Theory of Self
Ongoing research since 2008
This study questions professionals from the fields of psychology, psychotherapy, philosophy, and counseling. Thousands of professionals were sent an e-mail questionnaire asking them their definition of “self”. The study found that every one of the respondents had a different definition. The purpose of the study is to highlight the problem of communicating within these fields regarding – self-esteem, self-support, self-destructiveness and self-awareness. The second phase of the study will be to start a dialogue by suggesting a new, functional definition for the “self” based on the Continuum Theory.
INTRODUCTION
The concept of self is used in everyday language as well as by professionals in the fields of psychology, sociology, philosophy, and counseling. Some of the terms we are familiar with and have clinical implications are: self-esteem, self-actualization, self-destructive, self-image, self-deprecating, self-support, self-concept, self-righteous, self-confidence, self-love, self-realization, self-transcendence, self-indulgence, and self-critical. These are all highly charged and meaningful terms. And we all behave as if we know what they mean. That requires that we all know what we mean by the word “self”. I set out to investigate whether we all used the same definition of “self” in order to communicate effectively to each other using these important terms.METHOD
We created a very simple 4 question survey and mailed it out through Yahoo groups to thousands of their members. There were numerous Yahoo groups and we came up with a number of groups that fit our criteria. We narrowed our selection down to the following twenty-two groups: AIMGrads , Adultdevelop, Applied Behavior Analysis, Celestialvision, Constructivism, ENTP, Energism, Exploration, Golden Dawn Forum, JCS-Online, NewPsychList, NYAITTNEWS, Psychiatry Research, Psychosynthesis, Silva UltraMind , Society for Scientific Exploration, Techs4Reality, Theory of Self, William James, as well as sending the survey to a few hundred college professors of psychology and philosophy at various universities. As we received the completed surveys each one was added to a database. From the data collected, the following analysis was made.
RESULTS
A total of seventy-seven individuals responded to our questionnaire. Two of the respondents did not fill out the questionnaire at all. Instead two individuals wrote their own definitions of self in paragraph forms. We did not use these two. The statistics below are based upon a sampling of seventy-five, not seventy-seven individual responses.
Question 1 of the questionnaire asked, Type your area of expertise. Ten responders did not elect to answer this. The areas of expertise for the remaining 65 ran the gamut from psychology, philosophy, therapist, educators (secondary as well as college), and counselors to engineers, scientists, lawyers and analysts etc. There were even some who did not fit in any of the previously listed categories, for example, skeptical critic, no particular area, aliveness, remote viewer, and spiritual teacher. Most were still active in their respective fields. There were, however, several retirees.
Question 2 asked, if you believe you are more than a body and a brain – which term(s) do you use , (a) Self, (b) Other - Please name it, and (c) I believe we are only body and brain. For 2a the total number of responses was 33, or 44%. For 2b, the total number of responses was 20, or 26%. For the second part of question 2b, where the respondents were asked to name the other ‘term’, 19 answered: consciousness, being, soul, person, spirit, mind brain, the whole, thetan, awareness, and life force. There were some redundancies. For 2c the total number of responses was 14, or 19%. For this question, seven individuals, besides placing an X also wrote in replies (some matter of the brain is phenomenal, I believe we are only body and brain, emergent self, soul, soul-mate?, and I believe that we are only body and brain – self is an Emotional System).
Question 3 required a yes or no reply; I have a clear and useful definition of self. Fifty-five individuals responded yes (85%) and fifteen individual responded no (15%) to the question.
Question 4 was an open-ended; the definition of self I use is … The responses ranged from very brief, one word answers like “Me”, to answers of various lengths. NONE OF THE ANSWERS WERE THE SAME. Three of the more lengthy examples are cited: Yes, I believe that I am something more than a body and a brain. I am something immaterial, which may metaphorically be called the stream of thought, and may more concisely be called the self.
We might in the Jamesian spirit define the self as a single present-tense pulse of attention that owns (recognizes from the inside) a lot of earlier past-sense pulses of attention, and that projects itself, and implicitly its inheritance, into the future.
and
Describing my experience of myself, not as I might describe it in 3rd person to a particular other: I feel like an embodied mind, in a physical sense, and permeating that, I feel more like a location...my feeling of self includes my body but extends out maybe a foot or so before gradually blending into and sort of disappearing into some form of space or spaciousness that feels more impersonal, more like a source that feeds into me.
and
a fictitious artifact useful in giving a distinct identity (id) for my body organism for its protection, preservation and procreation (survival) by providing continuity (in time), coherence (for experience), ownership (for possessions) and doer ship (for actions). It gives an id and helps in separating my body organism from the other (me vs. other) to feed my mouth instead of a dog over there when my body needs an energy input (feels hungry).
DISCUSSION
From the above results, it appears that the majority of respondents believe in some concept of the self. In addition, most of the respondents believe that they have a clear and useful definition of self. However, as illustrated by their responses to the open-ended question, their clear and useful definition of self would seem to apply only to themselves and not to anyone else as was evidenced by the wide-ranging and dissimilar responses to this question. In summary therefore, if someone were to seek an understanding of what people believed the self to be, he/she will most likely get as many definitions/explanations as individuals asked.
The conclusion we drew from this small study is the need to arrive at a definition of self which professionals from the various disciplines can agree with and use when doing research. Otherwise we are unclear as to how we can communicate our research and know that we’re talking about the same thing.
