Presenter: |
John H. Riker, PhD |
Chair: |
Joanne S. Moran, PhD |
Self Psychology Page | 21th Conference
Program
This paper claims that college students are having difficulty developing the personal, emotional, and moral maturity of self needed to enter the adult world and that self psychology can both elucidate why this phenomenon is occurring and be used to alleviate the situation. The first part describes the symptoms of developmental arrest in students and identifies the particular conditions of current college life that cause injuries to self functioning. These include the loss of selfobjects in going to and graduating from college, the increasing lack of adult contact and the possibility of mentoring, the difficulty of sustaining love relationships, and the omnipresence of drugs and alcohol in social life. The second part describes an experiment in which I met with a group of first-year students weekly for a year and a half, educated them in the concepts of self psychology, and allowed them to use the group as a restorative selfobject. The results were astonishing in terms of what the students went on to accomplish in their college careers. I believe that the methods I used to restore self functioning can be transferred to most institutions in which stresses cause temporary impairments to the self.