What are theories 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, 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 ego as an important but secondary structure
that mediates between the instincts of the id 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 archetypes 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 idealized self.
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,
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 identity crisis
during adolescence that has been highly influential on contemporary research on
self-concept 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 serves to promote 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 self-image 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 behaviorism, 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 his or her 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 traitlike 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 his or her 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 mind-body problem 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 hippocampus 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 schemas. The prefrontal cortex is also involved in carrying out many
actions attributed to the self, such as the planned action of self-efficacy and the
techniques of presenting the self in a particular light, as in self-monitoring.
Research such as that by Antonio Damasio, an American neurologist, 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 construct 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, proposes that the
self gains its unity and identity from the consistency of the social roles a
person plays. He points 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.

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 see 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.

American developmental psychologist Dan McAdams has 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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