CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background to the Study
What does it mean to be autotelic? Is autotelic an attribute of the individual, or do certain environmental factors facilitate or inhibit the enactment of the autotelic self? This study proposes that autotelic behaviour is the idiosyncratic perception that one is behaving in a way that is in accordance with his or her core being. As such, the sense of the autotelic is considered an important component of the self.
Autotelic is a word composed of two Greek roots: auto (self), and telos (goal). An autotelic activity is the one we engage with and do for one’s own sake because to experience it is the main goal. Applied to personality, autotelic denotes an individual who generally does things for their own sake, in other to achieve some latter external goal. The mark of the autotelic self is the ability to manage a rewarding balance between the play of challenge finding and the work of skill building.
Professor Mihaly Csikszentmilhalyi in late 20th century articulates the autotelic self. Csikszentmilhalyi asserts “…the autotelic self as a self that has self-contained goals” (207). For him, it is a self that is like a bounded container, a self- acting ego and self-contained entity. In other words, the idea of autotelic self is incorporated into self-sufficient, self-referential, self-deciphering, self-existent, self-defining, and self- serving totality.
Compatibly, Ikenna Dieke elucidates this kind of self (autotelic) in his Critical Essays on Alice Walker, he justifies “It is a self that fiercely asserts and guards the validity and integrity of her own experience, validity and integrity that requires no other validation either morally, socially, or culturally”. (204) This illustrates the unifying nature of autotelic self as an epitome of self-contained goals as is revealed most trenchantly in Kincaid and Walker’s The Autobiography of my Mother, Lucy, Annie John, At the Bottom of the RiverOn Stripping Bark from Myself, Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning. The sheer audacity of voice with which this self announces her presence on this earth is unmistakable. The announcement, which sounds almost bellicose, comes down like a peal of thunder. It is as if out of the nebulous depth of social conformism and conditioned selves, a new ego wrapped in sympathetic eros emerges to claim her place in the logos of the world. Ikenna Dieke in his Critical Essays on Alice Walker presents the core image of the autotelic personality through the speaker in one of the Alice Walker’s poems. The speaker depicts the notion of self in merely a special quality which is attributed to a pulsating non-conformist self. We read:
I find my own small person,
a standing self against the world.
An equality of wills,
I finally understand. (12)
The dialectical principle and the complexity inherent in autotelic experiences are often not only stimulated through the traits of a person but also through the environment. Autotelic self tends to have family, society, school, and environments which simultaneously provide challenge and support, independence and cooperation, flexibility and cohesion, integration and differentiation. Discussing the autotelic self, the researcher admits that the autotelic self is an analytical problem solving self, self-motivated personality and an intuitive action self-oriented being. In other words, it is a self that finds itself among other selves and is able to distinguish itself into a final emancipation of self.
