What the self and the self-concept mean

1. Your self is your sense of being one continuous person who exists separately from everyone and everything else.
2. Your self-concept is the picture you hold of that person, covering both what you are like and how you feel about it.

Lewis and the two selves

1. Lewis (1990) argued that the self appears in two steps during early childhood.
2. The existential self is the basic awareness that you exist, that you are separate from other people and objects, and that you go on being the same person over time.
   1. This is the earliest part of the self to appear, and a child shows it when they understand that the face in the mirror belongs to them.
3. The categorical self is the next step, when you realise you can be placed into categories and start describing yourself by them.
   1. Age and gender are usually the first categories a child uses, with size, skills and personality added later.

The three parts of your self-concept

1. Rogers (1959) described the self-concept as three parts working together.
2. Self-image is how you actually see yourself at the moment, including your appearance, your abilities, your roles and your personality.
3. Self-esteem is how much you value and like the person you see, and it can sit anywhere between high and low.
   1. Rogers treated self-esteem as something built out of your experiences and able to change, rather than as a fixed fact about you.
4. Ideal self is the person you would like to be, made up of the qualities, achievements and goals you are aiming at.

Self-actualisation

1. Self-actualisation means reaching your full potential and becoming everything you are capable of being.
2. Rogers treated it as the direction people naturally grow in when nothing is getting in the way.
3. It is a direction of travel rather than a finishing line, so you move towards it rather than arrive at it.

When your self-image and ideal self line up

1. Congruence is a close match between the person you see yourself as and the person you want to be.
2. The closer that match, the higher self-esteem tends to be, because you already value the person you see.

When self-image and ideal self drift apart

1. Incongruence is a wide gap between your self-image and your ideal self.
2. The wider that gap, the lower self-esteem tends to fall, because you keep measuring yourself against a version of you that feels out of reach.
3. Rogers saw incongruence as what holds self-actualisation back, and as a gap that can be narrowed rather than a permanent state.

Turning this into marks

1. Name Lewis for the existential and categorical selves, and Rogers for self-image, self-esteem and the ideal self.
2. Give the meaning of a term rather than who named it, then add a short example.
3. The mark most often lost is defining a term in the abstract when the question describes a named person to apply it to.