•

NATURE OF THE SELF

By George Herbert Mead
• –to have a self is to have the capacity to observe,
respond to and
• direct one's own behaviour.
• One can behave towards oneself as one can towards
any other social object.
• One can evaluate, blame, encourage and despair about
oneself.
• One can alter one's behaviour.
• One is behaving toward oneself in the context of
interaction with others.
• 2. Once child begins to function symbolically,
play activities become more important.

• 3. Then, organized games follows. One must

generalize the expectations of the others and
act on that basis. When the child becomes
member of group, then he starts to achieve
self- consciousness.
“The self is any idea or systems
of ideas which is associated with
the appropriate attitude we call
self-feeling”
CHARLES H. COOLEY
looking-glass composed of 3 principal
elements: (not how we appear but
HOW WE IMAGINE)

• 1. imagination of appearance to others

• 2. imagination of his judgment of that
appearance
• 3. some sort of self-feeling
(pride/mortification)
 The individual’s SELF-CONCEPT is his
picture of himself –his views of himself as
distinct from other persons and things.
Self-concept incorporates:
1. SELF-IDENTITY
–his perceptions of
who he is. Child is
helped to see
himself as a person
separate from
other people or
things.
2. SELF-EVALUATION –his feelings
of worth and adequacy as child
develops self-identity, he begins
to make value judgments about
himself. He may see himself as
superior/ inferior,
worthy/unworthy, adequate/
inadequate depending on the way
others view him because he has
no other standards except those.
3. SELF-IDEAL –his picture of the person he
could be & should be the individual’s self-
concept includes not only a sense of personal
identity & worth but also of aspiration for
accomplishment & growth (influenced by
parents, friends, neighbours, peers, &
society/group they belong share common
standards & have similar conceptions of ideal
self)
• 4. SELF-DIRECTION –
“decider subsystem”
controls process of the
units of system the leader
who serves as director for
interpreting,
coordinating, planning,
and decision-making
becomes “operation
center” of the personality
and a highly selective
force in shaping
subsequent behaviour
As one author puts it:

“It’s difficult for me to describe what

kind of person I am, because a part of
someone is, at my stage, made up of
what they want to be. Like that I could
describe myself partly in terms of what I
want to be.”
Self- direction

“One behavior systems theorist James G. Miller

point out that each living system contains what
he describes as a
“decider subsystem”.