Self is a concept that has always been a bit hard to understand. Some famous psychologists had different ideas about what self means. For example, Carl Rogers (1959) believed that babies start to develop a sense of self when they can tell themselves apart from others. Carl Jung (1951) thought that everyone has a natural desire to be their best, and he called this the self. Gordon Allport (1961) talked about six important things that help us become mature, with two of them related to our sense of self. The first one is when we include our interests as part of who we are. The second one is being able to connect with others way. Some researchers (e.g., Damon & Hart, 1988) now use the term “self-system” instead of just “self” as it is better at indicating how complicated the self is. The self-system includes things like how we see ourselves, how we control ourselves, and how we feel about ourselves. In 1890, William James talked about two aspects of self: the ‘I’ and the ‘me.’ ‘I’ is the part of us that experiences things, while ‘me’ is the part that watches and knows. Freud (1911) thought of the self as many different characters, but other psychologists like Jung, Rogers, and Horney (1942) saw it as a unified person.
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Rogers, C. R. (1959). A theory of therapy, personality and interpersonal relationships, as developed in the client- centered framework. In S. Koch (Ed.), Psychology: A study of science (Vol. 3). New York: McGraw-Hill.