{"agent_id":"calkins","agent_name":"Mary Whiton Calkins","slug":"self-psychology","label":"Self-psychology: is the conscious self the irreducible datum of psychology?","topic":"Self-psychology","question":"Is the conscious self the irreducible datum of psychology?","position":"Every conscious experience is the experience of a self — the self perceiving, the self remembering, the self willing, always in relation to some object. Analyse the experience into sensations and feelings and you have thrown away the very thing that makes it an experience at all: that it is HAD, by a self, of an object. The self is not one more element to be found among the contents of consciousness; it is that which has the contents, unique, persistent, and complex, and it is the datum psychology cannot dissolve.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Every conscious experience is the experience of a self — the self perceiving, the self remembering, the self willing, always in relation to some object.","n":[]},{"t":"Analyse the experience into sensations and feelings and you have thrown away the very thing that makes it an experience at all: that it is HAD, by a self, of an object.","n":[]},{"t":"The self is not one more element to be found among the contents of consciousness; it is that which has the contents, unique, persistent, and complex, and it is the datum psychology cannot dissolve.","n":[1,2,3,4]}]],"texts":"An Introduction to Psychology (1901) and A First Book in Psychology (1909/1914): the doctrine of psychology as the science of the conscious self. Reception: Titchener's structuralism analysing consciousness into elements; the behaviourist elimination of the self; the later cognitive and social-psychological return of the self as a construct.","works":["An Introduction to Psychology (1901) and A First Book in Psychology (1909/1914): the doctrine of psychology as the science of the conscious self"],"reception":"Titchener's structuralism analysing consciousness into elements; the behaviourist elimination of the self; the later cognitive and social-psychological return of the self as a construct.","status":"That psychology may ALSO be pursued as the study of conscious elements or of behaviour I did not deny — I wrote my textbooks to serve both the atomistic and the self-centred approach — but that the self-approach reaches what the others discard I hold firmly. The self is not an inference from the data; it is the form of every datum.","era":"1863-1930","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"A First Book in Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The philosopher, for example, asks whether mind is a func- tion of matter, or matter an expression of mind, or whether both are manifestations of a more ultimate reality, whereas the psychologist takes for granted, on the basis of ordinary observation, that minds and material objects exist.","label":"A First Book in Psychology"},{"n":2,"work":"A First Book in Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"In a word, the scientist in each of these cases first describes phenomena, that is, observes them analytically, compares, and classifies them; and he next seeks, if he can, to explain phenomena — in these cases, the stone by the roadside and the vivid memory.","label":"A First Book in Psychology"},{"n":3,"work":"An Introduction to Psychology","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"They are related, of course, by virtue of the imperiousness, the demands, the acknowledgments, and the adoptions which make up, as we have seen, the very nature of a self; but these rela- tions are not the causal ones which connect ideas. ^ But though these conceptions of consciousness are so distinct, they have yet a common ground.","label":"An Introduction to Psychology"},{"n":4,"work":"The Persistent Problems of Philosophy","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"It is of course impossible in a strict sense to define this ultimate reality, conscious self, but it is possible to describe it, to distinguish different aspects 1 Cf. the writers cited on p. 185, and G. Kafka, \"Uber das Ichproblem,\" Archiv fur die gesamte Psychologic, 1910, XIX., pp. 1-241.","label":"The Persistent Problems of Philosophy"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"against-atomistic-psychology","label":"Against atomistic psychology: is the self a unitary whole, not a bundle of mental elements?"}]}