Self-psychology: is the conscious self the irreducible datum of psychology?

Mary Whiton Calkins, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Every conscious experience is the experience of a self — the self perceiving, the self remembering, the self willing, always in relation to some object.¹²³ 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.⁴⁵

Sources

1. Psychology has been defined as science of the self-being- conscious; and we rightly therefore ask for a further description, even if only a preliminary description, of the self. The conscious self of each one of us is not a reality which is merely inferred to exist: it is immediately experienced as possessed of at least four fundamental characters.

   A First Book in Psychology, pp. 3–4

2. In the first place, we shall regard each one of them without reference to any self, as an idea, a fact of consciousness, occurring in a series of ideas. We shall next, however, consider each experience as relation of a self to other selves, and shall distinguish it from different forms of consciousness by the nature of this relation.

   An Introduction to Psychology, pp. 149–150

3. The great problem of the personalistic philosophy is, therefore, the problem of the nature, the number, and the relation of conscious selves. With regard to the first of these problems personal idealists agree that the nature of the self or selves which constitute ultimate reality must be known primarily by introspective study.

   The Persistent Problems of Philosophy, p. 408

4. The word ' idea ' is applied to any complex experience regarded as one term in a succession. The word ' feeling ' is used, in a very general way, of any conscious experience; it may, therefore, be applied both to the complex idea and to the simple element of consciousness.1 II The conception of consciousness as a mere series of ideas connected with each other is a perfectly consistent doctrine of the widest…

   An Introduction to Psychology, pp. 151–152

5. 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.

   A First Book in Psychology

Where the argument is made

• An Introduction to Psychology (1901) and A First Book in Psychology (1909/1914): the doctrine of psychology as the science of the conscious self

How the argument was received

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.