William James and the Constituents of the Self
William James, brother of novelist Henry James and diarist Alice James, was a leading 19th century philosopher and one of the founders of modern psychology.
In his book The Principles of Psychology (1890), a publication that is often credited with making the idea of “stream of consciousness” more widely known in Western culture, one of the things he does (in Chapter 10) is name and describe three distinct aspects of human experience: the material self, the social self, and the spiritual self.
Photo by Marty O’Neill on Unsplash
Story writers can have fun exploring fictional characters via the triple lens of these categories, and using them to uncover new insights:
(a) The material Self, for example…
- the body
- clothes
- possessions
- home
- family (as we share common genes)
- things we have made
Invitation: When you consider the material aspects of your main characters’ lives (as listed above), what specific details of their experience might you newly identify and describe? Feel free to indulge all five senses, where relevant, as you write, and include sensory details. Try writing a good page or two (or three!) of notes that you might use as texture informing (explicitly or implicitly) the stories/chapters themselves later on.
(b) The social Self, for example…
The Novella-in-Flash 