The Concept of “Self” by G.H. Mead, H. Blumer and E. Goffman
Introduction
The concept of self or self-concept as has been known by other authors and individuals have fascinated many sociologists, psychologists, and other individuals in the society. This is because this concept pertains to the real meaning of one’s perception and view on the true personality of an individual. In addition, the concept of self also fascinates and stimulates the imagination and the intellectual capacities of many due to the reason that it encompasses other concepts and ideas, such as culture, personality, behavior, genetics/heredity, society/community, and many other factors known to man. In this sense, it can be perceived that given such concepts and ideas, the self-concept or the concept of self is the accumulation of the different concepts known to man and its integration forms the unique self found in all of us. The fascination of man in terms of the concept of self leads the author of this paper to critically analyze the concept of self as emphasized and given explanation by G.H. Mead, H. Blumer, and E. Goffman.
Self-Concept according to Mead, Blumer, and Goffman
It has been reported that the concept of self has long been a central concept in the social sciences, which is especially true in sociology, due to the fact that the self and the related ideas of roe and identity have been used to establish a link or connection between the individual and the social structure. The importance of the self-concept is given emphasis in a rich theoretical tradition that commences with the works of James in 1890, Cooley in 1902, and Mead in 1934, and extends to the more recent works of Blumer in 1969, Goffman in 1959, Turner in 1976, Rosenberg in 1979, and Stryker in 1980 among others (Callero 1992). In this sense, the self, which is a sense of who and what we are, is suggested as an organizing construct through which people’s everyday activities can be understood (Kleine et al 1993).
The entire philosophical and social scientific framework of G.H. Mead revolves around his central notion of the bipolar social self as a dialectic of I and Me or individuation and sociation. In addition, Mead’s concept of self completely overturns the dualistic framework of Cartesian subjectivism for a non-dual framework. This is because Cartesian subjectivism represents an inter-subjective model of the social self as an individual-society interaction, as well as a psychosomatic model of self as a body-mind interaction and an ecological model of self as a human-nature interaction. Based on the arguments of Mead, it can be stated that the self is not only a social self, but also a temporal self and a multiple self, which is considered a series of emergent or discontinuous events, wherein the creative, novel, and spontaneous I in the present responds to the deterministic social situation of the Me in the past, so that with each passing moment the old self is replaced by a partly new self in the ever changing stream of consciousness. In this sense, Mead emphasizes that the human self is neither a separate self nor an absolute self, but a social self with two poles, the I pole that represents individuality, and the Me pole that represents sociality. The social self arises through an interaction between the I or the individual organism and the Me or the social environment including both human society and living nature (Odin 1996). In this regard, it can be understood that for Mead, the concept of self can be defined as the social self, which has its own individuality and sociality. As such it can be given emphasis that the concept of self involves a valuable interaction with the individual and the society.
