The Self
Part 3 - Three Types of Self

This section allows us to spend more time looking into the details of three types of self as highlighted by the psychologist Carl Rogers.

1. The first term is the organismic self, used to describe the whole of our being, our very own life force: from our atoms and cells to our organs and to all the DNA that shapes us. Our organismic self accounts for pretty much everything about us. Rogers had a strong notion that every person has an in-built drive to do the very best for themselves that they possibly can.
Just like a plant changing the direction of its leaves in pursuit of the sun’s rays, so do we, as humans, strive to get the most out of our lives, so as to be a fully functioning person. This is all part of the organismic self.

2. Then there is the self-concept. This is about how you see your own self, and how much awareness you have of your own self. The self-concept includes all the beliefs you hold about yourself. It also includes the things that define you: age, gender, race, sexuality, etc.

3. Finally, there is the ideal self: who you would like to be. This is the self with bits that have been added to you as well as bits of you that have been taken away, in order to create your ultimate state.

Below are some examples of how these three selves could be useful to explore in depth.

• When we are sleepy, this is our organismic self’s way of telling us that it’s time for bed – for the good of our whole body. The same can be said of when we are hungry, when we are bored and when we need to use the toilet. The organismic self gives us pretty big clues to help us regulate ourselves, yet we don’t always heed the signals we are given. We stay up late. We neglect to eat, or we over-eat. In essence, we don’t always look after ourselves, or trust our organismic self. Working out what this is all about could be very useful indeed.

• Some of us have little awareness about who we are – and even less about our ideal self, since we don’t take the time to think about it. Maybe we think that things in our life just happen to us, rather than us having the right to make changes ourselves. Understanding what we want out of life could be the first step to exploring who we want to be.

• If we hate ourselves, this may seem to go against the whole idea of having an organismic self (that is trying to do the very best for us). Yet self-loathing is likely to spring from the planting of a virus in our self-concept. If we can locate and discard these toxic elements, there is every chance that we can start to love and care for ourselves once more.

• See the Venn diagrams below:

In Figure 1. the ideal self of a person is far removed from their actual current self, whereas in Figure 2. there is a greater part of the self that the person is comfortable with. If you were to draw two circles to represent your self-concept and your ideal self, how close together would they be?