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The subjects of self, person, and identity, which occupy the attention of psychoanalysts so concentratedly, also have been and remain subjects of concern to psychologists and philosophers. This volume is the product of a conference held in Chicago in 1975 and is described by the editor, the late Theodore Mischel, as "… designed to explore interrelations between philosophical analyses of the family of concepts relating to the self (e.g., self-knowledge, self-control, self-development) and empirical studies in psychology of the development and manifestations of self-control, self-knowledge, and the like" (p. ix).
The problem of self centers around two questions. First, is self an entity or is it an abstraction, a concept? As Mischel says, this book discusses concepts related to the self, in each case a hyphenated term, not self in isolation. Second, is self an "agent"? When we speak of motivation, action, affect, thought, is it more useful to postulate the self as an active agent or to postulate psychic functions in terms of the structural theory of psychoanalysis? Is this merely a semantic controversy or is it basic to new approaches in the theory and practice of psychoanalysis?
In the one chapter by a psychoanalyst, "'Irrationality" in a Psychoanalytic Psychology of the Self" by Ernest S. Wolf, the author