I recently received an interesting question from Peter van Deerse, a musician in the Netherlands. With his permission, this was his note:
I have always been fascinated with your contribution concerning MI theory.
I really am interested in what your thoughts and feelings are when it comes to a big missing link in education in relation to personal and even mondial problems. This missing link in my view is the development of what you call the intra personal intelligence as an integral part of education and beyond.
I truly believe that when young people would (also) learn in school to reflect on what they feel, what they really want and from a spiritual point of view: who they are, the world would be a more organic place in which every human being is working as much as possible from their mission and strength.
It is too elaborate for me and probably for you that I write everything down.
My question is: what do you see as the benefit of implementing the development of the intra personal intelligence in relation to personal struggles, illness, being in your strength in your working life etc...So what is your vision and what made you write this aspect in particular?
I truly believe that what you have written is the key to more balance and consciousness and a better world with more wisdom and harmony.
My Response:
I have thought and written less about intrapersonal than about the other intelligences—so I am using your question as a catalyst for setting down some thoughts.
First, while I believe that there are psychological and neurological bases for all of the intelligences, intrapersonal intelligence is by far the most difficult to describe, understand, and nurture.
Indeed, while it's clearly been a human potential for thousands of years, it has really ballooned in importance only in the last few centuries, and chiefly in the West—defined as Europe, North America, and places influenced by these portions of the globe.
Another way to put this: the Greeks (Socrates) said "know thyself"—but that directive was not much heeded in the rest of the world for many centuries.
Painting with a very broad swathe, one could say that interest in oneself was catalyzed by the Renaissance of the 15th century and heightened by the Enlightenment of the 18th century. Medieval paintings were almost never signed, while the painter's signature became important in the last few centuries. We could even say the same about music, the area that you are familiar with—who wrote Gregorian chant? We don’t know. What composers did we know by name before Josquin de Pres (1450/1455? -1521)—we don't even know his date of birth for sure! By the time of Beethoven (1770-1827), his persona (and his person) had become fundamental to the world of music.
Freud ushered in the 20th century, and, with it, an obsession with the self (and also, to be fair, many useful concepts to think about persons in general, and oneself in particular—the movie maker, Woody Allen, has made much of that!) And even without Freud, in a complex modern industrial and post-industrial society, it's much more important to have knowledge of self, than in a communitarian era, where individuals hunted or farmed throughout their lives, and all decisions and signals were seen as coming from the gods, rather than from one's own society or one's own psyche.
I have sometimes quipped that "Only your psychiatrist knows for sure whether you have good intrapersonal intelligence." And indeed, nowadays, most of us think that we know ourselves but that knowledge can be very faulty. One purpose of a 360 degree evaluation carried out across an office is to reveal to you, aspects of yourself which you may not be aware of. But even if the rest of the world were constituted by Mary Trump—the niece who revealed aspects of her uncle Donald's psyche to the rest of the world—we can be quite sure that it would not have changed Donald Trump's view of himself—he thinks that he knows himself (and others) thoroughly.
Having given this background, let me know return to your question. In our time, it's certainly important that each of us know something about ourselves, and we should make use of useful comments and insights from others—certainly, from individuals who are clinically trained, but also from family and trusted friends. I have certainly learned lots about myself without having to lie on a couch for an hour each week and pay significant amounts of money.
But like every other intelligence, intrapersonal intelligence can be used benevolently or malevolently. A thief or even a murderer could be more effective if he or she understood his or her personality, moods, motivations better.
In our recent study of colleges, The Real World of College (link here), Wendy Fischman and I report an astonishing finding: that American college students use the word "I" or "me” eleven times more frequently than "we" or "us". Clearly there is intrapersonal interest, even preoccupation!—but that is not necessarily benevolent for the society (Fischman and I would say it's not) and it does not mean that our understanding of self is necessarily more accurate, it's just that our preoccupation with ourselves is prevalent.
I am quite confident that this empirical result would be less true in Japan—which is much more of a "we" society, than an "I" society—it's a society that has been far more interested in Western sociology than in Western psychology. China is somewhere in between, though with its Confucian roots, there is probably a large segment of the society that is more similar to Kyoto than to Chicago or California—but these are empirical matters, not ones to be speculated about casually.
Finally, how about your question of knowledge of providing support at times of troubles, difficulties? As a complete Westerner, I think that such knowledge is useful, and indeed, I recommend Michael Ignatieff's recent book, On Consolation, as a way for people in the Western tradition to deal with death, dying, and illness. But I believe that support at such times can come as well from religion—and from religious figures and texts and rituals. So I would not necessarily mandate a course on "I"—even if that course were quite sensibly and sensitively designed and executed. (This is one of the problems of the field of positive psychology, but that’s an issue for another day).
I am not sure that my response is helpful, or even that it is directly responsive to the question that you raised—but I am indebted to you for helping me to think about and articulate my current thoughts about intrapersonal intelligence.