Not Seeing is Believing: the Role of Invisibility in Human Lives

Our life is full of invisibility that exerts power on our acts, relationships, and construction of the self. This paper discusses psychological processes in which invisibility plays an essential role, and constructs a typology of invisibility in society and in our lives. After a brief look at the crucial role of invisibility in prevailing theories of psychology, I first show how invisibility works in children's meaning constructions, the process in which their selves become clear for observers (the presentational self, Komatsu 2010). The development of children's meaning making is led by different types of invisibility concerning the children themselves. Second, I extend the discussion from the development of individuals to the role of socially regulated invisibility that controls our acts and relationships with others, introducing examples concerning religious belief in history. After these discussions, I present a hierarchical classification of invisibility from a simple spatial-temporal separation of concretely existing objects and ourselves to an abstract aspect of invisibility in which the object and its meaning are unclear.