UNDERSTANDING THE SELF  brain.
The preliminary results from the
Introduction to Self-Understanding
Understanding oneself is essential to understand
behaviors and beliefs that affects ourselves and others
specifically in becoming effective and successful person
in life, work, and relationship.
self-understanding
 Provides a sense of purpose
 leads to healthier relationships
 helps harness your natural strength; and
 promotes confidence.
Personality
 comes from etymological derivative the word
“persona”, the theatrical masks worn by
Romans in Greek and Latin drama. Personality
also comes from the two Latin words “per” and
“sonare”, which literally means “to sound
through”.
 it is a relatively permanent traits and unique
characteristics that give both consistency and
individuality to a person’s behavior (Roberts &
Mroczek, 2008).
 plays a key role in affecting how people shape
their lives.
 the overall pattern or integration of a person’s
structure, modes of behavior, attitudes,
aptitudes, interests, intellectual abilities, and
many other distinguishable personality traits.
Determinants of Personality
 Environmental Factors of Personality. The
surroundings of an individual. It is counts the
social circle the individual has.
 Biological Factors of Personality.
 hereditary factors or genetic make-up of
the person that inherited from their
parents. This
 describes the tendency of the person to
appear and behave the way their parents
are.
 physical features include the overall
physical structure of a person: height,
weight, color,sex, beauty and body
language, etc.
electrical stimulation of the brain (ESB)
research gives indication that better
understanding of human personality and
behavior might come from the study of the
brain.
 Situational Factors of Personality. Alter a person’s
behavior and response from time to time.
 Cultural Factors. Culture is complex of these belief,
values, and techniques for dealing with the
environment which are shared among
contemporaries and transmitted by one generation
to the next.
Personality traits
 reflect people’s characteristic patterns
of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
The Five-Factor Model of Personality
 Openness. The tendency to appreciate new art,
ideas, values, feelings, and behaviors.
 Conscientiousness. The tendency to be careful, on-
time for appointments, to follow rules, and to be
hard working.
 Extraversion. The tendency to be talkative, sociable,
and to enjoy others; the tendency to have a
dominant style.
 Agreeableness. The tendency to agree and go along
with others rather than to assert one owns opinions
and choices.
 Neurotism. The tendency to be frequently
experience negative emotions such as anger, worry,
and sadness, as well as being interpersonally
sensitive.
Self-concept
 Understanding of who you are as a person
 is generally thought of as our individual perceptions
of our behavior,
 abilities, and unique characteristics—a mental
picture of who you are as a person.
Self-understanding
 understanding what your motives are when you act
THE SELF ACCORDING TO PHILOSOPHY
Philosophy
 is defined as the study of knowledge or wisdom
from its Latin roots, philo (love) and sophia
(wisdom).
 This field is also considered as “The Queen of All
Sciences” because every scientific discipline has
philosophical foundations.
Socrates
 philosopher from Athens, Greece and said to have
the greatest influence on European thought.
 known from the
 writings of his student Plato who became one of the
greatest philosophers of his time.
 self is dichotomous which means composed of two
things:
 The physical realm or the one that is
changeable, temporal, and imperfect. The best
example is the physical world. The physical
world is consisting of anything we sense – see,
smell, feel, hear, and taste. It is always changing
and deteriorating.
 The ideal realm is the one that is imperfect and
unchanging, eternal, and immortal. This
includes the intellectual essences of the
universe like the concept of beauty, truth, and
goodness. It is only the ideal forms themselves
that are perfect, unchanging, and eternal.
Plato
 A student of Socrates
 who introduced the idea of a three-part soul/self
that is composed of reason, physical appetite and
spirit or passion.
 The Reason enables human to think deeply,
make wise choices and achieve a true
understanding of eternal truths. Plato also
called this as divine essence.
 The physical Appetite is the basic biological
needs of human being such as hunger, thirst,
and sexual desire.
 The spirit or passion is the basic emotions of
human being such as love, anger, ambition,
aggressiveness and empathy.
St. Augustine
 the last of the great ancient philosophers whose
ideas were greatly Platonic.
 Like Plato, Augustine believed that the physical
body is different from the immortal soul.
 According to St. Augustine, the human nature is
composed of two realms:
 God as the source of all reality and truth.
Through mystical experience, man is capable of
knowing eternal truths. This is made possible
through the existence of the one eternal truth
which is God.
 The sinfulness of man. The cause of sin or evil is
an act of mans’ freewill. Moral goodness can
only be achieved through the grace of God.
 He also stated that real happiness can only be
found in God. For God is love and he created
humans for them to also love. Problems arise
because of the objects humans choose to love.
Rene Descartes
 A French philosopher, mathematician, and
considered the founder of modern philosophy.
 famous principle the “cogito, ergo sum—“I
think, therefore I exist” established his
philosophical views on “true knowledge” and
concept of self.
 He explained that in order to gain true
knowledge, one must doubt everything even
own existence. Doubting makes someone aware
that they are thinking being thus, they exist.
 The self is a dynamic entity that engages in
metal operations – thinking, reasoning, and
perceiving processes. In addition to this, self-
identity is dependent on the awareness in
engaging with those mental operations.
John Locke
 An English philosopher and physician and
famous in his concept of “Tabula Rasa” or Blank
Slate that assumes the nurture side of human
development.
 The self, according to Locke is consciousness.
 he discussed the reflective analysis of how an
individual may experience the self in everyday
living. He provided the following key points:
 1. To discover the nature of personal identity,
it is important to find out what it means to
be a person.
2. A person is a thinking, intelligent being who
has the abilities to reason and to reflect.
3. A person is also someone who considers
themselves to be the same thing in different
times and different places.
4. Consciousness as being aware that we are
thinking—always accompanies thinking and
is an essential part of the thinking process.
5. 5. Consciousness makes possible our belief
that we are the same identity in different
times and different places.
David Hume
 a Scottish philosopher and also an empiricist.
 His claim about self is quite controversial
because he assumed that there is no self!
 he said that, if we carefully examine the
 contents of [our] experience, we find that there
are only two distinct entities:
1. Impressions are the basic sensations of
our experience, the elemental data of
our minds: pain, pleasure, heat, cold,
happiness, grief, fear, exhilaration, and
so on.
2. Ideas are copies of impressions that
include thoughts and images that are
built up from our primary impressions
through a variety of relationships, but
because they are derivative copies of
impressions, they are once removed
from reality.
 Hume considered that the self does not exist
because all of the experiences that a person
may have are just perceptions and this includes
the perception of self.
Sigmund Freud
 well-known Australian psychologist and
considered as the Father and Founder of
Psychoanalysis.
 The dualistic view of self by Freud involves:
 The conscious self is governed by reality
principle. Here, the self is rational, practical,
and appropriate to the social environment.
 The unconscious self is governed by
pleasure principle. It is the self that is
aggressive, destructive, unrealistic and
instinctual.
Gilbert Ryle
 British analytical philosopher.
 the self is best understood as a pattern of behavior,
the tendency or disposition for a person to behave
in a certain way in certain circumstances.
Immanuel Kant
 A German Philosopher who made great
contribution to the fields of metaphysics,
epistemology, and ethics.
 an individual self makes the experience of the world
comprehensible because it is responsible for
synthesizing the discreet data of sense experience
into a meaningful whole.
 the self is the product of reason, a regulative
principle because the self regulates experience by
making unified experience possible and unlike
Hume, Kant’s self is not the object of consciousness,
but it makes the consciousness understandable and
unique.
Paul and Patricia Churchland
 American philosopher interested in the fields of
philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, cognitive
neurobiology, epistemology, and perception.
 self is a product of brain activity.
 Patricia Churchland claimed that man’s brain is
responsible for the identity known as self.
 Paul Churchland viewed the self from a materialistic
point of view, contending that in the final analysis
mental states are identical with, reducible to, or
explainable in terms of physical brain states.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
 A French philosopher and phenomenologist.
 He took a very different approach to the self and
the mind/body “problem.”
 According to him, the division between the “mind”
and the “body” is a product of confused thinking.
The self is experienced as a unity in which the
mental and physical are seamlessly woventogether.
 The Self According to Sociology and Anthropology
Sociology presents the self as a product of modern
society. It is the science that studies the development,
structure, interaction, and collective behavior of human
being.
Anthropology is the study of humanity. This broad field
takes an interdisciplinary approach to looking at human
culture, both past and present.
George Herbert Mead and the Social Self
 Mead is an American philosopher, sociologist, and
psychologist
 He is regarded as one of the founders of social
psychology and the American sociological tradition
in general.
 He claimed that the self is something which
undergoes development because it is not present
instantly at birth.
 The self-arises in the process of social experience.
one cannot experience their self alone; they need
other people to experience their self.
 Mead’s stages of self-formation:
1. Preparatory Stage. self develops over time
dependent on social interaction and social
experience. Understanding the symbols.
2. The Play Stage. Role-taking in the play stage
is the process of mentally assuming the
process of another
3. The Game Stage. the child now has the
ability to respond not just to one but
several members of his social environment.
 The self, according to Mead is not merely a passive
reflection of the generalized other. The two phases
of self:
1. the phase which reflects the attitude of the
generalized other or the “me”; and
2. the phase that responds to the attitude of
generalized other or the “I”.
The Self as a product of modern society among other
constructions
Georg Simmel
 Simmel was a German sociologist, philosopher, and
critic.
 Simmel proposed that there is something called
human nature that is innate to the individual.
 He also added that most of our social interactions
are individual motivations.
 The individual or subjective culture refers to the
ability to embrace, use, and feel culture.
 Objective culture is made up of elements that
become separated from the individual or group’s
control and identified as separate objects.
 Interrelated forces that tend to increase objective
culture:
 Urbanization is the process that moves
people from country to city living.
 Money creates a universal value system
wherein every commodity can be
understood.
The Self and Person in the Contemporary
Anthropology
 Archeology. Focus on the study of the past and
how it may have contributed to the present
ways of how people conduct their daily lives.
 Biological Anthropology. Focus on how the
human body adapts to the different earth
environments.
 Linguistic Anthropology. Focused on using
language as means to discover a group’s
manner of social interaction and their
worldview.
 Cultural Anthropology. Focused in knowing
what makes one group’s manner of living forms
an essential part of the member’s personal and
societal identity.
1. Symbols. These are the words,
gestures, pictures or objects that have
recognized or accepted meaning in a
particular culture.
2. Heroes. These are persons from the
past or present who have
characteristics that are important in
culture. They may be real of work of
fictions.
3. Rituals. These are activities participated
by a group of people for the fulfilment
of desired objectives and are concerned
to be socially essential.
4. Values. These are considered to be the
core of every culture. These are
unconscious, neither discuss or
observed, and can only be inferred from
 the way people act and react to
situations.
The Self Embedded in the Culture
Clifford Geertz
 an Anthropology Professor at the University of
Chicago.
 He studied different cultures and explored on
the conception of the self
 His cultural study about the description of self
in Bali is that the Balinese person is extremely
concerned not to present anything individual
(distinguishing him or her from others) in social
life but to enact exclusively a culturally
prescribed role or mask
The Self According to Psychology
Psychology is a scientific study of mental processes and
human behavior. It aims to describe, analyze, predict,
control human behavior in general.
Self is an essential construct in psychology because it
fulfills the goals of the discipline in studying human and
the reason for their action.
The Self as Cognitive Construction
Self-concept is defined as self-knowledge, a cognitive
structure that includes beliefs about personality traits,
physical characteristics, abilities, values, goals, and
roles, as well as the knowledge that an individual exist
as individuals.
Six domains related to self-concept (Dr. Bruce Bracken)
1. the social domain or the ability of the person to
interact with others
2. the competence domain or the ability to meet
the basic needs
3. the affect domain or the awareness of the
emotional states
4. the physical domain or the feelings about looks,
health, physical condition, and overall
appearance
5. academic domain or the success or
failure in the school
6. family domain or how well one function within
the family unit
William James and the Me-Self and I-Self
 the founder of functionalism.
 The Principles of Psychology (1890) self – the
knower (the pure or the I – Self) and the known
(the objective or the Me – Self)
Real and Ideal Self Carl Rogers
 founder of client-centered therapy
 The real self includes all those aspects of one's
identity that are perceived in awareness
 The ideal self is defined as one’s view of self as
one wishes to be
Multiple versus Unified Self
 Multiple Selves Theory, there are different
aspects of the self-exist in an individual. From
here, we can say that self is a whole consist of
parts, and these parts manifest themselves
when need arise.
 The experiential self or the theater of
consciousness is a domain of self that
defined as felt experience of being
 The private self-consciousness system
or the narrator/interpreter is a portion
of self that verbally narrates what is
happening and tries to make sense of
what is going on.
 the public self or Persona, the domain
of self that an individual show to the
public, and this interacts on how others
see an individual.
 Unified being is essentially connected to
consciousness, awareness, and agency. A well-
adjusted person is able to accept and
understood the success and failure that they
experienced.
True versus False Self
Donald Winnicott
 pediatrician in London who studied
Psychoanalysis with Melanie Klein
 false self is an alternative personality used to
protect an individual’s true identity or one’s
ability to “hide” the real self.
 true self has a sense of integrity and connected
wholeness that is rooted in early infancy. Can
 be achieved by good parenting that is not
necessarily a perfect parenting

The Self as Proactive and Agentic

Albert Bandura

 psychologist and Professor Emeritus of Social

Science in Psychology at Stanford University
 The Social Cognitive Theory asserts that a
person is both proactive and agentic, which
means that we have the capacity to exercise
control over our life
 This theory emphasized that human beings are
proactive, self-regulating, self-reflective, and
self-organizing.
 Self as proactive means an individual have
control in any situation by making things
happen.
 They act as agent in doing or making
themselves as they are.
 Self-efficacy beliefs determine how people feel,
think, motivate themselves and behave.