Identity Development and Personal Fable
As mentioned, the Personal fable is an important process that every adolescent experiences and it plays an important role in the adolescent's self-perception in all life stages. Research has shown the personal fable to have an impact on identity development specifically. When it comes to identity, adolescent egocentrism is considered an important construct, especially given its relation to self-compassion. Adolescents gradually develop cognitive skills which allow them to understand or speculate what others are thinking. In other words, adolescents develop theory of mind.
Specifically, theory of mind is an individual's ability to understand another's actions, thoughts, desires, and to hypothesize on their intentions. This construct has been found to emerge once a child reaching three to four years of age and continues to develop until adolescence. Müge Artar conducted a study comparing adolescents identified as having higher levels of egocentrism with adolescents exhibiting more emotional inference and looked into their relationships with their parents. An adolescent's ability to infer a family member's thoughts is considered an important developmental stage. Social-emotional questions were based on the adolescents’ understanding of their mother and father’s beliefs. Participants were asked questions such as “When you have problems with your mother/father, what does your mother/father feel? What do you feel? Does your mother/father think what you feel?” Most of the adolescents perceived their relationship with parents relevantly and also accurately perceived images about family network.
It can be inferred then that theory of mind acts as a counter to egocentrism. Where egocentrism revolves around the individual and everything in relation to one's own perspective, theory of mind allows for the inclusion of the fact that other people have differing viewpoints.
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Famous quotes containing the words identity, development, personal and/or fable:
“I look for the new Teacher that shall follow so far those shining laws that he shall see them come full circle; shall see their rounding complete grace; shall see the world to be the mirror of the soul; shall see the identity of the law of gravitation with purity of the heart; and shall show that the Ought, that Duty, is one thing with Science, with Beauty, and with Joy.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters “woman’s peculiar sphere,” her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)
“But there’s another knowledge that my heart destroys
As the fox in the old fable destroyed the Spartan boy’s
Because it proves that things both can and cannot be;
That the swordsmen and the ladies can still keep company;
Can pay the poet for a verse and hear the fiddle sound,
That I am still their servant though all are underground.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)