Self-Concept Theory & Hirschi's Theory

Self-concept theory

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Harvard psychologist William James laid down a cornerstone of modern self theory. In his 1890 Principles of Psychology, James distinguished between the self as knower (the I) and the self as object known (the Me, or self-concept). This formulation offered a language for talking about matters that had been obscured by reifications such as psyche, mind, soul, spirit, and ego. Following James, the self could be seen as both a process—acts of perception and knowing—and the outcome of that process—knowledge about the knower. James's distinction remains basic to self theory today.

The origins of self theory lie in human prehistory. As our hominid ancestors sought to explain the world around them, they likewise struggled to explain themselves. The world of dreams, images, thoughts, and feelings was perhaps no less troubling a mystery than the outer world of animals, plants, weather, and landscape. Where did these inner forces come from, and how did they relate to the outer world? What made one person different from another? To wrestle with these questions was to begin to theorize about the self (Blustein, 139).

Reflecting on the capacities, dispositions, and inner processes that make us human may thus be as old as consciousness. By the time such reflections began to be recorded, people surely had been thinking about human nature for ages. When Socrates (470-399 BCE) urged “know thyself,” he presumed an intellectual framework within which disciplined introspection made sense. The Socratic admonition leaves open, however, the question of precisely what it is we should seek to know. And that is the question that has occupied subsequent social theorists.

To try to identify a history of thought regarding the self raises, first, the question of whether there exists a body of thought that constitutes a coherent tradition of theorizing about the self. By modern standards of scholarship, the answer is no, at least prior to the nineteenth century. Before then, one can find a great deal of philosophical and theological discourse about the inner processes—or, more often, “essences”—that constitute human nature (Blustein, 433). Absent is conceptual consensus or continuity. Psyche, soul, spirit, mind, proprium, and ego may all be answers to roughly the same question, but the answers, cast in such disparate terms, refuse to add up.

Following in the pragmatist tradition, John Dewey and George H. Mead built on James's ideas concerning the social nature of the self. Dewey emphasized the “I” as a conditioned subjectivity: a configuration of habits shaped by our relationships with others and by our choices in response to the moral dilemmas inherent in social life. Dewey's contribution was thus to highlight the self as both a social product and an agent of its own making. Mead drew on James, Dewey, and Cooley, powerfully and creatively extending their ideas (see Mead [1934] Mind, Self, and Society). Mead's profound contributions lay in theorizing about the development of the self, the role of language in this process, and the relationship between mind and ...