A . Introduction While we all have many things in common with our parents, siblings, other relatives and friends, each one of us is also a unique person, different from all others. This sense of being unique gives us our sense of self — the sense of ‘I’ which is different from ‘you’, ‘them’ and ‘others’. How do we develop this sense of self ?
What we think about ourselves and how we describe ourselves — does it change over the years? What are the elements of the self? Why should we study about the self? Does our self influence the way we interact with people?
In this unit we will study about these and other interesting aspects of the self. Related to the concept of the self are two other concepts — identity and personality. While psychologists distinguish between these three concepts in terms of their definitions, the concepts are intricately related and we often interchange these terms in common usage.