ABSTRACT
The friendship between John and Judy and the obvious impact it has on John’s self-concept could occur in any stage of the life cycle. The near axiomatic proposition that friends impact one another’s self-concepts would apply regardless of whether Judy and John were 2 or 82. Luckily for me, the example given by Cocking and Kennett in the above quotation just happened to be a cross-sex friendship. In their provocative article, Friendship and the Self, they explore some of the ways friendships and self-concepts are related from a philosophical perspective (1998). I conduct a similar theoretical exploration in this chapter from a cognitive, communication, and contextual perspective as briefly previewed in the next paragraph.
