Although it has been a subject of fascination for thousands of years, self is an ill-defined concept in philosophy and psychology, generally taken to refer vaguely to the "inner" being of the individual that is, at times, both the subject and object of experience. It should be seen as distinct from both person (the totality of an individual being) and identity (an individual's sense of who they are in relation to a social and physical world). When people refer to the "problem" of the self, they are, in fact, referring to a great many problems. Is there really a self at all? What sort of methodology should be used to investigate it? Does a person have one self or many selves? Where is the self located? How does the self develop? How does one self interact with another? What is broadly agreed is that the experience of self is somewhat paradoxical since the self can appear to be simultaneously unified yet fragmented, continuous yet disparate, immanent yet transcendent, apparent yet elusive, private and personal yet social. These problems, as they arise in the behavioral sciences, share a history with the world's religions. Theologians and philosophers alike have attempted to address them.

The self in psychology

In the 1890's psychologist and philosopher William James (1842–1910) proposed that the self-as-subject, the I-self, be differentiated from the self-as-object, the me-self. His model contended that the me-self, which is created from an individual's subjective interpretation of experience, could be subdivided into three components: the bodily, material self at the bottom; the social self in the middle; and the spiritual self, the extremely precious enduring dispositions and moral constitution of a person, at the top. The elusive I-self, he proposed, is an active agent that is able to shape its own destiny and is responsible for perceived continuity and the construction of the me-self.

James's differentiation of "me" and "I" remains intrinsically attractive to many theorists, but although an abundance of complex structural and systemic models of the self have been proposed, the very existence of the I-self is still frequently questioned. Empirical and theoretical psychology, however, has generally taken each individual's development of a sense of an inner self for granted.

One way of categorising models of the self is through their division into global unidimensional models, which emphasize a single factor such as the importance of self-esteem for the maintenance of the self, and multidimensional models, which implicate a network of hierarchically organized cognitive structures that collectively constitute the self. Though these two types are not strictly antithetical, there has been a dramatic shift towards hierarchical models in recent years and the self is more often discussed as a complex system rather than a unitary entity.

On these lines, the psychologist George Kelly argued that the self-system should be likened to a theory constructed by the individual, which serves to organize their relationship to the world. Some information processing models suppose that the individual's cognitive experiential organization results in the formation of self-schemata, which are constructs that serve both to give a sense of self and to guide and govern future behavior. Others argue that the components of what is generally known as the self are interconnected so as to form a loosely integrated whole giving the illusion of continuity but continuing to exist as a multiplicity, each retaining the capacity for a degree of autonomous functioning—in the cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky's terms, a "society of mind." A common way of accounting for the apparent sense of an inner self, whilst remaining ambivalent about its literal existence, is to appeal to the idea of narratisation—the notion that what is called a self is actually just a dynamic process of integrating a personal experiential history into a coherent unified life story. The autobiographical narrative so constructed effectively amounts to a person's unique identity, but this does not equate to some mysterious transcendent inner entity. Many have argued, however, that the demands of living in postmodern society raise certain difficulties for an individual's construction of a singular coherent identity; the essential fragmentation of the self is a common theme in postmodern thought.

Social psychology is concerned not so much with the individual representation and functioning of the self but with its genesis and development in a social context. In William James's opinion, there was not one single "social self" but, rather, a multiplicity, each of which could find expression at any one time. This idea of multiple selves that are essentially relational, situation-specific constructs arising from social encounters, is a central feature of social psychological models. In 1902 sociologist Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929) and, subsequently in the 1920s, philosopher and social psychologist George Herbert Mead (1863–1931), developed perspectives in which an individual's social interactions in the form of linguistic exchanges (symbolic interactions) were deemed to be central to the construction of self. Indeed the theory of the social construction of the self finds its most straightforward expression in Cooley's famous concept of the "looking-glass self," the idea that an individual comes to know themselves only by assimilating the reactions of others towards oneself into a self-image. Here, the "me" and "I" components of the self are deemed to be interdependent, each continuously redefining the other. Modern empirical social psychology has identified a variety of different socially determined factors that come to bear on the development of the self, even to the extent that an individual's perceptions of especially close others may come to be integrated into their concept of themselves.

Other, psychoanalytic theories, most notably object relations theory, also emphasize the importance of the role played by an individual's relationships in the healthy development as well as the psychopathology of the self. According to object relations theorists, who rejected the Freudian psychosexual developmental model of the individual as narcissistic and pleasure seeking, the self develops as a complex matrix of representations acquired through emotionally laden experiences of oneself in relation to others.

So, different theories have collectively enhanced the knowledge of the self, but none could individually lay claim to offer a complete account. Psychoanalytic psychology, for example, has the benefit of a holistic approach to the self and the personality, but not the (alleged) fine grained, empirically verifiable explanatory power of information processing approaches. Information processing accounts, by contrast, often fail to pay adequate heed to the roles of affective psychological processes when modelling the self. Despite considerable differences of opinion over its contributory structures and processes, competing theories of the self do generally converge on a number of basic principles, such as its essential dynamism and the notion that much of the self remains unconscious, invisible to introspection. Some recent work has been directed towards further uniting apparently disparate theories of the self that have arisen in distinct psychological schools.

Non-western concepts of the self are often difficult to translate into western psychological terminology. Although the sense of self has frequently been supposed to be an innate, pan-cultural feature of the human psyche, ethnographers are agreed that what amounts to the sense of self arises from a vast array of interconnected individual-cognitive and sociocultural influences. The innateness controversy rages on, but it appears unlikely that anything as complex as the self could be determined by the genes of an individual. All this is not to say, however, that evolutionary theories of the phylogeny of the self should be discounted; the "modern" self, in as much as it is partly determined by evolved mental and physiological processes, must surely have been influenced by the pressures of natural selection.

The self in religion

Several theorists have observed that Christian theological notions of the soul are the immediate ancestors of Western philosophical and psychological notions of the self, and there is a very strong tradition of positioning knowledge of self in conversation with Christian doctrine and the knowledge of God. Contemporary analyses of this tradition such as Charles Taylor's The Sources of the Self (1989), which charts the genesis and phylogeny of the modern identity in Western philosophy and social thought, traces the origin of introspection back to Augustine of Hippo (354–430 C.E.), although the writings of mathematician and philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) effectively inaugurated the form of critical self-reflection that characterises the "modern" period. Often, the theological influence on the development of thinking about self in non-Christian cultures is also readily apparent. Personal senses of self, as well as concepts of the nature and function of the self in a religious context, differ markedly between cultures. These range from those of the modern western Christian world, with their overt emphasis on individualism and personal autonomy, to those of certain cultures and other religious traditions where concepts of person and self are less explicit or even absent.

In the western world, then, the origin of the "inner self" as an inwardly focused and centered entity that is distinct from the physical body lies in the works of Augustine, who emphasized the importance of adopting a first person standpoint in the understanding of oneself, and in doing so, fundamentally changed the way that people conceived of the soul and subsequently the self. For Augustine, appreciation of the meaningful order of the world, grounded in the goodness of God, was possible only through introspection of the soul. God, as an inner light—the light of the soul—was conceived by Augustine to be the underlying principle of knowing itself.

A major strand of Christian theological thought concerning the origin and nature of the inner self can be identified in discussions that are centred upon the imago dei, the triune God in whose image, Christianity teaches, human beings are created. Augustine's discernment of the triadic structures of human thought, which he grounds in the being of God is a celebrated example of this type of theory, but this theme has been revived and elaborated upon many times.

Conceiving the nature of God as Trinity, some (such as Alisdair McFadyen) argue that a theory of human nature might be analogously informed. They argue that the model of the Trinity as a unique community of persons does not entail the autonomous individuality of each person nor an understanding of each person as a specific mode of relation to the other persons of the Trinity. Echoing of the dialogical personalism developed by the Jewish thinker Martin Buber, this understanding of the Trinity is reflected in the understanding of human persons as acquiring identity only through their relations with others, including their relationships with God. At all times an individual self is engaged in a threefold living relation with human others, with his or her environment and, through faith, with God.

In Islam, where the word Nafs may be equally well translated as soul or self, it is generally discussed in the context of Hudan (the right guidance), and the appropriate path to virtue as taught in the Qur'han. Although the Islamic concept of the soul is affected by both inner and cultural factors the notion of an essential self is less explicit than in the West, being more of a social construct made manifest through the taking of roles. In submission to Allah the self is both controlled and cultivated as part of a hierarchical cultural and religious order.

The various collections of teachings subsumed under the generic name Buddhism, by contrast, teach that the sense of an inner self (which is really not-self), as expressed in words such as "I" and "me," is a source of suffering and that only through surrendering this sense can a state of bliss really be found. All sentient beings are deemed by Buddhists to be part of a continuous cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. Nirvana, effectively the escape from this cycle, can only be achieved by a successive rooting out of all greed, hatred, confusion, and delusion from what passes as one's self. In Buddhist thought, it is by ceasing to grasp after the perceived continuity of self, and thereby accepting the present as an opportunity to develop the cardinal virtues of wisdom and mindfulness that one might finally and completely transcend the process of becoming.

The self at the interface of psychology and religion

Some psychologists and philosophers of religion have succeeded in coordinating certain aspects of their respective theories and models of the self and in many cases these theories are mutually informative. Francisco Varela, in The Embodied Mind (1991), for example, draws his primary inspiration for his theory of the self from Mahayana Buddhist teachings. However, although empirical social and cognitive psychology has attempted to quantify the impact of various religious influences on self-development, the emphasis on explanation in these models seems very different to the more interpretative, discursive theories that have arisen in theological discourse. Although not all psychological theories of the self are as antitheological as those of Sigmund Freud or some evolutionary psychologists, even those psychological models of mental health and development that accentuate the importance of an individual's perceived relationship to God portray the self in a fundamentally different light to that of explicitly religious theories. It tends to be seen as a product of innate and acquired individual and social influences rather than, as in Christian thought for example, an entity created and sustained by God, which stands in perpetual relation to God. It seems, then, that although the relationship between religious and psychological theories of the self has great historical significance, and there may be dialogue between them, their objectives, their identities and, ultimately, their raisons d'être remain distinct.

See also BUDDHISM; DESCARTES, RENÉ; EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY; EXPERIENCE, RELIGIOUS: COGNITIVE AND NEUROPHYSIOLOGICAL ASPECTS; FREUD, SIGMUND; GOD; IMAGO DEI; ISLAM; PSYCHOLOGY; SELF-TRANSCENDENCE; SOUL

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