**2. The self and the culture**

Throughout the humanity history we have witnessed a revolution about the reference values, with respect to the man role in culture and in social development. While Western culture fathers (the Greeks and Jews), believed that the supreme life target was man perfection, modern human beings often look more and more to things perfection, and to the knowledge of methods to produce these perfect objects. The long and complex transition from a "humanistic" society to a "technological" society have repercussions on the personality development (and therefore on the human self development [2]), since it embodies the process through which society transmits its cultural system from one generation to another, creating

values, style of life ideals, social roles, habits and customs, language and expressive behaviors. In this regard, during the twentieth century second half, both in the anthropological field and in the psychological area, particular attention was given to the culture study, realizing how it has a strong influence on people's life, making available different belief systems and values. The questions that man think are therefore affected by his own context: it influences individual experiences, how he perceives reality, how to satisfy fundamental needs, etc. The culture, which in the past was considered an outside objective frame, today is conceived as a sort of individual "internal" dimension, like a part of human self, and as a constitutive basis of individual behaviors: this makes us think on how the limits between "interior spaces" and "exterior spaces" are blurred and mixed. Thus, we can ask ourselves how profound is the culture influence on human being? We know, for example, that the probability that certain emotional experiences became conscious depends from the specific culture context in which they are experienced. According to this point of view, we can therefore affirm that an experience for which a specific language does not have a corresponding word to represent it rarely comes to man's awareness: language embodies a certain disposition towards life, and can therefore be defined as an expression of a certain way of experiencing life [1]. According to this perspective, the psycholinguistic analysis that can be made with respect to verbs and nouns use in various languages is really interesting. The cultural paradigm shift from the self development to the technology development is represented by the growing number of people that today prefer to think in terms of having something, rather than in terms of being and acting: there is actually a preference for the use of nouns, instead a preference for verbs. Language, grammar, and words are indicative of the way and perspective of our life experience, and establish which kind of experiences can have access to our awareness (if there is not a term to indicate an experience in our language is difficult to became aware of this specific aspect). It is often believed a language differs from another only because it uses different words to mean the same thing, erroneously assuming some thought pattern and rules are universal, but this fact is not true because thought is influenced by a cultural system, which can show some conflicting logics with other cultural systems logics; thus, the individual often cannot afford to be aware of thoughts and feelings that are incompatible with his cultural models (according to which he grew up), and he is therefore unconsciously forced to remove them. About this topic, Fromm states that the conscience represents the social man and the contingent limitations imposed by his historical situation and context. In summary, we can note that the psychological functioning is therefore "intrinsically cultural", since persons reason about the world using language and communication systems that acquire in their own culture, which are the product of human generations' cultural experience; furthermore, we must focus that the themes to which individuals think about have a personal meaning within systems of meaning, based precisely on cultural and social practices, which are different according to context. We must point out, moreover, that the cultures are built by the same people who acquire the sense of being individuals from this same culture: the personality (the self) and culture structure each other; as a matter of fact, the proper significant culture customs and psychological processes of each of its members are mutually interacting [2]. In this regard, for example, we can also assert that there are collectivist cultures and individualist cultures, present more frequently respectively in East and West countries: how are they related to the constitution of the Self, and vice versa? The collectivist cultures place emphasis on membership, and on the shared rules that govern the community relationships: the person often define himself as part of the social community, since there is an intense emotional attachment to the largest social group to which he belong (not only to the family, but also to wider society); in this context, the self is often very

#### *The Real Self and the Ideal Self DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.98194*

focused on cooperation and social control. Therefore, people who refer to a collectivistic perspective more frequently pay attention to others and attribute greater relevance to contextual and external factors to explain a certain individual action; instead, individualistic cultures, often give emphasis on the "ego", emphasizing the importance of personal autonomy, success and self-sufficiency: the self is often defined as an distinct entity from the social group in which it is contextualized; this perspective encourages to reach personal objectives. In this cultural framework, the personality is more oriented towards autonomy and competition values. People who refer to an individualistic perspective frequently give importance to individual responsibility in the explanation of the behavior causes [2]. Finally we have to state that the idea that Oriental culture and Westerners culture have created a sense of a more interdependent human self (in the former case), and a a sense of more independent self (in the second case), is blurred by the globalization phenomenon. This dynamic has been made possible by technological achievements (especially telematic ones), and has involved the entire planet in many areas: international exchanges have increased at an economic level and, consequently, also political, social and cultural one. This fact has led to a new worldwide phenomena emergence, both in the East and in the West countries: individual and context are not independent, but are interacting with each other in a dynamic way, and they really create each other [2]. The individual considered isolated is therefore a pure abstraction: he is a part of an articulated relationship system not only with the physical environment, but also with the socio-cultural and relational environment that surrounds him: we can therefore also ask, today, how hyper-modern era influences the ideal self and the real self, in various contexts, and vice versa.
