ABSTRACT
William James is often credited with laying the foundations for psychological understandings of self and identity. The process of narrative self-construction includes an essential psychodynamic component. People’s self-defining life stories have an intrinsically defensive nature; the description-narration of one’s own inner life is organized on the basis of the fundamental need to construct and defend a self-image endowed with an at least minimal solidity. The selfing process, therefore, imposes a teleology of self-defense on the human psychobiological system. James’s functionalism is an extensive attempt to model psychology on Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection; and he can be considered the “first double-barrelled Darwinian psychologist” since he employs selectionist logics at both phylogenetic and ontogenetic levels. James’s pragmatism is thus naturalistic in a Darwinian sense in that it views humans as evolved organisms developing in a natural world.
