In this work we develop the idea that "self" can be operationally defined as that system whose change or violation is spontaneously interpreted as a loss of the sense of self. The Jamesian "I," in other words, is only knowable directly by the experiences that take place in moments of challenge and change. This makes sense theoretically, because we can interpret self as an enduring, dominant context, near the top-most levels of the dominant context hierarchy. We have previously cited evidence that contexts can be experienced only through mismatch through change or violation in contextual expectations. In the same way, it may be that self can only be experienced (and hence reported) through mismatch.         

                    This idea has a good deal of intuitive plausibility. It certainly fits our ordinary language: All statements about conscious experience use personal pronouns, as in "I saw a pussycat," "You are only imagining that pain in your tummy," "She smelled a rat," etc. Certainly we would be surprised if we were unable to access consciously some vivid recent memory, some sight, smell or taste in the immediate environment, or some well- known fact about our own lives. The "self" involved in conscious access is sometimes referred to as the self as observer. Similarly, all commonsense statements of voluntary control have "self" as the initiator or actor in charge, as in "I told him to go," "He decided to find out more," and "I am responsible for my own actions." Again, we would be surprised and upset if we were unable to move an arm, to stop an intended speech act, or to control a usually controllable conscious desire. The controlling agency for this expected domain of voluntary control is sometimes labeled the self as agent. A number of behavioral psychologists maintain that the notion of self is a delusion of common sense; perhaps we simply infer a non-existent agent in charge of our actions and experiences, creating an imaginary entity where there is none. Certainly people sometimes make false inferences. The scientific question is, of course: is there an underlying reality that justfies the inference? If there is, then "self" is not delusional; it is something we need to understand.                         

The idea of "mismatch with self" leads naturally to a contrastive analysis of self vs. not-self reports. People report self-alien experiences in many situation that seem superficially just like the normal, self-consistent experiences that  most of us have most of the time. Spontaneous self-alien experiences are reported in disorders like depersonalization, psychogenic fugue, and multiple personality. Reliable evidence is available about these conditions, and they are all grist for our mill. We develop a contrastive analysis based on this evidence.      

                    We will conclude that the "self" can be viewed theoretically as the enduring higher levels of the dominant context hierarchy, including both conceptual and goal contexts. Thus the self-system is more than just another knowledge representation --- it is knowledge that provides the framework for all conscious experience. Self, in this sense, is a perspective, a point of view, an overarching context for the flow of conscious events. It has perceptual-motor, evaluative, conceptual, motivational, and social aspects. The self-system evidently mediates and creates continuity among more local contexts. The word "self" will be used as an abbreviation for "self- system," and contrasted to the self-concept, which is a set of beliefs about oneself. The self-concept corresponds to James' Me. Like any context, self has aspects that can be de-contextualized and experienced as objects of consciousness. These objectified aspects of self can then be used to construct a model of self; but, contrary to some suggestions, we suggest that this model of ourselves is not the self itself.  When T.S. Eliot's Unidentified Guest in the epigraph remarks on the experience of stumbling on the staircase on the way to a party, he is pointing to a moment where an aspect of the self as context comes to be experienced as conscious content or object. Stumbling is a violation of expectations, of course, and suddenly, from being in charge and confident of one's reception at the party, one becomes an object "at the mercy of a malevolent staircase." We humans are often surprised by our own reactions to a new situation, suggesting again that the self (as dominant context) and self-concept (as one's beliefs about oneself) are not the same. However, in the normal course of events we are continually, smoothly switching back and forth between self as context and aspects of self as objects of experience.               

                    Thus the "self" corresponds to what James called the "I," while the self-concept, insofar as it is consciously accessible corresponds to James' "me." As a set of beliefs about oneself, the self-concept is based on experiences of oneself as if seen From an outside perspective. When people are asked about themselves they will express some part of their self-concept, but the self itself is not immediately available to put into words. For this reason it is best to avoid using the beliefs people express about themselves as evidence for the self; but it is, of course, evidence about their self-concepts.          

                    The self-concept may function as a monitoring system within the larger self system. One's beliefs about oneself, including beliefs about how one should be, can serve as a tool to evaluate and control thoughts and actions. In adults, most voluntary activities can be quickly tested against the self-concept. That is, most of the time adults can answer the question, "Is what I am doing right now really what I 'should be' doing?" In the language of psychodynamics, the self-concept includes the ego-ideal (Freud, 19xx). Severe violations of the self-concept are experienced as shameful, guilt-provoking, or depressing, as we fall short of our ideal self. Matches with self-concept may be experienced as pride, self-acceptance and satisfaction. In sum, we explore in this chapter both a theoretical opportunity and a necessity. The necessity comes from the fact that any discussion of consciousness seems incomplete without appeal to some plausible self-system; the opportunity lies in the fact that we can develop one such concept straightforwardly from what we already know. The resulting perspective has implications for numerous issues, including motivational conflict, emotion, the perceived freedom of voluntary action, the disruptive nature of emotional upset, impulse control, and attributional ambiguity.          

The self-system is opaque to direct introspection.  

                    How could we approach the organization of "self"? First of all, we can try to pinpoint a set of empirical operations that presumably reflect it. There are a number of reasons to believe that the evidentiary basis of self may be different from the evidence for our readily available concept of ourselves. Here are a few reasons for this distinction.                             

                   Resistance to self-knowledge. Perhaps the most obvious reason to differentiate between the self-system and self-concept are the psychodynamic barriers to self-knowledge, the extent to which we profit from self- deception. One does not need to accept all of psychodynamic theory to believe that wishful thinking (and sometimes catastrophic thinking) stands in the way of an accurate self-concept. Indeed, even the scientific skeptics do not question the existence of pervasive self-serving distortions about ourselves. In everyday life we surprise ourselves so often with unexpected feelings, actions, and images. If we knew ourselves well this could not happen.

                    Other source of incorrect self-knowledge. 

                    But we do not have to appeal to wishes and fears, repression, or emotional conflict to note the absence of accuracy in many self-descriptions. A number of social psychological studies show that people often make false claims about themselves when there seems to be little motivational pay-off in doing so. These studies emerge from two streams of investigation within social psychology, one focused on errors of attribution, and the second on the induction of cognitive dissonance. In a typical attribution study a subject may be led to believe that the sound of an accelerating heart-beat is the sound of his/her own heart. This false feedback has been shown to affect subjects' perceptions of their own emotional excitement, say, in the context of threatening stimuli. Further, a wide variety of cognitive dissonance studies show that subjects will evaluate an unpleasant event more highly if they are given inadequate justification for their involvement in the unpleasant event. Presumably they create a higher evaluation justify their involvement post hoc. In general, these studies show that people are consistently inaccurate in their descriptions of their own motives.        

                               Nisbett & Wilson claim on the basis of such studies that human beings have no privileged access at all to their own processes. This conclusion has been widely criticized as overstated. The critics have pointed out that there are many persuasive cases of accurate introspection, and that we really need to know is under what conditions we can expect accurate judgments about ourselves. Nevertheless, the evidence remains strong that people cannot tell us about themselves much of the time, even when common sense would expect them to be able to do so. For example, when people choose from a display of identical stockings, they will tend to choose the right most, or the  best illuminated stockings. Asked to explain their preference, they will generate hypotheses with an air of conviction; but they will not know the reasons for their action. There are numerous examples of this kind, showing that very often people do not know their own motives. The Langer & Imber on misinterpreting one's own automatic performance is very much along the same line. In general, human beings greatly overestimate the accuracy of their self-knowledge, and seem to freely fabricate answers about their intentions, especially when the information available to make the judgment is inadequate.

Self-concept is typically oversimplified.

                    Another reason for doubting the identity of self-concept and

self is the extraordinary oversimplification that seems to characterize our self-concept. The self-concept seem to be value- laden, reducing the complexities of living to remarkably simple "shoulds" and "wants." These voluntarily accessible beliefs about ourselves often seem to be context-free and absolute. "I'm a likable person. I'm very efficient. I have a lot of friends." In contrast, the organization of the self-system, as we will see below, seems to be highly complex, multilayered, and adaptive. In the overall self-system, the "self-concept" may play a monitoring or supervisory role.                

                    Research on thought monitoring by Singer and his co-workers

suggests an explanation for the remarkable oversimplification of the self-concept. If we were to track every bit of inner speech produced by one person, day after day, we would quickly fill volumes. Even disregarding other conscious events --- mental images, evanescent feelings, percepts, and the like --- the stream of consciousness is lengthy, constrained by numerous accidental and local factors, often self-contradictory, and complex. When we are asked to characterize ourselves in a phrase or two, we are forced to summarize this rich lode of information. And the fact is, of course, that people are often unable to produce accurate summaries for great amounts of diverse information. With the best will in the world, and even absent all of the motivational distortions in self-perception, we simply cannot describe ourselves very well.                 

                    This does not mean that it is hopeless to ask people about themselves and expect accurate answers. Rather, it is vital to do so under optimal circumstances, and not to expect people to have access to the deeper layers of their own organization. Further, our previous discussion throughout this book suggest that people only learn about contextual  representations by failure of those representations; we can check reports of such violations objectively, and see if the result accords with voluntary self- reports. Inferences made about ourselves  on the basis of these surprising events may lead to a different understanding of ourselves than our normal self-concept indicates.                

Conscious self monitoring may be guided by the self concept.                    

                    In yet different language, we can say that the self-concept as an object of  onscious thought and experience may be considered to be an object-like analogue of the self-system. The self-concept represents self as an object of knowledge. But self is not in the first instance an object of knowledge; it is contextual. We can of course monitor many aspects of self at will: our orientation in space, the loudness of our speech, our social acceptance by others. These events are objects of consciousness that are usually compared to some set of criteria: where are we compared to where we want to go? Should we be speaking louder? Should we curry favor with others? Such criteria are presumably part of one's self concept. The self-concept is that part that is always looking at ourselves from a real or imagined outside point of view. At the social level, it is as if we are always asking, consciously or automatically, what will the neighbors say? And if not the neighbors, then parents, peers, siblings, professional colleagues, teachers, or the judgment of history?                  

                    Self, on the other hand, may be considered to be the cross- situational context of experience and action. Our consistent expectations about the world are unconscious; the more redictable they are, the less they are likely to become conscious. All of our experience is shaped and defined by these unconscious contextual expectations: perceptual, conceptual, social, communicative, scientific, etc. Even our actions are generated and interpreted in a context of goals that are mostly unconscious at the time we perform the actions. One way to think of "self" is as a contextual organization that seldom encounters contradiction, because it remains largely predictable across the situations which we normally encounter. But once the predictable situations of our lives change, aspects of ourselves which previously provided adequate context for our experience are violated, and need to be changed; these stable presuppositions may then be perceived as object-like, even though they were invisible components of self before.
                

Contrasting self and not-self experiences.
                               

                    As James points out at the start of this chapter, the "I" is difficult to know directly. Certainly just asking people about it is problematic, because by definition we do not have direct conscious access to it: It is, in Jamesian language, the knower rather than the known. However, we can approach "self as knower" empirically with a contrastive analysis, just as we have done before with conscious experience and volition. We will find a great range of evidence for self/not-self contrasts in perception and motor control, in social situations, self- evaluative experiences, psychopathology, and the like. The empirical evidence regarding self is actually plentiful and well-studied, once we know where to look.
                

Self-alien experiences as evidence for self as context.                               

                    Just as we have contrasted comparable conscious and unconscious processes throughout this book, we can also compare cases where "self" is perceived as "not-self," or as "another self." The most radical, well-established cases involve psychogenic fugue, multiple personality, and depersonalization disorder. The standard psychiatric diagnostic manual DSM III is an authoritative source on these conditions. We will briefly review all three syndromes.     

                    Note that if self can reasonably be viewed as a dominant context, we can make some predictions about the effects of violating it.  We know well that contexts can be decomposed by events that violate contextual expectations and intentions. These violative events may be either internal or external in origin, but we should certainly expect "shocking" external events, which are easy to observe, to trigger a disruption in the stable dominant context. Further, since context helps to shape, control and evoke conscious experience, some changes in the contents of consciousness may also be expected under these conditions. Fundamental life changes should sometimes evoke surprising alterations in thought, images, inner speech, feelings, and perhaps even perception. Personal values may change, because after all values are associated with the dominant goal context --- all values posit a claim that one thing is more desirable (hence goal-like) than another. Finally, this point of view predicts that after fundamental life-changing events, people may lose touch with their assumptions about reality as well these are after all viewed in GW theory as part of the conceptual context. All of these predicted features are found the following self-alien syndromes. Depersonalization disorder. DSM III describes this as "an alteration in the perception and experience of the self so that the usual sense of one's own reality is temporarily lost or changed. This is manifested by a sensation of self-estrangement or unreality, which may include the feeling that one's extremities have changed in size, or the experience of seeming to perceive oneself from a distance. ... the individual may feel 'mechanical' or as though in a dream. Various types of sensory anesthesias and a feeling of not being in complete control of one's actions, including speech, are often present. All of these feelings are ego-dystonic (self-alien)...” Mild depersonalization is quite common: it is estimated to occur at some time in 30% - 70% of young adults.                  

                    Depersonalization has many of the expected features. First, it is often triggered by severe stress, such as military combat or an auto accident, physical pain, anxiety, and depression. A similar syndrome can occur after brain-washing, thought reform, and indoctrination while the captive of terrorists and cultists --- all cases in which routine, dominant goals and perspectives are profoundly challenged. These facts are consistent with the notion that disruption of the self involves deep context-violation. Indeed, stress may be defined as a deep violation of expectations and intentions (goal and conceptual contexts). Onset of depersonalization is therefore likely to be rapid, as is indeed found, while recovery may be slow, because it takes time to reconstruct a disrupted fundamental context. The high incidence of depersonalization in early adulthood is also significant, since people often establish their fundamental goals and expectations during this period in life, while at the same time going through major life changes which may challenge a new, tentative integration.                 

                               Second, there are evidently changes in the way victims of depersonalization experience themselves and the world, consistent with the fact that contexts constrain conscious experiences. Along these lines, DSM III states that "derealization is frequently present. This is manifested in a strange alteration in the perception of one's surroundings so that a sense of the reality of the external world is lost. A perceived change in the size or shape of objects in the external world is common. People may be perceived as dead or mechanical... Other associated features include ...  a disturbance in the subjective sense of time." Evidently, as the self is challenged, the perceived world may also be estranged. Psychogenic fugue provides another example of a self-alien syndrome. It involves "sudden, unexpected travel away from home or customary work locale with assumption of a new identity and an inability to recall one's previous identity. Perplexity and disorientation may occur. Following recovery there is no recollection of events that took place during the fugue." This diagnosis is not made if there is evidence for organic disorder. Again, this disorder can be seen to be a result of deep violations of the normal dominant context, followed by an effort to create a new dominant context, free from the environment that created insupportable problems for the original identity. Fugue typically "follows severe psychosocial stress, such as marital quarrels, personal rejections, military conflict, or natural disaster." It seems to be related to psychogenic amnesia, in which a loss of memory occurs after severe psychological stress. Amnesia sometimes involves a loss of personal identity, but no purposeful travel, and no assumption of a new identity. Note, by the way, that we have encountered spontaneous amnesia before, in our discussion of highly hypnotizable people, who often have spontaneous amnesia for the hypnotic session. This is consistent with the notion that high hypnotizables enter a deep, absorbed state, in which they are guided by a context that differs radically from their post hypnotic context, so that there is relatively little in the way of recall cues available to them afterwards. The issue of spontaneous amnesia and loss of autobiographical memory is indeed a key to the notion of self we are developing here.        

                    The most famous example of self-altering pathology involves multiple personality. Here, too, an eclipsed personality reports a gap afterwards in the flow of experience, just as do victims of amnesia and fugue. "The essential feature," says DSM III, "is the existence within the individual of two or more distinct personalities, each of which is dominant at a particular time. Each personality is a fully integrated and complex unit with unique memories (sic!), behavior patterns, and social relationships that determine the nature of the individual's acts when that person is redominant. Studies have demonstrated that different personalities may have different responses to physiological and psychological measurements. One or more subpersonalities may report being of the opposite sex, of a different race or age, or from a different family than the original personality ... The original personality and all of the subpersonalities are aware of lost periods of time...". Sub-personalities may hear each other or speak to each other, but often with a sense that the voice heard is self alien outside of the self of the current dominant personality.

                Recent work with multiple personalities indicates that there is often a "regulator personality," one that keeps track of and mediates between other sub-personalities. Spiegel suggests on this basis that the normal self, too, may function as a regulator, integrating experience across different situations. This again is consistent with the notion of the self as a dominant context, one that creates continuity across subordinate contexts.

                               Note the repeated theme of gaps in autobiographical memory in the self alien syndromes. Autobiographical memory is of course self attributed experience, and in a GW framework, if self is identified with deep context, we know that it must shape and select characteristic experiences.      

                               The everyday example of deeply absorbed states reveals the same cluster of phenomena: gaps in autobiographical memory, loss of time, and a changed sense of self. It is often difficult to remember a period of absorption later, and time seems to have gone faster in retrospect, presumably because we can recall fewer details of the absorbed period. Another common theme in the self alien syndromes is the relationship between a loss of self and losing valued or presupposed conditions of one's life. It seems as if the more we rely upon something in dealing with the world  --- upon an assumption, a personal capacity, a skill, or a goal --- the more its loss will lead to self alien experiences. This may be particularly true when the lost element is presupposed, so that we no longer even know that it is there as an object of experience. If we have assumed all of our lives that we can trust people completely, so that this assumption has simply become part of our dealings with them a deep violation of trust will have consequences that propagate widely throughout our selves and our experiences. Presumably, if we rely less on this sort of thing, violations of trust will not be so disruptive.                               

Self as deep context.                             

The self system has routine access to all sensory modalities, to immediate memory, recent autobiographical memories, routine facts, to long term  personal "marker" memories, and future or fantasied images. In addition, we have indirect voluntary access to a host of specialized skills (like English syntax and motor control) which are not conscious in the qualitative sense --- we do not experience our syntactic rules directly --- but whose unexpected absence would create great conscious surprise. This is of course the point Dennett remarked upon in the passage quoted at the beginning of this chapter, the notion that self is that which has access to consciousness. A major, rapid change in the access conditions of any of these domains may be perceived as a self alien change in one's experience. Thus loss of memory should impact one's sense of self, as should sudden blindness, or even a sudden increase in one's ability to imagine things. Any rapid change violates contextual predictability, but changes consistent with one's goals should be relatively more acceptable.         

               The same may be true on the output side. We expect voluntary control over our skeletal muscles; over many mental functions, like the ability to recall this morning's breakfast, or the ability to express our thoughts; over many objects in our environment; over people, to some extent; and, within limits, over some social institutions. We can even control autonomic bodily functions through mental images. A loss in any area of expected control may be perceived as a profound change in self. These functions are controlled by the goal hierarchy, and are normally self attributed. Recall that English sentences describing an act of voluntary control always take a personal pronoun as subject. The self-concept system controls conscious self monitoring.

                  Next, we attempt to model the self-concept. The self concept presumably emerges from many conscious experiences of self monitoring,  and comparing the results to real or imagined evaluations from other people. It has been said (rather cynically) that conscience is the still small voice reminding us that someone may be looking. It may be the fleeting ideomotor image that says, "What would the neighbors think? What will Daddy say when he comes home? My friends would laugh at me if they saw me now. Any person of the opposite sex simply must admire my looks, strength, wit, and intelligence." Such sentiments are utterly commonplace and must surely have an effect on one's self-concept. Indeed, an effective therapy for depression is based on the assumption that such rapid, nearly automatic thoughts are the key to depressive self-denigration.          

               The self concept system can then be treated as a high level context, operating within the self system, and making use of the kind of conscious self monitoring shown to control and evaluate one's own performance. Over time, conscious self-monitoring experiences, like any other predictable experiences, must become contextualized. Thus self concept apparently begins to function as a part of the larger self-system. The contextualized aspects of the self-concept are of course less available to voluntary retrieval, just as any other context is hard to recall voluntarily. Further, aspects of oneself that are not acknowledged in the self-concept are notorious for influencing human actions and experiences.  The entire psychodynamic  tradition of the last hundred years is devoted to the study of these phenomena.  Perhaps all human beings have potential conflicts between those aspects of the self that match our self-concept, and those that are disavowed. As suggested above, the self concept system can be treated as a goal context that makes use of self monitoring and evaluation in order to move one's performance closer to the ideal. Notice that this goal encounters competition from other goals; perhaps there is resistance to the effort demanded by the self concept system to reach its goals;  perhaps there are goals aiming to obtain more immediate rewards than are allowed by the self concept; perhaps there are goals expressing impulses that are not consistent with the self concept.  All these goals systems may compete with the self concept system.  The goal hierarchy that is consistent with the self concept comes very close to the idea of the "conflict free sphere of the ego" articulated by the ego psychologist Heinz Hartmann. That is,  it is a domain in which the system that always tries to control our actions, the self concept system, coincides in its aims with other major goals. Thus there is no destructive competition between different goal systems. Presumably most of our normal, voluntary actions are guided by this conflict free sphere of the goal hierarchy.                   

Further questions to explore.              

                    These considerations create a new perspective on the issues of conscious experience and voluntary control. In particular, the conflict free sphere provides an "executive" of sorts that is in control of most voluntary action. That is, there is a set of goals and expectations within the larger self-system that are acceptable to the self-concept, and within this shared domain, actions can be planned and carried out without inner conflict. For example, while  we are physically perfectly able to slap our close friends and colleagues in the face, most of us rarely do so. If we were to do so, most likely we would shock not only others but ourselves, and the action would have immediate repercussion for our self-concept. Thus even intense anger is likely to be expressed in a form that is a compromise between fantasy revenge and the self- concept.  Voluntary control is profoundly shaped by these considerations. It seems as if we are always attempting to earn our own self-respect first of all.                  

                               Now we can reconsider Dennett's remark that consciousness  is the domain of access of the self. After all, by means of Options Contexts, the dominant context hierarchy can indeed gain access to all domains of consciousness: to the senses, to immediate memory, to voluntary effectors, to imagination, and the like. The conflict free sphere as an executive can presumably access any of these domains without internal resistance. Unresolved goal conflicts may persist outside of the conflict-free sphere. However, outside of the conflict free domain, competing goal contexts may persist, conceivably for many years. This allows GW theory to represent typical impulse control problems, where people may successfully resist the temptation to express anger for a period of years, and then, perhaps when the dominant goal hierarchy becomes less dominant, the suppressed anger may emerge overtly. The research evidence for this type of phenomenon may be controversial, but naturalistic evidence seems persuasive. In any case, the existence of such persistent competition is implied by the fact that goal contexts can compete for access to consciousness. From a theoretical point of view the possibility of persistent unexpressed goals costs nothing in added theoretical conceptions, and it may allow for future expansion of the theory into an important domain of human motivation. Multiple personality represents the most spectacular case of such persistent conflict between different "selves," or in our earlier terminology, between different context hierarchies. Whenever one goal hierarchy dominates consciousness, it is presumably able to access the senses, immediate memory, voluntary musculature, as well as options contexts that allow one to access  short term memory, to monitor and evaluate oneself, etc.

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