The Real Self: From Institution to Impulse

Abstract

It is proposed that people variously recognize their real selves either in feelings and actions of an institutional and volitional nature, such as ambition, morality, and altruism, or in the experience of impulse, such as undisciplined desire and the wish to make intimake revelations to other people. A shift toward the impulse pole seems to be under way and might be plausibly explained by chaning cultural definitions of reality modified terms of social integration, shifting patterns of deprivation, or new opportunities and consequences. Many standard sociological assumptions about social control are incopatible with the new pattern of self-identification.