Final Study Guide - Readings and Lectures - Adler Adler The...

Adler & Adler: “The Glorified Self: The Aggrandizement and the Construction of
the Self”
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This paper is to describe the previously unarticulated form of self-identity: the
“glorified” which arises when individuals become the focus of intense
interpersonal and media attention, leading to their achieving celebrity
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There is a dynamic contradiction between the internal and external pressures
become resolved (highlights the ascendance of an unintended self-identity in the
face of considerable resistance)
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glorified self: a greedy self, seeking to ascend in importance and to cast aside
other dimensions that as it grows
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individuals become embroiled in inner conflict between their desire for
recognition, flattery...etc.. and the inclination to keep feeding these elements and
the socialization to fight them
I. Settings and Methods
• Five year period, talked to assistant coach, coach’s wife, and players
medium (6,000) private university in mid-south, mostly white, suburban middle
class student population
• top 40 NCAA I schools, 70% black players
The Experience of Glory
A. The Reflected Self
As a result to the face-to-face interaction, they began experiencing the Cooley “looking
glass” self, where team members form selves that are a combination of cognitive and
affective forces, although individuals react intellectually to the impressions they perceive
others forming about them, they develop emotional reactions about these judgments
• team members perceived how people treated them; subsequently they formed
reactions to that treatment
• they were very sought out by strangers, treated with respect and awe (but these
interactions carried a lot of stylized but empty words
• they experienced the “Midas touch” where they spoke to the boosters, thought
that everybody wanted to talk to them and they had fame that everybody wanted
B. The Media Self
Media Self: They were in a state of “public self-consciousness” in which the self comes
to be perceived as a social actor who serves as a stimulus for other’s behavior
• the good boys were expected to be the good boys, charismatic selves, etc.
Interesting: The more they interacted with people through their dramaturgical induced
selves the more they became comfortable with those selves
Behavior turned from role playing into role making
Self-Aggrandizement
• There was a new self added to their repertoire: a glorified self
• Although they wanted to bask in the glory, they felt hesitant and guilty
• They struggled wit8h factors inhibiting their self aggrandizement and it shows us
how they ultimately developed glorified selves

A. Inhibiting Factors
• Norms in society dictate a more modest, more self effacing stance, and players
worked hard to suppress their feelings of self-aggrandizement
• they drew on their own feelings of fear and insecurity
• they tried to discount the flattery of others as exaggerated or false
• the athlete’s feelings of superiority were constrained by the actions of the coach