Knowledge of Self

Abstract

In many ways the next chapter is one of the most important in the book. Much of the psychological development of the individual is bound up with the emerging sense of self, the sense that the individual has a separate identity of which he himself is uniquely conscious. Yet in spite of its importance, the phenomenon of the self is one of the most difficult for psychologists to explain, so much so that many of them prefer to ignore it in their work altogether. The topic is conspicuous by its absence from many basic texts in psychology, where the emphasis is upon observable behaviour, and it is sometimes argued that there is in fact no reliable way of researching into it since we can only gain knowledge of another person’s self-awareness by listening to what he is able to tell us on the subject himself. This method, known as the introspective method, has long been suspect amongst large numbers of psychologists because of the difficulties involved in checking the accuracy of the information thus gained. People may give us a deliberately false picture, or they may be unable to put what they wish to convey into words, or they may mean subtly different things by the words they use from what we take them to mean.