Self is a concept which is central to various social theories in which there are
different approaches to the description of the complexity of individual experience (see Elliot, 2007). It is a concept which is hard to define, and its definitions have caused many controversies among researchers. It is equated with (Leary and Tengney, 2003: 6—8):
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the person himself or herself (in everyday discourse),•
all or part of an individual’s personality (in everyday discourse),•
“the inner psychological entity that is the centre or subject of a person’s experience” (e.g., James, 1890),•
perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and beliefs about oneself,•
an “executive agent” regulating people’s behaviour (e.g., Baumeister, 1998). 124 The concept of selfThe first two meanings are now avoided in academic work as the self is thought to refer to something else than person or personality. While the other three are the most frequently used meanings of self, there are many others, because the term self or the prefix self- are used in many different contexts with many different meanings. Generally speaking, the self(-concept) is “the set of meanings we hold for ourselves when we look at ourselves” (Stets and Burke, 2003: 130). It is based on (Stets and Burke, 2003):
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our observations of ourselves (the self-image),•
our inferences about who we are from others’ behaviour towards us (the reflected self),•
our wishes and desires (the idealized self),•
our evaluations of ourselves (self-esteem).George Herbert Mead (1863—1931) (1934), who is thought to be one of the founders of symbolic interactionism, a theoretical approach to the self, claims that every individual has “a thing-like self” which can be distinguished from the immediate organism. It is a complex concept and can be looked at and analysed from different perspectives. On the one hand, it is presented as something belonging entirely to the individual, something responsible for his psychological structure, and shaped to some extent by the culture he belongs to. In a similar tone, Spiro (1993: 114) sees the self as “the cultural conception of some psychic entity or structure within the person.” According to Ashmore and Jussim, the self is “crucial to making sense of the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals” (1997: 11—12). But on the other hand, the self is “also important to explaining the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of [...] personal relationships and role relationships” (Ashmore and Jussim, 1997: 12). It appears as an important agent in the formation of societies and cultures (Ashmore and Jussim, 1997). Thus, the self is not only created by culture, but itself creates it. Its character and structure not only are the core of the individual’s personhood but also influence the nature of the individual’s relations with others and the character of greater collectivities of individuals such as societies.
The concept of self has been central in psychology since the 1890s, back to which can be dated the beginning of the scientific analysis of the concept. In 1890 William James published The Principles of Psychology. The main assumption of his work was that the self is a major determinant of human thought and behaviour, and as such can be taken into consideration as a subject of scientific analysis (see also Calkins (1900), “Psychology as science of selves”). The date of the publication of James’ seminal work also saw the birth of symbolic interactionism, the study of the relationship between self and society (Abercrombie et al., 2000). James Mark Baldwin (1897), Charles Horton Cooley (1902), and George Herbert Mead (1934) are three scholars whose works had a great impact on the formation of symbolic interactionism.
According to this school of thought, both the self and society are created and sustained through the process of symbolic communication between social actors. The self is shaped by social interaction, but it also has an impact on social reality. The self and society are mutually interdependent (Stets and Burke, 2003: 128; Mead, 1934; Stryker, 1980; Denzin, 1992). The self influences society through the individual’s behaviour. Society influences the self through language and meanings that make it possible for a person to take the role of the other, reflect on himself as an object, and participate in social interaction (Stets and Burke, 2003). As Mead claims in his famous work Mind, Self, and Society
from the Standpoint of the Social Behaviorist (1934), the social self is created
through interaction with other people. During the process of self creation it is language that plays a principal role. People, unlike other living creatures, communicate by means of symbols. That is why this approach to the self is called symbolic interactionism.
The social character of the self is said to lie in the fact that it can exist only in relationships with other selves (Mead, 1934/1972). That is, “each individual finds himself or herself in a web of complex social relations” (Dunning, 2003: 433). Understood in this way, the concept has a definitely interpersonal character.
Interactionists have taken two basic views of the self. In the first one, arising from the works of Mead, who extended Kant’s idea in which a transcendental “I” is contrasted with an empirical “me,” “the self became the structure that organized the flow of experience confronted and produced by the person” (Denzin, 1988: 67). William James (1890) also differentiated between the subjective and objective aspects of selfhood. For him, the principal form of the self is the knower, the subject, or the “I,” which is at the centre of consciousness. The self as subject interacts with the self as object, the “me.” The word self is reflexive, in the sense that it can be both subject and object. Every individual can take the attitude of others and act toward himself as they do. In other words, he can become an object to himself. Such an objective, impersonal attitude toward oneself is treated as an instance of rational conduct. The “me” is the social identity of which the “I” becomes conscious during the social development of the individual. However, Mead’s (1934) understanding of the concept of self differs from James’s in that his self is not mentalistic; it is rather a “social object which lies in the field of experience” (Denzin, 1992: 4). The “I” is present in memory. The “me” is in the other’s attitude towards the self; it represents the situation in which the self is. The “I” responds to this situation (Mead, 1934: 175). Thus, the self is a result of the social symbolic interaction. This understanding of the self has been maintained in the majority of interactionist theories of the self.
The second view of the self within the interactionalist tradition treats it as a linguistic structure; The “I” and the “me” are perceived as linguistic terms that 126 The concept of self
are given in the language of the subject. Denzin (1988: 67) claims that these two views of the self are incompatible and cannot be held simultaneously, as “the self and its component structures are either linguistic structures, in which case the language speaks for the subject, or the “I” and the “me” have to be assumed to exist alongside language, as primordial, deep structures of a structure called self.”
The first view is represented by Erving Goffman (see Section 5.2.5.). Goffman’s research interests ranged from urban anthropology, ethnology of communication and micro-sociology (with the study of social interaction) to sociolinguistics. Among the concepts he studied were self, face and ritual in social interaction. In spite of the diversity of topics he investigated and his unwillingness to subscribe to any particular trend, he is often placed in the symbolic interactionist tradition of sociological thought.
Anthony Giddens is a self theorist whose impact on sociological thought can be compared to that of Goffman. But unlike Goffman, Giddens (1991) claims that in the late Modern Age the self is a reflexive project. Self-identity is not a constant entity. It is rather a way of thinking about oneself which varies in different situations. Changes in an individual’s life are always related to the need for some psychological reorganization; the self is constructed and transformed in the reflexive process, involving both individual and social changes. The individual reflects on his own identity and tries to rework it. Reflexivity, according to Giddens (2006), is the relationship between knowledge and social life. It is a process of incessant self-defining based on observations and reflections on psychological and social information which could influence the individual’s choices (Elliot, 2007). In this way, the individual makes use of the knowledge to change his self-identity.
Self-identity does not refer merely to the persistence of the self over time, but “presumes reflexive awareness. It is what the individual is conscious ‘of ’ in the term ‘self-consciousness.’” It is “something that has to be routinely created and sustained in the reflexive activities of the individual” (Giddens, 1991: 52: cf. Goffman’s ego identity (1963/1986)). It is the knowledge of the self, its mental representation and its image in the individual’s eyes (Gajda, 2008). Discursively, self-identity can be defined in terms of the linguistic differentiation of “I”/“me”/“you” (or their equivalents). For Giddens (1991; Gajda, 2008), the relation of “I”/“me”/“you” is internal to the language, and not, as Mead claimed, one that connects the unsocialized part of the individual, the “I,” to the social self. It is through language that self-identity is expressed and created. The language is an integral element of the individual’s self-presentation.