self identity essay

How to Identify Yourself in an Essay: Exploring Self-Identity in Writing

• by Brandon Thompson
• October 18, 2023

Writing an essay about oneself can be a daunting task. How do you capture the essence of who you are in just a few words or pages? How do you define yourself in a way that is both authentic and engaging? In this blog post, we will dive into the art of self-identification in essay writing, providing you with tips, insights, and examples to help you craft a compelling narrative about your own identity.

Whether you’re facing the challenge of answering questions like “How do you define yourself?” or “What makes up your identity?” or struggling with how to discuss yourself without using the first-person pronoun, we’ll guide you through the process step by step. We will explore various techniques for writing a self-identity essay, such as using reflection, describing your social identity, and introducing yourself in a creative way.

So grab a pen and paper, or open up that blank document, as we journey together to discover how to effectively identify yourself in an essay – a reflection of who you are in this ever-evolving world of 2023.

How to Identify Yourself in an Essay: Let Your Words Shine!

When it comes to writing an essay, one of the most important aspects is identifying yourself and expressing your unique voice. After all, no one wants to read a dull and lifeless piece of writing! So, how can you make sure your essay stands out? Let’s dive in and explore some tips on how you can identify yourself effectively in your writing.

Find Your Writing Persona

Just like superheroes have alter egos, writers too have their own personas. Embrace your inner writer and let your personality shine through your words! Whether you’re witty, introspective, or even a bit sarcastic, infusing your essay with your authentic voice will make it engaging and relatable. Don’t be afraid to show some personality – after all, who said essays have to be boring?

Inject Some Humor

Who says essays can’t be entertaining? Injecting humor into your writing can captivate your readers and make your essay stand out from the crowd. Of course, don’t force it or try too hard to be funny; instead, lightheartedly sprinkle in some jokes or clever anecdotes that relate to your topic. A humorous tone can make your essay more enjoyable to read while still conveying your thoughts effectively.

Reflect Your Unique Perspectives

We all have our own perspectives and experiences that shape the way we view the world. Use your essay as an opportunity to showcase your unique point of view. Whether you’re tackling a philosophical question or exploring a personal experience, don’t be afraid to express your thoughts and feelings authentically. Remember, your perspective is what sets your essay apart.

Play with Structure

While essays typically have a formal structure, that doesn’t mean you can’t play around with it a little. Use subheadings, bullet points, or even numbered lists to organize your thoughts and make the reading experience more enjoyable. Breaking up your content into smaller, digestible sections makes it easier for your readers to follow along and keeps them engaged from start to finish.

Dare to Be Different

Everyone loves a fresh perspective, so dare to be different in your writing. Challenge conventional ideas or take a unique stance on a topic. By offering a fresh take or a creative spin, you’ll leave a lasting impression on your readers. Remember, the goal is not to conform but to stand out and be memorable.

Embrace Your Quirkiness

We all have our quirks, so don’t be afraid to let them shine in your essay. Whether it’s an unusual hobby, a unique talent, or a peculiar fascination, incorporating your quirks into your writing can make it more interesting and authentic. By embracing your individuality, you’ll create a personal connection with your readers and leave a lasting impact.

In conclusion, when it comes to identifying yourself in an essay, the key is to be genuine, entertaining, and captivating. Let your writing persona shine, inject some humor, reflect your unique perspectives, play with structure, dare to be different, and embrace your quirkiness. By following these tips, you’ll not only create an essay that stands out but also enjoy the process of writing and expressing yourself. So, grab your pen and let your words do the talking!

FAQ: How do you identify yourself in an essay?

How do you answer what defines you.

In an essay, when asked what defines you, it’s important to delve deep into your values, beliefs, experiences, and passions. Reflecting on your unique qualities and characteristics will help you provide an authentic and meaningful response. Remember, you are more than just a list of accomplishments or titles – you are the sum of your values and experiences.

How do you write a self-identity essay

Writing a self-identity essay can be both challenging and liberating. Start by introspecting and reflecting on your identity – the cultural, social, and personal influences that shape you. Then, craft a compelling narrative that showcases your journey of self-discovery. Share anecdotes, milestones, and experiences that have contributed to your growth and sense of self.

How can I define myself

Defining oneself is like peeling an onion – layer by layer, you discover who you truly are. Embrace introspection and explore your passions, values, strengths, and weaknesses. Look beyond external expectations and societal norms. Remember, it’s a lifelong process, and it often takes time and self-reflection to truly understand and define yourself.

What is an identity example

Identity is as unique as a fingerprint, and each person’s identity is formed by a combination of factors. For example, an identity can be shaped by cultural heritage, such as being a proud Latina or a devoted fan of Korean pop music. It can also be influenced by personal traits, such as being an adventurous thrill-seeker or a compassionate and empathetic friend. Ultimately, identity is the intricate tapestry that makes each person who they are.

What makes up a person’s identity essay

A person’s identity essay encompasses various aspects that contribute to their sense of self. These include cultural background , beliefs, values, interests, experiences, and relationships. It is the fusion of these elements that shapes a person’s unique identity and makes them the individual they are.

How do you write an identity statement

Crafting an identity statement is like capturing the essence of who you are in a concise and powerful sentence. Start by reflecting on the core values, passions, and qualities that define you. Then, articulate these elements into a clear and compelling statement that encapsulates your identity. Be authentic, genuine, and unafraid to showcase what makes you extraordinary.

How do you make a new identity for yourself

Making a new identity for yourself can be both exciting and challenging. Start by identifying the changes you want to make, whether it’s adopting new habits, exploring new interests, or reassessing your values. Embrace personal growth, surround yourself with supportive individuals, and be open to new experiences. Remember, creating a new identity is a journey, and it takes time, effort, and self-reflection.

How do you write a few lines about yourself

When writing a few lines about yourself, it’s important to strike a balance between showcasing your unique qualities and maintaining brevity. Highlight your key accomplishments, interests, and passions. Inject a touch of humor, if appropriate, to engage your readers. Remember, the goal is to leave a lasting impression and pique curiosity about the person behind those few lines.

How do you define yourself reflection

Defining yourself through reflection involves introspection and analyzing your thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Take the time to understand your values, strengths, weaknesses, and aspirations. Explore how your past experiences have shaped you and consider how you want to grow in the future. Through reflection, you can gain a deeper understanding of yourself and thereby define your identity.

How would you describe your social identity

Describing social identity involves considering how you relate to different social groups and communities. It encompasses aspects such as race, ethnicity, gender, religion, and socioeconomic background. When describing your social identity, you may discuss the intersectionality of these various facets and how they influence your perspective, experiences, and interactions within society.

What makes up your identity

Your identity is an intricate tapestry woven from various threads that make you unique. It comprises elements such as your cultural background, personal values, experiences, relationships, and aspirations. It is the combination of these factors that gives you a distinct identity, shaping your beliefs, actions, and overall sense of self.

How do you talk about yourself in an essay without using “I”

Crafting an essay about yourself without relying heavily on the pronoun “I” requires creativity and alternative perspectives. Instead of constantly using “I,” focus on sharing specific experiences, achievements, or insights. Use descriptive language to engage your readers and help them visualize your narrative. By varying sentence structures and utilizing storytelling techniques, you can effectively convey your unique story without relying solely on “I.”

How would you describe yourself in one sentence

In one sentence, I am a curious wanderer, forever seeking adventures, embracing new experiences, and finding joy in the simple moments of life.

What is meant by self-identity

Self-identity refers to the recognition, understanding, and acceptance of one’s own unique characteristics, values, and beliefs. It is a journey of self-discovery that involves introspection, reflection, and a deep connection with one’s true self. Self-identity allows individuals to define who they are and navigate their lives authentically.

How would you describe yourself in a college essay

Describing oneself in a college essay requires striking a delicate balance between showcasing personal qualities and demonstrating suitability for academic pursuits . Be authentic and genuine, highlighting your unique traits, experiences, and ambitions. Emphasize your academic achievements, extracurricular involvements, and personal growth. However, remember to let your personality shine through your writing, engaging the readers with your unique voice.

How do I identify myself example

An example of identifying oneself could be acknowledging oneself as an adventurous explorer who finds solace in nature, a compassionate listener who provides comfort to others, or an analytical thinker who thrives in problem-solving. Identifying oneself involves understanding and embracing personal traits and qualities that make each person unique.

How do you introduce yourself in a class essay

When introducing yourself in a class essay, start with a captivating anecdote or a thought-provoking question related to the topic. Provide a brief overview of your background, emphasizing experiences or interests relevant to the class. Establish credibility while showcasing enthusiasm and curiosity for the subject matter. Engage the reader from the start to set the tone for an engaging essay.

What are 5 important parts of your identity

Five important parts of one’s identity may include cultural background, personal values, aspirations, relationships, and experiences. These elements shape who we are, influence our decision-making, and provide a lens through which we view the world. Each individual’s identity is unique, comprising an intricate web of multifaceted components.

How do you introduce yourself in academic writing

In academic writing, introducing yourself should be done succinctly and professionally. Start with your full name, followed by your current academic affiliation, such as the university or institution you attend. If applicable, mention your area of study or research interests in a concise manner. Avoid unnecessary personal details and maintain a confident and polished tone throughout your introduction.

What is your identity as a student

As a student, your identity extends beyond being a mere participant in academic pursuits. It encompasses your intellectual curiosity, enthusiasm for learning, and dedication to personal growth. Your identity as a student is shaped by how you navigate challenges, collaborate with peers, and actively engage in the pursuit of knowledge. Embrace this multifaceted identity as a student, allowing it to empower and guide you on your academic journey.

How do you identify yourself meaning

Identifying yourself is about recognizing and defining your unique qualities, values, beliefs, and experiences. It involves understanding how these elements shape your perspective, actions, and life choices. By acknowledging and embracing your identity, you gain a sense of self-awareness, enabling personal growth and an authentic connection with others.

How do you introduce yourself in writing examples

Hello, fellow readers! I’m Jane, a passionate storyteller with a penchant for adventure. Whether lost in the pages of a book or exploring the great outdoors, I find solace in embracing new worlds and acquiring fresh perspectives.

Greetings, everyone! I’m John, a coffee-fueled wordsmith on a perpetual quest for knowledge. When I’m not decoding complex theories at my laptop, you can find me immersing myself in the creative realms of photography or scouring the city for the perfect cup of joe.

How do you introduce yourself in a creative essay

In a creative essay, the introduction is your chance to make a memorable first impression. Craft an opening that hooks the reader and sets the tone for your creative exploration. Utilize vivid descriptions, figurative language, or an intriguing anecdote that illuminates your unique perspective. Take the reader on a journey, introducing yourself as a protagonist in your own story, ready to embark on an adventure of self-expression.

How do you introduce yourself as a student

As a student, introducing yourself is an opportunity to showcase your enthusiasm for learning and to connect with your peers. Share your name, grade or year level, and a personal interest or hobby that reflects your individuality. Consider mentioning your academic goals and aspirations, highlighting your determination to excel. Be approachable, friendly, and open to forging new connections in the student community.

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Brandon Thompson

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Essay on Self Identity

Students are often asked to write an essay on Self Identity in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Self Identity

Understanding self identity.

Self identity is the way we see and define ourselves. It’s like a mental picture we have about who we are. It includes our likes, dislikes, beliefs, and values. Our self identity helps us understand our unique qualities.

Factors Shaping Self Identity

Many things shape our self identity. Our family, friends, and experiences play a big role. For example, if we grow up in a family that loves sports, we might identify as a sporty person. Our culture and society also influence our self identity.

Self Identity and Relationships

Our self identity affects how we relate to others. If we see ourselves as kind, we will treat others kindly. If we see ourselves as strong, we will act confidently. Our self identity can shape our friendships and how we work in teams.

Importance of Self Identity

Self identity is important because it gives us a sense of who we are. It helps us make choices that align with our values. A strong self identity can make us feel confident and happy. It can help us find our path in life.

Changing Self Identity

Our self identity can change over time. As we grow and have new experiences, our self identity can evolve. This is a normal part of life. It’s okay to change and grow. This helps us become better versions of ourselves.

250 Words Essay on Self Identity

What is self identity.

Self Identity is the way we see and think about ourselves. It is a mix of our beliefs, personal values, and roles in society. It is the image we carry of ourselves in our minds. Our self identity helps us understand who we are and where we fit in the world.

Building Blocks of Self Identity

There are many things that shape our self identity. Our experiences, the people around us, our culture, and our personal choices all play a part. For example, if you are good at sports, you might see yourself as an athlete. If you love to help others, you might see yourself as a helper.

Why is Self Identity Important?

Self identity is important because it influences our actions, decisions, and relationships. When we know who we are, we can make choices that align with our values and beliefs. This can lead to a sense of fulfillment and happiness.

Our self identity can change over time. As we grow and have new experiences, we may start to see ourselves in different ways. For instance, a student who discovers a love for art may start to see themselves as an artist. This is a normal part of life and personal growth.

In conclusion, self identity is a vital part of who we are. It is shaped by many factors and can change over time. Understanding our self identity can help us make choices that align with who we truly are, leading to a more fulfilling life.

500 Words Essay on Self Identity

Self Identity is the way we see and think about ourselves. It is a collection of beliefs that we have about our own nature, qualities, and behavior. We form these beliefs through our experiences, relationships, and interactions with the world around us. Our self identity is like a personal map, guiding us through life. It helps us understand where we fit in the world and how we relate to others.

The Building Blocks of Self Identity

There are many parts that make up our self identity. These include our personal characteristics, values, and beliefs, as well as our physical attributes, skills, and talents. Our personal characteristics might include being kind, honest, or brave. Our values and beliefs are the things we think are important, like fairness, respect, or love. Our physical attributes include things like our height, weight, and hair color. Our skills and talents can be anything from playing a sport, to painting, to solving math problems.

How Self Identity Develops

Our self identity starts to form when we are very young. As babies, we start to recognize ourselves in the mirror. As we grow older, we start to notice differences between ourselves and others. We begin to form opinions about ourselves based on these differences. For example, we might think, “I’m taller than my friend,” or “I’m not as good at drawing as my sister.” These thoughts and observations shape our self identity.

Role of Others in Shaping Self Identity

Other people play a big role in shaping our self identity. This can include our family, friends, teachers, and even people we see on TV or read about in books. These people can influence our self identity in both positive and negative ways. For example, if our parents often tell us we are smart, we might start to believe that we are. On the other hand, if a friend often makes fun of us for being bad at a certain sport, we might start to believe that we are not athletic.

Why Self Identity is Important

Understanding our self identity is very important. It helps us make decisions, set goals, and build relationships. When we know who we are, we can make choices that align with our values and beliefs. This can lead to a more fulfilling and happy life. Having a strong self identity can also help us feel more confident and secure in who we are.

In conclusion, self identity is a complex and ever-changing part of who we are. It is shaped by many factors, including our personal characteristics, values, beliefs, physical attributes, skills, talents, and the influence of others. Understanding our self identity is important for making decisions, setting goals, and building relationships. It is a lifelong journey to understand and embrace our unique self identity.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

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Essay Samples on Self Identity

How do i define myself: unraveling the layers of my identity.

The essence of being human lies in the intricate tapestry of individuality that weaves together experiences, beliefs, aspirations, and values. In this introspective essay, I embark on a journey to explore the profound question of how do I define myself. From the colors that paint...

• Self Identity

Online Identity vs. Real Life Identity: Unveiling the Dual Self

The advent of the digital age has ushered in a new dimension of identity — one that exists both in the physical world and the virtual realm. The distinction between online identity and real life identity is complex, blurring the lines between authenticity and projection....

How Do You Define Yourself: the Concept of Self-Perception

How do you define yourself? Defining oneself is a complex and introspective task that delves into the core of one's identity and beliefs. This essay embarks on a journey to understand how individuals define themselves, exploring the factors that shape their sense of identity and...

Evolving Identities: The Concept of Self-Identity and Self-Perception

For centuries psychologists, like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung have discussed the concept of self-identity and self-perception. In social sciences, identity refers to an individual's or party's sense of who they are and what defines them. As the human condition, we have evolved to form...

• Personal Identity

Theme of Self-Identity in the Graphic Novels American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang, and Skim by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki

The coming of age genre is reflective of the life-changing moments in the lives of every growing adolescent. The stories share a mixture of minor yet pivotal events that allow the readers to see themselves in a moment where they are experiencing numerous emotions that...

• American Born Chinese

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Theme of Questioning One's Own Identity in the Poem The Love Song by J. Alfred Prufrock

One of the many different types of characteristics of modernism in literature is that it questions self and identity by strong expression of emotion. Writers will often show modernism to dig deeper into the questions of self and identity. In poem 'The Love Song of...

• The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Best topics on Self Identity

1. How Do I Define Myself: Unraveling the Layers of My Identity

2. Online Identity vs. Real Life Identity: Unveiling the Dual Self

3. How Do You Define Yourself: the Concept of Self-Perception

4. Evolving Identities: The Concept of Self-Identity and Self-Perception

5. Theme of Self-Identity in the Graphic Novels American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang, and Skim by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki

6. Theme of Questioning One’s Own Identity in the Poem The Love Song by J. Alfred Prufrock

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• Bisexuality
• Asian American
• Anthropology

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You are a network

You cannot be reduced to a body, a mind or a particular social role. an emerging theory of selfhood gets this complexity.

by Kathleen Wallace   + BIO

Who am I? We all ask ourselves this question, and many like it. Is my identity determined by my DNA or am I product of how I’m raised? Can I change, and if so, how much? Is my identity just one thing, or can I have more than one? Since its beginning, philosophy has grappled with these questions, which are important to how we make choices and how we interact with the world around us. Socrates thought that self-understanding was essential to knowing how to live, and how to live well with oneself and with others. Self-determination depends on self-knowledge, on knowledge of others and of the world around you. Even forms of government are grounded in how we understand ourselves and human nature. So the question ‘Who am I?’ has far-reaching implications.

Many philosophers, at least in the West, have sought to identify the invariable or essential conditions of being a self. A widely taken approach is what’s known as a psychological continuity view of the self, where the self is a consciousness with self-awareness and personal memories. Sometimes these approaches frame the self as a combination of mind and body, as René Descartes did, or as primarily or solely consciousness. John Locke’s prince/pauper thought experiment, wherein a prince’s consciousness and all his memories are transferred into the body of a cobbler, is an illustration of the idea that personhood goes with consciousness. Philosophers have devised numerous subsequent thought experiments – involving personality transfers, split brains and teleporters – to explore the psychological approach. Contemporary philosophers in the ‘animalist’ camp are critical of the psychological approach, and argue that selves are essentially human biological organisms. ( Aristotle might also be closer to this approach than to the purely psychological.) Both psychological and animalist approaches are ‘container’ frameworks, positing the body as a container of psychological functions or the bounded location of bodily functions.

All these approaches reflect philosophers’ concern to focus on what the distinguishing or definitional characteristic of a self is, the thing that will pick out a self and nothing else, and that will identify selves as selves, regardless of their particular differences. On the psychological view, a self is a personal consciousness. On the animalist view, a self is a human organism or animal. This has tended to lead to a somewhat one-dimensional and simplified view of what a self is, leaving out social, cultural and interpersonal traits that are also distinctive of selves and are often what people would regard as central to their self-identity. Just as selves have different personal memories and self-awareness, they can have different social and interpersonal relations, cultural backgrounds and personalities. The latter are variable in their specificity, but are just as important to being a self as biology, memory and self-awareness.

Recognising the influence of these factors, some philosophers have pushed against such reductive approaches and argued for a framework that recognises the complexity and multidimensionality of persons. The network self view emerges from this trend. It began in the later 20th century and has continued in the 21st, when philosophers started to move toward a broader understanding of selves. Some philosophers propose narrative and anthropological views of selves. Communitarian and feminist philosophers argue for relational views that recognise the social embeddedness, relatedness and intersectionality of selves. According to relational views, social relations and identities are fundamental to understanding who persons are.

Social identities are traits of selves in virtue of membership in communities (local, professional, ethnic, religious, political), or in virtue of social categories (such as race, gender, class, political affiliation) or interpersonal relations (such as being a spouse, sibling, parent, friend, neighbour). These views imply that it’s not only embodiment and not only memory or consciousness of social relations but the relations themselves that also matter to who the self is. What philosophers call ‘4E views’ of cognition – for embodied, embedded, enactive and extended cognition – are also a move in the direction of a more relational, less ‘container’, view of the self. Relational views signal a paradigm shift from a reductive approach to one that seeks to recognise the complexity of the self. The network self view further develops this line of thought and says that the self is relational through and through, consisting not only of social but also physical, genetic, psychological, emotional and biological relations that together form a network self. The self also changes over time, acquiring and losing traits in virtue of new social locations and relations, even as it continues as that one self.

H ow do you self-identify? You probably have many aspects to yourself and would resist being reduced to or stereotyped as any one of them. But you might still identify yourself in terms of your heritage, ethnicity, race, religion: identities that are often prominent in identity politics. You might identify yourself in terms of other social and personal relationships and characteristics – ‘I’m Mary’s sister.’ ‘I’m a music-lover.’ ‘I’m Emily’s thesis advisor.’ ‘I’m a Chicagoan.’ Or you might identify personality characteristics: ‘I’m an extrovert’; or commitments: ‘I care about the environment.’ ‘I’m honest.’ You might identify yourself comparatively: ‘I’m the tallest person in my family’; or in terms of one’s political beliefs or affiliations: ‘I’m an independent’; or temporally: ‘I’m the person who lived down the hall from you in college,’ or ‘I’m getting married next year.’ Some of these are more important than others, some are fleeting. The point is that who you are is more complex than any one of your identities. Thinking of the self as a network is a way to conceptualise this complexity and fluidity.

Let’s take a concrete example. Consider Lindsey: she is spouse, mother, novelist, English speaker, Irish Catholic, feminist, professor of philosophy, automobile driver, psychobiological organism, introverted, fearful of heights, left-handed, carrier of Huntington’s disease (HD), resident of New York City. This is not an exhaustive set, just a selection of traits or identities. Traits are related to one another to form a network of traits. Lindsey is an inclusive network, a plurality of traits related to one another. The overall character – the integrity – of a self is constituted by the unique interrelatedness of its particular relational traits, psychobiological, social, political, cultural, linguistic and physical.

Figure 1 below is based on an approach to modelling ecological networks; the nodes represent traits, and the lines are relations between traits (without specifying the kind of relation).

We notice right away the complex interrelatedness among Lindsey’s traits. We can also see that some traits seem to be clustered, that is, related more to some traits than to others. Just as a body is a highly complex, organised network of organismic and molecular systems, the self is a highly organised network. Traits of the self can organise into clusters or hubs, such as a body cluster, a family cluster, a social cluster. There might be other clusters, but keeping it to a few is sufficient to illustrate the idea. A second approximation, Figure 2 below, captures the clustering idea.

Figures 1 and 2 (both from my book , The Network Self ) are simplifications of the bodily, personal and social relations that make up the self. Traits can be closely clustered, but they also cross over and intersect with traits in other hubs or clusters. For instance, a genetic trait – ‘Huntington’s disease carrier’ (HD in figures 1 and 2) – is related to biological, family and social traits. If the carrier status is known, there are also psychological and social relations to other carriers and to familial and medical communities. Clusters or sub-networks are not isolated, or self-enclosed hubs, and might regroup as the self develops.

Sometimes her experience might be fractured, as when others take one of her identities as defining all of her

Some traits might be more dominant than others. Being a spouse might be strongly relevant to who Lindsey is, whereas being an aunt weakly relevant. Some traits might be more salient in some contexts than others. In Lindsey’s neighbourhood, being a parent might be more salient than being a philosopher, whereas at the university being a philosopher is more prominent.

Lindsey can have a holistic experience of her multifaceted, interconnected network identity. Sometimes, though, her experience might be fractured, as when others take one of her identities as defining all of her. Suppose that, in an employment context, she isn’t promoted, earns a lower salary or isn’t considered for a job because of her gender. Discrimination is when an identity – race, gender, ethnicity – becomes the way in which someone is identified by others, and therefore might experience herself as reduced or objectified. It is the inappropriate, arbitrary or unfair salience of a trait in a context.

Lindsey might feel conflict or tension between her identities. She might not want to be reduced to or stereotyped by any one identity. She might feel the need to dissimulate, suppress or conceal some identity, as well as associated feelings and beliefs. She might feel that some of these are not essential to who she really is. But even if some are less important than others, and some are strongly relevant to who she is and identifies as, they’re all still interconnected ways in which Lindsey is.

F igures 1 and 2 above represent the network self, Lindsey, at a cross-section of time, say at early to mid-adulthood. What about the changeableness and fluidity of the self? What about other stages of Lindsey’s life? Lindsey-at-age-five is not a spouse or a mother, and future stages of Lindsey might include different traits and relations too: she might divorce or change careers or undergo a gender identity transformation. The network self is also a process .

It might seem strange at first to think of yourself as a process. You might think that processes are just a series of events, and your self feels more substantial than that. Maybe you think of yourself as an entity that’s distinct from relations, that change is something that happens to an unchangeable core that is you. You’d be in good company if you do. There’s a long history in philosophy going back to Aristotle arguing for a distinction between a substance and its properties, between substance and relations, and between entities and events.

However, the idea that the self is a network and a process is more plausible than you might think. Paradigmatic substances, such as the body, are systems of networks that are in constant process even when we don’t see that at a macro level: cells are replaced, hair and nails grow, food is digested, cellular and molecular processes are ongoing as long as the body is alive. Consciousness or the stream of awareness itself is in constant flux. Psychological dispositions or attitudes might be subject to variation in expression and occurrence. They’re not fixed and invariable, even when they’re somewhat settled aspects of a self. Social traits evolve. For example, Lindsey-as-daughter develops and changes. Lindsey-as-mother is not only related to her current traits, but also to her own past, in how she experienced being a daughter. Many past experiences and relations have shaped how she is now. New beliefs and attitudes might be acquired and old ones revised. There’s constancy, too, as traits don’t all change at the same pace and maybe some don’t change at all. But the temporal spread, so to speak, of the self means that how a self as a whole is at any time is a cumulative upshot of what it’s been and how it’s projecting itself forward.

Anchoring and transformation, sameness and change: the cumulative network is both-and , not either-or

Rather than an underlying, unchanging substance that acquires and loses properties, we’re making a paradigm shift to seeing the self as a process, as a cumulative network with a changeable integrity. A cumulative network has structure and organisation, as many natural processes do, whether we think of biological developments, physical processes or social processes. Think of this constancy and structure as stages of the self overlapping with, or mapping on to, one another. For Lindsey, being a sibling overlaps from Lindsey-at-six to the death of the sibling; being a spouse overlaps from Lindsey-at-30 to the end of the marriage. Moreover, even if her sibling dies, or her marriage crumbles, sibling and spouse would still be traits of Lindsey’s history – a history that belongs to her and shapes the structure of the cumulative network.

If the self is its history, does that mean it can’t really change much? What about someone who wants to be liberated from her past, or from her present circumstances? Someone who emigrates or flees family and friends to start a new life or undergoes a radical transformation doesn’t cease to have been who they were. Indeed, experiences of conversion or transformation are of that self, the one who is converting, transforming, emigrating. Similarly, imagine the experience of regret or renunciation. You did something that you now regret, that you would never do again, that you feel was an expression of yourself when you were very different from who you are now. Still, regret makes sense only if you’re the person who in the past acted in some way. When you regret, renounce and apologise, you acknowledge your changed self as continuous with and owning your own past as the author of the act. Anchoring and transformation, continuity and liberation, sameness and change: the cumulative network is both-and , not either-or .

Transformation can happen to a self or it can be chosen. It can be positive or negative. It can be liberating or diminishing. Take a chosen transformation. Lindsey undergoes a gender transformation, and becomes Paul. Paul doesn’t cease to have been Lindsey, the self who experienced a mismatch between assigned gender and his own sense of self-identification, even though Paul might prefer his history as Lindsey to be a nonpublic dimension of himself. The cumulative network now known as Paul still retains many traits – biological, genetic, familial, social, psychological – of its prior configuration as Lindsey, and is shaped by the history of having been Lindsey. Or consider the immigrant. She doesn’t cease to be the self whose history includes having been a resident and citizen of another country.

T he network self is changeable but continuous as it maps on to a new phase of the self. Some traits become relevant in new ways. Some might cease to be relevant in the present while remaining part of the self’s history. There’s no prescribed path for the self. The self is a cumulative network because its history persists, even if there are many aspects of its history that a self disavows going forward or even if the way in which its history is relevant changes. Recognising that the self is a cumulative network allows us to account for why radical transformation is of a self and not, literally, a different self.

Now imagine a transformation that’s not chosen but that happens to someone: for example, to a parent with Alzheimer’s disease. They are still parent, citizen, spouse, former professor. They are still their history; they are still that person undergoing debilitating change. The same is true of the person who experiences dramatic physical change, someone such as the actor Christopher Reeve who had quadriplegia after an accident, or the physicist Stephen Hawking whose capacities were severely compromised by ALS (motor neuron disease). Each was still parent, citizen, spouse, actor/scientist and former athlete. The parent with dementia experiences loss of memory, and of psychological and cognitive capacities, a diminishment in a subset of her network. The person with quadriplegia or ALS experiences loss of motor capacities, a bodily diminishment. Each undoubtedly leads to alteration in social traits and depends on extensive support from others to sustain themselves as selves.

Sometimes people say that the person with dementia who doesn’t know themselves or others anymore isn’t really the same person that they were, or maybe isn’t even a person at all. This reflects an appeal to the psychological view – that persons are essentially consciousness. But seeing the self as a network takes a different view. The integrity of the self is broader than personal memory and consciousness. A diminished self might still have many of its traits, however that self’s history might be constituted in particular.

Plato, long before Freud, recognised that self-knowledge is a hard-won and provisional achievement

The poignant account ‘Still Gloria’ (2017) by the Canadian bioethicist Françoise Baylis of her mother’s Alzheimer’s reflects this perspective. When visiting her mother, Baylis helps to sustain the integrity of Gloria’s self even when Gloria can no longer do that for herself. But she’s still herself. Does that mean that self-knowledge isn’t important? Of course not. Gloria’s diminished capacities are a contraction of her self, and might be a version of what happens in some degree for an ageing self who experiences a weakening of capacities. And there’s a lesson here for any self: none of us is completely transparent to ourselves. This isn’t a new idea; even Plato, long before Freud, recognised that there were unconscious desires, and that self-knowledge is a hard-won and provisional achievement. The process of self-questioning and self-discovery is ongoing through life because we don’t have fixed and immutable identities: our identity is multiple, complex and fluid.

This means that others don’t know us perfectly either. When people try to fix someone’s identity as one particular characteristic, it can lead to misunderstanding, stereotyping, discrimination. Our currently polarised rhetoric seems to do just that – to lock people into narrow categories: ‘white’, ‘Black’, ‘Christian’, ‘Muslim’, ‘conservative’, ‘progressive’. But selves are much more complex and rich. Seeing ourselves as a network is a fertile way to understand our complexity. Perhaps it could even help break the rigid and reductive stereotyping that dominates current cultural and political discourse, and cultivate more productive communication. We might not understand ourselves or others perfectly, but we often have overlapping identities and perspectives. Rather than seeing our multiple identities as separating us from one another, we should see them as bases for communication and understanding, even if partial. Lindsey is a white woman philosopher. Her identity as a philosopher is shared with other philosophers (men, women, white, not white). At the same time, she might share an identity as a woman philosopher with other women philosophers whose experiences as philosophers have been shaped by being women. Sometimes communication is more difficult than others, as when some identities are ideologically rejected, or seem so different that communication can’t get off the ground. But the multiple identities of the network self provide a basis for the possibility of common ground.

How else might the network self contribute to practical, living concerns? One of the most important contributors to our sense of wellbeing is the sense of being in control of our own lives, of being self-directing. You might worry that the multiplicity of the network self means that it’s determined by other factors and can’t be self -determining. The thought might be that freedom and self-determination start with a clean slate, with a self that has no characteristics, social relations, preferences or capabilities that would predetermine it. But such a self would lack resources for giving itself direction. Such a being would be buffeted by external forces rather than realising its own potentialities and making its own choices. That would be randomness, not self-determination. In contrast, rather than limiting the self, the network view sees the multiple identities as resources for a self that’s actively setting its own direction and making choices for itself. Lindsey might prioritise career over parenthood for a period of time, she might commit to finishing her novel, setting philosophical work aside. Nothing prevents a network self from freely choosing a direction or forging new ones. Self-determination expresses the self. It’s rooted in self-understanding.

The network self view envisions an enriched self and multiple possibilities for self-determination, rather than prescribing a particular way that selves ought to be. That doesn’t mean that a self doesn’t have responsibilities to and for others. Some responsibilities might be inherited, though many are chosen. That’s part of the fabric of living with others. Selves are not only ‘networked’, that is, in social networks, but are themselves networks. By embracing the complexity and fluidity of selves, we come to a better understanding of who we are and how to live well with ourselves and with one another.

To read more about the self, visit Psyche , a digital magazine from Aeon that illuminates the human condition through psychology, philosophical understanding and the arts.

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Consciousness and altered states

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3 Self and Identity

For human beings, the self is what happens when “I” encounters “Me.” The central psychological question of selfhood, then, is this: How does a person apprehend and understand who he or she is? Over the past 100 years, psychologists have approached the study of self (and the related concept of identity) in many different ways, but three central metaphors for the self repeatedly emerge. First, the self may be seen as a social actor, who enacts roles and displays traits by performing behaviors in the presence of others. Second, the self is a motivated agent, who acts upon inner desires and formulates goals, values, and plans to guide behavior in the future. Third, the self eventually becomes an autobiographical author, too, who takes stock of life — past, present, and future — to create a story about who I am, how I came to be, and where my life may be going. This module briefly reviews central ideas and research findings on the self as an actor, an agent, and an author, with an emphasis on how these features of selfhood develop over the human life course.

Learning Objectives

• Explain the basic idea of reflexivity in human selfhood—how the “I” encounters and makes sense of itself (the “Me”).
• Describe fundamental distinctions between three different perspectives on the self: the self as actor, agent, and author.
• Describe how a sense of self as a social actor emerges around the age of 2 years and how it develops going forward.
• Describe the development of the self’s sense of motivated agency from the emergence of the child’s theory of mind to the articulation of life goals and values in adolescence and beyond.
• Define the term narrative identity, and explain what psychological and cultural functions narrative identity serves.

Introduction

In the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, the ancient Greeks inscribed the words: “Know thy self .” For at least 2,500 years, and probably longer, human beings have pondered the meaning of the ancient aphorism. Over the past century, psychological scientists have joined the effort. They have formulated many theories and tested countless hypotheses that speak to the central question of human selfhood: How does a person know who he or she is?

The ancient Greeks seemed to realize that the self is inherently reflexive —it reflects back on itself. In the disarmingly simple idea made famous by the great psychologist William James ( 1892/1963 ), the self is what happens when “I” reflects back upon “Me.” The self is both the I and the Me—it is the knower, and it is what the knower knows when the knower reflects upon itself. When you look back at yourself, what do you see? When you look inside, what do you find? Moreover, when you try to change your self in some way, what is it that you are trying to change? The philosopher Charles Taylor ( 1989 ) describes the self as a reflexive project . In modern life, Taylor agues, we often try to manage, discipline, refine, improve, or develop the self. We work on our selves, as we might work on any other interesting project. But what exactly is it that we work on?

Imagine for a moment that you have decided to improve your self . You might, say, go on a diet to improve your appearance. Or you might decide to be nicer to your mother, in order to improve that important social role. Or maybe the problem is at work—you need to find a better job or go back to school to prepare for a different career. Perhaps you just need to work harder. Or get organized. Or recommit yourself to religion. Or maybe the key is to begin thinking about your whole life story in a completely different way, in a way that you hope will bring you more happiness, fulfillment, peace, or excitement.

Although there are many different ways you might reflect upon and try to improve the self, it turns out that many, if not most, of them fall roughly into three broad psychological categories ( McAdams & Cox, 2010 ). The I may encounter the Me as (a) a social actor, (b) a motivated agent, or (c) an autobiographical author.

The Social Actor

Shakespeare tapped into a deep truth about human nature when he famously wrote, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” He was wrong about the “merely,” however, for there is nothing more important for human adaptation than the manner in which we perform our roles as actors in the everyday theatre of social life. What Shakespeare may have sensed but could not have fully understood is that human beings evolved to live in social groups. Beginning with Darwin ( 1872/1965 ) and running through contemporary conceptions of human evolution, scientists have portrayed human nature as profoundly social ( Wilson, 2012 ). For a few million years, Homo sapiens and their evolutionary forerunners have survived and flourished by virtue of their ability to live and work together in complex social groups, cooperating with each other to solve problems and overcome threats and competing with each other in the face of limited resources. As social animals, human beings strive to get along and get ahead in the presence of each other ( Hogan, 1982 ). Evolution has prepared us to care deeply about social acceptance and social status, for those unfortunate individuals who do not get along well in social groups or who fail to attain a requisite status among their peers have typically been severely compromised when it comes to survival and reproduction. It makes consummate evolutionary sense, therefore, that the human “I” should apprehend the “Me” first and foremost as a social actor .

For human beings, the sense of the self as a social actor begins to emerge around the age of 18 months. Numerous studies have shown that by the time they reach their second birthday most toddlers recognize themselves in mirrors and other reflecting devices ( Lewis & Brooks-Gunn, 1979 ; Rochat, 2003 ). What they see is an embodied actor who moves through space and time. Many children begin to use words such as “me” and “mine” in the second year of life, suggesting that the I now has linguistic labels that can be applied reflexively to itself: I call myself “me.” Around the same time, children also begin to express social emotions such as embarrassment, shame, guilt, and pride ( Tangney, Stuewig, & Mashek, 2007 ). These emotions tell the social actor how well he or she is performing in the group. When I do things that win the approval of others, I feel proud of myself. When I fail in the presence of others, I may feel embarrassment or shame. When I violate a social rule, I may experience guilt, which may motivate me to make amends.

Many of the classic psychological theories of human selfhood point to the second year of life as a key developmental period. For example, Freud ( 1923/1961 ) and his followers in the psychoanalytic tradition traced the emergence of an autonomous ego back to the second year. Freud used the term “ego” (in German das Ich , which also translates into “the I”) to refer to an executive self in the personality. Erikson ( 1963 ) argued that experiences of trust and interpersonal attachment in the first year of life help to consolidate the autonomy of the ego in the second. Coming from a more sociological perspective, Mead ( 1934 ) suggested that the I comes to know the Me through reflection, which may begin quite literally with mirrors but later involves the reflected appraisals of others. I come to know who I am as a social actor, Mead argued, by noting how other people in my social world react to my performances. In the development of the self as a social actor, other people function like mirrors—they reflect who I am back to me.

Research has shown that when young children begin to make attributions about themselves, they start simple ( Harter, 2006 ). At age 4, Jessica knows that she has dark hair, knows that she lives in a white house, and describes herself to others in terms of simple behavioral traits . She may say that she is “nice,” or “helpful,” or that she is “a good girl most of the time.” By the time, she hits fifth grade (age 10), Jessica sees herself in more complex ways, attributing traits to the self such as “honest,” “moody,” “outgoing,” “shy,” “hard-working,” “smart,” “good at math but not gym class,” or “nice except when I am around my annoying brother.” By late childhood and early adolescence, the personality traits that people attribute to themselves, as well as those attributed to them by others, tend to correlate with each other in ways that conform to a well-established taxonomy of five broad trait domains, repeatedly derived in studies of adult personality and often called the Big Five : (1) extraversion, (2) neuroticism, (3) agreeableness, (4) conscientiousness, and (5) openness to experience ( Roberts, Wood, & Caspi, 2008 ). By late childhood, moreover, self-conceptions will likely also include important social roles : “I am a good student,” “I am the oldest daughter,” or “I am a good friend to Sarah.”

Traits and roles, and variations on these notions, are the main currency of the self as social actor ( McAdams & Cox, 2010 ). Trait terms capture perceived consistencies in social performance. They convey what I reflexively perceive to be my overall acting style, based in part on how I think others see me as an actor in many different social situations. Roles capture the quality, as I perceive it, of important structured relationships in my life. Taken together, traits and roles make up the main features of my social reputation , as I apprehend it in my own mind ( Hogan, 1982 ).

If you have ever tried hard to change yourself, you may have taken aim at your social reputation, targeting your central traits or your social roles. Maybe you woke up one day and decided that you must become a more optimistic and emotionally upbeat person. Taking into consideration the reflected appraisals of others, you realized that even your friends seem to avoid you because you bring them down. In addition, it feels bad to feel so bad all the time: Wouldn’t it be better to feel good, to have more energy and hope? In the language of traits, you have decided to “work on” your “neuroticism.” Or maybe instead, your problem is the trait of “conscientiousness”: You are undisciplined and don’t work hard enough, so you resolve to make changes in that area. Self-improvement efforts such as these—aimed at changing one’s traits to become a more effective social actor—are sometimes successful, but they are very hard—kind of like dieting. Research suggests that broad traits tend to be stubborn, resistant to change, even with the aid of psychotherapy. However, people often have more success working directly on their social roles. To become a more effective social actor, you may want to take aim at the important roles you play in life. What can I do to become a better son or daughter? How can I find new and meaningful roles to perform at work, or in my family, or among my friends, or in my church and community? By doing concrete things that enrich your performances in important social roles, you may begin to see yourself in a new light, and others will notice the change, too. Social actors hold the potential to transform their performances across the human life course. Each time you walk out on stage, you have a chance to start anew.

The Motivated Agent

Whether we are talking literally about the theatrical stage or more figuratively, as I do in this module, about the everyday social environment for human behavior, observers can never fully know what is in the actor’s head, no matter how closely they watch. We can see actors act, but we cannot know for sure what they want or what they value , unless they tell us straightaway. As a social actor, a person may come across as friendly and compassionate, or cynical and mean-spirited, but in neither case can we infer their motivations from their traits or their roles. What does the friendly person want? What is the cynical father trying to achieve? Many broad psychological theories of the self prioritize the motivational qualities of human behavior—the inner needs, wants, desires, goals, values, plans, programs, fears, and aversions that seem to give behavior its direction and purpose ( Bandura, 1989 ; Deci & Ryan, 1991 ; Markus & Nurius, 1986 ). These kinds of theories explicitly conceive of the self as a motivated agent.

To be an agent is to act with direction and purpose, to move forward into the future in pursuit of self-chosen and valued goals. In a sense, human beings are agents even as infants, for babies can surely act in goal-directed ways. By age 1 year, moreover, infants show a strong preference for observing and imitating the goal-directed, intentional behavior of others, rather than random behaviors ( Woodward, 2009 ). Still, it is one thing to act in goal-directed ways; it is quite another for the I to know itself (the Me) as an intentional and purposeful force who moves forward in life in pursuit of self-chosen goals, values, and other desired end states. In order to do so, the person must first realize that people indeed have desires and goals in their minds and that these inner desires and goals motivate (initiate, energize, put into motion) their behavior. According to a strong line of research in developmental psychology, attaining this kind of understanding means acquiring a theory of mind ( Wellman, 1993 ), which occurs for most children by the age of 4. Once a child understands that other people’s behavior is often motivated by inner desires and goals, it is a small step to apprehend the self in similar terms.

Building on theory of mind and other cognitive and social developments, children begin to construct the self as a motivated agent in the elementary school years, layered over their still-developing sense of themselves as social actors. Theory and research on what developmental psychologists call the age 5-to-7 shift converge to suggest that children become more planful, intentional, and systematic in their pursuit of valued goals during this time ( Sameroff & Haith, 1996 ). Schooling reinforces the shift in that teachers and curricula place increasing demands on students to work hard, adhere to schedules, focus on goals, and achieve success in particular, well-defined task domains. Their relative success in achieving their most cherished goals, furthermore, goes a long way in determining children’s self-esteem ( Robins, Tracy, & Trzesniewski, 2008 ). Motivated agents feel good about themselves to the extent they believe that they are making good progress in achieving their goals and advancing their most important values.

Goals and values become even more important for the self in adolescence, as teenagers begin to confront what Erikson ( 1963 ) famously termed the developmental challenge of identity . For adolescents and young adults, establishing a psychologically efficacious identity involves exploring different options with respect to life goals, values, vocations, and intimate relationships and eventually committing to a motivational and ideological agenda for adult life—an integrated and realistic sense of what I want and value in life and how I plan to achieve it ( Kroger & Marcia, 2011 ). Committing oneself to an integrated suite of life goals and values is perhaps the greatest achievement for the self as motivated agent . Establishing an adult identity has implications, as well, for how a person moves through life as a social actor, entailing new role commitments and, perhaps, a changing understanding of one’s basic dispositional traits. According to Erikson, however, identity achievement is always provisional, for adults continue to work on their identities as they move into midlife and beyond, often relinquishing old goals in favor of new ones, investing themselves in new projects and making new plans, exploring new relationships, and shifting their priorities in response to changing life circumstances ( Freund & Riediger, 2006 ; Josselson, 1996 ).

There is a sense whereby any time you try to change yourself, you are assuming the role of a motivated agent. After all, to strive to change something is inherently what an agent does. However, what particular feature of selfhood you try to change may correspond to your self as actor, agent, or author, or some combination. When you try to change your traits or roles, you take aim at the social actor. By contrast, when you try to change your values or life goals, you are focusing on yourself as a motivated agent. Adolescence and young adulthood are periods in the human life course when many of us focus attention on our values and life goals. Perhaps you grew up as a traditional Catholic, but now in college you believe that the values inculcated in your childhood no longer function so well for you. You no longer believe in the central tenets of the Catholic Church, say, and are now working to replace your old values with new ones. Or maybe you still want to be Catholic, but you feel that your new take on faith requires a different kind of personal ideology. In the realm of the motivated agent, moreover, changing values can influence life goals. If your new value system prioritizes alleviating the suffering of others, you may decide to pursue a degree in social work, or to become a public interest lawyer, or to live a simpler life that prioritizes people over material wealth. A great deal of the identity work we do in adolescence and young adulthood is about values and goals, as we strive to articulate a personal vision or dream for what we hope to accomplish in the future.

The Autobiographical Author

Even as the “I” continues to develop a sense of the “Me” as both a social actor and a motivated agent, a third standpoint for selfhood gradually emerges in the adolescent and early-adult years. The third perspective is a response to Erikson’s ( 1963 ) challenge of identity. According to Erikson, developing an identity involves more than the exploration of and commitment to life goals and values (the self as motivated agent), and more than committing to new roles and re-evaluating old traits (the self as social actor). It also involves achieving a sense of temporal continuity in life—a reflexive understanding of how I have come to be the person I am becoming , or put differently, how my past self has developed into my present self, and how my present self will, in turn, develop into an envisioned future self. In his analysis of identity formation in the life of the 15th-century Protestant reformer Martin Luther, Erikson ( 1958 ) describes the culmination of a young adult’s search for identity in this way:

“To be adult means among other things to see one’s own life in continuous perspective, both in retrospect and prospect. By accepting some definition of who he is, usually on the basis of a function in an economy, a place in the sequence of generations, and a status in the structure of society, the adult is able to selectively reconstruct his past in such a way that, step for step, it seems to have planned him, or better, he seems to have planned it . In this sense, psychologically we do choose our parents, our family history, and the history of our kings, heroes, and gods. By making them our own, we maneuver ourselves into the inner position of proprietors, of creators.”

— (Erikson, 1958, pp. 111–112; emphasis added).

In this rich passage, Erikson intimates that the development of a mature identity in young adulthood involves the I’s ability to construct a retrospective and prospective story about the Me ( McAdams, 1985 ). In their efforts to find a meaningful identity for life, young men and women begin “to selectively reconstruct” their past, as Erikson wrote, and imagine their future to create an integrative life story, or what psychologists today often call a narrative identity . A narrative identity is an internalized and evolving story of the self that reconstructs the past and anticipates the future in such a way as to provide a person’s life with some degree of unity, meaning, and purpose over time ( McAdams, 2008 ; McLean, Pasupathi, & Pals, 2007 ). The self typically becomes an autobiographical author in the early-adult years, a way of being that is layered over the motivated agent, which is layered over the social actor. In order to provide life with the sense of temporal continuity and deep meaning that Erikson believed identity should confer, we must author a personalized life story that integrates our understanding of who we once were, who we are today, and who we may become in the future. The story helps to explain, for the author and for the author’s world, why the social actor does what it does and why the motivated agent wants what it wants, and how the person as a whole has developed over time, from the past’s reconstructed beginning to the future’s imagined ending.

By the time they are 5 or 6 years of age, children can tell well-formed stories about personal events in their lives ( Fivush, 2011 ). By the end of childhood, they usually have a good sense of what a typical biography contains and how it is sequenced, from birth to death ( Thomsen & Bernsten, 2008 ). But it is not until adolescence, research shows, that human beings express advanced storytelling skills and what psychologists call autobiographical reasoning ( Habermas & Bluck, 2000 ; McLean & Fournier, 2008 ). In autobiographical reasoning, a narrator is able to derive substantive conclusions about the self from analyzing his or her own personal experiences. Adolescents may develop the ability to string together events into causal chains and inductively derive general themes about life from a sequence of chapters and scenes ( Habermas & de Silveira, 2008 ). For example, a 16-year-old may be able to explain to herself and to others how childhood experiences in her family have shaped her vocation in life. Her parents were divorced when she was 5 years old, the teenager recalls, and this caused a great deal of stress in her family. Her mother often seemed anxious and depressed, but she (the now-teenager when she was a little girl—the story’s protagonist) often tried to cheer her mother up, and her efforts seemed to work. In more recent years, the teenager notes that her friends often come to her with their boyfriend problems. She seems to be very adept at giving advice about love and relationships, which stems, the teenager now believes, from her early experiences with her mother. Carrying this causal narrative forward, the teenager now thinks that she would like to be a marriage counselor when she grows up.

Unlike children, then, adolescents can tell a full and convincing story about an entire human life, or at least a prominent line of causation within a full life, explaining continuity and change in the story’s protagonist over time. Once the cognitive skills are in place, young people seek interpersonal opportunities to share and refine their developing sense of themselves as storytellers (the I) who tell stories about themselves (the Me). Adolescents and young adults author a narrative sense of the self by telling stories about their experiences to other people, monitoring the feedback they receive from the tellings, editing their stories in light of the feedback, gaining new experiences and telling stories about those, and on and on, as selves create stories that, in turn, create new selves ( McLean et al., 2007 ). Gradually, in fits and starts, through conversation and introspection, the I develops a convincing and coherent narrative about the Me.

Contemporary research on the self as autobiographical author emphasizes the strong effect of culture on narrative identity ( Hammack, 2008 ). Culture provides a menu of favored plot lines, themes, and character types for the construction of self-defining life stories. Autobiographical authors sample selectively from the cultural menu, appropriating ideas that seem to resonate well with their own life experiences. As such, life stories reflect the culture, wherein they are situated as much as they reflect the authorial efforts of the autobiographical I.

As one example of the tight link between culture and narrative identity, McAdams ( 2013 ) and others (e.g., Kleinfeld, 2012 ) have highlighted the prominence of redemptive narratives in American culture. Epitomized in such iconic cultural ideals as the American dream, Horatio Alger stories, and narratives of Christian atonement, redemptive stories track the move from suffering to an enhanced status or state, while scripting the development of a chosen protagonist who journeys forth into a dangerous and unredeemed world ( McAdams, 2013 ). Hollywood movies often celebrate redemptive quests. Americans are exposed to similar narrative messages in self-help books, 12-step programs, Sunday sermons, and in the rhetoric of political campaigns. Over the past two decades, the world’s most influential spokesperson for the power of redemption in human lives may be Oprah Winfrey, who tells her own story of overcoming childhood adversity while encouraging others, through her media outlets and philanthropy, to tell similar kinds of stories for their own lives ( McAdams, 2013 ). Research has demonstrated that American adults who enjoy high levels of mental health and civic engagement tend to construct their lives as narratives of redemption, tracking the move from sin to salvation, rags to riches, oppression to liberation, or sickness/abuse to health/recovery ( McAdams, Diamond, de St. Aubin, & Mansfield, 1997 ; McAdams, Reynolds, Lewis, Patten, & Bowman, 2001 ; Walker & Frimer, 2007 ). In American society, these kinds of stories are often seen to be inspirational.

At the same time, McAdams ( 2011 , 2013 ) has pointed to shortcomings and limitations in the redemptive stories that many Americans tell, which mirror cultural biases and stereotypes in American culture and heritage. McAdams has argued that redemptive stories support happiness and societal engagement for some Americans, but the same stories can encourage moral righteousness and a naïve expectation that suffering will always be redeemed. For better and sometimes for worse, Americans seem to love stories of personal redemption and often aim to assimilate their autobiographical memories and aspirations to a redemptive form. Nonetheless, these same stories may not work so well in cultures that espouse different values and narrative ideals ( Hammack, 2008 ). It is important to remember that every culture offers its own storehouse of favored narrative forms. It is also essential to know that no single narrative form captures all that is good (or bad) about a culture. In American society, the redemptive narrative is but one of many different kinds of stories that people commonly employ to make sense of their lives.

What is your story? What kind of a narrative are you working on? As you look to the past and imagine the future, what threads of continuity, change, and meaning do you discern? For many people, the most dramatic and fulfilling efforts to change the self happen when the I works hard, as an autobiographical author, to construct and, ultimately, to tell a new story about the Me. Storytelling may be the most powerful form of self-transformation that human beings have ever invented. Changing one’s life story is at the heart of many forms of psychotherapy and counseling, as well as religious conversions, vocational epiphanies, and other dramatic transformations of the self that people often celebrate as turning points in their lives ( Adler, 2012 ). Storytelling is often at the heart of the little changes, too, minor edits in the self that we make as we move through daily life, as we live and experience life, and as we later tell it to ourselves and to others.

For human beings, selves begin as social actors, but they eventually become motivated agents and autobiographical authors, too. The I first sees itself as an embodied actor in social space; with development, however, it comes to appreciate itself also as a forward-looking source of self-determined goals and values, and later yet, as a storyteller of personal experience, oriented to the reconstructed past and the imagined future. To “know thyself” in mature adulthood, then, is to do three things: (a) to apprehend and to perform with social approval my self-ascribed traits and roles, (b) to pursue with vigor and (ideally) success my most valued goals and plans, and (c) to construct a story about life that conveys, with vividness and cultural resonance, how I became the person I am becoming, integrating my past as I remember it, my present as I am experiencing it, and my future as I hope it to be.

Text Attribution

Media attributions.

• Me in the mirror
• The Shakespeare, High Street, Lincoln

The idea that the self reflects back upon itself; that the I (the knower, the subject) encounters the Me (the known, the object). Reflexivity is a fundamental property of human selfhood.

Sigmund Freud’s conception of an executive self in the personality. Akin to this module’s notion of “the I,” Freud imagined the ego as observing outside reality, engaging in rational though, and coping with the competing demands of inner desires and moral standards.

A broad taxonomy of personality trait domains repeatedly derived from studies of trait ratings in adulthood and encompassing the categories of (1) extraversion vs. introversion, (2) neuroticism vs. emotional stability, (3) agreeable vs. disagreeableness, (4) conscientiousness vs. nonconscientiousness, and (5) openness to experience vs. conventionality. By late childhood and early adolescence, people’s self-attributions of personality traits, as well as the trait attributions made about them by others, show patterns of intercorrelations that confirm with the five-factor structure obtained in studies of adults.

The sense of the self as an embodied actor whose social performances may be construed in terms of more or less consistent self-ascribed traits and social roles.

The traits and social roles that others attribute to an actor. Actors also have their own conceptions of what they imagine their respective social reputations indeed are in the eyes of others.

Emerging around the age of 4, the child’s understanding that other people have minds in which are located desires and beliefs, and that desires and beliefs, thereby, motivate behavior.

Cognitive and social changes that occur in the early elementary school years that result in the child’s developing a more purposeful, planful, and goal-directed approach to life, setting the stage for the emergence of the self as a motivated agent.

The extent to which a person feels that he or she is worthy and good. The success or failure that the motivated agent experiences in pursuit of valued goals is a strong determinant of self-esteem.

Sometimes used synonymously with the term “self,” identity means many different things in psychological science and in other fields (e.g., sociology). In this module, I adopt Erik Erikson’s conception of identity as a developmental task for late adolescence and young adulthood. Forming an identity in adolescence and young adulthood involves exploring alternative roles, values, goals, and relationships and eventually committing to a realistic agenda for life that productively situates a person in the adult world of work and love. In addition, identity formation entails commitments to new social roles and reevaluation of old traits, and importantly, it brings with it a sense of temporal continuity in life, achieved though the construction of an integrative life story.

The sense of the self as an intentional force that strives to achieve goals, plans, values, projects, and the like.

The self as knower, the sense of the self as a subject who encounters (knows, works on) itself (the Me).

The self as known, the sense of the self as the object or target of the I’s knowledge and work.

An internalized and evolving story of the self designed to provide life with some measure of temporal unity and purpose. Beginning in late adolescence, people craft self-defining stories that reconstruct the past and imagine the future to explain how the person came to be the person that he or she is becoming.

The ability, typically developed in adolescence, to derive substantive conclusions about the self from analyzing one’s own personal experiences.

The sense of the self as a storyteller who reconstructs the past and imagines the future in order to articulate an integrative narrative that provides life with some measure of temporal continuity and purpose.

Life stories that affirm the transformation from suffering to an enhanced status or state. In American culture, redemptive life stories are highly prized as models for the good self, as in classic narratives of atonement, upward mobility, liberation, and recovery.

An Introduction to Social Psychology Copyright © 2022 by Thomas Edison State University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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How to Write About Yourself in a College Essay | Examples

Published on September 21, 2021 by Kirsten Courault . Revised on May 31, 2023.

An insightful college admissions essay requires deep self-reflection, authenticity, and a balance between confidence and vulnerability. Your essay shouldn’t just be a resume of your experiences; colleges are looking for a story that demonstrates your most important values and qualities.

To write about your achievements and qualities without sounding arrogant, use specific stories to illustrate them. You can also write about challenges you’ve faced or mistakes you’ve made to show vulnerability and personal growth.

Table of contents

Start with self-reflection, how to write about challenges and mistakes, how to write about your achievements and qualities, how to write about a cliché experience, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about college application essays.

Before you start writing, spend some time reflecting to identify your values and qualities. You should do a comprehensive brainstorming session, but here are a few questions to get you started:

• What are three words your friends or family would use to describe you, and why would they choose them?
• Whom do you admire most and why?
• What are the top five things you are thankful for?
• What has inspired your hobbies or future goals?
• What are you most proud of? Ashamed of?

As you self-reflect, consider how your values and goals reflect your prospective university’s program and culture, and brainstorm stories that demonstrate the fit between the two.

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

Writing about difficult experiences can be an effective way to show authenticity and create an emotional connection to the reader, but choose carefully which details to share, and aim to demonstrate how the experience helped you learn and grow.

Be vulnerable

It’s not necessary to have a tragic story or a huge confession. But you should openly share your thoughts, feelings, and experiences to evoke an emotional response from the reader. Even a cliché or mundane topic can be made interesting with honest reflection. This honesty is a preface to self-reflection and insight in the essay’s conclusion.

Don’t overshare

With difficult topics, you shouldn’t focus too much on negative aspects. Instead, use your challenging circumstances as a brief introduction to how you responded positively.

Share what you have learned

It’s okay to include your failure or mistakes in your essay if you include a lesson learned. After telling a descriptive, honest story, you should explain what you learned and how you applied it to your life.

While it’s good to sell your strengths, you also don’t want to come across as arrogant. Instead of just stating your extracurricular activities, achievements, or personal qualities, aim to discreetly incorporate them into your story.

Brag indirectly

Mention your extracurricular activities or awards in passing, not outright, to avoid sounding like you’re bragging from a resume.

Use stories to prove your qualities

Even if you don’t have any impressive academic achievements or extracurriculars, you can still demonstrate your academic or personal character. But you should use personal examples to provide proof. In other words, show evidence of your character instead of just telling.

Many high school students write about common topics such as sports, volunteer work, or their family. Your essay topic doesn’t have to be groundbreaking, but do try to include unexpected personal details and your authentic voice to make your essay stand out .

To find an original angle, try these techniques:

• Focus on a specific moment, and describe the scene using your five senses.
• Mention objects that have special significance to you.
• Instead of following a common story arc, include a surprising twist or insight.

Your unique voice can shed new perspective on a common human experience while also revealing your personality. When read out loud, the essay should sound like you are talking.

If you want to know more about academic writing , effective communication , or parts of speech , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

Academic writing

• Writing process
• Transition words
• Passive voice
• Paraphrasing

 Communication

• How to end an email
• Ms, mrs, miss
• How to start an email
• I hope this email finds you well
• Hope you are doing well

 Parts of speech

• Personal pronouns
• Conjunctions

First, spend time reflecting on your core values and character . You can start with these questions:

However, you should do a comprehensive brainstorming session to fully understand your values. Also consider how your values and goals match your prospective university’s program and culture. Then, brainstorm stories that illustrate the fit between the two.

When writing about yourself , including difficult experiences or failures can be a great way to show vulnerability and authenticity, but be careful not to overshare, and focus on showing how you matured from the experience.

Through specific stories, you can weave your achievements and qualities into your essay so that it doesn’t seem like you’re bragging from a resume.

Include specific, personal details and use your authentic voice to shed a new perspective on a common human experience.

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Self-identity and personal identity

• Published: 07 August 2020
• Volume 20 , pages 235–247, ( 2021 )
• Cite this article
• John J. Drummond   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7197-2593 1  

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The key to understanding self-identity is identifying the transcendental structures that make a temporally extended, continuous, and unified experiential life possible. Self-identity is rooted in the formal, temporalizing structure of intentional experience that underlies psychological continuity. Personal identity, by contrast, is rooted in the content of the particular flow of experience, in particular and primarily, in the convictions adopted passively or actively in reflection by a self-identical subject in the light of her social and traditional inheritances. Secondarily, a person’s identity is rooted in others’ characterizations of that person in the light of the social conventions and constructs of the cultures and traditions that have shaped the personal identity of the ones who make the attributions. Personal identity, on this view, is fundamentally rooted in beliefs, traits—especially character traits—sentiments, and moods, that is, in the subject’s convictions about the true, the good, and the right—and in the commitments to the pursuit of (apparently) worthwhile goods and to the practical identities rooted in those convictions.

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Self and Self-Concept

Identification

Personal identity is social identity

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

John Locke posed for us the modern problem of personal identity, and he offered a psychological criterion for personal identity in the following passage from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding : A person, Locke claimed,

is a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing, in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness, which is inseparable from thinking, and as it seems to me essential to it: It being impossible for any one to perceive, without perceiving, that he does perceive. When we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, meditate, or will any thing, we know that we do so. Thus it is always as to our present Sensations and Perceptions: And by this every one is to himself, that which he calls self : It not being considered in this case, whether the same self be continued in the same, or divers Substances. For since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and 'tis that, that makes every one to be, what he calls self ; and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things, in this alone consists personal identity , i . e . the sameness of a rational Being: And as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past Action or Thought, so far reaches the Identity of that Person ; it is the same self now it was then; and 'tis by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that Action was done. (Locke 1975 , 335)

Note (i) that the language of self and person are used interchangeably in Locke’s text, (ii) that backward extension serves as the psychological criterion for personal identity, and (iii) that personal identity is defined as the “sameness of a rational Being.” We can state the Lockean criterion for personal identity formally as follows: a self-reflective conscious Y at t 2 is identical to X at t 1 if and only if Y ’s consciousness “can be extended backwards” to X .

Subsequent developments of Locke’s view attempt to clarify the nature of this psychological criterion. One—the memory version—claims that a self-conscious Y at t 2 is identical to a self-conscious X at t 1 if and only if Y can remember at t 2 an experience X had at t 1 . But this cannot be right. Memory presupposes identity; it does not constitute it. Moreover, suppose I had an experience at t 1 but have now forgotten it, or suppose in the future I suffer from amnesia or enter a persistent vegetative state. In the former case, the memory version entails that I am no longer the person I was at t 1 , and in the latter case, it entails that I will no longer be the same self or person that I am now. Finally, and most fundamentally, identity is a transitive relation, but memory is not. Footnote 1

These difficulties motivate a second view—the “connectedness” version. Derek Parfit, for example, advances the view there are several kinds of direct psychological connection. As examples, he mentions (i) a future intention and the subsequent act that carries out the intention and (ii) the connections obtaining when we continue to have a particular psychological attribute, for example, to hold a belief or to desire something (Parfit 1984 , 204–5). There exists strong connectedness, he says, when “the number of connections, over any day, is at least half the number of direct connections that hold, over every day, in the lives of nearly every actual person” (Parfit 1984 , 205). But this strong connectedness cannot itself serve as the psychological criterion for connectedness, too, is not a transitive relation. Continuity, however, is. So Parfit turns to psychological continuity which he explains by appealing to the “holding of overlapping chains of strong connectedness” (Parfit 1984 , 205–7). In summary, then, for Parfit X at t 1 is the same person as Y at t 2 if and only if X is uniquely psychologically continuous with Y , where psychological continuity consists in overlapping chains of strong psychological connectedness, itself consisting in significant numbers of direct psychological connections such as memories, future intentions, beliefs/goals/desires, and similarity of character (Shoemaker 2016 ).

I shall argue that such psychological accounts of self-identity are inadequate. They are of interest to a phenomenologist insofar as any attempt to answer the question about the identity of the self must, as Locke recognized, be cast in first-personal, experiential terms. But the key to understanding self-identity is identifying the transcendental structures that make a temporally extended, continuous, and unified experiential life possible. This structure, I shall argue, is found in the phenomenological account of self-awareness, which also functions as an account of self-identity. I shall further argue that self-identify and personal identity are to be distinguished. Self-identity responds to the question, how is it that a subject of experience at t 2 can be, and can grasp itself as, the same subject in different experiences at t 1 ? Personal identity, by contrast, responds to the question, who am I? or who are you? or who is she?

1 Self-awareness and self-identity

The key to a phenomenological notion of self-identity is the intentional structure of self-awareness, which is inseparable from the consciousness of the temporality of experiences. In hearing, say, “Dio, Che Nell’alma Infondere Amor” from Verdi’s Don Carlo , I am aware not only of the presently sounding note or notes, I am aware of the aria as a whole. Only if this is true can I, upon hearing the opening bars of the aria, immediately identify it, expect what is to come as it unfolds (and, indeed, recognize when a note is wrongly sung), and recognize not only its beginning but its ending. Even when I am unfamiliar with a piece of music and cannot expect particular notes with a determinate tone and duration, I still have vaguer, more indeterminate expectations about what is to come, expectations that are shaped by my familiarity with general musical conventions, with similarly sounding pieces, with other music of the era in which the piece was composed, and so forth. This entails that my momentary experience has a temporal “stretch” to it such that I am aware at once of notes as presently sounding, as elapsed and slipping into the past, and as yet to come. The music might have intruded on my thinking about how to compose this paragraph, and when it ends I put it out of mind and continue writing. I am aware of turning my attention back to the computer screen to resume, so to speak, the experience I was having before the song intruded. In listening to the music, I am aware, in brief, of my hearing as forming a temporally extended, experiential unity with its own position in the course of my experiential life.

On pain of infinite regress, the awareness of hearing, say, the aria as a temporally extended and unified experience cannot itself be temporally qualified. This awareness must be a non-temporal awareness that makes possible the experience of both subjective and objective time. As seen in the example, this non-temporal awareness is not merely the experience of the Now, for that would account only for the awareness of the presently sounding note. It fails to account for my awareness of the succession of elapsed notes, the present note, and the anticipated notes as I continue to listen to the aria. If the non-temporal awareness experienced only the Now, I could be aware in the flow of experiences only of the succession of “atomistic” conscious experiences, of a series of Nows one after the other. I could never in any given momentary phase of experience be aware at once of temporal succession . The intentional structure of the occurrent phase of this non-temporal awareness must be such that there is an intertwining in any given moment of the awareness of what has elapsed, of what is now, and of what is to come. The non-temporal structure of awareness, in brief, temporalizes my experiences.

Husserl’s view of the relation between the non-temporal awareness and the temporally extended experience is ambiguous. On the one hand, he distinguishes (Husserl 1991 , 382):

Objects with their objective, worldly time (either enduring or processual);

The flow of immanent experiences with their phenomenal time; and

The absolute, non-temporal self- and time-constituting “flow” (although, since this absolute consciousness is not itself temporal, the language of “flow” can only be metaphorical).

John Brough ( 1972 , see also 1989 , 1991 ) understands the relation between (3) and (2) as a constituting-constituted relation. Husserl claims that the absolute flow constitutes itself, that is, brings itself to appearance, along with the immanent flow of temporally qualified experiences. The risk in distinguishing two “flows” leads, first, to conceiving the relation on the model of object-intentionality, that is, to conceiving the immanent experience as the “inner” or “immanent object ” (my emphasis) of the absolute flow and, second, to the need for two notions of pre-reflective self-awareness, namely, awareness of the self-constituting absolute flow as well as awareness of the flow of immanent experience.

There are, however, opposing indications. For example, Husserl denies that there is a real separation between (2) and (3) (Husserl 1991 , 84); there is only one flow of consciousness with its objects. Dan Zahavi ( 1999 , 70–71) stresses this unity; in particular, Zahavi argues that self-awareness involves consciousness’s appearing to itself, its self-manifestation, and not the appearance of one level of consciousness to another. However, emphasizing the unity of (2) and (3) has its own dangers. For example, it seems to require, first, that in order to secure a single flow, we must attribute features of the absolute—for example, that it is non-temporal—to the experienced temporal flow of conscious experiences, and, second, that experiences could not be given as temporal unities, as discrete experiences, except through reflection.

I have argued elsewhere (2006, 213–18) for a middle ground. There is ample justification for identifying the distinction between what Husserl calls absolute consciousness and the immanent flow of experience as a distinction between a form and the concretum it informs rather than a distinction between a constituting stratum and a constituted one. Husserl suggests this when he claims, “The fundamental form [my emphasis] of this universal synthesis, which [form] makes all other syntheses of consciousness possible, is the all-encompassing consciousness of inner time” (Husserl 1970 , 43; translation modified; see also 75–76; Husserl 2014 , 157). The identification of the form of the universal synthesis—a synthesis that is equivalent to the whole of a conscious life—with the consciousness of inner time maintains the distinction between the ultimate and non-temporal time-constituting form of experience and the concrete flow of temporally extended experiences. It maintains this distinction, however, without putting the form and the concrete ego into a constituting-constituted relation on the model of intending an object.

Briefly put, the idea is this: the impressional-retentional-protentional form of the momentary phase of experience is something akin to Aristotle’s noûs , a form that is itself a “thinking.” If we understand “intentionality” broadly as meaning “directedness to”—or simply directedness—and then distinguish a narrower conception of intentionality as directedness to an object —that is, object-intentionality—we recognize that the form of a momentary phase of experience is a sheer intending comprising both object-intentionality and the form’s directedness to the flow of concrete experiences that it informs (Drummond 2006 , 217–18). On this view, the momentary phase of experience is an openness both to the concrete, experiencing self and to the world. The momentary phase of experience, in short, is awareness of (i) my occurrent experience with its “inner temporality” (e.g., my hearing the aria), (ii) “the whole of [ my ] conscious life” as unified synthetically (Husserl 1970 , 41–42, translation modified; see also Husserl 2014 , 161–62), and (iii) the object upon which my experience is directed (the aria as heard). There are, in other words, two dimensions to our unified self-awareness: we are aware of our occurrent experience and we are aware of the continuous flow of experiences within which our occurrent experience appears as a temporal unity.

The self, then, is pre-reflectively and non-thematically aware of itself always as a subject of object-intentionality and not as the constituted “object” of a constituting absolute consciousness. This concrete self is what Zahavi calls the “minimal self” (Zahavi 2005 , 106). The same principle, however, that accounts for the pre-reflective self-awareness of the minimal self accounts for its numerical identity. I am aware not only of my present experience; I am aware also of my past experiences as belonging to the same, continuous immanent flow of experiences as my present experience, and I am aware of yet-to-come experiences that will belong to the same flow, as for example, the anticipated action that, when executed, will fulfill my present future intention to act.

This structure is more fundamental than the psychological criteria mentioned at the outset. Memory, we said there, presupposes identity, and neither memory nor psychological connectedness are transitive. The identity presupposed by memory and connectedness is possible only insofar as experience is continuous, and it is the temporalizing form of conscious experience that accounts for that continuity. The identity presupposed by memory, for example, is possible only insofar as an experience is intentionally retained in the same stream of consciousness as the occurrent memorial experience (Brough 1975 ). The ordered retention of experiences is a function of the fundamental form that synthesizes the whole of experience. Similarly, other concrete psychological connections sufficient to establish identity are possible only insofar as the connected experiences are retained (or protentionally envisioned) in a single, unified, continuous stream of conscious experiences.

We must remember, however, that in ordinary, everyday experiences we are not aware of ourselves merely as a self-identical being. We are not aware of ourselves as minimal selves, but rather as persons. Our personal identity encompasses our self-identity but is not reducible to it by virtue of the fact that the formal structures that constitute our self-identity are filled by an experiential content that yields a concrete personal identity.

2 Personal identity

We might in suitable circumstances say of Sue, “She’s not herself today,” or of Mary, “She’s a different person from when I knew her ten years ago.” The subject pronoun in each sentence refers to a single, self-identical person, but one sentence uses the language of “self” while the other uses “person.” We have difficulty thinking that Sue today is genuinely a different self from Sue yesterday, and the first sentence, despite itself, does not claim that Sue today is not numerically identical with Sue yesterday. We do not, however, have difficulty thinking that Mary today is genuinely a different person from Mary of ten years ago even though Mary today is numerically identical with Mary of ten years ago. In both examples, we have an identical self who has undergone a change in some respect. This motivates the question, given the enduring identity of the self, why do we, when speaking of changes in the person, sometimes speak of the “self” and sometimes of the “person”?

This question suggests its own answer. It points to the facts that not all changes in the person are changes in personal identity and that changes in personal identity, which is grounded in self-identity, do not touch self-identity. Self-identity is a transcendental structure—in Heideggerian terms, a “fundamental ontological” structure—common to all selves apart from the particular experiences that distinguish them as subjects. Self-identity, in other words, is rooted in the continuity of experience regardless of the kind or content of experience. Self-identity individuates selves, but it does not individuate persons. What, then, beyond self-identity, constitutes personal identity? I shall suggest that personal identity arises from the content of the person’s experiences, in particular, the convictions (beliefs and emotional attitudes) she holds, the commitments her actions realize, and the practical identity those commitments and actions embody.

A person as a center of conscious decision-making (rather than instinctual behavior) is an embodied, social and historical, practical, and reflection-capable minded entity. The fact of embodiment incorporates a biological dimension into our understanding of personal identity. We are aware of our bodily movements, attitudes, postures, and so forth in continuous somaesthetic and kinaesthetic sensations. This is an aspect of our pre-reflective self-awareness, and, therefore, embodiment is a necessary, formal, transcendental structure belonging to the identical self (Drummond 1979 –80). Moreover, higher-order experiences such as judgments articulate the perceived sense of things and thereby both encompass and depend upon the bodily dimension of perception. Emotions and choices too are rooted in our embodiment. We need think only of a wheelchair-bound paraplegic’s seeing a flight of stairs as a (disvalued) obstacle to ascending to an upper floor rather than as a (valued) means to do so. The bodily disability shapes the understanding and evaluation, and it limits the possibilities for choice and action.

An attempt to establish a purely biological criterion for personal identity would have the form: if X is a person at t 1 , and Y exists at any other time, then X and Y are identical if and only if Y ’s biological organism is continuous with X ’s biological organism. Such a biological criterion is too narrow to serve as the basis for personal identity, since the continuity it posits can account only for the self-identity of a biological organism experienced from a third-person perspective. It cannot account for personal characteristics as lived and experienced from the first-person perspective. Such a biological criterion makes no reference to the experiential dimension of the person. The biological dimension I have introduced, by contrast, just is a feature of the experiential continuity previously discussed. It is, more particularly, a biological continuity manifested in the continuity of somaesthetic and kinaesthetic awareness. Nevertheless, this phenomenological approach to embodiment and bodily continuity is also insufficient to provide a criterion for personal identity. Insofar as it is an aspect of the continuity of our awareness of our experiencing worldly things, it does not establish the kind of experiential content requisite for personal identity.

The person, I have said, is beyond her embodiment and free motility also a social and historical, practical, and reflection-capable entity. It is in these aspects of the person that we must ground the person’s identity. A person is not an isolated subject. There is no person without the social, just as there is no social without persons. The personal and the social are jointly constituted in what Husserl calls empathic and communicative experiences. Empathic experiences of another include (1) the perceptive (or memorial or imaginative) recognition of the other’s bodily movements, bodily changes, and bodily activities and (2) the apperceptive recognition of another center of conscious experience. The bodily movements, changes, and activities might be of various sorts: I might recognize the other’s moving and squinting her eyes so as to perceive better some object in the world, or I might recognize certain physiological changes, facial configurations, and gestures as expressions of emotions, or I might recognize bodily movements as actions expressive of choices, or I might hear the other’s speech as expressive, say, of judgments. In experiencing another body in these ways, I do not experience a merely material body, such as a stone, a tree, or a building. I experience these bodily changes and activities as expressive of a conscious being in control of the body I now encounter. I experience the other person in (and not through ) the perceptual presentation of the other’s bodily changes and activities (Husserl 1970 , 108ff.). I encounter, for example, the other’s anger in her facial expressions, her bodily motions, the volume of her voice, and so on.

Empathy, then, is the perceptual recognition of an embodied, expressive center of conscious agency. It is a unique kind of perceptual recognition, one that grasps not merely a material object in the world before me but a “subject-object” (Husserl 1973a , 457), an object who, like me, is a subject. Since the fundamental element in my self-awareness is of myself as an experiencing subject, my fundamental sense of the other “subject-object” is of another subject. I encounter this other subject first and foremost as a co-subject sharing a world with me (Husserl 1989 : 201). This view entails that empathy involves a mutual recognition. The other subject’s disclosure of the world includes the disclosure of myself as also a “subject-object” for the other subject. I become part of what the other intends as worldly. When I experience others, in other words, I experience them as subjects who experience worldly objects, including me (Husserl 1973b , 4–5).

The mutual encounters of subject-objects disclosing a shared world establishes a multiplicity of conscious agents, who form a community in and through communicative acts rooted in the empathic experience of the other, that is, “acts in which [a person] places himself in a communicative relation toward his fellow [humans], speaks with them, writes letters, reads about them in the papers, associates with them in communal activities, makes promises to them, etc.” (Husserl 1989 , 191). A “we”-subject arises in such communicative experiences, in the shared understanding of the common world we inhabit.

This social world is not to be understood as comprising persons considered merely as individuals; rather, it comprises persons who are members of communities that preserve themselves in time, that have their communal properties, their moral and legal systems, their modes of functioning in collaboration with individual persons as well as other communities, their dependencies on circumstances, and their regulated ways of changing and developing themselves over time (Husserl 1989 , 191–92). The world is a world of common objects, common values, common uses, common actions and achievements that create and maintain cultural objects, institutions, and behaviors. We take objects as utensils, tools, sculptures, paintings, literary products, insignias, seals, vestments, icons, sacred spaces, and so forth, and we consider them in various ways as valuable or distasteful. We relate our actions to others in definite ways, act in common with them, and comport ourselves together with them toward the objects of this world.

The sociality of the person manifests itself in two dimensions: the sense of myself as a person expressing my individual freedom and the sense of myself that depends (at least in part) on social constructions. Husserl characterizes the relation between the influence of others and a subject’s individual freedom as follows:

The development of a personality is determined by the influence of others, by the influence of their thoughts, their feelings . . . [and] their commands. Other’s thoughts penetrate my soul. They can in shifting circumstances—that is, relative to my psychic situation, the stage of my development, the formation of my dispositions—have a different effect, either huge or small. The same idea has a different influence on different people in the “same” circumstances. Opposed to the thoughts of others are my own thoughts, ones that “arise originally” in my mind or are inferred by me from my own premises (that might perhaps rest on the influence of others) and suppositions. The same is true of my own feelings , ones that have their originary source in me, and the feelings of others that are acquired, felt, but inauthentic. What comes from others and is “taken over” by me . . . can be characterized as issuing from the other subject . . . as an imposition , to which I yield perhaps passively, perhaps reluctantly. Alternatively, I might appropriate it on my own accord, and it becomes my own . . . Besides what proceeds from other persons, there appear in the intentional form of indeterminate generality, the impositions of morality, of custom, of tradition, of the spiritual milieu: “one” judges so, “one” holds a fork so, and the like—that is, the demands of the social group, of the class, and so forth. One can passively comply, or one can actively take a stand, freely choose. (Husserl 1989 , 281–82)

The development of a person, her convictions, and her personality is tethered to a social, historical, and cultural inheritance transmitted to us through the communicative medium of both other individuals and tradition. Tradition’s transmission across generations calls attention as well to the historicality proper to both an individual’s and a community’s experience. A tradition, in brief, is a complex form of intersubjective—better, communal—intentionality, Footnote 2 and the inherited past of the community shapes an individual’s openness to the future. The intersubjective experience that establishes a linguistic, cognitive, and practical normality embodies itself in the form of a normal world-apprehension on the basis of linguistically transmitted and sedimented meanings, practices, and institutions. This normal world-apprehension manifests itself as conventions, as ordinary ways of encountering the world, as what “one” thinks or should think, what “one” does or should do, and what “one” is or should be.

Traditions account, then, for our initial understanding of empirical concepts, emotion concepts, value concepts, and moral concepts. A person’s thinking and agency always occur and must always occur within this horizon of pre-given traditions. The apprehension of what is the case, the evaluation of goods (including moral goods), decisions about how best to realize those goods, and evaluative judgments about our own actions, the actions of others, and social practices and institutions all arise against the background of the “common” knowledge embodied in our collective determinations of empirical, evaluative, and moral concepts, of choiceworthy goods, and of praiseworthy actions, a common knowledge passed down from one generation to the next that continues to be worked out, criticized, modified, and reappropriated within successive generations.

A person can take over this past passively, that is, inauthentically, or actively, authentically. In becoming fully rational, a person reflects upon and critically weighs the proposals tradition places before her and appropriates or modifies or rejects them. A person becomes self-responsible—responsible for her beliefs, attitudes, and actions—in the transition from passively accepting beliefs handed down in tradition or proposed by others to the active appropriation of a judgmental content as one’s own conviction, one into which one has insight and one that has been tested against the convictions of others, especially those whose opinions or arguments differ from our own. Both the presentation of possibilities for one’s life and the choice of a practical identity or identities arise within the social structure of intentionality. To exercise reason actively and fully—to achieve the flourishing appropriate to human persons—is to move beyond living passively in what is handed down to me and to be a truthful agent responsible for what one believes, for one’s evaluative attitudes toward things, for what one does, and also for the overarching commitments and the practical identity that organizes one’s life in meaningful ways. To exercise reason fully is, in short, to be responsible for who one is, for one’s character.

In the affective sphere, it is not isolated emotions that characterize the person but rather the character traits, sentiments, and moods that are associated with one’s commitments and practical identities. I adopt an emotional attitude toward things and the world, and this emotional attitude, when reflected upon and recognized as appropriate, takes the form of a “conviction” or habitus disposing me to experience the world in ways that conform to the convictions I hold and to act in ways that fulfill my evaluations of what it is worthwhile to be and to do.

Suppose, for example, my colleague angers me at a faculty meeting with his remarks. Suppose as well that this colleague regularly angers me. Meeting after meeting, I come away experiencing anger and judging that this colleague has offended me or others in the department. These continued judgments regarding the wrongdoing of my colleague form a habitus that disposes me to feel anger whenever dealing with this colleague. This emotional disposition I call a “targeted trait”; it disposes me to feel one emotion—anger—and to feel it in relation to this one person—my colleague. This is not to say, of course, that I do not occasionally get angry at other people. It is simply to say that I possess the dispositional trait only in relation to this colleague. My occasional anger at others does not manifest the trait; I am not irascible in general. Of course, it is clear that some people are accurately described as hot-tempered, quick-tempered, or irascible. If I were to get angry regularly in my interactions with other people in general, I would be such a person, and my irascibility would be considered not merely a targeted trait but a feature of my character, a character trait.

Similarly, if someone were to react with fear to a broad range of things and situations—whether or not the fear is appropriate, the subject believes it is—then that person could be described as fearful or timorous. Here, again, the disposition to experience fear—the character trait—is limited to the one emotion, but the object of the fear is not limited to any one object or even one type of object. The character trait—fearfulness or timidity—disposes the subject to fear many different kinds of things and situations. Targeted traits and character traits are similar in that they involve one emotion, but they differ in that the targeted trait is an emotion aimed at one object whereas the character trait is an emotion aimed at many.

Traits—whether targeted or character traits—are not natural dispositions characteristic of a kind of substance. Solubility in water is a natural disposition of salt and sugar, but irascibility and timidity are not natural dispositions of persons. Traits are acquired over a course of experience, and, as such, they are personal characteristics. Recognizing someone’s traits reveals to us how a person will react to a situation and what we can expect the person to do.

Sentiments are similar to emotions and traits in that they motivate emotion-episodes and states. However, the dispositional character of sentiments differs from that of traits. The dispositions associated with traits are dispositions to experience one emotion; they are “single-track dispositions” (Deonna and Teroni 2012 , 8). The dispositions associated with sentiments, by contrast, can motivate different kinds of emotional experience; they are “multi-track dispositions.” An obvious example of a sentiment is love (and, conversely, hate). Love manifests itself in emotions such as affection (for the beloved), admiration (of the beloved), pride (in the beloved’s accomplishments), grief (at the loss of the beloved), fear (of the loss of the beloved’s affection), jealousy (of the beloved’s relations with a rival—supposed or real—for the beloved’s affection), anger (at the beloved’s supposed or real betrayal). Similarly, hatred manifests itself, for example, in episodes of enmity, anger, resentment, loathing, and joy at the misfortune of the hated [ Schadenfreude ].

Moods are a still more complicated matter. Following Husserl, I take a mood to be a unity of intentional feelings [ Gefühlseinheit ]. Footnote 3 This unity can be viewed as a Gestalt that organizes the varied feelings of a subject into a dominant affective attitude toward the lifeworld as a whole (Lee 1993 , 36). Moods arise from emotions. For example, an exceptionally joyful experience gives rise to a cheerful mood, and a pattern of fearful experiences gives rise to an anxious mood. A mood’s defining characteristic informs—Husserl uses the well-worn metaphor “colors”—a subject’s entire outlook on the world. Footnote 4 Moods, insofar as they inform our sense of the world as a whole, dispose us to experience particular emotions directed to worldly things and situations. A person in a cheerful mood, for example, is more likely to experience emotions such as serenity, gratitude, kindness, contentment, and enthusiasm. Similarly, someone who is depressed or anxious is more likely to experience negative emotions such as worry, frustration, hopelessness, and despair. In this way, a mood and the individual emotions from which the mood arises and which it, in turn, underlies are inseparable. And while moods and sentiments can both motivate different emotions, moods and their motivated emotions have the same valence, which is not always the case with sentiments and their motivated emotions.

Moods frame all our affective experience. They and the affective experiences they motivate and frame register the evaluatively salient and practically relevant features of things and situations with, as Nancy Sherman puts it (Sherman 1991 , 47), the “sort of resonance and importance that only emotional involvement can sustain.” In short, moods and the affective experiences they motivate and frame serve to buttress us in our practical commitments to the goods we value, including both moral goods and our practical identities with their associated beliefs and practices. In this way, moods are related to character traits.

While the authentic human person exercises her freedom to think and decide for herself in the context of her sociality and historical traditions, we cannot forget that aspect of mutual empathic experience that grasps me as an “object” (a subject-object) in the world. Hence, my identity will in part be bestowed upon me according to the social conventions and constructions of the time. I have in mind here social constructions like racial identity, sexual and gender identity, ethnic and national identity, and, to some degree, religious identity. These aspects of a personal identity might not be important to or chosen by the person herself in the way that commitments and practical identities are important and authentically chosen. Indeed, even when the attribution, say, of race to a person is accepted and adopted by the person in question, that aspect of the person’s identity might not be central to her sense of her personal identity in the way that others believe it to be or in the way that the beliefs she affirms, the convictions she holds, and the commitments she makes are central to the manner in which she conceives her personal identity. To enter into a discussion of these aspects of personal identity, however, would take us beyond what I am claiming is central to a person’s identity.

3 Conclusion

I have claimed that self-identity is rooted in the formal structure of intentional experience, in particular, in the non-temporal form that accounts for the temporalization and continuity of a particular, concrete flow of experience. I have also claimed that personal identity, by contrast, is rooted in the content of the particular flow of experience, in particular and primarily, in the convictions—cognitive, evaluative, and practical—adopted passively or actively by a self-identical, reflection-capable subject who can or does reflect on her social and traditional inheritances in order to gain insight—cognitive, affective, and practical—into the truth of things. Secondarily, a person’s identity is rooted in the attributions others apply to us in the light of the social conventions and constructs characteristic of shared communities. Personal identity, on this view, is fundamentally rooted in the person’s beliefs, traits—especially character traits—sentiments, and moods. It is rooted, in other words, in the subject’s passively accepted or actively achieved convictions about the true, the good, and the right and in the person’s commitments to the pursuit of (apparently) worthwhile goods and the practical identities rooted in those convictions and commitments.

The sentence “Sue is not herself today” does not, as mentioned earlier, deny Sue’s self-identity, but it does indicate a change in Sue that is not—that does not rise to—a change in Sue’s personal identity. This might be a physiological change brought about by illness or injury; it might be the result of a particular emotional experience; or it might be the result of a transitory change in mood. If, however, the particular emotional experience were to become a character trait or the change in mood were to endure, we might then wonder whether Sue had become a different person.

The sentence “Mary is a different person from when I knew her ten years ago” does not deny Mary’s self-identity, but it does affirm a change in personal identity. On the view of personal identity suggested here, this means that there has been a change in Mary’s convictions, that is, in one or more of the beliefs, character traits, or practical commitments to the goods and identities that organize her life (see also Zahavi 2005 , 129: Čapek 2017 , 373).

We should, however, be careful when ascribing changes to personal identity on the basis of changes in one’s practical identities. Much of the contemporary literature about practical identities locates personal identity in the practical identity itself. But we must go deeper to the level of the commitments underlying one’s practical identities. For example, a change in practical identity from a jurist to a politician does not necessarily indicate a change in personal identity. Both identities ideally aim at serving the public good, but both can allow for either moral or immoral behavior. So, in changing from one to another, there is no change in personal identity unless the person’s underlying moral commitments also change, unless the change is, say, from moral jurist to immoral politician. However, when a practical identity is itself morally questionable—imagine the commitment to be the best possible thief—then a change to a different practical identity—say, lawyer—along with a change in the underlying moral commitments would constitute a change in personal identity. But the change from thief to immoral lawyer would not. This suggests that the rootedness of personal identity in convictions and commitments cannot be properly understood apart from questions of truth and falsity, from the truthfulness of the subject in all the spheres of reason—cognitive, affective, and practical. The telos and the flourishing of the person are found in the striving for and commitment to the truthfulness of her convictions, commitments, and actions, and we must look to those convictions, commitments, and actions to find the person’s identity.

Consider the Brave Officer case: Suppose a boy of ten (A) is flogged for stealing apples from an orchard. At forty, a general (B) bravely takes a standard from the enemy and remembers his having been flogged at ten. At eighty, the general (C) remembers taking the standard, but he has forgotten having been flogged. On the memory version of personal identity, A is the same person as B, and B is the same person as C. But A is not the same person as C. This result, however, is contradictory, for the general (B=C) both is and is not the same the boy who was flogged (A); see Reid 2002 , 276.

I have discussed tradition at greater length in Drummond 2000 .

Husserl  1931 , unpublished archival Ms. A VI 34, 19. I thank Julia Jansen, the Director of the Husserl Archives, Leuven, for permission to quote from Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts. Affective experience encompasses several related and interwoven, but non-identical, experiences and states: intentional feelings, emotions, affective traits, character traits, sentiments, and moods. See Drummond forthcoming for a more complete—but still incomplete—discussion of different kinds of affective experience.

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Self-identity is the perception or recognition of one's characteristics as a particular individual, especially in relation to social context.

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