Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters in the third part of this book. The part of the book addresses the following questions: Which depiction of the structure of self is the more adequate from an empirical point of view? and If individuals in everyday interaction falsify their public presentations of self, under what social and historical circumstances does this occur? Traditional symbolic interactionist views of the social process maintained that the self was an ongoing product of the reciprocal interaction of humans with significant symbols. Dramaturgical social psychology developed an important challenge to traditional symbolic interactionism. According to the tradition of George Herbert Mead, Charles Horton Cooley, W. I. Thomas, and Herbert Blumer, the self results from and exists within interactions where the social identities attributed to an individual by others are internalized by that individual as self.