ABSTRACT
Three major contemporary perspectives with roots in modern scientific and humanistic inquiry carry psychologist's thinking about selfhood beyond the rich symbolic presentations of myth and common sense, religion and philosophy and literature, taken together, to provide a foundation for more specific psychological formulations. These are an evolutionary or phylogenetic perspective, how psychologists got to be human in the first place; a cross-cultural and transhistorical perspective, looking at empirical variants of selfhood; and a developmental or ontogenetic perspective, how psychologists attain person-hood in their individual lives. The evolutionary perspective on selfhood, nevertheless, leaves with the knowledge that psychologist's status as persons is a natural but surprising emergent from evolutionary process and with the speculation that psychologist's existential predicament as persons is an inherent side effect of psychologist's gift of symbolization and language. Historical comparisons have the same conceptual status as cross-cultural ones, with the addition of opportunities to examine continuity and change in a single sequence.
