A Processed Processor: The Processual Nature of the Self

Abstract

The contribution deals with the question of the constitution and persistence of the “self,” linking psychological and sociological approaches. The central interface of this linkage is derived from the process character of the self. It is argued that transdisciplinary work aiming at this common conceptual core will prove particularly fruitful. After discussing the status of the term “the self” in both science and everyday usage, conceptual arguments and definitions (in contrast to related terms such as ego, individual, person, or subject) are examined. A third step provides a synopsis of established approaches and arguments both from psychological and sociological perspectives, offering points of convergence for a metadisciplinary concept of the self. The proposed process character of the self is discussed with respect to language pragmatics, memory performance, and body boundedness. The final section sums up the lines of argumentation and emphasizes intended inspiration for interdisciplinary discussion.

In everyday life, people speak often, and apparently gladly, of themselves. When speaking of “the self,” however, various things are meant—in everyday life as well as in scientific discussions. The word “self” is used in some constellations to reinforce a first person statement (“I have experienced it myself that ...”). When we speak of “our” self in scientific contexts, we are often aiming at the “I” as the action center of doing and experiencing, which will differ situationally in the details and connotations associated with each, but which nevertheless seems to be subject to a Cartesian certainty that literally one and the same person has experienced these different situations. Here lies a bridge to extra-scientific discourse: in everyday life, but also in many more specific (e.g., psychotherapeutic) contexts, this connotation of a substantial, essentialist “core” is apparently strong (“that’s not really me,” “I’ve figured out what my true goals are”). Often irritating, at any rate favoring misunderstandings, is the ambiguity of demonstrative or recursive use of the self: not always is an “object” even suggested (let alone implied) by the term “self”: Van Gogh could portray himself, but not his self. The question of what the speech of the self can meaningfully refer to, at least in the context of the empirical sciences, is what we will deal with in this paper.

Not uncommonly, the terms self, identity, individual, “I,” person, and subject are simply used synonymously. A closer look, however, shows: The self is usually not dissolved in or reduced to these terms, and is—at least in many cases—not simply replaceable by them. Obviously, the meaning of the “self” is peculiar in a special way, and this is quite independently of its consideration from the perspective of cognitive processes, the developmental perspective of individuals in their lifespan, or from the perspective of social conditions and cultural influences.

In what follows, we pursue a number of related questions from a psychological and from a sociological point of view. Although, or perhaps because, we look at the subject matter from different disciplinary perspectives, we notice a convergence of questions. Everyday language as well as professional discourse often assumes (or suggests) the “self” as the center of experience and action. In fact, our thinking often seems to revolve around such an “essential” center, seems to proceed from it. Yet, many arguments speak for conceiving the self in a more processual way, not only because of its mobility, but also for other theoretical reasons. We want to pursue them in this essay. The commonality of the perspective is the commonality of the basic question: what is the potential that distinguishes the analysis of the “self?” How can the disciplines mutually inspire and enrich each other? In order to support the assumption that the cross-disciplinary perspective can add something to the ongoing discussion, our goal is not an encompassing survey of the diversity of approaches, but rather to address possible points of convergence.

The starting point of the reflections could first be some observations, such as the frequently encountered conceptual imprecision of the use of the concept of self (reflexive or demonstrative, transitive or intransitive, etc.), or also the sometimes blurred demarcation in language use, but also in theoretical reflection, to a number of adjacent and related concepts: Identity, individual, person, subject, and I—perhaps others.

Persistent, and therefore difficult to ignore, is an astonishing inherent regularity as well as experiential persistence of the self. Connected with the self is a distinctive coherence meaning, at least coherence suggestion for the execution of life. It emerges not least as a special potential, how the individual settles down in the world and makes himself capable of acting in it. The constantly inflowing experiences and the abundance and diversity of daily perceptions and experiences may be experienced as fragmenting and as permanent pressure to act and decide (“how am I supposed to keep things together?”). The self, however, remains as a basis of attribution, where things are always converging (“I am experiencing this problem”) and being made available (“I can and do this”). Even in moments in which we experience ourselves “inconsistently”—for instance, in very acute stress situations (“I don’t even know who I actually am anymore”), the form and structure of the individualistic family of languages requires a logical “I” as the center of this experience of this very disjointness. It is peculiar, for example, that the self remains with us, when we have partially or completely discarded the identity ascribed to ourselves or to others (as a specification of personal unity) at an earlier point in our biography. We then still speak of “our” self—it has just changed, if necessary even fundamentally (“I have changed my identity,” “I have only now found my true identity”). ¹

The question of how much we experience changes to (in, of) ourselves, even dramatic ones, is nevertheless not marginal. That which constitutes the concept of the self (perspectivity, social accountability, pre-reflexive self-confidence, and perhaps also certainty of “my-ness”—see Metzinger, 2000) is perhaps in each case inescapable (Musholt, 2015), but diachronically very fragile. That which connects me with the 6-year-old version of myself just enrolled in school is perhaps really only the uninterrupted history that finds its respective situational expression in a biographical narrative. There are countless evidences that even the memories we are very sure of can be quite wrong. But where does then the certainty come from that I always was (still am) the same? In very many cases, at least helpful, possibly partially constitutive, will be the infrastructure of dispositives that exist outside of me and keep reminding me. They pull me back into the knowledge order of my waking self, perhaps temporarily abandoned in sleep (“Mrs. Müller, we are waiting for your expertise!”).

Again more difficult to judge is the question whether Homo sapiens has “always” experienced this personal (individual) self-awareness (or rather: self-perception?) as a phenomenal potential or rather only acquired it in a culturally evolutionary way. What evidence there is in this regard suggests, even within Western cultural traditions, that ancient humans experienced themselves as the locus of “several.” Demons, gods, and other “entities” operating within them and through them (Gill, 2006). Admittedly, it is difficult to prove this conclusively: the externally ascribed effect of third parties (“the gods”) need not correspond to the experience. Modernity has then gradually developed the “I" (or just: self) as an “inner” center of experience and action (e.g., Taylor, 2012). This could suggest (should it be provable) that there is not only intercultural variance (e.g., individualistic vs. collectivistic), but that there has been an (evolutionary) development of the self-understanding of Homo sapiens: “we” first had to “learn” (or: invent; Carruthers, 2011; Metzinger, 2004) to experience and categorize ourselves as “us.” A process that also opens up an extremely noteworthy research perspective with regard to social processes of subjectivation, that is, the social and cultural ways in which the subject and its subjectivity are formed (in contrast to the idealistic conception of the subject as a pre-social and autonomous agent; we return to this below).

Preliminary Conceptual Considerations: The Conceptual Relatives of the Self

As already indicated with regard to the concept of identity, the self is also not the same as the individual: individuality means, literally, indivisibility; it has become a social imperative, as it were, in the present-day modernity of at least individualistically influenced cultures. Individuality as distinctiveness, especially as particularity-individuality, became a value and a standard. But it is possible that in modern times, an individual has merely become the particularly prominent form of description of the human being; it is, however, only one among other conceivable subject forms (this refers once again to the point of cultural/historical discontinuity mentioned above). In any case, an individual does not necessarily have to be the smallest unit of the social; it is not the master category for the self, only with different wording. Rather, the reality of practices (Alkemeyer, 2013; Reckwitz, 2015) of the individual should be taken into account, which, in their repetition and routine, produce forms of social consolidation, that is, precisely that “temporally unfolding and spatially dispersed nexus of doings and sayings” (Schatzki, 1996, p. 89), which is of particular importance in the analysis of processes of subjectivation. Ultimately, this would also affect the conviction that persons are always also individuals (et vice versa). It remains an empirical question to work out to what extent practices in correspondence with dispositifs constitute individuality in the first place and make it permanent, and whether and where the positing of an individual in advance obscures views of it. In addition, it is conceivable that the self can do without individuality, passes over to collective forms, and now finds its identity reference in something that is no longer borne by individuals alone.

The person, in turn, is an identity marker in the legal (e.g., civic) sense: thus, in the Civil Code, a legal subject is addressed through it in many cases (but, interestingly, not necessarily: a company can be a legal subject as well). In its conceptual history the Latin “persona” (the theatrical mask) also shines through, with which it emerges as a form determination of social identity. Although there is unquestionably considerable overlap between “person” and “self,” for instance, in the fact that the notion of a self often times presupposes a person (though not vice versa: a person can also exist without a self, as it may be the case with coma patients or newborns), or in the fact that the individual development of these two concepts are closely related (e.g., Barresi et al., 2013, for instance, the concept of person will be difficult to understand without the concept of self), the self cannot be reduced to “person” (Herma, 2022). In particular, the category of person hardly captures, let alone explains, the process character of the self.

The concept of identity, which perhaps comes closer to the self—as mentioned above—admittedly suffers especially from an extremely heterogeneous use (meaning) in very different traditions of thought and science (Perry, 2008). In many cases, the concept of identity (in sociology as well as in psychology) seems to be normatively biased: Not all selves have identities (in the psychological or sociological sense)—this requires a certain complexity, a certain integratedness and consistency, perhaps among other conditions (Nunner-Winkler, 1985). At least in psychological contexts, this is often an important difference: an identity may be absent, or underdeveloped or deformed, pathological or damaged—but a (concept of one’s) self is also possessed by (almost) all those persons to whom such would be attested (if they are capable of reflexive consideration at all, that is, capable of certain complex cognitions). Even if (e.g., in the case of severe dementia) the subjective representation of who one is (was) has become largely inaccessible (internally or externally), the “identity” of this person with the person who used to live in place x and was married to y would still be ascertainable on the one hand, and on the other hand, this person could not be denied a (specific) self without specific reasons (e.g., coma).

It becomes clear that if the concepts of individuality and identity are not “dynamized,” they become formalizing and static. We will argue in what follows that “static” conceptions do not capture the—precisely dynamic—process character of the self. In order to do so, we need to look at the moving practices through which the self emerges, changes, and at the same time continues. This process character, which we want to address here in particular, explains (or: meets) that the self forms its special ability to response flexibly and adequately (“adaptively”) to changes precisely with the help of its “mobility,” without, as it is proverbially said, “losing itself.” The processual, dynamic, and practice-bound nature of the self is also the reason for the conceptual proximity of the terms self and subject. If one understands the self praxeologically as a network of ongoing practices, the proximity to the conception of the subject as the result of demarcations from the environment and from other subjects (“I am not you”) is obvious. This closeness becomes plausible if one places both concepts outside the idealistic tradition of thought and without essentialist premises of a self as already given and essentially unchangeable. For example, the program of empirical subjectivation analysis (Bosančić et al., 2018), which follows on from Foucault, aims at this character; subjectivity is understood as an expression of linguistic actions through which self- and other positionings take place and, as a result, such positions are solidified in social events, must be defended, or are prevented. In short, according to this way of thinking, only the establishment of a subject position allows a self to unfold, no matter what form it takes. These positions inform what position speakers occupy in this space and through this become recognizable, negotiable, and in some respects only socially existent (in relation to communication power in digital communication, cf. Herma & Maleyka, 2019). In these processes, there are always opportunities and dangers at the same time for the person concerned: such subject positions can be denied, they can be damaged, violated and degraded.

The subject as grammatical implication of the first person singular has, of course, also independently of social practices a strong suggestion of the substantial. The question, whether the (grammatical) subject of (a description of) an activity is more than a grammatical subject, is an open question—and the very question discussed in this paper. Again, the word “I" takes a somewhat different position. ² The philosophical discussion on how the use (meaning) of this word (first person singular) can be acquired ontogenetically without already “knowing” it beforehand (Musholt, 2015) is complex and instructive since the explanation (“when one means oneself, one does not say ‘you’ but ‘I’ ”) obviously presupposes exactly this “knowledge” or experience (“when one means whom?”). But however the development of this reflexivity competence de facto proceeds—quite obviously there is a point in time sometime in the first decade of life (individually varying) at which we master this rule-conforming language use with sufficient competence. The details, however complex, are an empirical question (on the development of self-concept in childhood, e.g., Harter, 1999, 2012; on the coherence development of children’s and adolescents' self-narratives: Köber et al., 2015).

These brief conceptual considerations suggest the consequence that one cannot assign a self to anyone and cannot already constitute it with this act alone. Even if an addressee reacts to such a (supposed) ascription, this interaction does not constitute a self (a dog that reacts adequately to being addressed by its name does not already have a self because of this). If ascriptions were indeed constitutive, then a self must assign its self-being to itself, which is admittedly not a unique act, but rather proceeds continuously. Such self-ascriptions rest on a grown knowledge (belief) about oneself, which is constantly used and articulated (only partially consciously or planned). How this process creates ego coherence usually escapes the radar of everyday observation (it is just taken for granted). However, it is not self-evident at all, but rather puzzling. In what follows, we want to spell the perspectives of both psychology and sociology on this continuous process.

The Processual Nature of the Self from a Psychological and a Sociological Point of View

Commonly the term process denotes a sequence, causally interconnected, that bring about a (series of) certain state of affairs. Process also refers to courses, developments, procedures, and several related concepts. Although this is the point of convergence of our perspectives, different perspectives on the self as the object of our interest emerge from it. To outline them in more detail should help to see the points of convergence more clearly (without denying or ignoring remaining differences), and thus to use them more constructively.

The Perspective of Empirical Psychology: “Selflessness” as Program and Processes as Focus of Research

The history of the conceptualization and empirical study of “the” self in scientific psychology (Baumeister, 1999) is anything but straightforward. At the beginning of the 20th century, the rise of a the critical-rational philosophy of science which could see no meaningful alternative to the deductive testing of empirically substantial theories shaped the common concept of all empirical (deductive-nomological) psychological approaches that have been discussed more extensively in academic psychology ever since. The first dominant approach in this tradition, the operationally turned (methodological) form of logical behaviorism, differed from the two most significant alternatives at the time not least in that the existence of an “I” (psychoanalysis) or “self” (humanistic theory) seemed irrelevant to it, unless it flatly denied it: “Show me what you do and I’ll know (all I need to know to say) who you are.” But even if the self as a serious object of scientific psychology had temporarily disappeared from the mainstream of scientific debate—from “folk psychology,” of course, it did not disappear (how—and why—is a person supposed to consistently claim “I do not believe in an I?”). The “persistence” of the phenomenon in everyday experience, as mentioned at the beginning, was perhaps not least shown by the fact that it remains largely resistant to scientific conjunctures. The practical inconsistency of the denial of a self as well as various other theoretical problems of logical and especially methodological behaviorism helped the cognitive turn to break through at the beginning of the second half of the century. This perspective brought intraindividual mental processes back into the cone of scientific attention. As a consequence, the self could also be discussed scientifically again—albeit with a dramatically transformed character. From the theoretical perspective of information processing all possibilities to understand “the” self essentialistically had failed irrecoverably (e.g., Baumeister, 1995). Even in the subjectively focused view (as self-concept, as self-esteem, and as self-efficacy), the self in empirical (psychological) research had become a “plurale tantum”: For the time being, the self was used only in hyphenated format.

Moreover, numerous inventive experiments had convincingly shown how fleeting, how context-dependent, and how easily changeable what I think about myself is. One of the legacies of psychoanalysis, Anna Freud’s project of the “defense mechanisms” of the ego (Freud, 1936/2012), contributed its part, empirically turned, and inserted into other theoretical frameworks: Numerous mechanisms influence, distort—possibly create—what I think of myself in the service of countless tendencies and restrictions of my inner world. Self-deceptions, selective memory, and several further biases of all kinds suggest that our image of ourselves is anything but a complete, realistic, and neutral archive (Leary and Tangey, 2012). Thus, the self, which many authors throughout two millennia of Western thought have repeatedly suggested as the actor and, hence, the “independent variable,” became the “dependent variable,” the producer turned into the product of our life experiences.

However, the discrepancy between the subjective experience of a self (a Cartesian or Kantian “I think”) on the one hand and scientific findings on the other hand grew into a serious tension, the more seriously the latter had to be taken. Several attempts to alleviate or dissolve this tension proved ineffective. For instance, the understanding of the self as a mere social construction (e.g., the labeling approach; In Farrington & Murray, 2014) was no real way out: We by no means believe everything we are told about ourselves, and we certainly believe not everyone. Actually, our self-knowledge does not entirely depend from social feedback (if only because there are many more social processes than just “feedback,” e.g., Bicchierei and Macnally, 2018). Actually, at least partly we, as asocial actors, do “create” the social context(s) that in turn shape our social cognitions, which co-regulate our actions (e.g., Zawidzki, 2013; for the biological account on niche construction see, e.g., Odling-Smee et al., 2003). The more this had to be differentiated, the clearer it became that the explanation for these differentiating processes is to be sought in the person itself. As a consequence, however, it became obvious that it is not “the person” that selects, interprets, and weights social feedback, but rather a multitude of processes (“inside” the person, as it were), of which only a minority is consciously monitored, let alone controlled, by the person. Moreover, at least on first glance, the (universality of the) persistence of the experience of an individual self that is, if not constant, then at least continuous, can neither be justified nor explained from this perspective. More recent approaches attempt to explain the emergence of our intuitions about ourselves (and ourself) by social processes (e.g., Musholt, 2015) or at least as resting on the very same resource (Carruthers, 2011). It is perhaps worth pointing out that the causal role that social processes (e.g., social and collective responses to self-presentations, socially and culturally shared self-evident beliefs about the individual’s relation to the social community in which he or she lives) play in the emergence of individual cognitions and evaluations does not necessarily imply a conception of the self as a social “construction” in which these processes not only influence or shape but constitute the individual self. The ontological (and thus epistemological) position implied in each case attributes a different role to contingent causal processes. Moreover, almost all scientific approaches on the self-agree that not only the contents of the self but also the processes that produce the current self are products of ontogenesis (which, in turn, is a product of phylogenesis, e.g., Tomasello, 2019).

This, however, makes the aforementioned tension between scientific findings and one’s own experience increasingly disturbing. Is, in the end, my “I” really nothing more than the grammatically necessary but substantially empty placeholder of the linguistic subject of sentences that refer to an extremely dynamic, downright volatile system in a state of permanent change? Am I “no one” (Metzinger, 2007)? Irrespective of these challenges: The arguments in favor of a (scientific) departure from the substantial and the persistence of the very experience suggesting this substantial at least turn the view: This experienced persistence, instead of being a (Cartesian) starting point and guarantor of certainty, now becomes the explanandum of scientific (psychological) explanations.

After all, the finding of the stability of (central facets of) our (adult) self can hardly be disputed. In adulthood, at least, our behavior is so stable, all things considered, that it is empirically successful to capture and predict central tendencies (personality traits), in fact getting better and better the older we get. This phenomenon of “cumulative stability” is well documented (e.g., Roberts & Caspi, 2003), and the long tradition of personality psychology seems to suggest that there is a basic set of personality traits, something like an inner core of us, that explains why we remain predictable, stable—just the same. However, a closer look shows that this cannot be an explanation either (Greve, 2005). We call someone “anxious” or “aggressive” if he or she behaves anxiously or aggressively more often or more easily (in more situations) than others. Therefore, referring to a trait as an explanation for current behavior does not explain anything, but only refers to the fact of stability—still to be explained (Greve & Kappes, 2017).

But what generates this stability, how—when so much seems to change in us and around us? How do we manage to behave and experience relative stability in changing environments and as life-long changing beings (Greve, 2005)? For this, the idea of defensive mechanisms is obviously not enough, because defensive mechanisms have costs: they misjudge realities that might sometimes be important to take note of. We need to know our limits and weaknesses, perhaps not as precisely as possible, but as accurate as necessary, if our plans and actions are not to constantly fail. Even processes that combine acknowledgment of realities and rejection of some of their possible implications through stabilizing adjustment of the inner structure of the self (e.g., “self-immunization”; Greve & Wentura, 2010), are insufficient because the experience of stability is then bought at the price of partial ignorance and diminishing social connectivity. For instance, we should register relevant changes in order to be able to react to them (Freund & Baltes, 2000).

Hence, self-stabilization is also in need of processes that accept realities, even unpleasant ones. One option is that it is not just self-referential beliefs but also their subjective importance that can be adjusted. Several approaches (Brandtstädter & Rothermund, 2002; Heckhausen et al., 2010, 2019) have provided empirical evidence that such “accommodation” of the self (Brandtstädter, 2007) contributes both to satisfaction and quality of life as well as to the feeling that one is still who one always was. What is crucial here is that changes are not denied, but their meaning or relevance is changed.

It is of particular importance to the perspective on the self-pursued here that these adaptive processes, although their significance changes over the life span (Brandtstädter & Greve, 1994), are recognizable throughout the life span (Greve & Kappes, 2023). This supports the suggestion that more constant than the contents of the self, it is the processes of the self that cause us to experience ourselves as “me” at all times (albeit differently in different contexts each time), that ensure that what is important is maintained (and also that what is maintained is important). Certainly: we are always “under construction,” always in motion, but it does not follow from this that there is no self, that we are therefore “no one.” The Rhine, on whose bank we stand, is of course, if one would take it physically, no longer the same Rhine as yesterday: the water is another, its bed has changed (a little), its speed, its temperature—everything. If you consider more than a few days difference, half a century, for example, it has fundamentally changed—has become a “completely different” river. But it is still undoubtedly true that this is the same Rhine: it never was, and never will be, the Moselle or the Main (although their waters later became Rhine waters), nor the Danube (although the water that evaporated from it may also once have become—via rain—Rhine waters), not to mention the Nile. Identity is not necessarily a physical or otherwise detailed identity; in fact, it hardly matters (Theseus' ship; Nozick, 1981). The structure of the constellation we aptly regard as the person has not changed in its central aspects. This structure includes the (literally) situation (space-time constellation) and context (of action), but also several attributes of the individual (“the one and only Rhine”; it is a river, not just a valley, it contains water, it has a particular history (including a time “before”) etc.). We are, and are embedded in, “developmental systems” (Ford & Lerner, 1992; Oyama, 1985). The interplay is what is essential, not the literal identity of the interacting parts.

Thus, on closer inspection, stability and change are not opposites, but complementary perspectives. Both are explained by the complicated interlocking of many processes which together produce and secure what we can call identity: being the same (in important respects). The crucial shift in perspective from the (untenable) constancy of content to the (plausible) continuity of stabilizing processes that characterizes developmental psychology in general at the turn of the millennium (Greve, 2023; Greve & Kappes, 2023) might offer a solution for the quest of the self.

Thus, the ambiguity of the use of the word ‘self’ can perhaps be explained using the example of the concept of (developmental) self-regulation just mentioned. On the one hand, it could refer in a transitive understanding to a “self” that (actively) regulates something else or is (passively) regulated by something else (“self-regulation”). On the other hand, in an intransitive, recursive understanding, it could refer to a special form of regulation, which is characterized by the fact that the respective system under consideration (“the regulator” or “the regulation”) regulates itself (“self-regulation”). Usually, although the use of the concept often suggests the latter meaning (“persons regulate themselves”), on closer inspection it is rather a variant of the former (transitive) connotation that is intended: when children learn self-regulation, it is usually meant that a regulating instance “in the child” (e.g., certain cognitive functions) regulates something else “in the child” (e.g., emotional reactions or the coordination of cognitive and/or motor processes). With respect to adult persons, admittedly, the intransitive understanding of the personal level (e.g., “the self-formation of one’s own person and development”) is more often retained at the next level of resolution - “in the person” (e.g., “the self is subject and object of one’s own development”). But here, too, the transitive meaning of self-regulation is usually intended: specific instances or processes “in the self” (e.g., defensive processes) regulate other instances or processes (e.g., the sense of self-esteem after experiencing threatening experiences). This vividly shows that the process-oriented perspective avoids essentialist dead-ends when it is sufficiently clarified what is meant in each case. This makes it all the more important to complement the person-centered (psychological) perspective with an interactional (social) one.

The Perspective of Empirical Sociology: Interaction, Language Pragmatics, and Subjectivation

Even if no “sociology of the self” has been established as a professional label, the topic indisputably looks back on longer traditions of activities and works. The interweaving of the term “self” with the dazzling concept of “subject” will have contributed to this; especially in recent times, there is a struggle for new definitions of relations (e.g., Eitler & Elberfeld, 2015; Reckwitz, 2015). In the shadow of long-dominant theoretical perspectives such as individualization and social construction, the self seemed to have the status of a linguistic appendage. New orientations may have been influenced by the discovery of the “I-perspective” of the social subject, the boom of self-therapeutic speech, and the often naturalizing desire for authenticity in numerous milieus from the 1970s on as a legacy of the movements in the 1960s. Even though the term “self” is always on the lips, the research base on its processual character is narrower. Only recently, and also in the course of subjectivation and practice-theoretical activities, has there been an increased focus on this.

Conceptual foundations for this come from Mead (1934/1968), later from Goffman (1959) and symbolic interactionism in general. Here, the “self” is not least an expression of the ability to display oneself as an object and to constantly reinterpret it by adopting the perspectives of others in object relations. Goffman in particular dealt with the topic of the self and gave essential impulses to microsociology (and also to other subjects, as just mentioned: “labeling approach”). Until today, the analyses of Mead, Goffman, H. Blumer and others inspire arguments for the productivity and emergent quality of social “interrelations” (Simmel, 2016/1908). Only in the network of actors involved, so the basic line, do self-images establish themselves as social identities. At the same time, these identities solidify supersituatively as documents, sign systems, and institutional entities - they do not pass away with the fleetingness of a face-to-face interaction. Moreover, the interrelations are based on (meaningfully underpinned, but not necessarily: conscious) “action,” with which early Weber (1922) distinguished sociology from a pure behavioral science (at that time a dominant tendency in psychology, as mentioned above).

Also of more recent date is the turn to the linguistic or communicative components of self-constitution, which will be given special attention here. It is based above all on the conviction that language and communication represent central mediating points of social processes. The entire cultural ensemble of the linguistic provides the “concepts,” the words and signs for the “comprehension” of the world and thus a social grammar that is always in a state of flux. The linguistic turn in the 20th century was inspired by the late philosophy of Wittgenstein (1984), which moved away from the image theory of language (“every concrete word has a concrete equivalent in the world”). The meaning of any linguistic processes is now understood as a rule-following part of language use in life practice, that is, embedded in “language games.”

If one follows this view also for considerations of the “self,” this stimulates ways of looking at its process character. The self now appears less as a black box, even if we literally cannot look into the heads of others. For the perspective adopted, this is not necessary either, because from this point of view, it is not unknown processes of consciousness, no motivational structures and no secrets that constitute the self socially, but syntactic processes in networks of relationships, which are not least linguistically founded. This way of looking at the constitution of the self does not at all lead to a theoretical thinning of the self—at most, it has a diminishing effect on an idealistic conception of the subject that pre-discursively sets the self. Rather, with the focus on linguisticity, the social conditions, possibilities, and limitations of being or being supposed to be a self also come into view. Orders of knowledge come into focus, vocabularies, discursive orders and dispositives that prefigure spaces for articulating, presenting, interpreting, perceiving, and also feeling oneself as a self of any kind and connotation.

As is well known, Foucault was particularly interested in the sedimentation of truth claims in discourses that regulate knowledge orders of all kinds. Here, the process of self-direction of the individual is decisive, which Foucault also outlined in his late work on the “technologies of the self” (1993) and their historical genesis in the sense of “concern for oneself.” In addition, recent sociological work on modes of subjectivation in the late modern professional world (prominently, e.g., the “entrepreneurial self,” Bröckling, 2007) should be noted, which elaborates how self-relations are imperatively invoked (cf. Traue et al., 2020). In this context, the “doing subject” (Reckwitz, 2015) is always to be emphasized as the double-sidedness of being-done-with-the-subject on the one hand, as well as the doing-of-the-subject on the other. Precisely in that the self is not the representation of an “objective” archive (see above), it is in its permanent acts of self-interpretation capable of modifications of “itself.” Subjects are not merely derivatives and they are at the same time not autonomous, history-less actors, but move in spaces with certain contingencies, even “failures” can be creative.

A sideways glance at social philosophical approaches is also stimulating for the topic of self-stabilization. For example, in “Sources of the Self,” (1994/1989) Taylor formulated an idea of self-determination of the self that is oriented to the idea of “staying with oneself” on the basis of “strong valuations” as opposed to short-term inclinations. Similarly, Bieri (2013) has formulated an approach of “self-reliance of the self” with reference to the weighty concept of dignity, as the idea of human dignity formulates it, to know one’s own subjectivity not merely as an abstract constitutional right to be protected, but to regulate oneself in the face of objectifications from outside in such a way that the self maintains an self-reliance.

For the process character of the self from a sociological perspective, three markers can be noted as an interim conclusion: Interactivity, linguisticity, the disposal of subject positions. The last two points will be discussed in more detail in the following. The contextual embedding of linguistic utterances in communication situations is relevant for the linguistic-pragmatic perspective adopted here. Linguistic utterances only become meaningful in communication situations (this distinguishes them from verbal sounds, which can occur free of external contexts). The functions of the linguistic are not exhausted in a “pure” content, they are at the same time social processes with a positional function. Bourdieu (2005) in particular has dealt praxeologically with this social-structural basis of speech. His considerations have been incorporated, for example, in remarks on the “linguistic habitus.” He regards the habitus as a processual principle (“structuring and structured structure”), which in its correspondence with social dispositions of individuals decides decisively which places in social space become tangible for them (insofar also for their “self”). Speech act theory, on the other hand, especially after Searle (1969/2007) following Austin (1979), puts its focus clearly sociolinguistically. The character of linguistic acts as reality-constituting actions (“How to do things with words” according to Austin) is pursued particularly consistently. According to this, speaking is not merely an act of describing facts in the world, but a reality of execution and thus the generation of facts itself.

But how can the process character of the self (here in the sense of linguistic practices) still be grasped in general terms? It is useful to look at the acts of “self-making” of the individual: The self thus comes into view as an actuality. Such positionings are sometimes very simple and decidedly everyday: “I am ...,” “I am not ....” Nevertheless, their effect is fundamental, since self-statements are taken up by others (other speakers, listeners, and readers) as acts of positioning in social space, as, for instance, the positioning analysis (Lucius-Hoehne & Deppermann, 2004) takes into account. Frequently, people known to each other talk to each other, informing each other about their opinions, interpretations, and the like. However, this is only true if this self is already “communicatively introduced” as a subject position (for an approach arguing in a similar direction, albeit from an identity-theoretical and ethical point of view, see Lindemann, 2014). Thus, it is about a completely basal, here: formal quality of self-statement: The self must first introduce itself (make itself recognizable, authorize) as someone, for instance, with the help of distinctions, for instance, the articulation of self-signifiers (“I am a worker in the shipyard xy,” “in my estimation ...,” “without me! ,” “I claim ...,” “I resolutely oppose ...,” or simply: “hmhm”—the act of confirmation of an “understanding” counterpart). Acts of linguistic self-setting map the social world into zones of the self and those that are not. Through this, the self experiences its formally constituting subjectivity. Again, through the affirmation of others, it experiences its certainty. It makes a distinction between itself and its environments in any form and coloration, which depends on ratification (recognition and validation).

If one looks at the self from the side of its constitutive practices via self-settings, the follow-up question arises as to which spaces of opportunity it can seize at all in this context. Which practical fields do societies form in a given historical time to experience and articulate themselves in principle as self?

Hahn (1987) provided groundbreaking reflections on this with the keyword of “institutions of self-thematization.” Institutions such as the biographical self-reflection, the confession, or the diary examined by Hahn are not constants of human history, but historically developed, culturally secured forums of self-reference. Sometimes they find proxies at the beginning of developments, at least in the form of handed down documents, as, for example, in the fourth century with the “Confessiones” of Augustine and later with “The Confessions” of Rousseau (1782 & 1789/1985, 1789/1985). The self-description, in turn, forms the data pool of social science biographical research, which deals with the question of the social mediatedness of biographical speech.

If we now take up Hahn’s “institutions of self-thematization,” consider the field-specific findings of biographical research, and take up the concept of subjectivation and the program of empirical subjectivation analysis (Bosančić et al., 2018), it is profitable to determine such overarching arrangements of self-reference in more detail. The guiding question here: against which cultural horizons of reference can practices of self-reference first unfold? With the concept of “reference spaces of the self” (Herma, 2022), such horizons can be mapped and broken down in their inner constitution. They represent established social contexts available for the individuals' self-interpretation. This procedure in itself is not new, but in late modernity, as a result of the erosion of traditional certainties, it has been placed in altered frames: The much discussed individualization, the “internalization of the world” according to Simmel, and many more. The reference spaces of the self are supersituative and possess a cultural persistence, but they are not ahistorical. The topological-spatial aspect of these reference spaces is not based on a container concept, but they are rather social venues for self-reference.

In biographical self-reflection, for example, life in its totality is at stake. It is about the creation of coherence, which can also bring fragmented and discontinuous experience into a form for which it is still possible to make it narratively accessible. When people speak about “themselves” and “their” life, this becomes meaningful only through the modern institutions of biography and life course. In personal relationships, the starting point is different: now it is about consensus building and dissent of the self together with others in the web of concrete relationships. Family, couple relationships, and friendships are types of relationships with high interdependence, in which form conditions of the self are fundamentally mediated and practiced, recognized, or rejected. Life in a couple allows one to learn how to stay in the game as a socially accepted relationship partner, but also still accept oneself. The prominence of romantic love in modernity lies not least in its being a central stage for the affirmation of the participants' highly personal worldview of the self (Herma, 2009, 2022).

With the historical generation, as another such reference space, the historical situatedness of a life is added. It can be articulated in structurally similar schemes of interpreting the world—a point that Mannheim (1928) made prominent in the sociology of knowledge. Finally, a last example: the esthetic stage of pop culture with the question: Who else could I be? Self-designs here can be playful, imaginative in nature, rehearsal stages without commitment, and yet with consequences in existing subject orders. Other such spaces can represent work, gender, body, origin and religion, and others. The position of the reference spaces of the self lies in the naming of established cultural grand frames for practices of self-reference. They describe a factual being-there of the self that emerges in actions (self-practices) that unfold apart from the category of experience, perception, or self-images, and where the formula of a somehow constituted “constructedness” falls flat.

The linguistic-pragmatic and practice-theoretical side of self-production opens up a variety of empirical-methodological approaches, for example, procedures for the analysis of self-thematization (Herma, 2009, 2022; Willems, 1999), which are part of established research traditions: For example, with the study of speech acts, speaker positioning, linguistic habitus, or biographical self-description.

Starting Points and Points of Convergence of a Metadisciplinary Conception of the Self

Via these brief insights into different conceptual and empirical approaches, traditions, and research fields of psychology and sociology on the topic of the self, we find, at first glance, seemingly much that is divergent, possibly incompatible. The self in psychology will remain primarily tied to cognitive operations. The self in sociology will remain primarily tied to social modes of generation. The consensual starting point shows up in ways of generation. Therefore, the aim is not to point out differences, but to formulate key points that are fruitful for transdisciplinary reflection. If this synopsis paints a sufficiently accurate picture: What points of convergence can be discovered and where could we proceed from here? In the following, several points will be addressed which could be helpful starting points or cornerstones for the definition of the topic and research field indicated by the term “self.”

The Starting Point: Presence Without Essence Through Processual Continuity

There is agreement in distancing ourself from a substantialist concept of self: It cannot be justified consistently, and an essentialist premise would also restrict the understanding of the manifold movements and tactics of the individual, which contribute to self-constitution and self-continuation. At the same time, the persistent subjective experience of the self must be taken seriously as a phenomenon: even if it cannot provide a Cartesian starting point, it must at any rate be systematically considered as an explanandum in an appropriate scientific approach to the self.

As described in the introduction, the self as a research topic eludes an immediately handy definition. Accordingly, the variety of approaches to capture the phenomenon is too large for a fair overview (e.g., Gallagher and Shear, 1999). Formulated as a minimal definition (sociologically): The self can be estimated as the sum of all communicative and performative practices that make attributions recognizable in terms of an “I” as a center of action. All performing practices of self-reference can then be subsumed under self-thematization (cf. Herma, 2022). The psychological perspective also addresses a field of research rather than a specific object of research (e.g., In Leary & Tangney, 2012). Even current searches for basal neural structures and processes, which as necessary (physical) conditions enable the mental processes—and the phenomena based on them (cf. also Markowitsch & Welzer, 2005)—addressed here, will not be associated with the connotation, let alone the theoretically substantial claim, of finding the “core of the self” (see, for instance, Gallagher, 2000; with respect to cognitive science: Carruthers, 2011). In fact, the investigation of this text is oriented toward the idea that the experience of a person’s center is produced in each case in a complex constellation of intra- and interindividual conditions, but in doing so remains precisely capable of change and adaptation.

The perspective pursued here of placing the processuality of the self and the continuity constantly established by it at the center of considerations has several fruitful consequences. First, the empirical perception of the permanent change not only of the person but especially also of the self-perception of the person (its self-concept) over the lifespan is taken seriously by this view (Greve, 2005). Second, the scientific view turns from the description of the respective current structure of self-related concepts and experiences to an explanation of the processes that process (“generate”) these self-concepts and experiences. At the same time, this avoids all essentialist assumptions (the “true,” “actual,” “core,” self, etc.), all of which have so far proved aporetic. It is one of the points of the conception of the self contoured here that avoiding the Scylla of essentialism need not mean falling into the trap of the Charybdis of a radical constructivist relativism.

The process perspective is not only well compatible with an empirical approach that considers the investigation of this (processual) self worthwhile and promising, it could stimulate it in a fruitful way. The concept of process must remain empty if it is not said about what it operates (what is processed). It is precisely here that a future theoretical (and subsequently also: empirical) work will have to be done, because even a concept like structure (which in many respects suggests itself here) needs an answer to the question of the structured elements. We are very aware that we have not yet filled in this point well, hardly hinted at it seriously. Even though the complete penetration of all dynamics of this constellation may lie beyond the horizon of our possible understanding, much can be at least partially explained: complex interactions, linguistic acts and socially induced self-techniques, and adaptive process patterns; the repertoire of approaches already of these two disciplinary traditions considered here is broad and differentiated. In this way, the perspective of the person—as a social or moral institution, as an individual experience—is not diminished or relativized, but on the contrary strengthened, possibly clarified. Thinking the self processually unfolds quite different disciplinary facets; it seems instructive and promising to us that they converge in many points. In the synopsis, we encounter, among other things, aspects of the development of people over their life span, the formation of reflexivity competence, learning, adaptation, modification, moral development, affect, and self-control, but also invocation, the assumption, or assignment of subject positions and their linguisticity, and both biographical self-interpretation or the formation of habitus formations.

It is obvious that people born into society do not reinvent the self as an idea. At the same time, however, it is incumbent on all of them to form such a self “for themselves” (e.g., as a behavior toward oneself, as a network of self-referentiality, but also as the construction of complex cognitive structures). There is not enough space here to go into the numerous recent approaches, which are quite divergent in their thrust, in which, among many other aspects, the linguistic, but also the practical side of behaving toward oneself has been thematized and considered in a differentiated way (e.g., the well-known actor models in the sociological discussion: for an overview, e.g., In Gabriel, 2004; Schimank, 2016). In many cases, the processual character of the self that we focus on here (albeit with different terminologies) is at least touched upon in these approaches, perhaps even addressed more centrally (under different names).

Perhaps it would be more appropriate to speak here of achievements and of processes of dealing with demands and challenges. Hence, even socialization cannot be thought of in any other way than as a process (hence: “socialization process”). But also below this central perspective, numerous working concepts can be found, such as development or processes of enculturation, through which individuals do not merely adapt (acculturation), but internalize and (distancing) reflect found culture in equal parts. This is accompanied by the expectation of individualistic societies for personal accountability of action and responsibility through processes of individuation. In the following, we want to briefly address some points that will have to be considered as a necessary partial perspective, in some cases also as a necessary (constitutive) condition of “the” self in a processual research approach.

The Linguistic Frame of the Self

Not only the fact that the considerations presented here are necessarily linguistically constituted, already all observations in the beginning of this text strongly refer to the linguistic framing of the self. We want to understand language here more precisely as speaking, because as self-evident as the interposition of the two may sound, it is not. Language is a facility in the sense of an ability, and it is undoubtedly a cultural technique—through its high aggregation of symbolic communication even a central one. But only the analysis of speaking as a communicative reality of execution opens the access to knowledge orders sedimented in it, from which also the practice of self-reference draws its forms, tools, and rationality models of individuality. As clearly as philosophical (e.g., Tugendhat 1997), but also scientific approaches (e.g., Tomasello, 1999) have emphasized the importance of the linguistic, the processual approach presented here is not necessarily committed to the assumption that language is indeed the necessary condition of a self: even a proto-linguistic self-referentiality (e.g., of very young children, but perhaps in other forms of life, as addressed; see Musholt, 2015, for a careful discussion) can be seamlessly inserted into a processual conception of the self—especially if “the self” is conceived as transcending life spans. ³ Conversely, however, a process-oriented perspective is always inherent in language as an evolutionary medium: language cannot be thought in an actual-, onto-, and phylogenetic way in any other way than dynamically, at any time variable and changing and thus processual. In a word, language as a (or even: the) medium of self-reference fits perfectly to the process approach, without any further philosophical position about the nature of this relation being already claimed or prejudiced.

This should make clear that recent theoretical as well as empirical questions on the linguistic nature of the self, beyond the symbolic character, emphasize precisely the pragmatic aspect of the linguistic. Rather, speaking always formulates social situations of individuals (and thus of their selves), whether in the mirror of a linguistic habitus (Bourdieu, 2005; Jafke et al., 2022), which can also be inferred from speech act theory (Austin, 1979; Searle, 2007), whether as part of discursive (power) relations and technologies of the self (Foucault, 2007), sedimented in patterns of interpretation (Oevermann, 1988), in practices of subjectivation (Alkemeyer, 2013; Reckwitz, 2015), in narrative patterns of self-description (Lucius-Hoehne & Deppermann, 2004), historically shaped institutions of self-thematization (Hahn, 1987), in socially established spaces of reference (Herma, 2022), or determined with procedures of a recent discourse-analytically oriented sociology of knowledge (Keller, 2014). The (communicative) constitution of the self is taken up from this perspective less as a consciousness-theoretical question than as an action-theoretical one.

Memory as Necessary Condition of (Persistence of) the Self

Obviously, self-reference can only be realized in the medium of time: I necessarily refer to a future or past self when I refer to myself (true simultaneity is impossible here—our autobiography can never become quite complete). Continuity entails diachronic reference, which, in turn, implies a form of preservation: memory. Human autobiographical memory is admittedly the condition of the possibility of the self experienced as persistent. Beyond the physical realization of autobiographical memory, it is of particular importance, especially in the context of the processual perspective presented here, that human (long-term) memory is anything but a completely reliable storage medium. Rather, especially in the context of autobiographical memory, the numerous processes of influence and processing that characterize, indeed constitute, it is of particular importance (Pohl, 2007). We are aware that the line of argument pursued in this section focuses on a certain concept of “memory” that might be objectionable. But even if we restrict our argument on a storage-retriever concept of memory, it is clear that the complexity of the interactions involved here is way beyond linear and predictable patterns. This, however, leads back to the information processing processes of the self discussed in more detail in the previous section, each of which concerns precisely the storage and retrieval of memory contents, which in this self-referentiality constitute at least one aspect of the self.

In order to validly elaborate this self-reference as an actual reference of the self to “itself,” in social scientific autobiographical research, the gráphein (the description) of the bíos (life) in the mode of the autós (the self) is not understood from the outset as an attempt to store all life events, which can necessarily be retrieved only fragmentarily or, as mentioned, is partly not possible at all. The aim is rather to take every kind of selectivity, especially the subjective relevance settings of the speakers in their selection (here not so much as a memory performance, but as a condensation and evaluation performance), as a form principle of the narrators (exemplary: “cognitive figures of autobiographical impromptu narration” in Schütze, 1984) into consideration, since precisely these performances come to light no less than as a form principle of the self. If Tristram Shandy had actually been able to record everything including his death, he would have merely, precisely: depicted (“recorded”) his life, but not described or narrated it, that is, made it present for himself and others (self-referentiality). Social science biography research, which has become prominent in the last decades, therefore does not consider the course of life from the perspective of event and course data (also not in the sense of oral history), but with regard to the processual elements (rationalization, prioritization, dramaturgy, and many more) of a biographizing practice, that is, from the internal perspective of the actors as “an own social reality” (Corsten, 1994).

The Physical Aspect of the Self

In the course of a “practice turn” in social science, the body is receiving increased attention. Not least Bourdieu (1987) with the concept of habitus and his theory of social practice often stimulates reflections on the social embodiment of the self. In the habitus, the body and its practices are quasi praxeologically fused. The starting point here: Experienced social history (the socially “incorporated”) is constantly “embodied” by individuals, whether in the physical, in arrangements of feeling, in patterns of speaking, for example, how a subject introduces himself linguistically about his own life (on this Jafke et al., 2022), or already in the physical “posture,” which, according to Bourdieu, can also be understood as a social posture formed in its entanglement of experienced personal with social history.

Not least with Schmitz’s (2011) approach to the body/“Leib” (the felt body) difference and the basic idea of a bodily self that is always in practices of execution (Lindemann, 2017), this means that even apart from verbal speech acts a non-speaking person does not merely “stand around” as a socially atomized body. The body and its movements also contain manifold culturally established signs (gestures, facial expressions, the taking of spatiality, thing practices, and others) that are capable of indicating the person’s self socially or for him/herself (especially bodily). Last but not least, the corporeality of the body can also be used as a point of reference for the final reassurance of one’s own self—precisely when language, processes of consciousness, or social environments do not sufficiently guarantee this. For research, it might be worthwhile to discuss the different levels in their connection.

In the more naturalistic psychological perspective, the study of the physical side of the self has largely focused on cerebral and neural processes and structures (in relation to memory, see, for instance, Markowitsch & Welzer, 2005). It certainly makes sense to assume that the physical realization of the mental processes that constitute the perspective on the self contoured here takes place in the central nervous system. Nevertheless, this assumption is by no means self-evident: the entire history of Western thought up to the frontier of modernity would not have tied a self to any form of corporeality (rather, it would have distinguished it precisely from it: in a sense, tied it to the soul rather than to the body). This cannot be the place to even outline the mind-body discussion touched upon by this (summarizing—instead of many—for instance, Metzinger, 2007), although many of the questions and problems of the self directly concern this subject area, for instance, the question whether a self (in the processual sense outlined here) can also be possessed by non-human entities (e.g., machines). The so-called “Turing test,” for instance, is one prototypical (version of an) argument that under certain conditions an “artificial” intelligence may legitimately deserve to be treated as being a person, perhaps having a self, if the communicative micro-structures were not able to demonstrate a practically experienceable difference. In addition, human selves (in particular conceptualized processually) posses history (which is (at present) hard to be realized by learning algorithms): we have grown in complex developmental processes, with biophysical, psychological, social, cultural, and historical conditions leaving their mark. Moreover, moral judgments and ethical maxims are characteristics of a human self (Taylor, 2012) that acts out of its “location-bound nature of knowledge” (Mannheim, 1928) and always measures the limitations of its resources, of whatever kind, against the background of its own finitude and weaves them into its life decisions. Even if non-human object relations can be ascribed self-resonance and machine entities cannot be denied reflexivity, it still remains a considerable leap to that “self-reflexivity” which Plessner (1975) had in mind with the expression of the “eccentric positionality” of man. Yet, this may change in a nearer future.

We have focused here on the intentional and the functional perspectives (in the sense of Dennett, 1978) on the self, without wishing to make a preliminary decision with respect to the “physical stance.” Notwithstanding this, it is becoming increasingly clear that it is likely to be fruitful to go beyond attention to the central nervous system to consider peripheral neural information processes more systematically than has been the case to date (for an inspiring approach taking inner perception seriously see Carruthers, 2011). Humans make bodily experiences from the very beginning, stimulating cognitive development, which in turn is the condition of the possibility of a development of the self-concepts. Precisely because our life course begins without a self that deserves this designation in the sense contoured here, the ontogenesis of the self and its physiological realization in Homo sapiens must always be considered for a comprehensive understanding of the processes constituting the self. At the same time, not only Dennett’s arguments indicate that a radical reductionist perspective (such as “the self is its physiological realization (in the brain)”) is unlikely to have any prospect of coherence.

Processual Perspectives: The Self as a Processed Processor

If the considerations presented here should stand up to the criticism we seriously invite and hope for, they lead to the thesis that the self as an object of investigation is a “moving target,” a complex and multilayered constellation whose adaptive dynamics mean permanent change of internal and external relations. It may not be harmful to use the term “system” for this. A Luhmannian (1984) association is obvious and can be useful, if one emphasizes the quality of internal relations of the self, which in its everyday practices let it appear again and again as a “being-for-itself,” which we described above and which is at least partly reliable, at least persistently experienceable—in this sense, “practices of self-reference,” no matter what form they take. The strength of the systems-theoretical view is to formulate communicative operations, that is, processuality, as the basic unit of sociality, which should not be uninteresting for the topic of the self. Thus, not only can it be shown with which conceptual tools society observes itself and its own operations. Of particular interest is the idea of contingency as well as the central view of communicative distinctions (difference), through which not least self/environment relations are established. Therefore, it would be obstructive to follow a simplistic logic of external relations that would assert an unbridgeable separation between “social system” and “psychic system” (Luhmann). Just such an interpretation would prevent the so fruitful entanglement of the spheres of the social and cultural with those of mental processes, cognitions, consciousness, and the psychic, regardless of whether this entanglement is thought, for example, more from the direction of discursive and non-discursive practices in Foucaultian thought or more from Bourdieu’s theory of practice or, for example, from the perspective of social psychological approaches to the effect of social groups on the individual. This understanding of the self, clearly conceived from the penetration of practical knowledge, on the one hand overcomes the notion of a static inside/outside difference and, in the same course, enables the detachment from a strictly sphere-separating conception of the “environment” surrounding the self (as the always other).

The self is permanently “in motion.” We claim that a static and especially essentialist personhood can hardly be tenable any more: Interactions of the elements of a system with each other and with the surrounding (and, in the sense described above, co-generated by them) system levels are ubiquitous and dynamic. Although the processes constitute a conceptual “center” of the self, certainly (as mentioned above) a complementary concept is needed to clarify (explain) what exactly is processed (and structured) by these processes. In other words: There is still much theoretical work to be done. However, the processual view advocated here clearly goes beyond an extension of the traditional personal (person-centered) perspective by an interactionist one (between “inside” and “outside”): the mutual causal and constitutive entanglement of the “systems” involved will certainly have to be thought in more complex terms than merely “interactive” (e.g., in the statistical sense); this concerns, for example, the nonlinear intrinsic laws of dynamic systems addressed in approaches to complexity (Feldman, 2019).

If there is a condition for experiencing one’s own self, then it is the experience of one’s own actor status in action, that is, in intentional behavior, which entails a choice of a goal and the action leading to it. The phenomenal inner view that, across all diversity of situational constellations, it is me who is doing this, and thus who has chosen, is likely to be essential to the impression of the persistence of the self that is so persistent. The processes that “create” this impression, however, are still to be explained.

Numerous authors have placed this point at the center of their analysis of the self, arguing not only with intention but also with meaning, in order to make clear that experienced actor-status does not imply the reflexive disposal of the actor’s sense of action. This raises a central point already alluded to above: We can hardly explain the self if we do not understand its constitutive self-referentiality (the practice of behaving toward oneself, Tugendhat, 1997) from its direction of reference and not from its sense of reference. This leads to the particular actor model underlying this direction and sense. The theories offered so far in this regard range from prominent models such as homo sociologicus, homo oeconomicus to homo culturalis (among others; In Gabriel, 2004; Schimank, 2016). Yet, it remains an empirical task to discover which rationality model is found where and for what reasons, by which influences it may be predominant or marginalized, or where it appears in mixed forms. Even if this cannot be spelled out in detail here, the basic idea is highly significant: Starting from the consensus that the process character of the self cannot to be explained without reference to contextual framings, only the development of the specific modes of self-reference forms the decisive theoretical hinge to make the accompanying practical lines recognizable.

Therefore, the processual perspective advocated here will not deny subjective experience, but at the same time will point to a reciprocal conditionality of self and action, which may make an either-or contrast (actor “versus” constituted by choice action) seem unnecessary. Moreover, it directs theoretical attention toward the reciprocal processes “within” (the system) that produce both the individual’s action and his or her experience of being the actor. It is clear that just proposing this processual perspective does not solve these open questions; however, it offers a fruitful point of departure for an integrative (both from a disciplinary and methodological point of view) approach—more fruitful than any essential notion of “the” self.

Actually, the metaphor of the “moving target” refers to the fact that the self can no longer be assumed unrestrictedly as explanans of social as well as individual phenomena, including actions. The assumption (or the experience) that actions could or even must be traced back to an agens, an acting subject, can then no longer provide the ratio cognoscendi and especially not the ratio essendi of an essential self (see also Schechtmann, 2014, for converging arguments in several aspects). The processual self contoured here is rather essentially the explanandum of psychological as well as sociological explanations. That the processes of the self are at the same time products (consequences) of the preceding interactive dynamics as well as producers (conditions) of the following ones is undisputed, but only coherently conceivable as a continuous and at any time unfinished sequence of constellations (neither static final “products” nor motionless “producers”). Thus, perhaps, the categorial separation between a personal perspective on the one hand, in which self-description has critical status (for discussion: Carruther, 2011; Musholt, 2015), and a subpersonal (cognitive-psychological or information-theoretical) perspective on the other hand, which considers subjective experience, including its persistence, exclusively as a “dependent variable” to be explained by (or even reduced to) “deeper” processes, could be dissolved (for recent discussions in psychology cf., e.g., Rothermund et al., 2020).

It might be worthwhile to address conceptual operations that partly seem similar (e.g., “depth/surface,” “manifest/latent”) more explicitly and to divide them where they create convergences and connections in the disciplines or, conversely, refer to completely different and incompatible topics. Thus, although—seemingly analogously—also in sociological discourse the division between Wittgenstein’s language-game concept (but also the sociolinguistic speech act theory according to Austin and Searle) as a linguistic “surface,” in which self-statements are regarded as moves in an interaction event, on the one hand, and approaches, which want to decode a social genetics of this very speech (quasi hidden from the surface, based on social patterns of meaning), such as depth hermeneutics (here with psychoanalytic proximity), or Objective Hermeneutics according to Oevermann, on the other hand, have long been tolerated unresolved (both approaches explicitly use the manifest/latent scheme, but address rather different concepts). Possibly, a contrasting of these respective intradisciplinary juxtapositions could itself resolve the stalemate. Thus, one might suggest that in the already hardly unified hermeneutic tradition, even the “latent” level is meant very differently from the “subpersonal” perspective of the cognitive-psychological view. And anyway, it is to be discussed whether the inside/outside difference for the comprehension of the process character of the self does not for its part restrict ways of looking, and should at least be supplemented by the difference open/closed (with regard to individual scopes of action).

A number of the considerations touched upon here could be translated into concrete research programs. For instance, cognitive processes in the person that constitute learning, coping, and development, finely correspond to the respective specific social framings of life challenges (e.g., the convergence of individual and social processes of coping with challenges; Greve & Strobl, 2004). Likewise, if the person and its diachronic dynamics is the starting point of the considerations, it becomes important to trace the specific social strategies as “responses” to life challenges and to explain them. This would then have to be complemented (one level of consideration or resolution below) by clarifying, for instance, the psychic “syntactics” or processes that represent, as it were, the intraindividual continuation of this challenge. For this very reason, the problem of the coherence of the self runs through both disciplines as a guiding question to be clarified empirically. For example, how flexible, adaptive, and self-organizing are challenging life experiences brought into alignment in such a way that they do not fragment and at worst bring life to a standstill? Which cognitive as well as communicative performances contribute to this and how (for an example Herma, 2022)?

Surprisingly—and this is also a supporting intention of the considerations presented here—the conceptual as well as methodological potential for understanding the self, which is fruitful for the other discipline in each case, has too rarely been used across disciplines. For example, in the context of his analysis of the religious function of confession, Alois Hahn proposed the concept of the “generator of biography,” in which the generative of it can be considered generalized for every “institution of self-thematization” (Hahn, 1987; cf. Willems, 1999). According to this notion, a self is constituted because it allows itself to be invoked by these institutions, and it is constituted through these institutions. This again points to the importance of social practices: By means of manifold practices, the self procures its existence, and it hardly needs to be emphasized that practices are genuinely processual.

This is also where the concept of the “reference spaces of the self” (Herma, 2022) comes in, with which, on the one hand, established institutions or social frames of the self and its self-thematization are determined. On the other hand, they open an empirical access to the systematic tracing of the self-practices interwoven with them. Finally, if one adds considerations of processes of subjectivation, these reference spaces are not simply places of invocation, adaptation, or submission, but of production. They emerged “before us” and are comparatively stable, but they can equally pass away, be modified, or be replaced by new spaces. In this respect, the question of (also historically situated) knowledge orders, of dispositives, of self-direction and self-regulation is also connected here.

Considerations of how forms and practices of self-referentiality emerge processually do not exclusively suggest a methodologically case-study and inductive approach, but also raise questions about possibilities of more abstract modeling and aggregation in large amounts of data. In addition, the view is to be kept open for further dimensions of the constitution of the self, for instance, for performative practices (e.g., Gebauer et al., 2012), with which more scenic constellations or different forms of esthetic practice are emphasized. The cultural ensemble of self-practices is rich and not exhausted with the side of the linguistic. It is true that it finds a particularly concise expression there that has been widely scrutinized in empirical social research, especially in approaches that bring hermeneutic considerations, biography-theoretical considerations, and those of a sociological discourse analysis (Keller, 2014) into exchange and seek connections. Nevertheless, self-practices possess a materiality that has only recently been emphasized with the body turn, not least in the sociology of the body (cf. Gugutzer, 2015). As outlined, it makes sense to likewise intensify investigations into the body/“Leib” (the felt body) dimension of the self from the perspective of psychology and sociology as well (physiological viewpoints, questions about the viability of the body-soul dichotomy, neuroscientific findings, etc.). The common denominator of these aspects, which are only hinted at here, is to dissolve entrenched front positions by expanding and especially dynamizing (processualizing) the framework of observation.

Likewise, “inner” dynamics of psychological regulatory processes ask for consideration of sociocultural contexts within which these processes unfold—if only to avoid one-sided narrowing to very specific (e.g., individualistic) cultural boundary conditions. For instance, Hannover and Kühnen (2004), following the seminal considerations of Markus and Kitayama (1991), have presented plausible theoretical and empirical arguments that behind intercultural differences in the processing of self-relevant information a process can possibly be suspected that produces different reactions depending on the respective currently or chronically activated parameter settings.

Accordingly, sociology has perhaps too often brushed aside attention to intrapsychic dynamics as lying below the professional radar and thus unremarkable—even though, as just noted, social contexts will also typically produce intraindividual effects only through a psychic interface. Therefore, the stronger focus on intraindividual, especially also cognitive processes “within” the “individual” on the one hand, and the stronger focus on the close coupling of self-constitution to the social, for instance, “subject orders” (Reckwitz, 2015), culturally evoked “technologies of the self” and “self-techniques” (Foucault, 2007), praxis (Bourdieu, 1987), and others on the other hand are by no means mutually exclusive. In fact, we recognize more than a mere complementary relationship in this: on the one hand, both cognitive processes and linguistic (and other) acts inform meaning contexts that arguably cannot be explained by mere stimulus impulses alone. A second common point of departure is that the coherence of the self (the density and convergence of self-referential practices) is produced both intraindividually and socially, but in both resorts to institutions of self-production (reflexively or pre-reflexively available) for its ordering and orienting services.

It would therefore be only part of the way to take psychological and sociological perspectives into consideration as complementary (after all not a self-evident step), but to perpetuate their status as a hybrid entity. Instead, a heuristic perspective can be suggested in which the processual functions as the dominant factor in research practice. For example, the cognitive operations of the “psychic self” and the more sociologically conceived “subject positions” and “subject orders” mentioned above make clear an obvious analytical nexus. It emerges in a closely coupled set of questions: on the one hand, how are invoked subject positions cognitively appropriated, adapted, processed, regulated, and, if necessary, resisted in the first place? On the other hand: What insights can be gained into any social-structural storage and the resulting social variability of the mental interface addressed?

Although these processes are actualized in the discursive as well as non-discursive practices that are often taken into consideration, the sociological perspective remains peculiarly monosyllabic on the side of their psychological representation. It remains a loss: it would be necessary to clarify, for example, how far-reaching and valid the concept of subjectivation with its toolbox illuminates the intraindividual side of the person in such a way that it does not miss the influence of the psychological dimension(s) of the appropriation and further processing of subject positions. Moreover, as has already been alluded to, it is to be expected that the appropriation and modulation of subject positions can hardly be presupposed without circumstance as a frictionless fit relation. Reckwitz (2015), for instance, points out that this relation is not free of contradictions; ambiguities, instabilities, and “unintended psychic effects” (Reckwitz, 2015, p. 42) can arise that irritate subject orders. There is a case for addressing more clearly how the interplay of dimensions and questions with traditionally sociological or psychological provenance can generate insight and emergence, both for empiricism and for theory building.

Thus, it should be an extremely worthwhile undertaking to bring the questions raised into stronger interdisciplinary correspondence and to make them connectable for research activities. Certainly, this endeavor must not end at the boundaries of the disciplines of psychology and sociology focused throughout this paper. For instance, we need to observe and integrate philosophical arguments (as our reference to some recent contributions throughout this paper indicates). With respect to discussions within the field of philosophy of biology, it might be fruitful to look for general processual concepts, in particular the concept of adaptation (e.g., In Rose & Lauder, 1996) that is applicable on subpersonal, personal and superpersonal levels likewise (Greve, 2023). Even if we certainly want to avoid a reductionistic naturalization (see, for instance, Ramstead et al., 2016) with respect, the theoretical potentials of such a concept would nevertheless be helpful here. Such a concept would have to be free of a static interpretation of the subject/environment difference and at the same time open to the social, historical, and cultural penetration of this difference by orders of knowledge, power, and subject. This would allow us to discuss an expanded notion of adaptation, which (to take just a few examples) could also be read in light of Althusser’s concept of invocation and submission as a logic of action, or, for instance, in terms of how Bourdieu (1987) conceives of the social habitus as a modus operandi or generative grammar (in contrast to the Chomsky interpretation), that is, as a social principle of generation in which active and passive elements amalgamate simultaneously (the habitus as a “structuring and structured structure”). The habitus of the self, for example, has so far been researched only rudimentarily (on this, Jafke et al., 2022). Sociological and psychological approaches could likewise enter into correspondence with the modernization-theoretical discussion of the development of individuality and, via this, also take into account historical-evolutionary aspects of the “becoming of the self.” One possible point of convergence, both theoretically and empirically, might be a perspective that advances the “self” as a process of “adaptation through reference” (Grundmann, 2020, p. 81), that is, as an approach in which the concepts of adaptation (Greve, 2023) and the reference spaces of the self (Herma, 2022) intertwine, insofar as aspects of self-concept development and practices of self-reference come into correspondence within the framework of networks of relationships and recognition—that is, always together with others in the world.

If the process perspective on the self proposed here should be connectable in both disciplines, then it would be important, on the one hand, to spell out the entanglement in small steps and, above all, to make it empirically investigable (for instance, by offering illustrative sample cases). On the other hand, such divergences between disciplinary concepts of process (which are viable for the self), which could not simply be corrected by conceptual sharpening, but perhaps point to profound (e.g., epistemological) differences, would then also have to be worked out. It can be assumed that there are such differences—but working on them would be particularly worthwhile if a process perspective (as proposed in this paper) were fundamentally a possible point of convergence between the disciplinary perspectives.

The common vanishing point of this paper is, after all, the question of the complex and multi-layered production processes of the “self”—as a central reference point of life practice and life certainty of this and other present times.