PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPERCTIVE OF THE SELF

The self as cognitive construction:

1. Focuses on mental processes rather than observable behavior.

2. Assist individuals in assimilating new information to their existing knowledge.
3. Make appropriate modification to their existing intellectual framework to accommodate new
information.

William James Wundt: Father of scientific psychology. (1890)

“The essence of a person: is his thoughts, feelings and action, experiences, beliefs, values, principles
and relationship”

James’s theory of the self is divided into two main categories:

1. Me-self. Refers to the aspect of someone that came from that person’s experiences.
2. I-self. Is classified as the thinking self.

James broke the me-self into three sections:

1. Material self. It consists of things that belongs to us or we belong to. Examples are, our body,
our clothes, our family and other.
2. Social self. Are who we are in a given social situation. People may change how they act
defending on the situation they are in.
3. Spiritual self. Is more concrete and permanent than the other two selves. It is who we are at
the core, subjective and more intimate self. Spiritual self include things like their personality,
core values, and conscience that do not typically change throughout their lifetime.

Global versus differentiated models:

There had been a postulation about one’s self that may be fragmented into different parts or
different selves which may be in conflict or needs regulations from each other.

“Self-esteem is a person’s overall self-evaluation or sense of self-worth.”

Global self-esteem:

✓ Trait self-esteem.
✓ It is the way people feel about themselves.
✓ A decision people make about their worth as a person.

State self-esteem:

✓ Feelings of self-worth.
✓ Emotional reactions to positive or negative events where we feel good or bad about
ourselves during these situations or experience.

Domain specific self-esteem:

✓ Self-evaluation.
✓ How people evaluate their various abilities.
✓ Making distinction and differentiate on how good or bad people are in their specific physical
attributes, abilities and characteristics.
Real and Ideal Self.

Karen Horney: With her feminine psychology.

“The person has an Ideal, Actual, and Real Self.”

She believed that everyone experiences basic anxiety and that we develop numbers of strategies to
cope with basic anxiety.

Idealized self-image:
✓ Is an imaginary picture of the self as the processor of unlimited powers and superlative
qualities is developed.

Actual self:
✓ Often despised because it fails to fulfill the requirements of the idealized image.

Real self:
✓ Developed to deal with basic anxiety and find ways to resolving conflicts.

Carl Rogers: Person-centered theory.

Established the conception of the self. Involving, Real self (the self-concept), and Ideal self.

Real self (The self-concept):

✓ One’s being and one’s experiences.
✓ Where we feel, think and act involving our self-image.

Ideal Self:
✓ Revolves in goals and ambitions in life.
✓ What we admire in others, what our society promotes, what we think are in our best
interest.

A wide gap between real self and ideal self can:

✓ Indicates incongruence and can cause unhealthy personality.
✓ If the way I am is aligned with the way I want to be, then I will feel a sense of mental well-
being or peace of mind.
✓ The greater the gap, the greater is the level of distress.

Multiple versus unified selves:

✓ Identity that shifts and morphs in different situations and in response to different stimuli.
✓ Flexible sense of self.

Multiple selves:
✓ The capacities we carry within us from multiple relationship.
✓ Not discovered, but created.

Unified selves:
✓ Congruent, Cohesive, and consistent.
✓ Essentially connected with selfhood and identity.
✓ The ego remains at the helm of the mind, coherent, and organized, staying at the center.
TRUE VERSUS FALSE SELVES.

Donald W. Winnicott:
Distinguished what we called the “Real Self” and the “false self” in human personality.

True self is based on a sense of being in the experiencing body.

False self is a necessary defensive organization, survival kit, and a care taker. Means a threatened
person managed to survive.

True self:
✓ Has the sense of integrity.

False self:
✓ Used to comply with external rules, such as being polite.
✓ Following social codes.
✓ Seeks to anticipate demands of others in order to maintain the relationship.

• Healthy fake self:

Functional. Can be compliant but without the feeling that it has betrayed its true self.

• Unhealthy fake self:

Feeling of forced compliance.

SELF AS PROACTIVE AND AGENTIC.

Social cognitive theory:

1. takes an agentic view of personality.
2. Human have the capacity to control over their own lives.

Agent self:
✓ Executive functions.
✓ Make choices and utilize our control in situations and actions.
✓ Resides decision making, self-control, taking charge in situations and actively responding.

Human agency:
✓ Active process of exploring, manipulating, and influencing the environment in order to
attain desired outcomes.

• Intentionality:
Performs intentionally.

• Forethought:
Setting goals, anticipation of outcomes of actions, selection of behaviors to produce
desired outcomes and avoiding undesirable ones.

• Self-reactiveness:
Monitoring progress.
 • Self-reflectiveness:
Examination of own functioning. Evaluation of the effect of other people’s action on
them.

The four core features of human agency led to self-efficiency.

• Self-efficacy:
➢ Capable of performing acting that will produce a desired effect.
➢ The center of Bandura’s social cognitive theory.
➢ People with high self-efficacy, eager to accept challenges, and believe they
can overcome them.
➢ People with low self-efficacy, avoid challenges, believed experiences are
more challenging than they actually are.

Sigmund Freud:

Saw the self, its mental processes, and one’s behavior as the result of the interaction between the ID,
Ego, and Superego.

George Herbert Mead: (1934)

Theory of interactionism. Argued that the self is created and developed through human interaction.
Three reason why self and identity are social products:

1. We do not create ourselves out of nothing. Society helped in creating the foundation of who
we are and even if we make our choices.
2. Whether we like it or not, we actually need others to affirm and reinforce who we think we
are.
3. What we think is important to us may also have been influenced by what is important in our
society and historical context.

Carver and Scheier (1981):

Identified two types of self that we can be aware of:

1. The private self or your internal standards and private thoughts and feeling.
2. The public self or your public image commonly geared toward having a good presentation of
yourself to others.

Self-awareness also present us with at least three other self-schemas:

1. The actual self - is who we are at the moment.
2. The ideal self – is who we like to be.
3. The ought self – who you think you should be.

Types of social comparison:

1. The downward social comparison – We create a positive self-concept by comparing ourselves
to those who are worse off than us. By having the advantage, we raise our self-esteem.
2. The upward social comparison – Comparing our self with those better off than us. While it
can be a form of motivation, a lot of those who do these actually felt lower self-esteem as they
highlight more of their weakness or inequities.
Social comparison also entails what is called self-evaluation maintenance theory:

This state that we can feel threatened when someone out-performs us, especially when that person is
close to us. In this case, we actually react in three ways:

1. We distance ourselves from that person or redefined our relationship with them, silent
treatment, change of friends, redefine by being closer to that person, hoping that some
association may give him a certain kind of acknowledgement.
2. We may also reconsider the importance of the aspect or skill in which you were outperformed.
If you got beaten in a competition, you might think that it is nor for you and you will find a
hobby where you could excel, thus preserving your self-esteem.
3. We may also strengthen our resolve to improve that certain aspect of ourselves. Instead of
quitting the hobby you fail to win in a competition, you might join seminars, practice more
often, read books about it, and add more elements on it that makes it unique. Achieving your
goals through hard work may increase your self-esteem.

Baumeister, Smart, and Boden (1996): researchers of self-esteem.

Self-esteem should only be for rewarding good behavior and other achievements and not for the
purpose of merely trying to make children feel better about themselves or to appease them when they
get angry or sad.