ABSTRACT
Philosophers and psychologists have long debated the nature of the self, and its relation to memory. Descartes famously postulated, “I think, therefore I am.” We might modify this to read, “I remember, therefore I am.” Along these lines, Berkeley (1734/1979) posited an entity that “exercises divers [sic] operations, as willing, imagining, remembering. . . . This perceiving, acting being is what I call mind, spirit, soul, myself [italics in original]” (p. 43). Hume (1739/1979), however, thought that the idea of a self that unified perceptions and memories was a mere illusion: “We feign the continued existence of the perceptions of our senses, to remove the interruption [i.e., the break from one perception to the next]; and run into the notion of a soul, and self, and substance, to disguise the variation” (p. 61). By the time of James, however, the notion of a self, however fanciful or imagined it might be, had taken hold in the new science of psychology. James claimed that there could be no science of psychology that ignored the self; indeed, “the personal self rather than the thought might be treated as the immediate datum in psychology” (1890/1981, pp. 220-221), because thoughts and perceptions and feelings are perceived as belonging to the self. Except for a lengthy reprieve in America during the dominance of behaviorism, a psychology of the self has flourished ever since. The main players in the game of self have been social and personality psychologists, with cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists as very recent entrants.
