ABSTRACT
Intelligence, mind, personality, and self are complementary aspects of the same entity: The person in its interaction with the physical, the social, and the symbolic world. Obviously, this is a generally accepted truism. Intelligence refers to the abilities underlying knowledge acquisition, understanding, and learning that aim to continuously keep the person able to cope with the changing demands of the world. Mind refers to exactly the same processes, although the emphasis shifts from the relationships of the person with the environment to the relationships of the person with himself or herself or others as thinking agents. That is, it refers to self-awareness about thinking, understanding, and learning. Personality refers to dispositions to relate with the world and interact with it in particular ways. Thus, one might say that personality sets the frames in which intelligence and mind are put in use. The self refers to all of these dimensions together as they are experienced, sensed, understood, and defined by each individual to produce this individual’s personal identity. Despite their complementarity, these aspects of the person have been studied separately in psychology and the theories formulated about each of them are conceptually and epistemologically very different. As a result, the common ground and the dynamic relationships between the dimensions represented by these theories are not clearly illuminated.
