only with the nineteenth century did writers reach such a status that a genre arose to extol them—the Künstlerroman. Some of these works include Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1824), and Novalis’s Henry of Ofterdingen (1842).

Like many imitations of this type, Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel (1929), Of Time and the River (1935), The Web and the Rock (1939), and You Can’t Go Home Again (1940) are disguised autobiography, depicting an artist’s disaffection from contemporary society. More original are books that try to refresh the formula, such as Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf (1929). At first it seems to be a novel of misguided self-consciousness, the ravings of a mad diarist, but Hesse portrays outpourings of the unconscious as an artist’s proper education. Another variant of the formula is to counterpoise the perspectives of many writer characters, as in Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point (1928), André Gide’s The Counterfeiters (1927), or Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet (1962).

In the United States, authors frequently labor to keep self-reflection from turning into preciosity. Consequently, a popular variant of the formula is to disguise it as masculine adventure, as in Orson Scott Card’s Ender novels. The first, Ender’s Game (1985), seems to be about a prepubescent military leader, although his siblings become famous writers. In the second volume, Speaker for the Dead (1986), his education is shown to have prepared him to write the scriptures for a new religion. By the later volumes in the series, including Shadow of the Giant (2005), his powers as author have reached a magical dimension such that he can make characters literally live merely by imagining them. In the Künstlerroman, being a writer is deemed the ultimate expression of a person’s potential, whereas the following level, the self-begetting novel, celebrates the author’s godlike creation of a whole world.

The Self-begetting Novel

In an attempt to define all self-reflexive long fiction, Steven G. Kellman devised the term “self-begetting novel,” by which he means a work that appears to have been written by a character within that work. Although he admits that this is actually not the focus of all selfreflexive works, his phrase does suit those fictions that suggest self-enclosure by, for example, ending with references to their beginning.

Kellman sees self-begetting fiction as predominantly French, stemming from Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past (1922-1931, 1981). Henry Miller, in Tropic of Cancer (1934) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939), models his writer-protagonist’s resistance to devouring time on Proust’s work. Comparably, Jean-Paul Sartre ’s Nausea (1949) concludes with its main character, Antoine Roquentin, wishing to write a novel so that people might one day revere him the way he does a singer on a repeatedly heard record. As Kellman observes, the waitress who plays the record is named Madeleine, an allusion to Proust’s madeleine cake, whose taste triggered the protagonist’s paranormal, vivid recollection of his past. Significantly, Michel Butor, famous for his A Change of Heart (1958), and Samuel Beckett, author of Malone Dies ( 1956), and The Unnamable ( 1958), have written not only self-begetting fictions but also major essays on Proust .

The aforementioned Proust-like narratives are increasingly constricted and dissatisfied with life. Miller’s world is designedly more tawdry and sordid than that of Proust. Sartre ventures further still into squalor, inspiring the “nausea” of Roquentin. Two decades later, rather than being by class a writer-intellectual like Roquentin, the protagonist of A Change of Heart works for a typewriter company, and Beckett’s fictions concern barely human authors in nightmarish worlds. Kellman argues that Beckett’s parodies of the tradition bring it to a close.

Anne Rice’s best-selling The Tale of the Body Thief (1992), however, combines elements of this French tradition (such as slow movement, world-weariness, and prestigious allusion) with American self-begetting narrative (adventure, youthful perspective, and uncouth diction, as in J. D. Salinger ’s 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye ). Rice’s French American protagonist Lestat alternates between poetic monologues about his centuries-long self-disgust and slang-filled expressions of his immortal youth. As epigraph, Rice quotes William Butler Yeats’s poem “Sailing to Byzantium,” about the need to leave the transience of life for the eternity of art or of the supernatural. Lestat achieves both: He writes the book and chooses a vampiric identity, which seems the next step beyond Beckett’s almost dead narrators. In Sophie’s World (1996) by Jostein Gaarder, the protagonist is a woman who fears that she might be only a character in a book, a worry shared by Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman in David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System (1987).

More purely American is the deliberate vulgarity of Kurt Vonnegut ’s Slaughterhouse-Five: Or, The Children’s Crusade , a Duty-Dance with Death (1969), a fictionalized autobiography prefaced and repeatedly interrupted by the author’s discussion of its composition. To emphasize circularity, he begins the story by accurately predicting that the final word will be a bird’s song endlessly reheard by Billy Pilgrim, the time-shifting protagonist. ‘

A frequent metaphor in American self-begetting novels (including Rice’s) compares the self-begetting to physically sterile but psychologically productive sexual adventures. Two groundbreaking works of this sort are Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973). These forays are fraught with shame and angst. Roth’s persona ends by wondering if he has allowed the irrational to govern his writings, and Jong’s protagonist at least once dreads being caught in her own book. Sexual explicitness brought Fear of Flying its notoriety; nonetheless, it has much in common with more restrained, feminist, self-begetting novels such as Doris Lessing’s masterpiece The Golden Notebook (1962).

In The Golden Notebook , the protagonist writes a series of notebooks culminating in the novel itself. This shows the closeness of the notebook form and selfbegetting fiction. For example, Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge , also known as The Journal of My Other Self (1930), although not precisely circular, frequently doubles back on itself, as Brigge keeps referring to earlier sections. His final discussion of the Prodigal Son involves the idea of cyclic return.

Comparably, the diarylike structure of Kfbf Abe’s The Box Man (1974) is possibly solipsistic and pervaded by metaphoric use of the box as an emblem of self-containment. Despite the form’s fascination with autonomy, throughout the world variants of selfbegetting fiction take on local color, as N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968) does from the Native American chant that begins and ends it, making the whole into the eternally repeating song of its protagonist.

Kurt Vonnegut

Extended Midrash

Because of its use by such critics as Harold Bloom, the term “Midrash” has come to denote literary interpretation in narrative form. Before there was a critical term for it, extended Midrash became fashionable through James Joyce ’s Ulysses (1922), based on a massive analogy between itself and Homer’s Odyssey (c. 800 b.c.e.), though it links itself to a vast number of other works as well. For example, its character Stephen Dedalus (protagonist of Joyce’s serialized Künstlerroman of 1914- 1915 [1916 book], A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ) spends a long chapter discussing William Shakespeare’s Hamlet in a manner applicable to Ulysses itself.

In the same year that Joyce published the even more metafictional Finnegans Wake (1939), Flann O’Brien issued the almost equally experimental At Swim-Two- Birds , a parody of Irish literary tradition. The appearance of these works did not mark the opening of floodgates, since Ulysses —like extended Midrash—requires readers who are able to comprehend a vertiginous play of allusions. Consequently, works of this sort are hardly plentiful. Even the most erudite readers do not always esteem them. In Remembrance of Things Past , for example, Proust’s narrator condemned theorizing about art within a novel, likening it to leaving a price tag on a purchase.

Midrash first developed as an ancient form of Jewish biblical criticism. Some modern fictions continue applying Midrash to scriptures. For example, biblical hermeneutics are repeatedly foregrounded in Thomas Mann’s multivolume Joseph and His Brothers (1934) also known as The Tales of Jacob ), thereby underlining the fact that his retelling of Genesis is a speculation or even a fantasy. Its protagonist is himself both storyteller and dream interpreter, analogous to Mann himself. Comparably, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) contains a Midrash-like dream about a character named Salman who finds that the Quran is imperfect, destroying Salman’s belief in everything. This sense of unreality spreads into the dreamer’s life, eventually causing him to kill himself. He has been an actor in religious roles, a part of the public’s collective dreams, which mingle with their interpretation of scriptures. Caught in their pious fantasies, for much of the book he is transformed into an angel with a halo, a stereotyping that contributes to his suicidal depression.

Although stories about scriptures, myths, and fairy tales are the most common varieties of extended Midrash, authors’ involvement with academia has resulted in other uses. For example, to his college class, Vladimir Nabokov presented an analysis of an apartment’s structure in Franz Kafka’s story The Metamorphosis (1936). This analysis found its way into a poem, on which a crazed exegete then expatiates, in Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire (1962). From an even more abstract source—a structuralist conference—Italo Calvino gleaned the idea of arranging tarot cards at random. The narrators of his The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1976) connect these arrangements simultaneously to characters in the novel and to ones from world literature. Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1981) takes the selfreflectivity one step further: It is a novel about a reader trying to read a novel named If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler . In Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), the narrator’s obsessions with love and with scholarship on Gustave Flaubert converge.

Samuel R. Delany’ s series of fantasies, beginning with Tales of Nevèrÿon (1979), wanders among his personal concerns as a gay African American, the Conan parody he is writing, and the literary theories (particularly deconstruction) that inspire the narrative. In extended Midrash, nonfiction (criticism, autobiography) and fiction converge ambiguously, creating a feeling of uncertainty that life often gives as well.

Because of its ambiguities, ironies, and complexities, extended Midrash cannot be treated as if it were a simple statement of an author’s opinions. Milan Kundera, for example, objects vociferously when critics treat the essays within his fictions as if they were his own views. Rather, he insists that their function is to reveal how he invents his characters. For example, as he reveals in The Art of the Novel (1988), his ruminations on the Romantic tradition led to his devising an imaginary member of it, the character Jaromil of Life Is Elsewhere (1974). In that novel, Kundera’s remarks about Romanticism are meant to create this character from the outside rather than through the devices of psychological fiction. His practice has its roots in eighteenth century characterization through recognizable types. Nonetheless, Kundera’s version is significantly different from this conventional stereotyping. He not only breaks the illusion of reality by spending much of his novels explaining how he devises characters, but also, through meditations on language and literature, constructs new types and narratives about them. Certain words and scenes thus repeat as motifs.

Some comparable repetition pervades all self-reflexive fiction. As Ulysses and Finnegans Wake prove, despite this iteration, self-reflexive fiction can have great length without being necessarily tedious. Nonetheless, as Robert Scholes observes, self-reflexive fiction more commonly presents its complexity within the limits of the short novel, novella, or even short story, as in the metaphysical fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. Consequently, it tends toward unconventional, multilayered, integrated condensation reminiscent of experimental poetry.

Bibliography Currie, Mark, ed. Metafiction. New York: Longman, 1995. Doody, Margaret Anne. The True Story of the Novel. NewBrunswick, N.J.: RutgersUniversity Press, 1996. Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. New ed. New York: Methuen, 1984. Kawin, Bruce. The Mind of the Novel: Reflexive Fiction and the Ineffable. 1982.Newed. Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 2006. Kellman, Steven G. The Self-Begetting Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Scholes, Robert. Fabulation and Metafiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979. Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2003.

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Giddens – Modernity and Self Identity Chapter Two

Last Updated on February 26, 2017 by

A brief summary of Anthony Giddens’ Modernity and Self Identity – chapter two – in which he focuses on the psychological aspects of identity

Chapter 2 – The Self – Ontological Security and Existential Anxiety.

An account of self-identity should be based on a stratified model of the psychological make-up of the individual.

(Following Wittgenstein) to be human is to know what one is doing. Reflexive awareness is characteristic of all human action, and most people when asked can give a discursive account of why they are doing what they are doing.

The social conventions which are produced and reproduced through social interaction are reflexively monitored by individuals. However, much of what allows us to ‘go on’ with our daily lives is carried on at the level of practical consciousness – this is non-conscious, bound up with the taken-for-granted routines of daily life. We do not ‘keep in mind’ most of what we do most of the time, we just act in ways because they are conventional, we do not question many of our social conventions.

Ontological Security and Trust

Following Garfinkel, we interact in accordance with a number of conventions which essentially bracket out existential questions and allow us to ‘go on’ – we bracket out questions about the nature of time, space, continuity, identity and the self, which are fragile constructs, because if we were to subject the premises of our day to day assumptions about our attitudes to such things to philosophical enquiry, we would find that such ideas lack stable foundation.

Practical consciousness, with its day to day routines, help bracket out existential questions so that we are freed from a level of anxiety and so that we may ‘go on’ with life. We need to invest a level of trust in these routines so that we may be free from anxiety and are actually capable of living in the world. Trust involves both an emotional as well as a cognitive commitment to certain forms of practical consciousness.

Anxiety and Social Organisation

Existential Questions

To be ontologically secure is to possess, on the level of the unconscious and practical consciousness, ‘answers’ to fundamental existential questions.

There are four existential questions which the individual must answer (not cognitively, but through being in the world, at the level of practical consciousness and the unconscious). These are questions to do with:

Finitude and human life

It is the later which I’ll go into here:

A normal sense of self-identity has all three of the above – a sense of biographical continuity, a protective cocoon of practical consciousness which ‘filters out’ several options of how to be in the world and finally there is sufficient self-regard to sustain a sense of the self as ‘alive’ –a feeling of being in control of things in the object-world, at least to a certain extent.

The self is embodied, and in contemporary society the body is of particular importance in keeping a self-narrative going – such that we have developed regimes of control, most notably diets.

Shame derives when we cannot live up to the vision of the ideal self – when we fail to achieve our goals, but also when trust is violated and we have to go back to those fundamental questions such as ‘where do I belong’ or ‘who am I’?

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self-reflexive adjective

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What does the adjective self-reflexive mean?

There are two meanings listed in OED's entry for the adjective self-reflexive . See ‘Meaning & use’ for definitions, usage, and quotation evidence.

How common is the adjective self-reflexive ?

How is the adjective self-reflexive pronounced?

British english, u.s. english, where does the adjective self-reflexive come from.

Earliest known use

The earliest known use of the adjective self-reflexive is in the mid 1600s.

OED's earliest evidence for self-reflexive is from before 1651, in the writing of Nathaniel Culverwell, philosopher and theologian.

self-reflexive is formed within English, by derivation.

Etymons: self- prefix , reflexive adj.

Nearby entries

• self-reconstruction, n. 1861–
• self-recording, adj. 1838–
• self-reference, n. 1802–
• self-referent, adj. 1803–
• self-referential, adj. 1841–
• self-referral, n. 1939–
• self-referred, adj. 1808–
• self-referring, adj. 1804–
• self-reflection, n. 1624–
• self-reflective, adj. 1670–
• self-reflexive, adj. a1651–
• self-reflexiveness, n. 1893–
• self-reformation, n. 1613–
• self-regard, n. 1595–
• self-regardant, adj. 1832–
• self-regarding, adj. 1682–
• self-regardless, adj. 1808–
• self-regardlessness, n. 1838–
• self-regeneration, n. 1688–
• self-register, n. 1799–
• self-registering, adj. ?1793–

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Meaning & use

Pronunciation, compounds & derived words, entry history for self-reflexive, adj..

self-reflexive, adj. was revised in January 2018.

self-reflexive, adj. was last modified in July 2023.

oed.com is a living text, updated every three months. Modifications may include:

• further revisions to definitions, pronunciation, etymology, headwords, variant spellings, quotations, and dates;
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Revisions and additions of this kind were last incorporated into self-reflexive, adj. in July 2023.

Earlier versions of this entry were published in:

A Supplement to the OED, Volume IV (1986)

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OED Second Edition (1989)

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Factsheet for self-reflexive, adj., browse entry.