Self and Identity

Self and Identity

Chapter sixteen

Self and Identity

From the beginning, psychology's relationship with the "self" has been a tempestuous one. When, for example, William James marched the self to psychology's center stage in his classic text, the field promptly ushered it to the wings. There it languished for more than half a century, ignored by a psychological mainstream whose embrace of positivism made it squeamish about constructs that seemed to lack clear empirical referents. And when the self finally did gain admission into the social psychological mainstream in the nineteen sixties, it had been stripped of some crucial features of the construct that James introduced. Whereas James saw the self as a source of continuity that gave the individual a sense of "connectedness" and "unbrokenness", the nineteen sixties were dominated by an ephemeral, shape-shifting self that routinely reinvented itself in the service of winning social approval.

Happily, over the last few decades, conceptualizations of the self have reclaimed much of the richness and integrity with which James first imbued the construct. Moreover, contemporary social-personality psychologists have warmly embraced these emerging, "neo-Jamesian" visions of the self: Between nineteen seventy-two and two thousand two, the percentage of self-related studies published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology increased fivefold. The rejuvenated image of the self is multidimensional. Most researchers now assume that the self has a rich history, some of which is conscious and accessible through self-reports and some of which is presumably nonconscious and accessible primarily through indirect measures. Although a strong belief still exists in the prepotency of a desire to win approval from others, most theorists acknowledge the significance of rival motivational forces, particularly in non-Western cultural settings. And modern researchers have complemented their long-standing interest in personal self-views or identities (we use these terms interchangeably) with investigations of social identities. It was this growing interest in social identity that prompted us to cover this work and title the chapter "Self and Identity" instead of simply "The Self," the title of Baumeister's earlier contribution to this volume. Before turning to the specific substantive issues that we cover here, we place our analysis in historical context. In particular, we briefly describe the chain of events that led to the legitimization of a multifaceted, enduring conception of the self.