DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY AND THE SELF

To dress correctly for the Bicentennial, psychologists are required t o sport the tasteful color combination of pride and optimism. The arrival of the “Self” would rudely shatter the atmosphere, for this unwelcome guest wears a tattered and outre costume. She used t o be the life and soul of the party; now people whisper behind her back. “She’s charming on the surface, but after a while you find there’s n o substance t o her.” If two of the early presidents of the A.P.A., Mary Whiton Calkins and James Mark Baldwin, proclaimed psychology as “the science of selves,” so much the worse for the A.P.A. Like its political past, America’s developmental interpretations of the Self are founded upon distinctly different intellectual traditions originating in seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe. The British empiricism of Locke and Hume, which was most significant for experimental psychology and the study of individual differences, also exerted a formative influence upon the psychology of the Self as expressed by American functionalists, most notably Allport. In this tradition, the Self was conceived as arising from experience through a clustering of impressions. The idea of such an empirical Self constituted an intellectual reaction t o the rational Self of Descartes. The Self seen from this latter perspective represents the core that makes any knowledge of the person possible at all; the concrete experiences appear as mere symptoms documenting and demonstrating what is known t o begin with. The autonomous Self, although in a more moderate form, entered into the logical a-priorism of Kant, and through Kant influenced American developmental interpretations. Both orientations, British empiricism and Continental rationalism, remained individual-centered (or rather, “Self-centered”). The social determinants were treated as only secondary. Moreover, both orientations were a-developmental and a-historical. Thus, viewing the Self in its intimate interdependence with social conditions appears t o be one of the most original contributions of American sociologists, most conspicuously, the symbolic interactionists. This idea also had its predecessors: proponents of idealistic and materialistic dialecticism like Hegel, Marx, and Engels. Departing from these philosophical orientations, however, symbolic interactionism stripped the dialectics of its concrete historical basis, thus making its interpretation more congruent with the synchronic viewpoints of traditional philosophy and sciences, most notably with the theories of Self originating from British empiricism and Continental rationalism. I t remains an important and uncompleted task t o elucidate the historical and developmental aspects of the study of Self.