Reflection paper Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words - 4

Reflection paper - Essay Example One can also read into these the notions of the self and the other that came into being as a result of the humanist movements of the Renaissance. The paper shall also look at the distinction between the mind and the body, as was propounded by Rene Descartes. These developments shall be looked into during the course of this paper. The developments that happened in this area have been significant in the development of later theories of the self and the unconscious, especially as they were articulated by the psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud. Plato’s concept of the self revolved around the notion of the division of the self into the rational, the spirit and the appetitive (Campbell, n.d.). This was accompanied by a privileging of the spirit. According to Plato, there was the level of the idea and the level of the material that needed to be addressed while analyzing the self and its relation to the rest of the cosmos. Everything on the earth had an equivalent in the realm of the idea. For instance, a table on the earth has an equivalent at the level of the idea. The table on earth was a mere copy of the one in the realm of the idea or the spirit and could and would never approach that one in terms of perfection. The self was thus determined in terms of its quality depending on the amount that it had invested in the spiritual aspect of the soul or the self. There is, thus, a privileging of the spirited over the rational whereas the rational is privileged over the appetitive. This division has great relevance for the understanding of the human psyche as it effects a difference in each and every human being on the basis of their dependence on the different aspects of the self. Therefore, it helps one understand that there are no fixed truths that can serve to explain the behavior of every person on the planet. The framework thus believes