A Beginner's Psychology

by Edward Bradford Titchener

Psychology, however, just because it has to do with a world in which man himself remains, is in a different case from the physical sciences; it has to take account of the self. The concept of self is not solely psychological; it is a common-sense concept; and like all the constructions of common sense it has three sides, philosophical, practical, and scientific. It is philosophical, in so far as it involves an attempt to explain or to rationalise the facts of observation; and it evidently does that; the notion of self is a way of explaining the continuity of memory and of conduct; I remember my past because I am I, and I behave in this way or that because it is ‘like me’ to do so. The concept is also practical; common sense rates a self as gifted or energetic or lazy or improvident; it is always valuing or estimating some Him or Her, some You or Me. It is further scientific, that is, psychological; for the self thus rated is some particular combination of talent, temperament and character, and the continuity which the self explains is some particular mental constitution, intellectual, emotive, active; one cannot at all define the ‘person’ or ‘individual’ of common sense without using psychological terms. So that psychology, if only in self-defence, must have its say in the matter, and must recast the self from its own point of view.

The recasting is not difficult. A self, in the psychological sense, is one of the particular psychological worlds. It is not mind, but a mind, the mental phenomena correlated with a particular nervous system, and arranged and determined in accordance with the tendencies of that system. We have made no mention of it hitherto, in this book, because our main business has been with general psychology, and we have had no need of it. Psychology, however, does not confine itself to the generalised world: and that is how it comes to be in different case from the physical sciences, and takes account, not only in self-defence, of the concept of self. If you go back to pp. 31 f., you will note that there is a differential psychology, a psychology of individual differences, as well as a general psychology. The variation of mental processes from observer to observer, and the limits and manner of this variation, are indeed just as much matter of observable fact, and therefore just as proper a subject for scientific enquiry, as their uniformity; and as the incidents of a man’s career may be set forth objectively, without praise or blame, in a biography, so may his psychological self, his mental processes in correlation with his nervous system, be set forth in a psychography. We ourselves, although we have been occupied with general psychology, and have for the most part spoken of ‘practised observers’ as a physicist might speak of ‘a sensitive galvanometer,’ without going into particulars,—we ourselves have, nevertheless, found frequent occasion to mention individual differences. The facts that we have thus touched upon incidentally are worked up, systematically, by differential psychology.

The concept of self is, however, a common-sense concept; it has, as we have seen, its practical side; and you will understand, therefore, that the differential study of selves has a high practical importance. Such a study is not rigorously or exclusively psychological. But since certain ‘mental traits,’ and certain combinations of them, may render a man fit or unfit for a proposed business or profession, it is important to know in what degree these traits are present; and here the psychologist is of assistance; he has helped to devise ‘mental tests’ which serve to identify and measure them. It is also especially important to know what traits are likely to be found together, and in what degree. This problem has been vigorously attacked, of recent years, on the side of intellect; and while the details belong to a chapter in practical psychology (p. 33) which we cannot here open, there is one result, at any rate, which should find a place in a scientific text-book. There seems to be no doubt that the individual nervous system possesses, over and above its special habits, susceptibilities, tendencies, and activities, a characteristic manner of functioning at large; so that a common or general factor enters into all the special intellectual responses that are called forth by particular situations. It is not easy to make this result clear to the reader, mainly because no one has as yet a clear idea of what the common or general factor is; we have good evidence that it exists, but we can say very little more about it. Different names have been given to it: ‘energy of attention,’ ‘general ability,’ ‘intellective energy,’ ‘general intelligence’; but they indicate the way in which it manifests itself, and not its own nature; the best name for the present is the vague ‘general common factor.’ We do not know, either, upon what it depends: on blood-supply, perhaps, or on the arrangement of nervous structures, or on some individual ‘quality’ of the nervous elements, or perhaps on something else that we cannot even guess at. What it does is to hold a man’s intellectual traits together and to enter into the exhibition of them all; it is thus, from the psychological point of view, a sort of supreme determining tendency, guiding all mental processes whatsoever into the channels of intellectual selfhood. Whether there is a like general factor on the emotive side, and whether ‘emotive energy’ is of the same kind as this ‘intellective energy,’ cannot be said.

One further point! We have been careful, in dealing with the common-sense concept of self, to distinguish its three aspects, philosophical, practical, scientific; but we have drawn the limits of this self more strictly than everyday usage warrants; and we must now correct that error. Common sense, as we remarked on p. 2, is likely to confuse the Me with the Mine, and the Him with the His; the self is extended from personality to possessions. The confusion of Him and His is a natural consequence of the practical reference of the concept; the easiest way to rate or estimate another person is to consider his property, his sphere of influence, his social prominence; and these things, which are a part of the other person’s value, thus become for us a part of himself. The confusion of Me with Mine has a different origin. Intellect, temperament and character are based upon habits, and habits imply an habitual surroundings; we are ‘not ourselves’ when we leave our accustomed groove. No doubt, each of these sources of confusion intermingles with the other; we are not concerned, however, to follow them in detail.

[§ 74]. The Persistence of the Self.—A full account of the self of common sense, in so far as this self calls for psychological treatment, belongs to social and not to general psychology; and the discussion therefore falls outside the scope of the present book. We must, however, say a word about that observed continuity of memory and conduct which the concept of self, on its philosophical side, professes to explain (p. 308); for the notion of the persistence of the self has had a marked influence, as we shall see in § 75, upon this chapter of general psychology.

We are all of us disposed to take the persistence of the self for granted. Do I not now remember what I did and thought and felt when I was a small child? and do I not now act in accordance with my character, as family and friends expect me to act? Surely the thing is obvious: the organism is physically continuous, from infancy to old age; a likeness of interest, of skill, of aptitudes, may be traced from childhood to manhood; and the discovery of the ‘general common factor’ in the intellectual sphere only confirms what we knew before. The child becomes the adult, and the adult passes into senility, while the self remains the same,—growing and developing and shrinking, to be sure, but essentially unchanged throughout. That is the natural view; and for the most part it goes unchallenged.

Let us see, however, whether it may not be questioned. We remember; that is true; but we also forget. The fact that certain past events are remembered tells more heavily, in common-sense thinking, than the fact that very many past events are forgotten, simply because it is human nature, as Bacon said, to give more weight to positive than to negative instances; but science does not emphasize; science takes all the facts at the same level. The organism, again, is physically continuous, and ‘the child is father of the man’; but who makes these observations? Not I, who am the continuous organism, but—in the first instance, at any rate—my fellow-men, those who are about me; and my fellow-men clinch their observations by the bestowal upon me of a personal name. In primitive thought, the superstitions that connect the name with the personality are legion; and even to-day our own name is warmly intimate, a very factor of our self. This name, which forms part of us and holds us together all through life, comes nevertheless from the outside; we do not name ourselves! Consider, further, the influence of language in general. It is clear that language, as it developed forms of speech in accordance with the common-sense notion of self, would powerfully reinforce that notion; the words and phrases which at first expressed ideas would come, in time, to shape or suggest ideas. The common-sense view is thus accepted as natural; but there is no proof that it is correct.

Suppose, then, that we openly challenge that view; what can we urge against it? We find, first of all, that language bears witness against itself. We say that a man is at times ‘out of himself,’ ‘not himself,’ ‘beside himself’; we say that he forgets, surpasses, loses, disregards, neglects, discredits, contradicts himself; we say that he does himself injustice, that he cannot contain himself, and so forth. Our daily life bears witness to the same effect. A man may be suave and affable in business and a veritable bear at home; and the man who sits as judge upon the bench, and plays a beginner’s game upon the golf-course, and carries his little son pick-a-back to bed, is he the same self in all three situations? There are changes of selfhood so abrupt that they remind us of the ‘mutations’ of the biologists: religious conversion, loss of fortune, sudden elevation to a position of responsibility, disappointment in love, may make ‘another man’ of the man we knew. The seven ages, we might almost say, correspond with as many different selves; it is a common remark that so-and-so has not fulfilled the promise of his youth, and that so-and-so is no longer the man he was. Pathology brings corroboration of the most striking kind; there are cases of dual or multiple personality, in which the same ‘individual’ shows at different times very marked differences of intelligence, emotivity and conduct, differences so marked that the same organism appears as two or more distinct ‘selves’; and these selves may be wholly separate in experience, so that one self has no knowledge or memory of the experiences of another. Here, therefore, the abnormal is a more trenchant and clean-cut figure of the normal; it is the normal carried, so to say, to its logical extreme. The judge delivering a charge does not think of his golf, and the irritated golf-player does not think of his charge; but in the abnormal cases the division may be complete; the one ‘personality’ cannot think of the other.

If, then, there are facts which look toward the persistence and continuity and stability of the self, there are also other facts which look toward impermanence and discontinuity and instability. Common sense has laid stress upon the positive evidence, and has enshrined in language the concept of a persistent and continuous self. This one-sided attitude, as we are now to see, has had its effect upon psychology. We have carried the present analysis only so far as was necessary for our own purposes; the full psychological discussion of the self of common sense belongs, as we said just now, to another branch of the science.

[§ 75]. The Self in Experience.—So far, we have been discussing the psychological self as viewed, so to say, from the outside; we have found out what the word ‘self’ means when it is used as a technical term like ‘mind’ or ‘memory.’ We have now to raise a different question, and to ask: How is myself represented in experience? There are very many occasions when the organism is, literally, thrown back on itself, when it meets a situation by a self-response; what mental processes are then involved?