Content area
Full Text
The Conceptual Self in Context: Culture, Experience, Self-Understanding, edited by Ulric Neisser and David A. Jopling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 285 pp. $54.95 cloth. ISBN: 0-521-48203-8.
Neisser and Jopling's edited volume collects an intelligent, sophisticated, and interdisciplinary set of essays on the self written by a distinguished group of psychologists, anthropologists, linguists, and philosophers. Notably absent from this interdisciplinary group are sociologists: None of the chapters is written by a sociologist, and very little reference is made to the work of sociologists in the volume. Still, insult aside, there is much here of interest to sociologists of the self.
The Conceptual Self in Context is the third volume on the self edited by Ulric Neisser, a psychologist, with a cognitive approach to the self. The previous two volumes, The Perceived Self and The Remembering Self, focused on perception and memory, respectively, in the development of self-knowledge. This volume emphasizes the self and its mental representation-the self-concept. In his introduction, Neisser distinguishes between the "self," which he seems to view as synonymous with personality, and the conceptual self or self-concept, which is a mental representation of the self (sociologists, by contrast, are more likely to view the self as a reflexive phenomenon, and not as a proxy for the person and personality). The main virtue of this conceptualization is that it enables consideration of the sometimes problematic relationship between self (or person) and self-concept. Neisser states that "self-concepts never do full justice to the self" (p. 3), because some aspects of the self are outside of our conscious awareness. This theme of disjuncture between self and self-concept is evident in several other chapters, especially those dealing with defense mechanisms, mental pathologies, and self-serving biases. These...