Why am I different with different people?
With parents one person, with old friends another, at work a third. At some point the thought arrives that one of them must be the real one and the others an act. And if nobody can say which, maybe all of them are.
In 1890 William James published The Principles of Psychology. Its tenth chapter, on the consciousness of self, has a passage that reads as if written for this worry.
As many selves as people who know you
"a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind"
— William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. I, ch. X, p. 294
James goes on at once. In practice the images fall into groups, and a person shows a different side to each group whose opinion matters to him. The boy who is demure before his teachers swears like a pirate among his friends. None of this, for James, is a sign of falsehood. It is how a self exists among other people.
He does separate two cases. The division can be a harmonious division of labour, or a discordant split, where someone is afraid to let one set of acquaintances see him as he is elsewhere. What worries him is not the number of selves. It is whether they hide from each other.
Standing by one
Later in the same chapter James turns to the rivalry of the selves. He would gladly be a philosopher, an athlete, a wit, a saint and a millionaire at once. It cannot be done. To make one of them real, the others have to be more or less given up.
He calls this standing by one of one's selves. The self a person stands by is the one whose failures are real failures. The rest become, in his word, unreal.
So James sets aside the question of which self is authentic. He asks which one a person has staked themselves on, and whether that was chosen or simply happened.
The page on becoming the self one truly is follows Carl Rogers on how a person becomes themselves. James describes something earlier: the plurality that exists before any such choice.
What stays open
James offers no test for the real self. He leaves a question: which of my selves do I stand by, and which do I only play?
Epimelea is an app built around the existential school. The conversation carries over from one meeting to the next. The archive is encrypted on the device and belongs to the person who wrote it.
About the app: an AI therapist for long-term therapy
This page is about a school of psychotherapy. It is not medical advice and not emergency help. If you are in danger right now, contact your local emergency number, or find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.