ABSTRACT
Joanne Batey to understand the exercise experience and assess how ADHERENCE and SELF-ESTEEM are impacted by EXERCISE BEHAVIOR.
Further reading
The part of a person’s experience that defines who he or she is as distinct from all others is known as the self, a word that has Germanic origins in selbha. The term self is usually used in a way that suggests reflexivity. When we are aware of the self, we are, by necessity, considering it as an object-we are aware of something. We express this reflexive action in our speech: ‘‘I wasn’t my real self today’’; or about others, ‘‘He spends so much time looking after others that he neglects his own self.’’ (Reflexivity, in this sense, means referring back to oneself, rather than performed without conscious thought, as in a reflex action). While ‘‘self ’’ is commonly employed, it is rarely defined, many
scholars assuming the word’s pervasiveness in language suggests a common understanding. There are, however, slight differences, Arthur Reber detecting six uses of self:
(1) an inner agent or force with controlling and directing functions;
(2) an inner witness to events-this is basically the sense in which the philosopher/psychologist William James (1842-1910) used it when he distinguished between the I (the knowing self) and the me (the self known);
(3) the totality of personal experience and expression, which makes it comparable if not synonymous with ego, person, individual and other inclusive terms;
(4) an integrated synthesis of everything the person is (a definition that is very close to PERSONALITY);
(5) consciousness, or personal conception (who we think we are); (6) an abstract goal or endpoint, as envisaged in the later work of Carl
Jung (1875-1961), who saw the self as final expression of spiritualistic development; this is similar to Abraham Maslow’s version of SELF-ACTUALIZATION.
