Theories of the self

• TYPE OF PSYCHOLOGY: Personality; developmental psychology; social psychology; consciousness
• The self is a term that is widely used and variously defined. It has been examined by personality theorists as a central structure. Social cognitive psychology has explored the individual and interpersonal processes that influence such dimensions as self-systems, self-concept, self-consciousness, and self-efficacy. Recent research has challenged psychologists to rethink concepts of the self.

Introduction

The concept of the self was invoked in Western thought long before the advent of the discipline of psychology. During the Renaissance and Enlightenment, scholars often depicted humans as having a soul, spirit, or metaphysical essence. The famous argument by French Renaissance philosopher René Descartes, “I think, therefore I am,” placed its fundamental confidence in the assumption that the “I”—an active, unique identity—could be directly experienced through introspection and, therefore, trusted to exist. Descartes’s dualistic formulation of the mind-body relation set the stage for a number of assumptions about the self: that the self is an active, unitary, core structure of the person that belongs to and is consciously accessible to the individual.

During the Enlightenment, empiricist and associationist philosophers retained mind-body dualism but emphasized the material, objectively observable behaviors of the body, with more stress on observable information, as seen in the rephrasing of Descartes by Scottish philosopher David Hume: “I sense, therefore I am.” William James, philosopher and founder of American scientific psychology, recognized that the personal experience of one’s own stream of consciousness—the sense of “I” or subjectivity—is fleeting and fluid and less measurable than the objective “me” with its body, relationships, and belongings. However, he considered the self to be made up of both subjective and objective components, a perspective reflected in the various theories of the self present in contemporary psychology.

Many psychologists believe that there is an internal self in potentia that takes shape and grows as long as an adequate environment is provided. Others emphasize a social component, suggesting that a person's sense of self develops directly out of interpersonal interactions.

Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Theories

Sigmund Freud, the Austrian founder of psychoanalysis at the turn of the twentieth century, had little use in his tripartite theory of the psyche for the idea of self as one’s central identity. He conceptualized the as an important but secondary structure that mediates between the instincts of the and the strictures of the superego. However, other psychodynamic theorists of the first half of the twentieth century returned to the idea of a center of personality. Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, thought of the self as an important archetype—an energized symbol in the collective unconscious—that organizes and balances the contradictory influences of other and in fact transcends opposing forces within the psyche. The archetype is an inborn potential, while its actual development is informed by personal experiences. Karen Horney, a German psychiatrist, believed that each individual is born with a real self, containing healthy intrinsic potentials and capabilities. However, because of basic anxiety and a belief that one is unlovable, some individuals become alienated from their real selves and pursue an unrealistic, . Margaret Mahler, Hungarian-born pediatrician and psychoanalyst, described the separation-individuation process of the first three years of life, by which a child achieves individual personhood through psychologically separating from other people.

In contrast, Harry Stack Sullivan, an American psychiatrist, believed that personality and self can never be fully disconnected from interpersonal relations. His concept of the self-system is thus a set of enduring patterns of relating to others that avoids anxiety by striving for others’ approval (the “good-me”), avoiding their disapproval (the “bad-me”), and dissociating from whatever causes their revulsion (the “not-me”). Heinz Kohut, the Austrian founder of self psychology, also stressed that healthy selfhood is only attained through satisfying, empathically attuned interactions between infants and caregivers. Caregivers initially provide the self with a sense of goodness and strength and are, therefore, termed self-objects. The healthy self then develops its own ambitions, ideals, and skills, while deprivation from self-objects results in an injured self.

Developmental Theories

While these psychodynamic theorists focused on the emotional and relational dimensions of early development, others, such as German-born Erik H. Erikson, who trained in psychoanalysis with Anna Freud, also emphasized cognitive and identity development over the entire life span. Erikson’s theory of the stages of development, in which the ego confronts a series of psychosocial crises, recognized such childhood stages as autonomy versus shame and doubt, initiative versus guilt, and industry versus inferiority as important to ego development. However, it was his conceptualization of the during adolescence that has been highly influential on contemporary research on and self-esteem. By searching out and eventually choosing life strategies, values, and goals, the adolescent establishes a sense of inner assuredness and self-definition, which promotes healthy intimacy, productivity, and integration later in life. James Marcia, an American developmental psychologist, demonstrated in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s that adolescents who actively explore the question “Who am I?” and achieve their own sense of identity are more likely to have positive outcomes, including high self-esteem, self-direction, and mature relationships. Erikson, Marcia, and other developmental scholars recognize that the task of establishing identity can be facilitated or hampered by the values and traditions presented in families and social structures.

Humanistic and Existential Perspectives

Since the 1920s, humanistic and existential traditions have focused on the human being as a whole, and division into parts or structures is resisted insofar as it leads to dehumanizing the person. Thus, the self as such is often renamed or deemphasized in these theories. Gordon Allport, an American psychologist, used the concept of “proprium” to describe the unique, holistic organization of personality and awareness that develops over the life span, culminating in ownership of one’s own consciousness in adulthood. American psychologist Carl R. Rogers also deemphasized the role of self, which he thought was merely one differentiated aspect of one’s phenomenological, conscious experience. Rogers’s was a complex representation of the total organism as perceived through self-reflection. Abraham Maslow, another American psychologist, proposed that one of the most advanced human needs was the pull to be true to one’s own nature. While he called this pull “self-actualization,” he did not theorize the self to be a central structure but a unique range of capacities, talents, and activities. American existentialist psychologist Rollo May suggested that instead of thinking of a person as having a central, internal self that is separated from the world, a person should be considered to be a being-in-the-world (Dasein in German), who is in all ways related to the physical and especially the social environment.

The Self as a Regulator of Individual Processes

Beginning in the 1950s and accelerating through the turn of the twenty-first century, much research on personality has moved away from extensive personality theories toward empirically testable hypotheses. Models of the self focus on describing and observing the mental mechanisms by which individuals moderate and control their internal processes and their interactions with the world within specific social traditions and expectations.

Albert Bandura, the American founder of social cognitive psychology, conceptualizes the person as part of an interactive triad consisting of individual, behavior, and environment. Like radical , social cognitive theory assumes that all human behavior is ultimately caused by the external environment. However, Bandura also describes individuals as having cognitions with which they regulate their own behavior, through the establishment of guiding performance standards. His idea of the self-system consists of internal motivations, emotions, plans, and beliefs that are organized into three processes: self-observation, judgmental processes, and self-reaction. In self-observation, the individual consciously monitors their own behavior and describes it. Through judgmental processes, values are placed on the observations, according to personal standards internalized from past experience and comparisons to others. The self-reaction is the self-system’s way of punishing, rewarding, changing, or continuing with renewed motivation the behavior that has been self-observed.

Bandura’s concept of self-observation has been further refined in research on self-awareness, self-consciousness, and self-monitoring. American social psychologists such as Robert Wicklund, Arnold Buss, Mark Davis, and Stephen Franzoi have defined self-awareness as a state of focusing attention on oneself, while self-consciousness is defined as a trait-like tendency to spend time in the state of such self-awareness. Most such research distinguishes between private self-awareness or self-consciousness, in which a person attends to internal aspects of self such as thoughts and emotions, and public self-awareness or self-consciousness, in which a person attends to external aspects of self that can be observed by others, such as appearance, physical movements, and spoken words. Private self-awareness and self-consciousness have been associated with intense emotional responses, clear self-knowledge, and actions that are consistent with one’s own attitudes and values. Self-monitoring is related primarily to public self-consciousness and is described by American psychologist Mark Snyder as the tendency to engage in attempts to control how one is perceived in social interactions. Snyder’s research suggests that high self-monitors use current situations to guide their reactions more than do low self-monitors, which can lead to the relationships of high self-monitors being dependent on situations or activities.

Social cognitive theory has also directed research on self-efficacy, the belief that one will be capable of using one’s own behavior, knowledge, and skills to master a situation or overcome an obstacle. For example, Bandura showed in 1986 that people in recovery from a heart attack were more likely to follow an exercise regimen when they learned to see themselves as having physical efficacy. Perceived self-efficacy was demonstrated throughout the 1980s and 1990s as contributing to a wide range of behaviors, from weight loss to maternal competence to managerial decision making.

A final theme coming to prominence since the 1970s relates to identity and self-concept. Self-concept has been defined by American psychologist Roy Baumeister as one’s personal beliefs about oneself, including one’s attributes and traits and one’s self-esteem, which is based on self-evaluations. American developmental psychologists such as Jerome Kagan, Michael Lewis, and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn found that by their second year, children become capable of recognizing and cognitively representing as their own their actions, intentions, states, and competencies. With further development, people appear to form not one unitary self-concept but a collection of self-schemas or ideas about themselves in relation to specific domains such as school or work. American psychologist Hazel Markus has also found time to be a relevant dimension of self-concept, in that persons develop possible selves: detailed concepts of who they hope and fear to become in the future.

Identity is defined as who a person is, including not only the personal ideas in the self-concept but also the public perceptions of a person in their social context (for instance, birth name or roles in cultural institutions). Identity consists of two major features: continuity or sameness of the person over time, and differentiation of the person as unique compared to others and groups of others. As mentioned with regard to Erikson’s theory and Marcia’s research, adolescence has been demonstrated to be a primary stage for exploring the values, beliefs, and group memberships that constitute identity. However, identity continues to evolve during adulthood with changes in roles (such as student versus parent) and activities (work versus retirement).

Neuropsychological Perspectives

From a neuropsychological perspective, brain functions underlie all dimensions and activities of the self. Yet an important question is how the functioning of biophysical structures such as the brain and the nervous system can give rise to the self, which can be consciously experienced, either directly or through its activity. This question relies on the same that first arose with Descartes. One solution to this mental-physical divide proposed by such neuroscientists as Australian Sir John Eccles and Hungarian-born Michael Polanyi is the concept of emergent systems, or marginal control of lower systems by the organizational rules of higher systems. As the nervous system evolved into a complex set of structures, neural circuitry gained a concomitant complexity of organized functioning such that a new property, consciousness, emerged. This emergent property has capabilities and activities (such as the experience of mental images) that are a result of the organization of neural patterns but are not reducible to its component neural parts, much as water molecules have different qualities from those of hydrogen and oxygen atoms alone. Yet, consciousness and, thus, experience of the self are necessarily embodied in and constrained by these patterned brain and biological processes.

Thus, the sense of self as having continuity relies on the capacity of several structures of the brain (such as the and specialized areas of the association cortex) for forming, storing, and retrieving personal memories, as well as representations of background bodily and emotional states. A specific self-concept, as explored in social cognitive research, can only be developed through the organizational capacity of the prefrontal cortex to self-observe and construct cognitive . The prefrontal cortex is also involved in carrying out many actions attributed to the self, such as the planned action of and the techniques of presenting the self in a particular light, as in self-monitoring. Research such as that by Antonio Damasio, a Portuguese , indicates that when normal functioning of specific neural circuits is disturbed, deficits also occur in these experiences of self as knower and owner of mental and physical states. For example, with anosognosia, damage to the right somatosensory cortices impairs a person’s ability to be aware of damage to the body or associated problems in the functioning of the self. The body itself may become completely disowned by the person, and the unified sense of “me” is fractured.

Culture and Gender Differences

Empirical and theoretical scholarship since the 1970s has presented alternatives to the universality of the self across culture and gender and has challenged the utility of the as heretofore defined. Humans’ experiences of self have been found to vary substantially across cultures and gender, especially regarding the importance of independence and separation versus interdependence and relationship. For example, American psychologist Markus, Japanese psychologist Shinobu Kitayama, and their colleagues found in their 1991 and 1997 studies that the concept of an individualized self as uniquely differentiated from others is descriptive of Americans’ psychological experience. In contrast, Japanese personal experience is often more consistent with collective, relational roles, a conclusion that has been replicated with other predominantly collectivist cultures.

Feminist psychologists working at the Stone Center in Massachusetts have drawn on the developmental psychological work of Americans Nancy Chodorow and Carol Gilligan, observing that many women find the notion of a discrete and individualized self places too much emphasis on separation between people. This research group proposed the concept of self-in-relation to capture the extent to which one’s core sense of being is defined by one’s relationships with and commitments to other individuals. Likewise, as American developmental psychologist Mary Field Belenky and her colleagues interviewed women about their learning processes, they found that the sense of self as an individual, separate knower and speaker is only one stage of development. The individualist stage is often followed by respect for the ways one’s subjectivity is informed by empathy and intimacy with others. These empirical observations suggest that theories of the self should attend more carefully to the interplay of individual and interpersonal or social experience.

Postmodern, Dialogical, and Narrative Theories

The advancement since the 1970s of postmodernism has led many psychologists to recognize that persons construct their own realities through social rules, roles, and structures. Kenneth Gergen, an American social psychologist, proposed that the self gains its unity and identity from the consistency of the social roles a person plays. He pointed out that the more a person’s roles multiply and conflict, as is common in fast-paced technological societies, the less cohesive and the more obsolete the concept of self becomes. Many modern theories of the self focus on the fluid nature of the self and the impact of modern technology on self-perception.

New Zealand-born cognitive psychologist Rom Harré and American psychologists Edward Sampson and Frank Richardson have each advanced alternative theories in which the concept of self is still viable but that emphasize the necessity of recognizing the multiplicity of perspectives within a self. Drawing on the sociological traditions of symbolic interactionism, especially the looking-glass self of American sociologists George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley, these theorists saw the self as constructed only through intimate involvement in interpersonal interaction and especially language, which allow one to reflect on oneself and create the social bonds that define one as a self. The unique and specific manner with which one articulates one’s self appears to reflect not only one’s culture and social audience but also one’s beliefs and commitments about identity. The looking-glass self is an approach to self-concept theory that asserts the concept of self is constructed through social interactions and the way an individual believes others perceive them. As social media platforms and digital media gained popularity, the digital self became an important part of individuals’ identities. However, the looking-glass self and the digital self can lead to unhealthy self-perceptions.

American developmental psychologist Dan McAdams led research on the narratives people tell to describe and explain their lives to themselves and others, concluding that the linguistic construction of the self is a continuous and central task of the entire life span. Jerome Bruner, an American cognitive psychologist, suggested that through narrative, the various dimensions of self—public and private, structure and activity—become interrelated in meaningful stories and serve to promote both the growth of the individual and the survival of human culture.

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