THE SELF AS PERSON

Some of the most interesting and important questions about human motivation grow out of the distinction between those acts that are self-involved and those that are not. In everyday life, we know what it means for a decision to be disinterested, for an act to be unselfish, for a dream or a work of art to unfold without a sense of participation on the part of its creator. We also know the opposites of these events. Unfortunately, psychological theories of many sorts tend to destroy these distinctions by blurring the meaning of self. Thus we find altruism described as a form of selfishness; we seek personal rewards or escapes from punishment in every human act. We find ourselves talking of one’s unconscious self with no real effort to say what that means. We take care to distinguish among terms such as self and self-image and self-concept, but we fail to make clear the lines of demarcation. We sometimes write as though another person could know my self better than I can. We sometimes use self to refer to a hypothetical knower or a hypothetical doer or both, entities that seem to reside inside persons in some curious sense. I n other contexts we use it to refer to one’s body and in still others to the body image or the body concept, terms used and distinguished from one another by Fred A. Mettler in this monograph. To avoid semantic confusion, we have sometimes borrowed the Latin ego to refer to one of the many meanings and tried to keep self for another. The result of all this is a nearly complete lack of communication on issues of vital theoretical importance. I should like to review a few problems in the definition of the word self and then present a treatment that seems to me to avoid most of the difficulties while doing justice to most of the phenomena with which psychologists have concerned themselves. Such reflexive words as himself, herself, and myself, are easily confused with references to ‘his self,’ ‘her self,’ ‘my self’. We should have a happier time of it if we could avoid the ambiguity of sentences involving reflexive usage. In what follows, I shall use circumlocutions wherever possible to avoid that pitfall. It is doubly treacherous because the word body itself has two meanings. Let me start with that secondary complexity. We use the word body (and related words) to refer to what is essentially a scientific construct. For example, we say that certain psychic events take place in the nervous system, or that auditory masking occurs on the basilar membrane, or that particular structural characteristics are determined by genes having certain locations on certain chromosomes. Regardless of the understanding or validity with which we use such statements, they are elaborate inferences involving a complex structure of ideas; they refer to phenomena only indirectly and by implication. Whether they are biology or pseudobiology, they refer to an organism whose properties are frequently hypothetical and almost always subject to change as new scientific facts or purposes emerge. The body known to medical science or to