Self

Definition

In psychology, the notion of the self refers to a person's experience as a single, unitary, autonomous being that is separate from others, experienced with continuity through time and place. The experience of the self includes consciousness of one's physicality as well as one's inner character and emotional life.

People experience their selves in two senses. The first is as an active agent who acts on the world as well as being influenced by that world. This type of self is usually referred to as the I, and focuses on how people experience themselves as doers. The second is as an object of reflection and evaluation. In this type of self, people turn their attention to their physical and psychological attributes to contemplate the constellation of skills, traits, attitudes, opinions, and feelings that they may have. This type of self is referred to as the me, and focuses on how people observe themselves from the outside looking in, much like people monitor and contemplate the competence and character of other people.

History and Development

Everyone has an experience of self. That self, however, can be quite different from the one experienced [Page 786]by another person. For example, historians suggest that people in medieval times experienced themselves quite differently from the way people do today. Literature from that time suggests that people did not possess the rich interior lives that people experience today but, rather, equated a person's self with his or her public actions. Not until the 16th century, according to the literature of the time, did people conceive of an inner self whose thoughts and feelings might differ from the way he or she acted. Over time, that inner self would become to be considered as the individual's real self, which reflected who the person really is. Today, people feel their selves are more accurately revealed by their interior thoughts and feelings rather than by the actions they take (although people often reverse this stance in their opinions of others, thinking others are revealed more by their actions than by their feelings and beliefs they express about those actions).

People also differ in their experience of self as they age and develop. Indeed, evidence indicates that people are not born with a sense of self, but that the notion that one is a separate and autonomous being is one that the child must develop. For example, suppose you placed a large orange mark on the forehead of a toddler, and then put the toddler in front of a mirror, a procedure known as a mark test. Children don't begin to show any recognition that it is their self that they are seeing in the mirror, reaching for their own foreheads to touch the mark, until they are between 18 and 24 months old.

The senses of self that children develop may also differ from the mature one they will attain when they are older. In 1967, Morris Rosenberg asked 10year-olds to describe themselves in 10 sentences. The children tended to describe themselves in physical terms. Not until a few years later did children, at the edge of adolescence, began to describe themselves in terms of their personality and character. However, some psychologists believe that a psychological rather than a physical sense of self develops much earlier than 10 years old. For example, ask young children if someone would be a different person if that person's body were replaced by someone else's, and children generally say no. However, if that person's personality were replaced by another individual's personality, children argue that that person's self has now been changed.

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